Bible Commentaries
Hebrews 2

Verses 8-9

The Crowned Christ

But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honour, that by the grace of God he should taste death for every man.— Hebrews 2:8-9.

We have a comparison in this chapter between humanity uncrowned and humanity in Jesus Christ crowned. Humanity is a tender and beautiful plant, but it is flowerless apart from Jesus Christ. All the strength, the grace, and the beauty of the race express themselves once for all in Christ who is the flower of the race. And we see the meaning, the purpose and the sovereignty of the human race when we see Jesus crowned.

Following the writer’s thought, let us consider,

I. Man’s unrealized Destiny.

II. His Sovereignty secured in Christ.

I

Man’s unrealized Destiny

“But now we see not yet all things subjected to him.”

1. That man was made for sovereignty was declared by the Psalmist whom the writer quotes. “Thou hast made him”—that is, man—“a little lower than the angels. Thou hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.” And this is not a doctrine peculiar to the Psalmist; it is not merely the excitement and rapture of genius that affirm it. Read the earliest pages of the Jewish Scriptures, and you will discover that in the record of creation it is said that man was made in the image of God, was appointed to have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth; and he was charged by God to subdue the earth, which had been made his kingdom.

Readers of Tennyson will remember the magic Hall of Camelot, with its four great zones or belts of sculpture. On the lowest belt were represented beasts slaying men. On the next higher, men are slaying beasts, on the third are warriors, perfect men, while on the highest are men with growing wings; and over all the ideal man beckoning upward to those beneath. A wonderful parable of the advancing man. To the writer of the 8th Psalm man had already tamed the beast, tamed its passions. He had made the ox the slave of agriculture. He had harnessed the fury of the fire, and found a way for his commerce in the seas. But while he thus felt how great was his place in the universe, nothing impressed him so much as that God thought about him and visited him. The greatest thing one can say is that man can hold communion with his God, that man can walk with the Eternal and have the atmosphere of heaven. 1 [Note: J. E. Rattenbury.]

(1) Man’s sovereignty extends over the material universe.—Man is infinitely more than the last and the highest result of operations entirely within the material. He is the last and the highest result of such operations, in certain senses; but he did not become man by such operations and processes. He became man by an act of God, distinct from all other acts; an act by which He did, in the mystery of His wisdom and the operations of His might, differentiate by infinite distance between man and everything that lay beneath him in the scale of creation. God’s place for this man in the earth is that of dominion. He made him to have dominion over the whole earth; over all that the earth yields in the mystery of its life; over all that dwells upon the earth, having sentient life. Over all these He placed man, that he might have dominion over them. All beneath man is imperfect without him, and can be perfected only as he exercises his dominion.

I refuse to be reduced to the same rank, to be placed in the same order, as the cattle that browse on the hills, or the fish that people the sea. I assert my supremacy. I believe that I have received from the hand of God crown and sceptre, and that although other designs may be accomplished by the existence of the material and living things around me, they are intended to serve me. The sun shines that I may see the mountains and the woods and the flashing streams, and that I may do the work by which I live. For me the rain falls and the dews silently distil—to cherish the corn which grows for my food, to soften the air I breathe, and to keep the beauty of the world fresh and bright on which I rejoice to look. The music of the birds is for me, and the perfume of flowers. For me it was that forests grew in ancient times and have since been hardened into coal; for me there are veins of iron and of silver penetrating the solid earth; and for me there are rivers whose sands are gold. The beasts of the earth were meant to do my work; sheep and oxen are given me for food. Fire and hail and the stormy wind were meant to serve me. I have authority to compel the lightning to be the messenger of my thought, and the servant of my will. Man is placed over the works of God’s hands; for those works were meant to minister to man’s life, man’s culture, and man’s happiness. 1 [Note: R. W. Dale, The Jewish Temple and the Christian Church, 49.]

(2) Man bears “ the image of God.”—In the creation which surrounds us, there are marvellous manifestations of the Divine attributes. A power to which we can give no other name than omnipotence, a knowledge which we cannot but call infinite, a wisdom whose depths are unfathomable, and an inexhaustible goodness, are revealed in the heavens above and in the earth beneath. But in man, God has given existence to a creature in whom we recognize not merely the operations of the Divine attributes, but the attributes themselves, though in a less noble form and an inferior degree. There is the manifestation of wisdom, of power, and of love, in the other works of God; but in man there is wisdom itself, love itself.

The preparation of the Declaratory Act, to remove difficulties and scruples felt by some in reference to the declaration of belief required from persons who receive office or are admitted to office in the Free Church, was undertaken with great care. At the Assembly of 1891, Principal Rainy was able to bring up the document which the Committee proposed to be adopted. The fourth section read as follows: “That in holding and teaching, according to the Confession of Faith, the corruption of man’s whole nature as fallen, this Church also maintains that there remain tokens of his greatness as created in the image of God; that he possesses a knowledge of God and of duty; that he is responsible for compliance with the moral law and with the Gospel; and that, although unable without the aid of the Holy Spirit to return to God, he is yet capable of affections and actions which in themselves are virtuous and praiseworthy.” 1 [Note: P. C. Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 125.]

(3) Man is endowed with freedom.—He is like God in this, that he possesses freedom to choose the objects of his life, and the means by which he will secure them. Let the iron hand of necessity control all things besides,—the eagle in her daring flight, the tumult of the ocean, the dance of the spray, the rush of the winds, the fury of the storm,—the will of man stands erect, confronting and defying all authority and all power. No outward force can compel it; no inward necessity bind it. The foundations of that throne on which the human will has been placed by the hand of the Creator cannot be shaken by the tremendous energies which rend asunder the everlasting hills. A solitary man can stand against a million; they may torture his physical frame till he cries aloud in his agony, but the whole force of a great empire has been met and mastered by the will of a quiet scholar and of a feeble woman. God has given to the human will the power of refusing to bow before His own greatness, and of disobeying His own commands. This imperial faculty it is, beyond all others, which stamps man as the rightful master of the world. He alone has this indispensable attribute of sovereignty. All creatures besides are in bondage to irresistible law; he alone has received the gift of freedom. “Thou hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.”

But it exceeds man’s thought to think how high

God hath raised man, since God a man became;

The angels do admire this mystery,

And are astonished when they view the same.

Nor hath he given these blessings for a day,

Nor made them on the body’s life depend.

The soul, though made in time, survives for aye;

And though it hath beginning, sees no end. 2 [Note: Sir John Davies.]

2. Man’s sovereignty, conferred on him originally by the appointment of his Creator, has not been fully realized. How miserably he has come short of it has been shown by the condition of all nations and of all ages. His freedom has been manifested in his violation of the most solemn and imperative obligations. The image of God has been so defaced that it has almost disappeared. The intellect of man has sunk into a chaos of ignorance and error, and, instead of rightly understanding the universe, he has constructed a thousand monstrous theories concerning its origin, concerning the very structure of material things, concerning his own nature and destiny. The commonest laws of the external world remained hidden from him for thousands of years, and remain hidden even now from the immense majority of his race. Instead of being the master of the inferior creation, he has been—and to a large extent, continues still—its unhappy victim. His life is destroyed by the poison of reptiles, and by the brute strength of beasts of prey. The vineyards he has laboriously cultivated he cannot protect from blight. The harvests he is ready to reap are wasted by destructive rains. On the land, his cities perish by earthquakes: on the sea, his ships go down in the storm. His health is ruined and his moral nature corrupted by the strong temptations of the outward world, which betray him into sensual excesses. He has come to be so humiliated and degraded that he has looked up to the moon and stars which were made to serve him, and has called them his gods; he has placed four-footed beasts and creeping things in the shrine of his temples, and has implored them to avert the calamities he dreaded, and to bestow on him the blessings for which he longed. The traces of his kingship have not disappeared; slowly and painfully in one province of his dominions after another, especially since Christ came, and in the lands of Christendom, he has been winning back the authority he had lost; but his hand is too feeble to hold the sceptre, and on all sides the subject creation is in open revolt—revolt which he seems often unable even to check, and is quite unable to subdue. “We see not yet all things put under him.”

If that psalm be God’s thought of man, the plan that He hangs up for us, His workmen, to build by, what a wretched thing my copy of it has turned out to be! Is this a picture of me? How seldom I am conscious of the visits of God; how full I am of weaknesses and imperfections, the solemn voice within me tells me at intervals when I listen to its tones. On my brow there gleams no diadem; from my life, alas! there shines at the best but a fitful splendour of purity, all striped with solid masses of blackness. And as for dominion over creatures, how superficial my rule over them, how real their rule over me! I can tame animals or slay them; I can use the forces of nature for my purposes. I can make machinery, and bid the lightning do my errands, and carry messages, the burden of which is mostly money, or power, or sorrow. But all these things do not signify that man has the dominion over God’s creation. That consists in using all for God, and for our own growth in wisdom, strength, and goodness; and he only is master of all things who is servant of God. “All are yours, and ye are Christ’s.” If so, what are most of us but servants, not lords, of earth and its goods? We fasten our very lives on them, we tremble at the bare thought of losing them, we give our best efforts to get them; we say to the fine gold, “Thou art my confidence.” We do not possess them, they possess us, though materially we may have conquered the earth (and wonderfully proud of it we are now), spiritually, which is the same as to say really, the earth has conquered us.

The sense I had of the state of the churches brought a weight of distress upon me. The gold to me appeared dim, and the fine gold changed, and though this is the case too generally, yet the sense of it in these parts hath in a particular manner borne heavy upon me. It appeared to me that through the prevailing of the spirit of this world the minds of many were brought to an inward desolation, and instead of the spirit of meekness, gentleness, and heavenly wisdom, which are the necessary companions of the true sheep of Christ, a spirit of fierceness and the love of dominion too generally prevailed. From small beginnings in error great buildings by degrees are raised, and from one age to another are more and more strengthened by the general concurrence of the people; and as men obtain reputation by their profession of the truth, their virtues are mentioned as arguments in favour of general error; and those of less note, to justify themselves, say, such and good men did the like. 1 [Note: The Journal of John Woolman.]

II

Sovereignty secured in Christ

“But we behold him … even Jesus … crowned with glory and honour.”

The writer of the Epistle has quoted the 8th Psalm as an illustration of his thesis that Christ, and we in Christ, are exalted above angels, and then he proceeds to admit that, as a matter of fact, men are not what the Psalmist describes them as being. But the psalm is not, therefore, an exaggeration, or a dream, or a mere ideal of the imagination. True, as a matter of fact, men are not all this. But, as a matter of fact, Jesus Christ is, and in His possession of all that the psalm painted our possession is commenced and certified. It is an ideal picture, but it is realized in Jesus, and, having been so in Him, we have ground to believe that it will be so in us. We see not yet all things put under man—alas, no—but we see Jesus crowned with glory and honour; and as He tasted death for every man, so in His exaltation He is prophecy and pledge that the grand old words shall one day be fulfilled in all their height and depth.

1. Christ’s sovereignty was won through humiliation and suffering.

(1) He was content to be “ made a little lower than the angels.”—Wherein was Jesus set under the angels? Not simply in that He became man; for His manhood is as truly the ground of His exaltation as of His humiliation. It is to man as man that the psalm ascribes the coronet of glory and honour—the exaltation over all creatures into which Jesus has entered. With Jesus, as with man in general, the inferiority to the angels is one of dispensation, not of nature. To be subordinated to the angelic dispensation is the same thing as to be “made under the law.” Jesus shared man’s humiliation, to win, not for Himself only, but for men, His brethren, the destined glory. God brings many sons to glory along with Him, inasmuch as He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one piece. Thus the blessings of the psalm do, in the world to come, fall to man. But they are earned for him by the man Christ Jesus who, tasting death for all, delivers us from the fear of death and so from bondage. And this blessing of deliverance from the bondage of the Old Covenant belongs even now to Christians, who have already tasted the powers of the world to come, who are regarded as dissociated from the earthly theocracy and living in view of that which is to come. “The world to come” is in fact the equivalent of the Kingdom of God in the gospel—already present among men, though hitherto as an object of faith, not of sight.

(2) He endured the suffering of death.—There are many ways of winning a crown. Here, and in these great chapters of Revelation (5, 6), we see Jesus greeted with unspeakable acclaim because He has suffered. Because of the suffering of death which He bore, because of the way in which He bore it, and because He bore it to such limits of endurance as are possible on earth, He was raised from the cross of shame to the throne of God. If we see truly, He changed the cross of shame into a throne of glory. Because it was He who was crucified, and because of the manner and spirit in which He bore the suffering of death, He Himself transformed and transfigured the shameful cross, until to-day it is the throne from which this universe is ruled.

(3) Because He wears the crown He still drinks man’s cup.—“That by the grace of God he should taste death for every man.” Jesus did not finish His suffering on Calvary. We have to recall the thought which John taught us when he showed us the Lamb standing in the midst of the throne, as though it had been slain—the thought that Calvary was but the revelation of the suffering of God which was from the foundation of the world, and shall be until earth and heaven are brought to peace and righteousness. So here we have this thought in a new and wondrous form. The crown of Christ and the glory which was awarded Him were like no other crown or glory ever awarded to man. We speak in our poor fashion of Christ’s suffering being followed by glory, and we mean a glory according to the fleshly heart of man. We speak of His exchanging the cross for the crown, not knowing that the crown is ever the crown of thorns. This writer tells us that the glory with which He was crowned was the glory of tasting death for every man. That was the glory He won by suffering so supremely on Golgotha. That was the glory He attained to because He was very faithful on that narrow cross, even as far as death.

The Cross of Calvary was taken into the very heart of the Eternal. From earth there went One who, by the experience of earth, was fitted to regain His place in the fellowship of God. That is the thought that places us at the very heart of what we generally mean by the Atonement. The Saviour who bears the sin of this world to-day is a living crucified Saviour to-day. Wherever there is sin, there is He crucified. So much of it as was possible out of the venom and malice of those Jewish foes fell upon Him in Jerusalem, but to-day He is free from the limits of mortal flesh, and has entered into the eternal Spirit of God once again; and wherever there is sin, there is Christ crucified. As He died that day for those who then lived, He tastes death in every ruined life, He is crucified in every lustful heart; His heart is broken in every ruined home, and smitten with pain by our coldness, and failure, and disobedience. 1 [Note: F. W. Lewis, The Work of Christ, 86.]

2. Christ’s crown is the prophecy and pledge of man’s dominion. He is the pattern of human nature. From Christ comes the power by which the prophecy is fulfilled and the pattern reproduced in all who love Him. Whosoever is joined to Him receives into his soul that spirit of life in Christ which unfolds and grows according to its own law, and has for its issue and last result the entire conformity between the believing soul and the Saviour by whom it lives. It were a poor consolation to point to Christ and say, “Look what man has become, and may become,” unless we could also say, “A real and living oneness exists between Him and all who cleave to Him, so that their characters are changed, their natures cleansed, their future altered, their immortal beauty secured.” He is more than pattern, He is power; more than specimen, He is source; more than example, He is Redeemer. He has been made in the likeness of sinful flesh, that we may be in the likeness of His body of glory. He has been made “sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”

The hopes for the future lie around us as flowers in some fair garden where we walk in the night, their petals closed and their leaves asleep, but here and there a whiter bloom gleams out, and sweet faint odours from unseen sources steal through the dewy darkness. We can understand but little of what this majestic promise of sovereign manhood may mean. But the fragrance, if not the sight, of that gorgeous blossom is wafted to us. We know that “the upright shall have dominion in the morning.” We know that to His servants authority over ten cities will be given. We know that we shall be “kings and priests to God.” The fact we know, the contents of the fact we wait to prove. “It doth not yet appear what we shall be.” Enough that we shall reign with Him, and that in the kingdom of the heavens dominion means service, and the least is the greatest. 1 [Note: Alexander Maclaren, Sermons Preached in Manchester, ii. 185.]

(1) “For every man.” The virtue of Christ’s cross is for all. Criminals may put themselves outside the pale of human sympathy easily enough. Their misdeeds may slay the sentiment of pity for them even in the heart of the most pitiful. Society, horrified and revolted by their evil doing, may with one voice demand the full penalty of the law. Yes, and even a mother’s love, the divinest thing on earth, may not be deep enough to condone the evil. Man by his sin may put himself outside the circumference of the tenderest human affection, beyond the range of the most pitiful human compassion. But no sinner can outrange the infinite love of God. His compassions flow beyond the widest and wildest wanderings of man’s transgressions. His tender love is deeper than the lowest depths of vice and wickedness. And the death of the Crucified One is gloriously sufficient to atone for the sins of every member of our sinful race.

I do find the love of God is the only power in the universe to accomplish any result. All must be the Devil’s, if it were not at work. Shall it not in some way or other vindicate all to itself? I wish to think awfully on the question, confessing with trembling that there is an unspeakable power of resistance in our wills to God’s love—a resistance quite beyond my understanding or any understanding to explain—and not denying that this resistance may be final, but still feeling myself obliged when I trust God thoroughly to think that there is a depth in His love below all other depths; a bottomless pit of charity deeper than the bottomless pit of evil. And I answer that to lead people to feel that this is a ground for them to stand upon is the great way of teaching them to stand. They are not made to hang poised in the air, which is the position I fear of a good many religious people, in a perpetual land of mist and cloud, never seeing the serene heaven, nor feeling the solid earth. “God is in the midst of us, therefore we cannot be moved.” What might there is in these words! 1 [Note: The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, i. 528.]

(2) Christ’s crown and ours are in the last resort the fruits of grace. This was granted to Him—this awful eminence, this sole right and power to taste death for every man, was granted to Him “by the grace of God.” It was by God’s gracious act and permission that He was welcomed back into the eternal Sonship. He had lived with the Father in eternity before He came to earth, and He went back not only Son of God but Son of Man. He went back the Head of our race. He went back our Brother. He went back, as He is called in this letter, the Leader whose followers we are. We have gained a place in the fellowship of the eternal suffering; our blood is there shed, mingled indistinguishably with the blood of God. We see not yet all things won and conquered, but we see this: that from our cradle, and our weakness, and our frailty, and our strife, Jesus has gone into the perfect suffering of God our Saviour, and man with God is on that awful throne. By the grace of God it has been granted. We have been taken into the veriest Divinity, for there is no Divinity ever imagined by man comparable with the Divinity that is revealed in the suffering of God; and we in Jesus Christ have been united with the very heart of the mystery of God Himself. Many things—all good things—come from the grace of God, which giveth all; and St. Paul tells us it has been “granted” to us not only to believe, but also to suffer ( Php_1:29 ). The word there is the same as the word here—the word “grace.” God’s highest gift is not the gift of all enjoyment, it is not the gift of all peace and blessedness; the highest gift of God is the gift of the fellowship of suffering, whereby we are raised into the society and friendship and likeness of no less an One than the Eternal God, who thereby becomes, as He never was before, our Father; thereby we become, as never before, His children.

I have so much cause for wonder at the human as well as the Divine love which has been poured out upon me. No one ever deserved it less. I am sure if I do not know what free grace means, or use the expression as a mere cant one, I am more to blame than all. It seems to me, from the highest to the lowest, from the manner of God’s redemption to the kind look and obedience of a servant, all is grace; all are parts of one living chain which is let down upon me and which is meant to draw me up. 1 [Note: The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, i. 527.]

Seven vials hold Thy wrath: but what can hold

Thy mercy save Thine own Infinitude,

Boundlessly overflowing with all good,

All loving kindness, all delights untold?

Thy Love, of each created love the mould;

Thyself, of all the empty plenitude;

Heard of at Ephrata, found in the Wood,

For ever One, the Same, and Manifold.

Lord, give us grace to tremble with that dove

Which Ark-bound winged its solitary way

And overpast the Deluge in a day,

Whom Noah’s hand pulled in and comforted:

For we who much more hang upon Thy Love

Behold its shadow in the deed he did. 2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 264.]

The Crowned Christ

Literature

Edwards (T. C.), The Epistle to the Hebrews, 21.

Griffith-Jones (E.), Faith and Verification, 146.

Lewis (F. W.), The Work of Christ, 80.

Maclaren (A.), Sermons Preached in Manchester, ii. 170.

Norton (J. N.), Short Sermons, 136.

Sowter (G. A.), Trial and Triumph, 199.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxv. (1879), No. 1509.

Westcott (B. F.), The Historic Faith, 59.

Wynne (G. R.), In Quietness and Confidence, 138.

British Weekly Pulpit, iii. 225 (A. Cave).

Christian World Pulpit, xl. 241 (J. Clifford); lvi. 4 (J. T. Parr); lxx. 166 (J. E. Rattenbury); lxxii. 73 (A. Clayton); lxxxii. 273 (G. C. Morgan).

Marylebone Presbyterian Pulpit, ii., No. 6 (C. Lorimer).

Record, Feb. 6, 1914 (E. N. Pearce).

Verse 10

Perfect through Sufferings

For it became him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.— Hebrews 2:10.

1. When we read a biography, when we study the plot of a novel or a play, or when we try to understand a character in history, the question we put to ourselves is—Is it true to life? Is this the man as he really was and lived? Does he fit together as a living whole? The profit and the pleasure of such books, and certainly the moral interest, lie largely in their setting forth a vital unity, in their assuring us of the reality and the individuality of the man or woman whom we are studying and giving us the assurance that we are following the true story of a human soul. Every great life comes to us as something of a surprise: perhaps the greater the life the greater the surprises are apt to be. We begin by saying to ourselves, “He could never have acted so. Why should he have taken that course? why risk that venture? why court that reverse? Now, if I had been he,” we say, and begin to reconstruct conduct upon the lines of instinct and of motive most familiar to ourselves. And then we turn back to our text and penetrate a little deeper into the secret springs of character, and incidents arrest us that do not square with our assumptions, and lights flash unexpectedly from words or acts which show that he was not the manner of man that we supposed, that after all it was humility not pride, it was courage not cowardice, it was simplicity not cunning, it was unselfishness not self-seeking, that made him act as he did. Little by little we discern a unity that was not there before, that removes inward contradictions, that makes the hero a consistent and intelligible whole, made up not of conflicting fragments but of a living and coherent self. And when we return to our first little criticisms and surprises, they look thin and hollow in presence of the truth, and we say to ourselves, “Now I know better; I understand more clearly what he was, by what lights he lived. Being what he was, he could not have said, done, acted otherwise. I have caught the secret; I hold the clue; I feel quite certain of the truth; all fits so perfectly that I must have hold of the right interpretation. It becomes him in a way that no other explanation does or could.”

2. The writer of this Epistle was addressing himself to Hebrew Christians, who had not yet quite reconciled themselves to a suffering Christ. They still shared in that Jewish conception of the Messiah which made the cross an offence. Why should the Anointed One, the chosen Messenger of God, pass through that wine-press of shame and agony instead of marching on in joyous triumph and planting His feet on the necks of His enemies? Why all that weakness and yielding and intolerable suffering, if He was indeed the beloved Son in whom the Father was well pleased? How could that awful and heartbreaking Calvary scene be the sign and seal of God’s approval? These questions, and questions like them, which are sometimes asked to-day, were answered in these words: “It became him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.” The writer here expounds to us the Divine philosophy of suffering, and declares that only by a suffering Saviour could God’s thought and purpose in redemption be expressed and fulfilled. It became Him. It was right and reasonable and necessary that He should take the way of suffering to reach His glorious end.

Two leading ideas emerge from this text:—

I. Suffering as a Means to Perfection.

II. The Necessity for the Sufferings of Christ.

I

The Discipline of Suffering

“Perfect through sufferings.”

“Perfect through sufferings”—we have grown accustomed to the phrase, but to any one who heard it for the first time, how strange it would sound! “Perfect through sufferings!” he would exclaim. Surely the writer must have made a mistake. He should have said perfect through joy. Suffering must be a sign and a cause of imperfection. Now, it is quite true that suffering is always a sign of present imperfection. But it may be the cause of future perfection, which could not be attained without it. On the assumption that the ultimate end of our existence is the development of a noble character, the necessity of suffering may be proved. For it can be shown that such a character could never be produced apart from the instrumentality of pain.

1. Suffering acts as a check upon our evil tendencies. Of course one may say that sin could have been prevented, and man saved from suffering. Yes, you can make a man of clay that cannot feel; you can forge a steel man that an avalanche cannot hurt. But when you have done, your men are only physical—not moral, not spiritual. They have no volition, no power of choice, no moral nature, no spiritual aspirations, and no functions that are fitting them for an eternal life of love. True, they have no capacity for joy either; and they are devoid of those higher attributes of sympathy and love that make God a Father and a Friend. Even so, if man had been intended to be only a physical being—a mere body, a machine driven by the resistless mandate of an overpowering will, God would doubtless have made him as hard and as unfeeling as the granite rock. But God’s purpose was to make a man—a being who by choice and will and struggle should remake himself, and become as like his Maker in the whole round of his higher nature as it is possible for him to be. And this purpose, manifest in creation, and reaffirmed in redemption, alone explains the processes of life through which He is conducting us, and it teaches us that every trial and every pang of suffering, if regarded aright, may bear us ever nearer to God. Evil, then, being a necessary fact, some suffering is also a necessity. It is the desire for present enjoyment that leads men astray; and they can be brought back only by the counteractive influence of pain. So far as suffering fulfils this purpose, it is manifestly the outcome of love.

God has His sanitary regulations as well as man. There are Divine cleansing forces at work, both in the material and in the moral world. And just as the tempest scatters the diseases that have gathered themselves together for deadly work, rendering them harmless, so the sufferings that follow guilt, and the revolutions of pain that overthrow the tyranny of an evil nature, are methods for securing the moral health of the race, and act as preservatives of man’s spiritual life. You have doubtless seen specimens of our English weaving machines. Those machines are so constructed and arranged as to let the machinist know when anything is wrong, and to call his attention to the fault in the piece that he is weaving, so that he may correct it before the whole fabric is spoiled. Constructed on a somewhat similar principle is God’s mechanism of human nature. You put your hand into the fire and you suffer; the pain makes you draw your hand out of the flame, and thus saves the limb from being burnt off without your knowing it. Your course of conduct is injuring your moral life, and your aching head and palpitating heart tell you so. Surely, then, there is wisdom as well as love manifest in the law that makes our physical sufferings teach us our moral dangers, and thus save us from them. 1 [Note: J. G. Binney.]

(1) Suffering often acts as an intellectual and spiritual stimulus. The world’s greater teachers have usually been men of sorrow.

When Dumas asked Reboul, “What made you a poet?” the answer was “Suffering.” “If I had not been so great an invalid,” said Darwin to a friend, “I should not have done nearly so much work.” We do not know much about Shakespeare’s life; but we do know, from his sonnets, that he had suffered vastly. His heart had been wrung till it almost broke. And in Tennyson we have another striking illustration of the educative effects of suffering. In Memoriam is by far his greatest poem; there are single stanzas in it worth almost all the rest of his works put together; and this poem was inspired by a great grief—the death of his friend Arthur Hallam.

(2) Suffering is necessary for the development in us of pity, mercy, and the spirit of self-sacrifice—the noblest of all our endowments. Only those who have experienced calamity themselves can understand what it means. And unless we know what it is, we cannot sympathize with it; nor are we likely to make any efforts towards averting it. No character can be perfect which has not acquired the capacity for pity; for in the acquisition of this capacity we receive our highest development, and realize most fully the solidarity of the race to which we belong.

The Chili palm grows to a height of from forty to sixty feet, and bears numerous small edible, thick-shelled nuts, and yields after it is felled, a syrup called palm honey. “This honey,” Darwin tells us, “is a sort of treacle, and forms really the sap of the tree. A good tree will yield ninety gallons, though it looks dry and empty as a drum. The tree is felled, the crown of leaves lopped off, and then for months the vessels of the tree pour forth their stores, and every fresh slice shaved off exposes a fresh surface and yields a fresh supply.” And have we not often found something akin to this in human experience? Have we not all known men apparently cold and hard, and utterly unfitted for the gentler and softer ministries of life, looking as sapless and empty as the Chili palm when standing in its native soil, but when they have been felled by some unforeseen trouble, and the cold iron has entered their souls, they have become even womanly in their capacity for consolation, yielding sympathy and love and helpfulness in measureless amount. Ah, yes; it often takes the sharp axe of suffering to open up in us the fountains of sympathy and healing love. Chili palm-like, some of us need to be felled and well sliced before the honey will flow; but—

Unto the hopes by sorrow crushed a noble faith succeeds,

And life by trials furrowed bears the fruit of loving deeds.

How rich, how sweet, how full of strength, our human spirits are,

Baptized into the sanctities of suffering and of prayer. 1 [Note: J. G. Binney.]

(3) Suffering appears necessary for the development in us of self-reliance, self-respect, and all that is implied in the expression “strength of character.” And it is only saying the same thing in other words to maintain that, without suffering, we could not attain to the highest happiness of which we are capable. Just think of the advantages to be derived from the struggle for success in life, painful as that struggle must often of necessity be. We cannot be born successful, and it would be a great pity if we could. Good fortune and prosperity are worth most when they have been achieved in spite of hindrances and difficulties. The happiness that we have obtained by effort is far sweeter than that which we have inherited, or that which has come to us by chance; and the very effort we have made to acquire it has tended to our own self-development. And what is true of individuals is true of races. It would have been a grievous disadvantage had they been created fully developed. The possibility of developing themselves is their grandest and noblest prerogative.

John Stuart Mill argues in his Posthumous Essays that this would be a better world if the whole human race were already in possession of everything which it seems desirable they should have. But surely it is infinitely better for races to struggle up to material prosperity and to spiritual perfection than to have been created incapable of progress. In the latter case they might have been comfortable and satisfied: but their comfort and satisfaction would have been no higher than a brute’s. 1 [Note: A. W. Momerie, The Origin of Evil, 22.]

I am one of those bright angels

Passing earthwards, to and fro,

Heavenly messengers to mortals,

Now of gladness, now of woe.

Might I bring from the Almighty,

Strength from Him who maketh strong;

Not as alms I drop the blessing,—

From my grasp it must be wrung.

Child of earth, I come to prove thee,

Hardly, sternly with thee deal;

To mould thee in the forge and furnace,

Make thine iron tempered steel.

Come, then, and in loving warfare

Let us wrestle, tug, and strain,

Till thy breath comes thick and panting,

And the sweat pours down like rain.

Man with angel thus contending,

Angel-like in strength shall grow,

And the might of the Immortal

Pass into the mortal so.

2. The virtue of suffering lies in the spirit of the sufferer. There is nothing in suffering itself that can bring a sense of its use or its nobility. It will strengthen the will, test the endurance, call out the pity, quicken the sympathy, serve the love of men only if men carry into it a conviction of the moral purpose with which it is fraught. Suffering itself, as we so often see, is unable to ennoble; suffering of itself often dulls, and blunts, and stuns, and exasperates the nature which suffers. What gives the power of suffering is not suffering itself, but the faith that discerns the purpose which lies behind it. So, then, if that faith were put to the strain and were lost, if anything were to happen to us that would make it reel when most we wanted it, then suffering alone might only cripple or overwhelm our characters. We want to know then where is the warrant for this faith that behind our suffering there is a purpose of the love of God. Where is the warrant? It is written in the cross of Jesus Christ. The sufferings of Jesus, we are prompted to think, went far beyond what was necessary as an acceptance of punishment of sin. It seems that He meant to go out into the very farthest reaches of human pain and to know and to understand them. It was part of that long self-sacrifice by which humanity in Jesus was learning to offer itself again in perfect obedience to the will of God. He was learning obedience through the things He was suffering, and not only accepting punishment of sin; He was perfecting His human life by the bearing of pain and sorrow. He was being made perfect through sufferings. Each pain of body or of mind was an offering of a Son’s love to God, and of a Brother’s sympathy to His fellow-men.

The most useful agents in nature have sometimes the most deadly effects. The atmosphere, which is essential to life, is the chief source of putrefaction and decay. The sea, which bears one mariner safely to the desired haven, buries another in a watery grave. Electricity, which carries a message across the world at the bidding of one man, strikes another dead. So the very circumstances of which a good man makes stepping-stones to heaven, a bad man will turn into a pathway to hell. The responsibility for this, however, rests not with God, but with men. 1 [Note: A. W. Momerie, The Origin of Evil, 52.]

Crosses are blessed to us only in so far as we give ourselves up to them unreservedly and forgetting self. Seek to forget yourself, else all suffering is useless. God does not lay suffering on us merely that we may suffer, but that we may die to self by dint of putting it aside under the most difficult of all circumstances, viz., pain. 2 [Note: Fénelon, Spiritual Letters to Men.]

Suffering borne in the Christian temper has often incidental effects upon character. For it induces tenderness, and strength, and spirituality of life. The man who has suffered much has a keener insight into the sufferings of others, and therefore a more appreciative sympathy for them. His very voice and glance and touch gain a magnetic power from his pain. Nor is this tenderness purchased at the cost of weakness, for suffering indurates and strengthens the entire person. Under all his apparent weakness, the man of sorrows is strong. And thus his own sorrow helps him to alleviate the sorrow of the world; while, besides thus enhancing his social efficiency, suffering refines and purifies the inner man, as a necessary consequence of the closer communion with the spiritual world to which it calls him. 1 [Note: J. R. Illingworth.]

But if, impatient, thou let slip thy cross,

Thou wilt not find it in this world again,

Nor in another; here, and here alone,

Is given thee to suffer for God’s sake.

In other worlds we shall more perfectly

Serve Him and love Him, praise Him, work for Him,

Grow near, and nearer Him with all delight;

But then we shall not any more be called

To suffer, which is our appointment here.

Canst thou not suffer then one hour, or two?

And while we suffer, let us set our souls

To suffer perfectly; since this alone,

The suffering, which is this world’s special grace,

May here be perfected and left behind. 2 [Note: E. Hamilton King, The Sermon in the Hospital.]

II

The Necessity for Christ’s Sufferings

“It became him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things.”

1. The phrase, “it became him,” speaks of a moral necessity lying upon God, a necessity springing from the requirements of the Divine nature and government. Of course the word is one of much broader application. We can speak of a comely face and of a becoming dress, as well as of “that which becometh saints.” There is a physical as well as a moral fitness. We may also say of anything that it becomes a man of wisdom, righteousness, truth—meaning by this only that it is not opposed to, though not absolutely required by, such a character. But, manifestly, that which in any circumstances is perfectly suited to the requirements of perfect wisdom and spotless rectitude is absolutely obligatory. To do anything else than this, while circumstances remain unchanged, would be folly and sin. Moral fitness runs speedily into moral obligation. Christian propriety is strictest law. How much more, then, Divine propriety—that which becometh God!

2. The statement here is not “it became God,” or “it became the Father,” but, with impressive emphasis, “It became him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things.” The sufferings of man’s Saviour fit into the whole character of Jehovah and all His infinite perfections: they form an essential element of the Divine counsels and operations. Either the whole scheme of the Divine creation and government is loose and contingent, or the perfecting of the Captain of salvation is based on a Divine necessity of wisdom, righteousness, and love. The question has sometimes been put, whether or not sinners might have been saved in some other way than through the incarnation of the Eternal Word, and the atonement of the cross. Here we have an answer to the question, as direct as the occasion calls for: “It became” the All-Perfect, that the work should be accomplished even so.

3. The revelation of His Fatherhood required it. Humanity was His own child. Humanity was a child of many sorrows, familiar with tears, and the tears were, in part at least, of His own ordaining. Sin had enormously increased the sorrows; but apart from sin there were the pangs and travail of creation, there was everywhere the pain and struggle and bereavement, and the bleeding and breaking heart. How could He join Himself to humanity without sharing human tears? If He really loved and pitied His sad and guilty world, how could He send His saving message to us otherwise than through the life of a suffering one? How could He prove to men His Fatherhood except by bearing their infirmities? How could He become incarnate save as a Man of Sorrows?

4. The rôle of “Captain” which Jesus assumed necessitated suffering. The word translated “captain” in the Authorized Version, which occurs only four times in Scripture, means literally one who leads or begins any course or thing; hence it comes to mean a commander (or a prince, as it is twice translated); and then again, with a very easy transition from the notion of leading to that of origination, it comes to mean cause (or author, as it is once translated). The conception of author is the dominant one here, but the word is probably chosen as prolonging the metaphor in the previous clause. This great procession of sons up into glory, which is the object and aim of God’s work, is under the leadership of Him who is the Captain, the foremost, the Originator, and, in a profound sense, the Cause, of their salvation. So, then, we have before us the thought that God brings, and yet Christ leads, and that God’s bringing is effected through Christ’s leadership.

This Captain needs to be made perfect through sufferings. We are not to suppose that the perfecting through sufferings which is here declared to take effect upon our Lord means the addition of anything to, or the purging away of anything from, His moral nature. We are refined by suffering, which purges out the dross if we take it rightly. We are ennobled by suffering, which adds to us, if we submissively accept it, that which without it we could never possess. But Christ’s perfecting is not the perfecting of His moral character, but the completion of His equipment for His work as the Captain of our salvation. That is to say, He Himself, though He learned obedience by the things that He suffered, was morally perfect, ere yet one shadow of pain or conflict had passed across the calm depths of His pure spirit; but He was not ready for His function of Leader and Originator of our salvation until He had passed through the sufferings of life and the agonies of death. Thus the whole sweep of Christ’s sufferings—both those which preceded the cross, and especially the cross itself—is included in the general expression of the text; and these equipped Him for His work.

It may be that under other conditions the discipline of suffering would have been unnecessary. To be a perfect king of angels, for instance, there would have been no need for Christ to suffer. To be the joy and bliss of unfallen spirits there would have been no need for Christ to suffer. To be the light and life of a sinless heaven there would have been no need for Christ to suffer. But to be a perfect leader for broken, stricken, sinful men, Christ had to suffer. To be able to emancipate them from their bondage and to lead them out of the prison-house, Christ had to suffer. To be an adequate Saviour and Redeemer, Christ had to suffer. The suffering was meant to fit Him for leadership. It was as the Leader of men’s salvation that Christ was made perfect through sufferings. 1 [Note: J. D. Jones, The Unfettered Word, 209.]

It is recorded of Captain Hedley Vicars that he singularly won the hearts of the soldiers under his command. Whilst keeping his own position he put himself into theirs. An incident in connexion with his life in the Crimea will illustrate the verse before us. In those bitter winter nights, which even now we can hardly bear to think of, when our brave soldiers slept out in an almost Arctic cold, they naturally gave way to some murmurs; but when the men under Captain Vicars learned that he absolutely refused to avail himself of special protection and comfort so long as his men suffered, and that he preferred to share their trials, all murmurings ceased. How could they complain when their captain for their sakes volunteered to share their hardships! As regards his sympathy with and his relationship towards the men, their captain was “made perfect through sufferings.” 2 [Note: J. W. Bardsley.]

(1) The Deliverer of man must be a Man.—The leader must have no exemption from the hardships of the company. If He is to be a leader, He and those whom He leads must go by the same road. He must tramp along all the weary paths that they have to tread. He must experience all the conflicts and difficulties that they have to experience. He cannot lift us up into a share of His glory unless He stoops to the companionship of our grief. A man upon a higher level cannot raise one on a lower, except on condition of himself going down, with his hand at any rate, to the level from which he would lift. And no Christ will be able to accomplish the Father’s design, except a Christ who knows the fellowship of our sufferings, and is made conformable unto our death. Therefore, because He “took not hold to help angels, but the seed of Abraham, it behoved him to be made in all things like unto his brethren.” And when the soldiers are weary on the march, footsore and tired, they may bethink themselves, “Headquarters were here yesterday.”

We can go through no darker rooms

Than He went through before;

and where He has stretched Himself on the cold ground and bivouacked, we need not be ashamed or afraid to lie down. The Captain of our salvation has shared all our hardships, and plodded with bleeding feet over every inch of the ground over which He would lead us.

(2) He must learn compassion in the midst of suffering.—Before He suffers, He has the pity of a God; after He suffers, He has learnt the compassion of a man. And though in the fight the general seems to have gone up the hill, and left the army to struggle in the plain, He has gone, like Moses to the mount, to lift all-powerful hands of intercession, and bearing in His heart tender compassion, a fellow-feeling of our pains. No Christ is worth anything to us, suffering and bleeding and agonizing here, unless it be a Christ of whom we know that His heart is full of sympathy because He Himself has felt the same, and that He has learnt to haste to the help of the miserable, because He himself is not ignorant of misfortune.

A German theologian finds the unparalleled power of Jesus in the unlimited range of His sympathies. He stands apart from and above all men in greatness. He is absolutely unique. He is, as Bushnell said, unclassifiable. But is not His uniqueness this, that He is not provincial, local, and narrow, but universal; that He knew what is in man as no other has known, and that He had power and sympathetic union with men and women of any nation and any religion? He whose uniqueness made Him the Son of God was He whose universality made Him the Son of Man_1:1 [Note: George Harris, Inequality and Progress, 147.]

Every believer realizes by experience that Christ is the only perfect sympathizer. “I’m not perfectly understood,” says everybody in fact. But if you are a believer you are perfectly understood. Christ is the only one who never expects you to be other than yourself, and He puts in abeyance towards you all but what is like you. He takes your view of things, and mentions no other. He takes the old woman’s view of things by the wash-tub, and has a great interest in wash powder; Sir Isaac Newton’s view of things, and wings among the stars with him; the artist’s view, and feeds among the lilies; the lawyer’s, and shares the justice of things. But He never plays the lawyer or the philosopher or the artist to the old woman. He is above that littleness. 1 [Note: Letters of James Smetham, 297.]

It was the need of a Divine assurance that there is a heart of sympathy at the root of things which Christ came to satisfy. He not only declared the Divine sympathy, He entered the human struggle. It was not enough that God should declare the Divine sympathy in a word: He chose also to declare it in a Life. There can be no doubt of a sympathy which issues in self-sacrifice; and we see the Heart of God in the Cross of Jesus Christ. He who ordained the hard law of the Cross, Himself submitted to it, to prove by His self-sacrifice that it came from a will of love: and He transformed it by bidding us not only to take it, but to take it after Him. It is through the fellowship of the Cross that He comes most closely to us. When we see and greet Him there, supreme and calm, He gives us His own supremacy and calmness. We conquer our crosses by bearing them with Him. 2 [Note: Cosmo Gordon Lang, The Miracles of Jesus.]

In Christ I feel the heart of God

Throbbing from heaven through earth;

Life stirs again within the clod,

Renewed in beauteous birth;

The soul springs up, a flower of prayer,

Breathing His breath out on the air.

In Christ I touch the hand of God,

From His pure height reached down,

By blessed ways before untrod,

To lift us to our crown;

Victory that only perfect is

Through loving sacrifice, like His.

Holding His hand, my steadied feet

May walk the air, the seas;

On life and death His smile falls sweet,

Lights up all mysteries:

Stranger nor exile can I be

In new worlds where He leadeth me.

Not my Christ only; He is ours;

Humanity’s close bond;

Key to its vast, unopened powers,

Dream of our dreams beyond.

What yet we shall be none can tell:

Now are we His, and all is well. 1 [Note: Lucy Larcom.]

Perfect through Sufferings

Literature

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Albertson (C. C.), The Gospel According to Christ, 77.

Bushnell (H.), Christ and His Salvation, 219.

Eames (J.), The Shattered Temple, 162.

Egan (R. B.), The Unknown God, 149.

Figgis (J. N.), Antichrist, 73.

Greenhough (J. G.), Christian Festivals and Anniversaries, 38.

Hamilton (J.), Faith in God, 195.

Henson (H. H.), The Creed in the Pulpit, 139.

Horne (W.), Religions Life and Thought, 49.

Jones (J. D.), The Unfettered Word, 204.

Kingsley (C.), National Sermons, 254.

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