SERMON XX.

SUFFERING THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE.

HEBREWS V. 8.

Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered."

ALTHOUGH We are taught that the godhead and manhood were so united in the person of our blessed Lord as to be absolutely one, there yet remains unrevealed a wonderful mystery respecting the conditions of His human nature; as, for instance, where He said of His second coming, "Of that day and that hour knoweth no man; no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." How did He not know? How should any thing be hidden from "the Son of Man, which is in heaven ?"? All that we can say is, that in these words He declared to us that the mystery of His incarnation was in some way ordered by the laws and conditions of our manhood. We have another example of this kind in the text:

1 St. Mark xiii. 32.

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2 St. John iii. 13.

St. Paul here tells us that Christ Himself "learned obedience by the things which He suffered."

And, first, this may be understood of the passive nature which, by taking upon Himself our humanity, He assumed into His divine person. As God He was impassible, immortal, incapable of being tempted by evil; infinite, and therefore unchangeable: neither growth, nor weariness, nor faintness, nor thirst, nor hunger, could reach the Eternal. He was above the conditions of a creature; but by the mystery of His incarnation, what things before could not reach or fasten upon His divine nature, were admitted to His manhood. He, therefore, took on Him our flesh and blood, that He might come under the dominion of suffering and mortality, of spiritual warfare and bodily infirmities. As He assumed the passive conditions of humanity, so He partook of the susceptibilities of its several ages. And therefore we read that "Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man." And these words are no mere economy or condescension, as when we read of God's repenting, or awaking, or plucking His right hand out of His bosom; but deep mysterious realities, as plainly to be taken and understood as the Word being made flesh, and weeping at the grave of Lazarus, and being nailed upon the cross.

1 St. Luke ii. 52.

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was the humiliation of the Eternal Son. He was made man, not only to suffer, but to learn; He assumed the imperfections of His creatures, and "compassed" Himself "with infirmity;" that, as before there was nothing in Godhead which was not in Him, so afterward there was nothing in manhood, sin only excepted, of which He did not partake. It is plain, then, that He "learned obedience" in the very truth of our nature, even as we learn it; that is, by measures and degrees, by discipline and in time.

And this brings us to one more truth. There are different ways both of knowing and of learning. A large part of our knowledge is either intuitive and ideal, residing in the pure reason; or speculative, that is, gathered by deduction and mental inference and this is one kind of knowledge, and one way of learning. Another kind is learned by what we call life; by experience, personal trial, entanglement with events, struggles in doing and suffering and what we learn in this way, we know with a depth and familiarity far beyond all other knowledge; it is a part of our living energies and powers, and dwells in our very being. Not only is its stamp imprinted on us, but it so passes into us as to blend with our whole inner nature. We are what we have done and suffered. And this is what we commonly call "experience."

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Now, if we consider that the impassible Word took on Him our passible nature, we shall see in what sense even He "learned obedience by the things that He suffered." As there is a difference in kind between the knowledge we possess of those things which we have, and those things which we have not, learned by experience; so the same is true also of His perfect manhood; and more visibly true of the knowledge of an omniscient impassible Being compared with the experience of suffering humanity. It is a mode and kind of knowledge which could not otherwise consist with the perfections of the Godhead.

He made trial, then, in a passible nature, of human suffering. He learned, by actual partaking of sorrow, what is the power of sin over mankind. Into His pure manhood the guilt of sin could no more enter than into His eternal Godhead: but the sinless infirmities of our fallen state, and its large capacities of agony, He took; and, girded about with them, He offered Himself to the strife of evil. He obeyed, in that He stood in the place of a sufferer. And in it He learned in very deed, by feeling and tasting, the nakedness and the bitterness of the fall of man. What was impossible to the Godhead, He as man endured in the wilderness, suffering the suggestions and solicitations of the Evil One; so likewise in the gar

den, He passed through an agony which cannot be uttered; there lay on Him a crushing burden of fleshly and spiritual woes, the like of which never man yet bare. In the betrayal, and in the judgment before Annas, and Caiaphas, and Herod, and Pilate, and by the way-side, and in the ascent of Calvary, and upon the cross, He learned a mystery of suffering, of pangs and agony, such as no son of man had ever known. Into all this the Eternal Word entered, through His passive nature as man. Strange words, yet most true, though so awful to the ear as almost to make us fear to speak them. He that suffered the rack of the spiritual cross, and the unutterable torments of bodily pain, was God. He to whom all mysteries lie open as the light of noon, learned, by the things which He suffered, what as God He could never taste. Through that life, short in days, but in sorrows above all measure long, through humiliation, and peril, and contempt, and cold, and fasting, and weariness, and thirst, and hunger, and faintness, and ingratitude, and contradiction of sinners, and treachery, and false witness, and unjust condemnation, and buffetting, and spitting, and mockery, and the smiting of the reed, and the crown of thorns, and the vinegar and gall, and the rending cross, and the hiding of His Father's face,- He, he Eternal, the Word of God, the Everlasting Son