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.
