What Jesus Said About His First Coming

I proceeded forth, and came from God.'--John 8:42.

BACK to Jesus' is the watchword of a growing and influential school to-day. There is a great deal in the cry, and in the drift of thought which it represents, with which every wise Christian must be in sympathy. But it covers very different tendencies, In some cases it means reverent submission to Jesus Christ, and acceptance of all His words. In some cases it is associated with a very free and arbitrary handling of the Gospels, which substantially results in the rejection, as not genuine, of all Christ's sayings that point in the direction of His supernatural origin or divine power. The underlying motive in such cases is the wish to get away from the Epistles back to the supposed simpler teaching of the Sage and Saint of Nazareth. Back to Jesus' means, in many cases, get rid of Paul, and keep only as much of Matthew and the other Evangelists as may yield the image of a humanitarian Christ.' Doctrinal prepossessions lie below the critical processes.

But it is somewhat strange that those who go farthest in the direction of this free-and-easy handling of the records seem to proceed upon the principle that if once we can get at what Jesus said and thought about Himself and His mission, we have got to absolute truth. Now, that is strange, and especially strange from their point of view. For we do not generally accept a man's estimate of himself, especially if it is a high one, as conclusive. Experience has taught us to take the Pharisee's short way of dealing with such claims. Thou bearest record of Thyself; Thy record is not true.' But the world is ready to take Christ at His own valuation. How comes that?

I want to go back to Christ' now, and to collect what He Himself said about His mission. My subject is not the single saying that I have read, but the whole class of passages to which it belongs. They are somewhat numerous; and, unless I am very much mistaken, they lay deep and broad and unshakable the foundation for the very conception of Christ which the doctrinal Epistles draw out into distinct statements. If Jesus said about Himself and His work what the Gospels unanimously report Him to have said, or anything like it, then the doctrines of Paul, and Peter, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, and John, are the only adequate explanation, and they arc but the explanation, of His claims.

Now, with these preliminary remarks let me try to gather these sayings of the Lord about Himself and His work under two or three heads, which may classify them, and help us.

 I. His Heavenly Origin And World-Wide Significance.

First, then, they give us Christ's own estimate of His heavenly origin and world-wide significance.

It is very remarkable that He only once speaks of having been born,' and that was under circumstances, as I shall have to show you presently, which explain the unusual expression. Bat at all other times it is either I come,' I am come, the Son of Man came'; or it is' I am sent.' Now that may be purely accidental, and it is quite conceivable that a man might drop into such a form of speech, if he were profoundly conscious of having a great work to do in the world, without any notion of thereby claiming anything extraordinary beyond the fact of his mission. But the persistent, exclusive use of the term does seem to indicate that Jesus Christ meant to claim something more than is common to humanity. And the presumption that He did so is elevated into certainty if you will notice, and bear with me whilst I adduce, two or three instances in which He expands the expression, so as to give us a glimpse of the fulness of its contents.

One of these is this word of my text, I proceeded forth'; that points to a condition in which He was before His earthly appearance, and which He voluntarily left. I came from God'; that points to His earthly life as being the permanent result of an initial act, which was voluntary and His own, and behind which stretched an indefinite existence. That is fair commenting, and nothing more.

The presumption is made still more certain if we turn to another scene, where, to soothe His sorrowing friends in the upper chamber, He said, I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world.' There was one solemn motion, self-originated, and its two termini were the Father, beyond the reach of sight, and the world, the scene of His visible manifestation. And that solemn motion necessarily involved the turning upon itself, and the returning to the Source, as He goes on to say, Again, I leave the world, and go unto the Father.' The same I' vibrates between the unseen abode with the Father, and the visible manifestation upon earth; and the same volition is at work in the coming into, and the departing from, this earthly scene.

Again, I point to other words, spoken in strangely different circumstances, and, therefore, with an entirely different colouring. To the Roman governor, with his half-amused contempt for the tatterdemalion of a King that stood before him, and his scornful question, in the full flush of conscious, vulgar, material power, Art Thou a King, then?' He answered, To this end was I born'--that was all that Pilate could understand --and for this cause came I into the world,' why was that added? Was it a synonym for being born? No! it was something that lay behind the birth. And, if I might venture to say so, Christ added to the former clause, which was level with Pilate's apprehension, the full explanation of the term, unusual on His lips, as a kind of satisfaction to His own consciousness, rather than for any enlightenment that it would bring to its original hearer, and because He could not, even for a moment, adopt only language which might carry to some ears the inference that His birth was His beginning, or was as the birth of other men.

Now, brethren, I do not think that I am exaggerating anything in my interpretation of these three sayings, and therefore I make bold to say that when the Apostle Paul, in his intensely doctrinal fashion, talks about Jesus Christ being in the form of God, and not considering equality with God, as a thing to be eagerly grasped at, but emptying Himself, and being in the form of a servant; and found in fashion as a man; or when the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews says, Forasmuch as the children were partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same'; or when John says the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us,' they are saying nothing more than Jesus Christ had said about Himself. Back to Christi' Yes! by all means; and back to the Christ who declared that He was before He was born; that He left the eternal, divine glory by His own act; that by His own volition He entered into the limitations of humanity, and was not ashamed'--why should a man be so?--to be called our brother.

So much, then, for the first of the lessons to be gathered from these great sayings. Let me, just in a sentence, refer to another. We find in these sayings clear indications of the world-wide significance which, in Christ's consciousness, attached to Himself and His work. I do not need to quote many of them. There are only two with which I will trouble you; one in which He says, I am the Light of the world, that whosoever believeth in Me might not abide in darkness'; and the other, in which He says, I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.' In His earthly career He recognised His limitation as being not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel: And yet His love and His prescient eye went out from the very beginning, as the synagogue in Nazareth witnesses, to the other sheep which are not of this fold'; to the lepers and the widows outside of Israel, and the whole race of mankind.

Think, think! the carpenter's Son,' with no name, with no culture, with no material force, in that little village hidden away amongst the hills in half-Gentile Galilee, standing up there, in that humble synagogue and saying, My mission is to humanity.' And think how nineteen centuries have vindicated what seemed an idle boast.

 II. The Purposes Of His Coming.

But, secondly, I find in these sayings collectively our Lord's conception of the purposes of His coming.

I gather them together as briefly as may be. The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost.' The Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them.' I am come, not to judge the world, but to save the world.' Salvation, then, is the purpose. Take another class. I am come that they might have life.' The bread of God is He which cometh down from heaven that He may give life to the world.' Salvation,then, or the communication of life, is the purpose. Yet again, I am come, a Light into the world, that whosoever believeth in Me may not abide in darkness: Salvation, then, or the communication of life, or the flooding of the world with light, such are the purposes, as Jesus saw them, of His coming.

Think of the conception of humanity, that is, of you and me, and of my needs and yours, which underlies these solemn words--dead; in peril; famished; dark and blind--that is humanity, as it presented itself before the meek Sage of Nazareth. And to deal with a humanity so full of desperate needs, and so utterly incapable of any kind of self-help, was the problem which this audacious young Rabbi grappled, and said that He had solved. That is tremendous. And not only is it tremendous, but it may come to us with a suggestion that we had better see whether the terms in which He described the world have any application to us, and, if so, what we mean to do. Christ looked below the surface. He regarded men mainly in their relation to God, and God's laws, and He beheld a universal pall spread over all nations, and every man as having come short of the glory of God.

Think, again, how in this declaration of purpose there lies the clearest consciousness of non participation in that universal condition. He who comes and arrogates to himself the power and the right to deal with these necessities must himself be clear from all implication in them. Think of the consciousness of inexhaustible power, as well as the outgoing motion of a boundless love, which such a notion of His life's work proves Christ to have possessed. What a superb confidence in the healing power of His touch, in the exuberant abundance of vitality, by which He was able to breathe a soul beneath the ribs of all the corpses in the valley of dry bones! What an unfailing fountain of light there must have been in His own consciousness of Himself, that He should venture upon such words as these!

And again, I say, His tremendous claim to be able to save the world in the full sense of delivering from all moral and physical evil, and endowing with all moral and physical good, is verified by facts. He has done it for some of us; He is doing it every day; and if He does not do it to the world, it is not because He has not the power, but because the world will not submit to the power.

Did Peter, or John, or Paul ever say more about His work than He said Himself? Are not their most rapturous sayings only the expansion and the setting forth of the ground and the consequences of His own statements? Back to Christ,' the Saviour, the Life-giver, and the Light-bringer.

 III. The Manner In Which The Purpose Of His Life Was To Be Discharged.

Note, from these collective sayings, our Lord's conception of the manner in which the purpose of His life was to be discharged.

Again I summarise. The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.' I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.' To this end came I into the world, to bear witness to the truth.' I am come to send fire on earth.' Now observe that these three last statements of the manner in which He discharges His work--viz, calling sinners to repentance, bearing witness to the truth, and sending fire on earth, are subordinate to the great purpose which was stated in the first of the passages quoted, the Son of Man is come to give His life a ransom for many.' The calling of sinners to repentance, and the bearing witness to the truth, fall mainly under the ministering which He did upon earth. Sending fire on earth is, as His own words abundantly show, only possible as the result of His giving His life a ransom for many. And so we have to regard the manner of His effecting His purpose as falling into two great portions, whereof the one covers the earthly life of ministration, with all the gentle words that drew publicans and harlots, and melted susceptible souls into a passion and a flood of repentance that needed not to be repented of, and with its witness to the truth by all the gracious words that came from His lips, and most chiefly by the witness of His life, which declared God to men, and revealed men to themselves.

But, side by side with that ministration by life, separable from it, and the shining apex of the great pyramid that was raised day by day, and deed by deed, stands His death as the ransom for many.' Brethren, conceptions of Christ's manner of saving the world which put all the emphasis on His witnessing to the truth, or on His gracious ministrations, or even upon His calling sinners to repentance, are truncated and incomplete; and, on the other hand, all these other forms of His activity are most fully operative in His death as our ransom on the Cross. For I would fain know what, in all the gentle beauty of His earthly life, has moulded and drawn hearts to self-abasement and a hearty hatred of, and turning from, their sins, like the pathos and the power of that death? and what, in all the gracious words that proceeded out of His mouth, and in all the deeds of beauty with which He wrought for us the living example of duty, has so borne witness to the truth, as that same death? And what is it that kindled the fire of that swift Spirit, poured out upon the world's icy coldness, but the sacrifice which must needs precede it?

Therefore, unless we take the ransom as the chief part of the manner by which He saves the world, we do not go back to Christ,' nor accept His own estimate of Himself. If we do so accept, we must listen to Him saying, As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up'; The bread which I will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.'

 IV. Lastly, I Find In These Collective Sayings Our Lord's Prevision Of The Issue Of His Work.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I am come, not to send peace, but a sword'; or, as another Evangelist has it less picturesquely, in the parallel passage, not peace, but rather division.' Again, His epilogue to the great story of the blind man who was made to see, and was then cast out by the blind men that would not see, is, for judgment am I come into the world, that they which see not might see, and that they which see might be made blind.'

Jesus was under no illusions as to the issue of His work, Purpose is one thing; result is altogether another. The mission had but one intention, but it has a twofold consequence; because man's freewill comes in, and even infinite Love could not ensure that all men should accept the ransom from captivity, or all should be enkindled by the leaping fire of the divine Spirit. How often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!' That is the wall of thwarted Omnipotence; the tears of blood dropped by wounded, infinite Love. All through the ages the same issue is being realised; and it is being realised here and now. Some believed the word that was spoken, and some believed not.' Thus the aged Simeon's prophetic vision is fulfilled: This Child is set for the rise and fall of many in Israel.' Though the mission has one purpose it has a double result.

So let me urge on you, dear friends, to take Christ's words, and to take them all. There is no warrant for the common practice of picking and choosing amongst them, and rejecting one of two sayings which come to us attested by precisely the same evidence, while we accept the other, on the ground that the one fits our notions and the other does not. All in all, or not at all,' should be our principle in dealing with the words of the Incarnate Truth.

As clearly as tongue can speak, He has asserted that He came forth from God, and came into the world.' That is the foundation of the Apostolic doctrine of the Incarnation. As clearly as tongue can speak, He has asserted that the purpose of His coming is to save the lost, to vivify the dead, to give light to them that sit in darkness.' That is the foundation of the Apostolic doctrine of man's sin and danger. As clearly as tongue can speak He has declared that the manner of His accomplishing His purpose is to minister,' to bear witness to the truth,' to call sinners to repentance,' to give His life a ransom for many.' That is the foundation of the Apostolic doctrine of the Atonement. As clearly as tongue can speak He has asserted that after His Cross He will flood the world with fire. That is the foundation of the Apostolic doctrine of an indwelling Spirit. As clearly as tongue can speak He has asserted that sight or blindness, life or death, depends on the reception or rejection of His words. That is the foundation of the Apostolic doctrine of the tremendous issues of salvation or of loss, which hang on our listening to Him or our turning from Him.

And it is the reason why I venture, dear brethren, to come to you now, and as Christ's unworthy ambassador beseech you in His stead that you listen to Him.

God Himself has spoken from heaven: This is My beloved Son; hear Him.' See that ye refuse not Him that speaketh' to us still; for if they escaped not who turned away from Him that spake on earth, much more shall we not escape if we turn away from Him that' now speaketh from heaven.'