CHAPTER XVI.

Christ’s”s Anticipations of last Passion previous to Night of Gethsemane—@Luke, 12xii. 49-51: “I have a baptism to be baptized with”l@—-John, 12xii. 27, 28: “Now is my soul troubled”—-John, 13xiii. 21: “ HIle was troubled in spirit”—-Heb. 5v. 7, 8: “ When he hbad offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tearxs”—-Objection answered arising from Divine Prescieniace —-Progress of Christ’s”s Anticipations.

PREVIOUS to the night of Gethsemane, the apprehension of his approaching suffering had, more than once-@d"@e,, visibly affected the incarnate God. The first passage illustrating this truth is the following: “I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled ?”—-Luke, 12xii. 49. “14But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!”— Luke, 12xii. 50. “ Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on the earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division.”—-Luke,te# 12xii. 51. The whole passage has been transcribed, with a view the better to exhibit, in all its potency, the full meaning of the fiftieth verse. The speaker was Christ. The dreaded baptism was his last passion. Who was “straitened” until the baptism should be accomplished ? Was it the man only? or was the indwelling God also “ straitened?” Did the distressing apprehension pervade the whole self of the divine speaker? or did it touch only his manhood, that finite speck, which bore a less proportion to the majestic whole than the glow--worm bears to the sun in the firmament ?

In theIn the forty-ninth and fifty-first verses his Godhead was clearly the paramount theme of the divine speaker. He adverted to his having “ come” into the world : manifestly referring to his advent as the second person of the Trinity. He announced one of the effects of hiMs having “ come” into the world. His advent was to “ send fire” and engender “division” on the earth. The foretold “ii shaking of the nations” was to be effected, not by the meek and pacific son of Mary, but by the almighty power of the indwelling God. The piercing “ division” created by the Gospel pervaded and severed the sinews, and arteries, and very heart of the social world. A fire was kindled on the day of Pentecost, whose mighty conflagration scarcely ceased to rage until the faith of the fishermen had fixed its sandalled foot on the; throne of the Cae,%sars. This triumph of the@ religion of the cross over the marshalled powers of unbelieving man, armed with the terrors of persecution, headed by the prince of darkness, and re-enforced by all his legions, was, perhaps, the most stupendous miracle ever displayed by him who came “,to send fire on the earth.”

If, then, in the forty-ninth and fifty-first verses of this memorable passage, the Godhead of the divine speaker was thus the almost exclusive theme, is it indeed true that, in the intervening, or fiftieth verse, it became, as it were, utterly merged in the little atom of his manhood? Did the divinity suddenly pass, in the “continuous discourse, under a total eclipse at the end of the forty-ninth verse, which eclipse as suddenly disappeared at the beginning of the fifty-first? Or, to drop the figures, did the incarnate God, at the commencement of the fiftieth verse, abruptly descend from hiMs divinity to his mere manhood, and as abruptly re-ascend, at the end of that verse, from his mere manhood back to his divinity? Such a double transition, so instantaneously repeated, would have seemed almost a phenomenon, had we been forced to yield our credence to its existence, by intrinsic indications that such was the intention of the speaker; but there are no such indications on the face or in the relations of the passage. The divine speaker passed through these contiguous and kindred verses, himself designated in each by the same personal pronoun “ I,” without the slightest intimation of any change in the natures of which he spoke. The subject represented by that personal pronoun formed, in each of the three verses, the one undivided and indivisible theme. If his divinity was the chief agent in sending “fire” and engendering “division” on the earth, his divinity was to be the chief recipient of the dreaded “ baptism.”

To impute to the speaking God a double change of subject, radical and vast as the change from the infinite to the finite, and thence back again from the finite to the infinite, affecting, too, his own united being, within the compass of this brief passage, without a shadow of change in the language which his wisdom chose, would seem, indeed, like the mere dream of fancy; or, if we are obliged to view it as a daylight atnd waking theory, we cannot but regard it as one of the boldest eff”orts of that ”bold hypothesis, “ God is impassible.” Such a dream, or such a theory, if so we must call it, should find no registered place among the fundamental articles of Christian faith.

If, then, we may justly infer from the language of Christ, in the fiftieth verse of the passage under review, compared with his language in the german verses, which go before and after it, that he intended to comprehend in that verse, as well as in the other two, both of his united natures, we have the conclusive authority of the Son of God, that his divinity as well as his manhood was “straitened” by the dread of the coming “ baptism.”

The next passage showing that the dismay of the incarnate God, caused by his approaching sufferings, had anticipated the scene of the garta@den is the following: “ Now is my soul troubled; and@ what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour.; but for this cause came I unto this hour.”—-John, 12xii. 27. What soul was troubled? The prevalent theory would say that it was the mere human soul of the divine victim. So said not the divine victim himself His declaration, in its plain and obvious import, comprehended his whole united spirituality. The limiting adjective “ human” fell not from the lips of the incarnate God. It is the interpolation of .earth.

“Father, save me from this hour; but for this cause came I unto this hour.” The august Comer was the second person of the Trinity. Upon his advent he had received the “ body” prepared for him, and thus , “manifest in the fleshs@” had meekly awaited that hour of hours. But upon the near approach of that tremendous hour, new and ”strange” in the annals of eternity, when God the Father was to pour on God the Son, made sin for sinners, the storm of infinite wrath, compounded of the “ multitudinous” transgressions of all the redeemed, the self-devoted victim, almighty as he was, for a moment stood appalled. “ Father, save me from this hour.” The august Comer and the momentary Supplicant were one, designated by the little pronouns “,I” and “,me.” Both pronouns referred to the self-same Being; both referred to the totality of that Being; both included within their illimitable import the whole incarnate Deity. The coming God, the “troubled” God, the supplicating God were identical. In each stage of the stupendous action the God was the chief Actor, the man but the humble adjunct.

Farther proof that, of Christ’s”s painful a-inticipations, -the garden was not the first witness, is to be found in the following passage: “When Jesus had thus said, he was troubled in spirit, and testified, and said, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.”—-John, 13xiii. 21. This passage has its date just after -our Lord’s”s institution of the sacramental supper, and on the same night in which his prediction of the treason of one of his disciples was fulfilled. The Greek word here translated “spirit” is used in the Bible, as well as the dictionary, in opposition to matter. Its scriptural, as well as its lexicographic meaning, is “ immaterial substance.” It denotes animated immateriality, whether found in man, in angels, or in the Godhead. Take the following s,pecimens of its application to the divine essence. St. Peter said of Christ: “ Being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit;” meaning doubtless, by the quickening Spirit, the Spirit of the Omnipotent. —-1 Peter, 3iii. 18. The “Alpha and Omega,” who appeared to his beloved disciple in the first three chapters of Revelation, styled himself the “Spirit.” “ Hear what the Spirit saith unto the Churches.”— Revelation, 2ii. 17. “God is a Spirit,” declared the same inspired disciple.—-John, 4iv. 24.

“He was troubled in spirit.” The term ”spirit” was clearly applicable, according to its scriptural meaning, to his ethereal essence; it was just as applicable to his ethereal essence as to his human intellect. Inspiration employed a term whose natural, boundaries included both. To exclude his divinity would be doing violence to those natural boundaries. It would be reducing them, by force and arms, from their inherent infinitude down to the finite compass of humanity. Inspiration interposed no discrimination between the human intellect and the ethereal essence of Christ. If we are permitted to understand the term as Inspiration has elsewhere taught us to understand it, his whole immaterial being, in both its elements, “was troubled.” "We are ignorant of any principle of grammar or of logic -by ,which human reason can interpose any discriminating barrier. Yet has the theory of presuming man dared to lay down on the scriptural map a line of demarcation, impassable as the walls of heaven, where no line of demarcation has been marked by the Holy Ghost. It has dared to affirm that Inspiration was so absorbed in the human as to lose sight of the divine Spirit of the incarnate God.

In this connexion, a pas-sage from one of the epistles, manifestly referring to the agonies of Christ at Gethsemane, may advantageously be introduced: ,”Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears, unto Him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared; though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered.”—-Hebrews, 5v. 7, 8. Who was the supplicant of this passage that “offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears?” It was certainly Christ. In what nature did he thus agonizingly supplicate? We suppose in both his natures; especially inixi his paramount, or divine nature.

The earnest supplicant was distinguished, in the passage, by two characteristic marks: he was “a Son,” the eternal Son; and he thus strongly supplicated “in the days of his flesh;” that is to say, in the days of his manhood on earth. The eternal Sonship of the supplicant was not predicable of the human progeny of Mary; nor were the expressions, “in the days of his flesh.” The phrase, “in the days of his flesh,” implies that there had been a time when the tearful supplicant had not been in the flesh; not clothed in human nature; when he had existed in another mode or state of being.

But the manhood of Christ had never been out of the flesh. It was created in the flesh; it was in the flesh in the manger; it was in the flesh on the cross; it was in the flesh, awaiting its quick returning spirit, in the tomb of Joseph; it is in the flesh on the right hand of God. It was only to the divinity of Christ that the inspired, writer to the Hebrews could have applied the descriptive peculiarity, “,in the days of his flesh.” That was, indeed, a memorable era in the eternity of the second person of the Trinity. He had been a disembodied and glorious Spirit from everlasting. He first came into the flesh when he made hiNmself incarnate. The days of the God Christ Jesus on earth were emphatically and descriptively “the day,-s of h” is flesh.” But the phrase would have been unmeaning if applied to the man Christ Jesus. It would have marked no era in his existence.

We have it, then, established by two distinguishing and unerring badges that the Supplicant in the passage from Hebrews was not simply the human offspring of the Virgin. His “prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears” were not the mere ebullitions of human frailty. The Supplicant was the eternal Son of God. To him pertained a state of antecedent existence, not comprehended “ in the days of his flesh.” The Supplicant, then, was, the second, the incarnate person of the Trinity. The implorin” g voice; the strong crying; the tears; ; the spirit which prompted that crying and those tears, were his. He who “,feared “ was hbe who had made the worlds. In this fearing, deprecatory scene of the mediatorial drama the divinity predominated as much as it did in the stupendous scene where the “five barley loaves and two small fishes” were made the superabundant aliment of five thousand famished persons.

But was it, indeed, the second person ofe the Trinity clothed in manhood, who “ offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears,” and “was heard in “ -that he feared?” Let Gethin semane answer the inquiry. Let the garden, where, “being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground,” reveal the awful truth. Let the angel respond who appeared unto him “ from heaven strengthening” the “fearing,” the almost sinking God.

We have heard it orally objected that if, at the approach of Christ’s”s passion, the dismay caused by its anticipation affected his divine nature, the same anticipation must equally have affected his divinity before it became incarnate; that to the divine mind the past and the future are one concentrated now; that to HIfim who fills eternity the anticipation of the cross wivas just as vivid before the creation of the world@is as it was in the garden; that our doctrine, therefore, would convert the illimitable preexistence of the Son of God into one saddened, unbroken Gethsemane.

To this objection we have a ready response. If we have failed to show, by scriptural evidence, that the divinity of Christ shared in the dismay caused by his approaching suffering, then this particular branch of our argument fails of itself. It needs not to be assailed by extraneous objection; it sinks under the burden of its own weight; its foundation is ascertained to be laid in unstable sandlid. But if we have succeeded in showing, by scriptural proofs, that the divinity of Christ participated in the dismay caused by his coming passion, then is our position fixed upon a rock. Underneath it is the everlasting foundation of the Bible. And because human reason, dimly peering through its earthy telescope, cannot scan the vast dimensions of that infinite Essence “ manifest in the flesh,” so as to ascertain with precision how his divine nature could, in harmony with all his attributes, have partaken of the dismay caused by the anticipated outpouring of his Father’s”s wrath, shall human reason, thus thwarted by the diminutiveness of its own powers of vision, venture boldly to repudiate a doctrine proved to be scriptural, and so deeplyv interesting to Christian faith?

Other answers to the objection may be given. The supposition that the past eternity and the future eternity are, to the divine mind, one concentrated now, rests not on scriptural authority. It is based on metaphysical speculation. Human reason has no right to speculate concerning the unrevealed mysteries of God; to convert his eternity into one monotonous now; to deprive him of the joys of retrospect, and the delights of anticipation. The past and the future are essentially different from the present, in the nature of things. The Omnipotent could not, by the word of his power, make them identical, without violating the inflexible laws of his empire, any more than he could make two and two amount to five. That past things and future things should be present things is a physical contradiction. The Son of God is not now creating the worlds; he is not now suspended on the cross; he is not now judging the quick and the dead. To view those widely separated events as contemporaneous, would be to view them falsely.

The God of truth sees things as they are. He views the past as gone, the future as to come, the present alone as actually present. To his mind the deluge is not now riding in triumph over the tops of the mountains; to his mind the elements are not now melting with fervent heat. Progression is a fundamental principle of God’s”s empire, and progressive events are viewed as progressive by the infinitely wise Legislator. The reckless violation of all laws by the afterward penitent malefactor, his belief with the heart when apostles fled, and his repose in paradise on the bosom of his redeeming God, were not simultaneous events in the estimation of the dwellers upon the earth, or in the view of Him who “ inhabiteth eternity.”

The memory of the Deity, doubtless, reaches back to the earliest past; his prescience reaches forward to the latest future. Eternity and immensity have no recesses hidden from omniscience. How vivid may be his anticipations of coming events, brought home by his unerring prescience, the Bible has not told us with perfect distinctness. On this sacred theme we may, perhaps, without irreverence, draw some twilight imaginings from the analogy of his earthly substitute, made in his own image, and after his own likeness, and into whose nostrils he breathed “ the breath of life.” To a good man it may be revealed, as it was to Peter, that a violent death awaits him. The conviction of his bitter doom is sure; the cruel death dwells ever in his conscious breast. Yet does not its sting disturb his happiness or serenity, until the hour draws nigh for the triumph of the king of terrors.

So the Bible shadows forth the progressive invatenseness of the anticipations of the Son of God, caused by his approaching suffering. When he foretold his passion first, it produced in him little seeming emotion. “From that time forth began Jesus to show unto his disciples how he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things.”—-Matthew, 16xvi. 21. “ “And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things.”—-Mark, 8viii. 31. A little farther onward, in Luke, he declared, “But I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.” Still onward, in John, he exclaimed, “Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour.” And at Gethsemane, when the dreaded “baptism,” the tremendous “hour” was just at hand, “,being in an agony,” he sweat “ as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”