Chapter XV

THE CROSS AND THE WILL OF GOD
Continued

SUBMISSION AND SUFFERING art utterly contrary to the flesh.  The thing man loves more than anything else in the world is himself.  The thing man wants is to have his own way and to enjoy himself.  Suffering, therefore, always crosses man where self is alive.  There, self refuses and rebels.  Suffering is so unwelcome to the flesh that it demands the total surrender of our wills. This therefore explains how that Christ, although sinless and innocent, learned "obedience by the things which he suffered." In order to be a perfect Redeemer from sin and self-will, Christ learned under the severest denial and testing to make the will of God supreme, and to keep it supreme, in the face of shame, in the face of suffering, in the face of death.  In His deepest suffering He learned His highest obedience.  When Mimosa, who had never learned to read, finally met her sister, Star, at the mission school she reverently gazed upon her Bible and books and said, "You know Him by learning; but I know Him by suffering.

The whole evil and wretchedness and ruin of sin is that man turned from God's will to do his own.  "The redemption of Christ has no reason, no object, and no possibility of success," says Andrew Murray, "except in restoring man to do God's will.  It was for this Jesus died.  He gave up His own will; He gave His life rather than do His own will." When He finally dropped His head in death, there was one thing that the pain and suffering and death had been unable to take away from Him, and that was His love for the will of God.  He died in that will.  Mind you, only that remained.  But, thank God, it remained.  And "He that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." As man Jesus won the reward of eternal life.  Praise His eternal Name!  The world passeth away.  Let it pass.  "Thou remainest."

Has the reader noticed that, when the Saviour was here upon earth, He was continually bringing man face to face with the impossible?  He laid upon men commands which were utterly contrary to the flesh and to human understanding.  They were often most unreasonable to the mind, as well as ungrateful to the flesh.  How impossible and unreasonable to demand that human nature love its enemies, turn the other check, rejoice in suffering, in reproach, in persecution, and on through the whole list of impossibles!  And what was all this for but to bring men face to face with themselves, with Deity, and with their need of His grace to do these very impossibles?  The Saviour was striking for the citadel of the will.  He would therefore cross that human will, contradict it, and bring the individual to conviction and submission.  This was the supreme reason why Christ was continually teaching His own about the Cross.  By principle, and by precept, and by parable, Christ taught the Cross.  Somebody has said, "God often touches our best comforts that we may live loose to them.  It was the doctrine of Jesus, that if thy right hand offend that thou must cut it off; and if thy right eye offend thee, thou must pluck it out; that is, if the most dear, the most useful and tender comforts thou enjoyest, stand in thy soul's way, and interrupt thy obedience to the voice of God, and thy conformity to His holy will revealed in thy soul, thou art engaged, under the penalty of damnation, to part with them." This quotation may sound harsh--"a hard saying"--but Christ did not utter smooth sayings.  Since "God is only our God by a birth of His own divine nature within us;' the Lord Jesus sought to contradict "the natural" at every point.  The Cross symbolized to a perfection that contradiction. Just as His own Cross was the supreme expression of His own perfect obedience, tried to the utmost, so must Jesus bring each disciple, through an awful process of inner crucifixion, to the end of His own self-will, and bring him to do the will of God.  As we have said before, Christ did not come to straighten out the natural but to "cross" it out.

Take the instance of the man with the withered hand.  That hand was useless, limp, helpless.  He could grasp nothing.  The man could not put that hand to the plow.  Yet before the gaze of a critical crowd the Saviour commands the man, "Stretch forth thy hand." It was an utterly impossible thing and therefore unreasonable.  In order to obey such an impossible and unreasonable command, the man must come to an end of himself through happy subjection to the will of God in Christ.  That subjection to the Lord Jesus, as the object of his obedient faith, brought life and power into that withered hand.  He did what he couldn't do.

It is even so with us.  The Saviour says, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me." We complain that this is the very thing we are utterly unable to do.  But our trouble is 

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