Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: June 2nd

THE REWARD OF CHRIST’S CONFLICT

Who for the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross, despising shame, and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. - Hebrews 12:2

Our Lord’s whole life is represented as being shaped and influenced by a vivid realization of an unseen reward; which vivid realization He owed to His faith. What was this unseen reward? The "joy that was set before Him." The image of the race is carried on here from the previous verses. At the winning-post hangs the glittering crown, full in the view of the runners; so shining afar, and ever in the eye of that fighting, struggling Captain of our salvation, hung the gleaming glories of the "joy that was set before Him."

And what was the joy? I think the subsequent words must be taken as being the answer to it: "for the joy that was set before Him" was the joy into which He has entered - viz., His session at the right hand of God, or, in other words, the lifting up of His manhood into a participation with Divinity.

Along with the strong impulse of obedience to the will of the Father, and in perfect harmony with self-forgetting and supreme love to the whole world, another strand of the gold cord which bound our great sacrifice to the horns of the altar was the thought of the joy that was to come to Himself. That joy was to sit at the right hand of the Throne.

And if this seems to introduce an element of self-regard into our Lord’s passion, which strikes cold on our hearts, let us not forget that all that exaltation is for our sakes, that it was all left for our sakes by the Incarnate Word, and that all which He won by His Cross and Passion was but the entrance of His manhood into the glory which was His own before the world was. Nor are we to forget that He is "for us entered" within the veil, nor that His exaltation is in order to His saving to the uttermost them who come unto God by Him. As He did not look upon His equality with God, before His incarnation, as a thing to be eagerly retained, so He did not look upon His sitting on the Father’s Throne, after His passion, as a thing to be eagerly desired for Himself alone, but chiefly because by it He could carry on and complete His great work. So that we may allowably say, "The joy of the Lord is the salvation of His servants." " He shall see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied," and the joy of the shepherd when he bears the lost sheep on his shoulders, and the joy of the householder when the lost treasure is recovered, and the joy of a true elder brother when the prodigal comes home - are all blended in that great motive which nerved Jesus for His Cross, and form part, and the chief part, of the joy that was set before Him.