The Life of Christ

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 19, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 47.

The Life of Christ.

The Revelation and Exemplification of the Divine Law.

When the Son of God came to our world to assume the “form of a servant” “in the likeness of men,” He exclaimed, “Lo, I come; in the volume of the Book it is written of Me, I delight to do Thy will, O My God; yea, Thy law is within My heart.” Ps. 40:7, 8. See also Heb. 10:7–9. Though He came as the Lamb of God destined for sacrifice, He came with a song of triumphant joy in His heart. It was in notes of deepest and sweetest melody that He sang, “I delight to do Thy will, O My God.” To do His Father’s will, to keep His law, was to Jesus the supreme good, the joy and end of life. What enabled Him to glory in the doing of that will and the keeping of that law, was the fact that the law was enshrined in His heart. His Father’s law was the law of His own being—the law of righteousness, the law of life. As the life of God is the life of Christ, so the law of God is the law of Christ. Hence when Jesus sings, “Thy law is within My heart,” He virtually sings, “Thy righteousness, Thy life, Thy Spirit, is within My heart.” When He says, “I come to do Thy will, O God,” He is really saying, I come to live Thy life, O God; that is, to unfold God’s law, to exemplify God’s life to a fallen race. He came to place before the eyes of men an all-comprehensive object-lesson. Through His own life of self-renouncing, self-denying service He revealed God; He demonstrated the character of His Father. In going about doing good, He eloquently portrayed God. He came to minister, not to be ministered unto, in order that He might lead men to see that God lives to give; yea, that God lives by giving; in short, Jesus came to show that

God Is Love.

To do God’s will, then, is to serve one another in love; to go about doing good, to love one’s neighbor as himself. Jesus spent all His days on earth in self-denying ministry; and in doing this He was doing God’s will, keeping God’s commandments. He Himself declares “I came down from heaven, not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me.” John 6:38. From all eternity Jesus, as the Son of God, did His Father’s will. He came to this world and was made flesh, in order that, as the Son of Man, He might do His Father’s will, and thus condemn sin in the flesh. For “sin is the transgression of the [God’s] law,” of God’s will. The Scriptures repeatedly declare that in Christ was no sin. Hence He never transgressed the divine law. If He never transgressed that law, He must ever have kept it. But His life was consumed in the service of love. He thus revealed and enforced the great truth that “love is the fulfilling of the law.” Rom. 13:10. Through Solomon the Holy Spirit declares that to “fear God and keep His commandments” is “the whole duty of man.” The same Spirit, through the lips of Jesus, declares that to love God with all the heart, and our neighbor as ourselves, is to fulfil the law of God. Hence Jesus, in His life of loving service, was Himself the divine law—the Ten Commandments—“drawn out in living characters.” He was God’s epistle, God’s letter, God’s message, known and read of men.

The Supreme Glory of Christ.

He did not even come in His own name. “I am come in My Father’s name,” He avers. John 5:43. He came that men might see and know, not Himself, but the Father. Hence He emptied Himself in order that the Father might appear in Him. He spoke not of Himself, but ever of the Father; He sought not His own glory, but His Father’s; for to the Pharisees He declared, “He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own glory.” He not only spoke in His Father’s name, but in that same name He did all His mighty acts. “I do nothing of Myself,” He protests. John 7:18; 8:28. The working maxim of His life was, “None of self, and all of Thee.” The supreme glory of Christ lay in the fact that He sought not His own glory; His everlasting honor, in the fact that in every deed and word of His life He honored not Himself, but the Father. Never did He entertain a thought of Himself, of His own glory, or of the esteem of men. To be about His Father’s business; to do the works which His Father had given Him to finish; to speak the words which He had heard from His Father; to fulfil the commandment enjoined on Him by His Father—these constituted the program and object of His life. How He hastened to disclaim for Himself the very works He did: “The Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works.” Every act that marks the life of our Lord proclaims with a thousand tongues, “Thine is the glory and the power.”

The doing of God’s will is the yoke that Jesus took and bore, and forever consecrated. This yoke He found easy and the burden light, because they were borne in love. Love makes all things—even hard things—easy. “God so

loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son;” Christ so loved the Father—and the world—that He rejoiced in being given. Love made it God’s will that His Son should lay down His life for the sins of the world. And, because this was His Father’s will, He passed through the awful shades of Gethsemane and Calvary with the prayer, “Not My will, but Thine, be done!” Ah, He could even say then, “My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work.” John 4:34. In the doing of that will He found sustenance, strength, yea, life itself. Jesus never did anything in a merely perfunctory spirit. Love never does. “I delight to do Thy will” meant, to Him, I delight to be “made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death.” Not for its own sake did the Saviour delight in the suffering of death, but because in it He discerned God’s will; and He knew that God’s will was determined in love, and that love knows nothing but good. To be in the line of God’s will, of His law, is to be in the way of love; and to be in the way of love, is to be in the way of peace, and joy, and life eternal.

Our Model.

But now, dear reader, we need to make the application. That Life of His was given to the world as our pattern, as the model to which we are to conform our lives. “He that saith he abideth in Him [Christ] ought himself also so to walk, even as He walked.” 1 John 2:6. Paul, referring to Christ humbling Himself and becoming obedient, even to the death of the cross, enjoins us to “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” Phil. 2:5. Did not Christ renounce His own will? What, then, is our duty? Did He seek His own glory? Whose glory should we seek? Did He minister to Himself? Whom should we serve? Did not He lay down His life for us? Ought not we “to lay down our lives for the brethren”? Did not He keep His Father’s commandments? Whose commandments ought we to keep?

In one breath He avers, “I am the light of the world;” in another, “Ye are the light of the world.” There is no contradiction here. He came to be what God would have us be. We are to let our light so shine that others will be led to glorify, not us, but our Father who is in heaven. “As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you.” Did He not teach us to pray, “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven”? Is that prayer fulfilled in our lives, as it was in His? Did He not say to the Father, “I have declared unto them Thy name”? Whose name should we declare and honor before the world? Did He not teach by precept and practise that “it is more blessed to give than to receive”? Do our lives attest the truthfulness of this sublime maxim?

May God grant that you and I may be of that happy number who shall repeat, to the extent of their consecrated capacity, the great and holy life of Him who lived it first. We need ever to remember that “Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven.” Matt. 7:21. How inspiring the glorious promise: “He that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” 1 John 2:17.

[The next article in the series is “Infinite Love Makes an Infinite Sacrifice.”]