Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2722
“Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.” Hebrews 5:8.
WERE you ever in a new trouble, one which was so strange that you felt that a similar trial had never happened to you and, moreover, you dreamt that such a temptation had never assailed anybody else? I should not wonder if that was the thought of your troubled heart. And did you ever walk out upon that lonely desert island upon which you were wrecked and say, “I am alone—alone—ALONE—nobody was ever here before me”? And did you suddenly pull up short as you noticed, in the sand, the footprints of a man? I remember right well passing through that experience—and when I looked, lo, it was not merely the footprints of a man that I saw, but I thought I knew whose feet had left those imprints. They were the marks of One who had been crucified, for there was the print of the nails. So I thought to myself, “If He has been here, it is no longer a desert island. As His blessed feet once trod this wilderness-way, it blossoms now like the rose and it becomes to my troubled spirit as a very garden of the Lord!”
My objective, in this discourse, will be to try to point out the footprints of Jesus in the sands of sorrow so that others of the children of God may have their hearts lifted up within them while they observe that “though He were a Son, yet learned He,” as well as the rest of us who are in the Lord’s family, “obedience by the things which He suffered.”
I. I ask your attention, first of all, to that which, I doubt not, you would have observed in the text without any help from me, namely, that OUR REDEEMER’S SONSHIP DID NOT EXEMPT HIM FROM SUFFERING.
“Though He were a Son.” It is put as if this might have been a case where the rod of the household could have been spared. That there should be suffering for enemies, that there should be sorrow for rebels against God is natural and proper, but one might have thought that He would have spared His own Son and that, in His case, there would be no learning of obedience by the things which He suffered. But, according to the text, Sonship did not exempt the Lord Jesus Christ from suffering. I want you to notice that, in His case, the Sonship was very emphatic. It was a relationship which was enjoyed by Him by Nature. He was the Son of God before the worlds were made, or time began. We know not how it was, neither may we attempt to explain the Doctrine of the Eternal Filiation, but, assuredly, as long as there was a Father, there was a Son—and Jesus Christ has always been “the Son of the Highest.” Yet, though He were a Son, when He came and took upon Himself our nature and appeared on earth, He was not exempted from learning obedience by the things which He suffered. In person He was august—He was the Heir of all things, the King of all kings, the King’s Son as well as King, Himself—and yet, notwithstanding the loftiness of His Nature and the unspeakable majesty of His rank, He “learned obedience by the things which He suffered.” He was the Son of God in a very special sense even by His earthly birth, for the angel said to Mary, “The Holy Spirit shall come upon you, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow you: therefore that Holy Thing which shall be born of you shall be called the Son of God.”
You and I are the children of men, but Christ was the Son of God. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh,” and nothing better—and the best of parents have only fleshly, carnal children. There is not a word of Scripture to support the novel notion that some children are born so good that they do not need regeneration or conversion. I do not wonder that to patch up the figment of infant sprinkling, that lie should have been forged—and it is nothing but a lie—there is not an atom of truth at the back of it! Our Lord said to Nicodemus, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that
which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” And Paul reminded the Ephesian Christians that they “were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.” Men are not the children of God by any universal fatherhood—they must come to be so by being begotten again “unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” This is not with us a matter of nature, but the gift of Grace. “As many as received Him, to them gave He power (the right or privilege) to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name.” But our Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God by birth and He is spotless in His Nature. There is no corruption, no bias towards evil, no original sin, no taint of birth—nothing of the kind. He is the second Adam, but He has not participated in the evil of the first Adam. In Him there was nothing that even the prince of this world could discover with the keenest glance of his malicious eyes. And yet, though He was, in this respect, God’s Son above us all, born absolutely pure, “yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.”