THE HUMILIATION AND GRACE OF CHRIST.

REV. C. BRADLEY, A.M.

ST. JAMES'S CHAPEL, CLAPHAM, AUGUST 24, 1834.

"For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich.”—2 COR. viii. 9.

stance.

HERE, brethren, in these few words is the Gospel, its whole sum and subIf we rightly understand only this one text, we understand enough to make us happy for ever; if we really believe the precious truths it contains, we shall be happy for ever; there is a power in them that can save our souls alive.

"He

The words offer four particulars for our consideration; and the first of them is this-THE Original CONDITION OF THE LORD JESUS CHRIST. was rich," says the Apostle.

In saying this he plainly asserts his pre-existence: I mean his existence somewhere before he came into our world. For where, brethren, on earth was he rich? Where are the treasures he renounced here? Shall we look for them in the stable at Bethlehem, or go in search of them to the cottage of Joseph at Nazareth? We shall find no riches there. Regard the Saviour as a mere man, coming into existence for the first time into our world, and then the Apostle's words have no meaning at all in them; they are such words as none but a man bereft of reason would have written or thought of.

But there is more than pre-existence in the words; we shall rest short of their meaning unless we ascribe to the Lord Jesus Christ much greatness and much glory in eternity. He was not only there in that unseen world, but he was "rich." Now this term when applied to a fellow-creature we understand at once. We call him rich who, besides having what is enough for his own wants, has the means of gratifying many of his desires; and we call him richer still who, after having satisfied his own wants and desires, has the means of satisfying the wants and desires of others. Imagine, then, a Being, inhabiting a world of glory with all its resources at his command, and all its immense dominions owning him as their Lord. Conceive of him as rich in heaven, and rich there in heavenly things; rich in the estimation of glorious angels-so rich that they go to him for all they need, and depend upon him for all they desire, and mean to do so for ever, and know that they can do so for ever, without exhausting or even diminishing his boundless treasures. Look on the Lord Jesus Christ as the light of heaven, the source of all its blessings, and all its glory, and all its joy and then look at the mighty universe, and take a survey, brethren, of star

after star, world after world-whatever you see happy or excellent in any one of them, trace it all to this amazing Being. It cam from him at first; it was his work, it is still his property: so that, make it over to him, lay it down at his feet, you have not given him anything; you have but returned to him that which was his own. And then go one step further: imagine him as needing nothing of all he possesses, so inconceivably rich in himself, as to be independent, of heaven and earth and all that they contain: incapable of having his happiness augmented by the treasures of the whole universe, and equally incapable of having it impaired by their loss. Conceive of a Being as having all things, and yet needing none.

But it is useless to labour thus: labour as we will we can form no one adequate idea of the original glory of the Lord Jesus. It was infinite; and none but an infinite mind can comprehend it. All we can say is, he was God-the self-existent, boundless Jehovah; no lofty angel, no inferior deity, but " very God of very God;" possessing in himself all the fulness of the divine perfections; sharing with his eternal Father in all he was and all he enjoyed. Such was Jesus Christ.

But the text calls on us to view him in a very different condition: it sets before us, in the second place, THE STATE TO WHICH HE HUMbled himself. "He became poor," it tells us.

But we may ask, How poor? Not as men often become so, by the loss of their former wealth; Christ as God could lose nothing, we never parted, he never could part, for a single moment, with his divine fulness or any one portica of it; it is as inseparable from him as his own existence. What then, you may say, are we to understand by this term? Simply this, that the Eternal God concealed, veiled this glory; that he assumed, and appeared in, a new character, and that a character infinitely below his own. The Apostle does not expressly say so, but he evidently speaks of him as man, though still in fact the Everlasting Jehovah; still rich as ever in the plenitude of his Godhead, but allying that Godhead to one of his creatures; taking on himself the nature of that creature, and manifesting himself in his form: and thus he became poor. The same Being who was rich as God, made himself poor, simply by this one act of becoming man. The single circumstance of his taking upon him our nature was an unutterable humiliation. We can understand but little of it, brethren ; our situation blinds us; we cannot send our eyes half high enough in the heavens to know what a stoop the great God made when he stooped down to our world. But let us think for a moment. Of all God's rational creatures man is the very lowest. We know not how many orders of beings there are above us, but we do know this, that there are none below us. Now could it have been conceived that the great Jehovah was about to take on him a creature's form, we could tell at once what form we should give him; we should have gone to the summit of creation, and placed him on a level with the greatest archangel; and then there would have been an act of condescension; the greatness of the act would at once have amazed and confounded us. But how did God act? He took not on him the nature of angels; he passed down through one order of beings after another, till he sunk into the very depths of his rational creatures, and took on him the nature of man He could not go lower, but he descended and descended

still, till he went the lowest. And observe our nature, not as he gave it to man at first, but our nature as we know it; in one sense, our fallen nature-its weakness, its liability to pain, and misery, and death; save this one thing, its pollution by sin, he took on him every thing connected with it that branded it with shame and dishonour.

And we must go lower yet. View him even as a man, he was poor; poor even among poor men. For observe, he assumed our nature, not in its highest, but in its very lowest condition. No unearthly palace was let down from the skies to be his dwelling-place; no monarch was driven from his throne to make room for him to sit on it: a stable was his first habitation, and a manger his first bed; the wife of a poor carpenter was his parent, fishermen his companions, women in the humblest ranks of life his benefactors; they "ministered to him," we read, "of their substance;" for he needed their alms. Hear his own touching description of his poverty: "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but (what have I?) the Son of man has not where to lay his head." And observe in what a simple, yet striking manner, the same fact is intimated by St. John: "Every man," says he; in the last verse of the seventh chapter (speaking of the dispersion of the multitude)—" Every man went to his own house." And why tell us this? we may ask; a circumstance so unimportant: what matters it to us where they went? It seems as though he told us this to make us notice the next thing he tells us, in the first verse of the following chapter: "Jesus went to the Mount of Olives." Every man went to his own not one, at the close of the

house:" among these persecuting Jews there was day, who had not a habitation to return to: but Jesus alone was obliged to seek refuge and a dwelling-place in the rocks of a mountain; he had "not where to lay his head."

"He made

And amidst all this he was poor in reputation, in character. himself of no reputation." "He was despised and rejected of men." In heaven, but a little before, he had been the object of adoration to angels; they adored him as they adored no other-yea, they adored none but him. Now miserable men scorn him: such abject beings as you and I are, though not worthy to breathe his air, or see his sun-we hid, in loathing and disgust, our faces from him. Men derided him, persecuted him, spat upon him, thought his very presence in this world a degradation to it, and wished to sweep him away from it.

Above all this, he was poor in consolation. What matters poverty, we may say—what matters shame and ill treatment, if God is shining into our hearts, and giving us heavenly consolation there? Even we ourselves, weak as we are, only give us these consolations, and we can bear anything. But there were times when the Blessed Jesus was almost a stranger to these comforts. Support, indeed, he had constantly from his Father, and at times, indeed, much serenity and peace: but he seems to have received less abiding solace in his affliction, less of the outpouring of heavenly joy than many of his people; and he seems to have suffered much more than any of them from the absence of it. In comparison with what he endured on this account, all his other troubles seemed light as air to him. He felt the treachery of Judas; he was doubtless cut to the heart by the cowardice of Peter, and the ingratitude of his other disciples: but, galling as these things were to his holy soul, they wrung from him no

complaint. At length, however, his Father forsook him: and then indeed he was poor: he could not bear poverty like this: it forced from him—not in the hour of bodily ease, mark you, but amidst all the disquietude and anguish of the cross-in the hour when we might have said he could only be alive to the pangs of his expiring nature-the absence of divine consolation forced from him that heart-rending cry, "My God, why hast thou forsaken ine?"

And he sunk lower yet: he "bowed his head, and gave up the ghost." He died a sinner's death, and laid himself down in a sinner's form, in a sinner's grave. Here was poverty indeed. I need not say, brethren, that death is humbling, even to degraded and miserable man: no one can look on it without feeling that there is something there that abases even miserable beings. But for the Lord of Life, for the King of Glory to become a mere mass of clay, a thing bereft of life and consciousness, that which they who loved it most, buried out of their sight-who can comprehend such a thought? Who can fathom or measure it?

But let us go on to the third point: THE END CHRIST HAD IN VIEW IN THIS UNPARALLEled Humiliation—the object he aimed to accomplish by it. "For our sakes," says the text, "he became poor, that we through his poverty might be rich."

Observe here, first, our natural condition intimated; the condition in which you and I entered the world, and in which many of us still continue. It is set forth as a state of poverty; and it is really so-a state of extreme, utter poverty; complete destitution. I refer not to the things that can serve the body: God may have given us enough of them, and more than enough to last for the few short years the body may need them: I refer to the never-dying soul—to our wants as rational and immortal beings-to our situation as creatures who are going into a state of existence far away from the world, and from all the world contains. In this life we are poor indeed; so poor, that in all the wide universe, look where we will, we can call nothing our own but sin and wretchedness. Poverty is indeed too feeble a word to convey even the very faintest idea of our forlorn condition. We are not only destitute of all good-we are full of all evil, involved in difficulties from which we cannot extricate ourselves, and overwhelmed with burdens which we cannot shake off or bear. A man, you are aware, may be poor, but yet owe nothing to any man. Sin, however, is a positive debt. We have a debt to pay, and a debt that will assuredly be demanded of us, and we have nothing whatever to answer the demand. Or, worse still, a man may be poor, and even in debt, and yet be healthy and strong, so that by his labour he may obtain his bread, and even, in the end, disentangle himself from his perplexities. But not so we: sin withers us; it is a disease as well as a debt; it is the sickness of the soul, something that paralyzes the soul, that renders it both unable and unwilling to make any one effort for its own release. It stupifies the soul, brethren; it fevers us; it renders us insensible to our own situation and circumstances: so that, though we talk about our souls and eternity, we naturally never care about them, nor ever act or feel with reference to them. We are in a stupor, the delirium of a dream, and a dream that nothing but death can disturb. You remember the Laodicean Church: "I am rich," she said, “and increased in goods, and have need of nothing." It is the

language of human nature; it has been the language of every heart that is now beating in this place; it is in too many instances its language still: "I am rich; I am increased in goods; I have need of nothing." But what says God to us?"Wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked." Yes: wretched, when your hearts are swelling with what you call happiness; wretched, amidst the song and the dance, and all the delights that folly and thoughtlessness can impart; wretched, when you just grasp the things you love best, and say "Now I am satisfied for ever:" "Wretched," says God, even then. And poor too: poor, amidst your silver and gold; poor, among your hoarded thousauds ; poor, in your spacious homes and your costly furniture; poor, while swelling with pride on account of your wealth in your counting-houses, and surrounded by your business. And blind, too: as ignorant, naturally, of all that is worth knowing, as the brute beasts that perish. And naked, also: naked as sin can strip you exposed amidst gospel light and gospel privileges to all the dangers of your lost condition—as much so, while out of Christ, as the idolater and the heathen; not like a man clothed and fenced from the wintry storm, but like a man left in that storm, bare and helpless, with not a garment to cover him, nor anything to shield him from its pitiless blast. "Wretched," says God," and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.”

Now THE END OF OUR LORD'S INTERPOSITION ON OUR BEHALF was not to confirm this state of things, but to alter it: it was, we read, to make us "rich" that is, to put us in possession, not merely of all that we need as rational and immortal beings, as creatures of urgent wants and an endless existence; but to supply our necessities so abundantly, to heap on us so much more than we need, that no desire shall be left ungratified, that even in God's estimation, that even in the heavenly world we shall be called happy, and not accounted so simply, but actually be so; that we shall be in heaven, not paupers and pensioners, but seated on high in heaven among the lofty and great, rejoicing in all the enriched riches and glory. Christ came not merely to give us the money that would seem to be needful to carry us through the world; but to give us the fine gold of heaven to enrich us, to give us his own spotless garments to cover and adorn us.

And observe, the Apostle does not say that Christ came merely to save or redeem us, but he says he became poor to enrich us; in other words, to make us partakers of his own blessedness. Look, for a moment, at the state of the rich man in hell. What has that proud worldling now that he can call his own? What is there within that man's reach that he can grasp and make his own? He cries for a drop of water, but he cries and laments in vain. Such is a picture of the utter poverty of fallen man. Look now at the beggar, Lazarus, carried to heaven on the wings of angels, placed in the bosom of Abraham, the friend of God, surrounded with all the glory and blessedness of heaven, of God himself. Such is the condition to which Christ is both able and willing to raise us.

When he visited our world, it was not merely that he might pluck us as brands from the burning: no, this was only the first step in the design he had in view; his ultimate object was to make us like himself, to make us the children of God, and exalt us to heaven at last. Before he became poor we were debtors: we had nothing to pay: now, if we are his people, all things are ours. The