FULL
CONSCIOUSNESS
"a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." Isa. 53:3
There is no necessity to do more than tabulate these
occasions which have been referred to at the beginning, as the mountain peaks
of FULL CONSCIOUSNESS. For the most part they have been considered in
connection with their proper setting, and it is not necessary therefore to do
more now than indicate them as the occasions upon whirl. Jesus seems to have
come through some special circumstance face to face with the fact of His Cross.
The first of these occasions is the
BAPTISM. Then, as has been seen, His very consent, no but His request for baptism, and His
insistence upon it, was the outward symbol of His identification with sinners
and therefore, moreover, of His identification with all that sin meant. For Him
the whelming in the water foreshadowed the passion-baptism. (Matt. 3:15)
The second occasion was that of
PETER'S CONFESSION, when, having consummated the teaching required to reveal to
His disciples His Messiahship, in a few words, startling and comprehensive, He
declared the whole pathway to and through the Cross. “From that time began Jesus to shew unto His disciples, that He must go
unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and
scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised up." (Matt. 16:21)
The third instance of this clear
consciousness of, and consent to, the Cross is to be found in HIS TRANSFIGURATION.
While the light of His human victory illumined the darkness of the night, and
He held familiar converse with the lawgiver and the prophet, it was of His
Cross and resurrection that they spoke. (Luke
9:31)
Again for the fourth time at THE
COMING OF THE GREEKS with their request to see Him, it is evident that the
sense of the Cross, as one of great sorrow, was upon Him, for He declared that
His soul was
troubled. Here again, however, He deliberately chose and asked that
His Father's name should be glorified, whatever the cost might be to Himself,
and then declared
His conception of what the Cross would mean. (John 12:28)
And lastly in THE GARDEN OF
GETHSEMANE, having passed outside the last limit of human comradeship, in awful
loneliness He looked into the heart of the great passion, and trembling at the
prospect, yet with a strength of purpose that astonishes, and fills man with
deep reverence, He chose the will of God, including, as it did, the emptying
of this cup of all its bitterness, that He might fill it with the wine of life
for the sons of men. (Luke 22:39-44)
Thus in deepest sense He is seen to
have been "a Man of sorrows, and
acquainted with grief." (Isa.
53:3) Yet though His whole life was based upon conformity to the Divine
purpose and will, even though He knew its issue was this mystery of deep pain, He
nevertheless exercised a ministry of beneficence which was ever a magnificent
prophecy of final victory by the way of the Cross.
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