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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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