Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2117
“Therefore does My Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I might take it again.” John 10:17
OUR Lord Jesus here speaks of Himself in His complex personality as God and Man, the Mediator between God and men. As such, He comes to us first at Bethlehem, “wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.” We behold Him a babe, a child, a man, a worker, a sufferer, a witness for the Truth of God and a victim condemned to die upon the tree. We behold Him dead in the grave and risen again as the Interposer between God and man.
In that capacity we shall think of Him during this discourse. It is the voice of the Man Christ Jesus, the eternal Son of God, which says, “Therefore does My Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I might take it again.” The Father feels boundless love to Him who, for us men, and for our redemption, came down from Heaven and took upon Himself our nature, and being found in fashion as a man, became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross. “Therefore God also has highly exalted Him,” or, to use His own words, “Therefore does My Father love Me.”
I. First, CONSIDER THE FATHER’S LOVE TO CHRIST JESUS BECAUSE OF HIS DEATH AND RESURRECTION. This love was exceedingly sweet to Jesus. Persecuted by men and sometimes depressed in His own spirit, He comforts Himself with this, “Therefore does My Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I might take it again.” To be well-pleasing to the Father was everything with our Lord Jesus Christ. In heaviest toll, in dark slander, in deepest perplexity, if His Father only said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased,” Jesus was refreshed with meat which others knew not of.
Beloved, let us be like our Lord Jesus in this—let the love of the Father to us be our comfort, our joy, our strength, our hope, our Heaven. What more can men or angels have than the love of God? Let that love be shed abroad in my heart by the Holy Spirit and even the celestial city cannot afford me a more pure and substantial delight. O my God, Your love is precious beyond all estimate! “Whom have I in Heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside
You.”
But to come back to our Lord. The Father took the greatest delight in His Son as laying down His life, first, because of the delight of Jesus in His Father’s plans. Exceedingly high are the thoughts of God in reference to His dealings with the sinful sons of men. Jehovah could, with a word, make creatures that should be perpetually innocent of sin. He could also make creatures which He foreknew would choose evil ways and depart into rebellion. But a simple act of creation would not produce the character of elect man. A weapon may be struck from the anvil at a blow. But a Damascus blade needs special annealing to produce the temper needed in a champion’s sword.
The chosen were to be a race who had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and so knew good and evil by actual practice—especially knew the result of evil in their own persons—for they would even die spiritually. But they would be restored from death, and Hell, and sin, and would be made haters of transgression, lovers of righteousness. Though left to their own free agency, yet when the work of Divine Grace was complete in them, they would be of a character to which sin would be impossible, since they would so deeply abhor it.
These persons would be raised to the peerage of the Divine kingdom and bear the name and dignity of sons of God, being in very deed Brothers in blood to Him who is One with God. They were to be Brothers of the Son of God by birth, and yet never to be the subjects of pride. It will be infinitely safe for the Lord to entrust us with all the privileges, royalties, and liberties of His own household. For this end it was necessary that the chosen from among men should undergo a marvelous process, much more complex and intricate than that which follows the fiat of power—we must in Jesus die— and be made alive again in Him.
Beloved, it was necessary, in order to the completion of the plan of Divine Grace, that God Himself, in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, should take manhood into eternal union with Godhead. The Son agreed to do this and was born of the Virgin. But when He took manhood into union with Himself, He took all that belonged to manhood. Now, sin having attached itself to manhood, the Christ, in becoming Man, took our sin upon Himself, as it is written, “The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
He could not be actually guilty—God forbid the thought! But He became legally amenable to the penalty due for our transgression. He was willing even to make this stoop of condescension. When the Divine Plan was proposed to Him, this was His answer—“Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of Me, I delight to do Your will, O My God!” Do you wonder that the Father loved Him, when He saw in Him such sympathetic union with Himself?