ROMAINE’S VIEW OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

“I mention not His person, although the Psalmist says, He was fairer than the children of men. The excellencies and endowments of His mind were so great and uncommon, that I need not insist on a less important part of the subject. For, consider, what it is that you admire and love in any person? Do extraordinary gifts or graces draw your esteem? Great abilities, or great virtues? Behold, everything that can adorn or dignify the human nature meets in the man Jesus Christ. If true wisdom and learning be your admiration, it is written, ‘that in Him were laid up all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.’ Do you think that learning never appears so grateful as when it is set off with the charms of virtue. Then look upon Jesus. In Him you see not this or that particular virtue only, but virtue itself in a body of flesh! and therefore made flesh that He might let His graces shine before men and communicate their sweet influence. He was goodness itself, and He went about doing good to the souls and to the bodies of men, teaching and enlightening the ignorance of their understanding, and regulating the depravity of the will and affections, and healing all manner of sickness, and all manner of bodily infirmities. There was not a malady which sin had brought upon soul or body but He proved Himself almighty to heal. Was there ever such a character as this? So universally amiable and lovely? Here is a Person, of all the sons of men the greatest and happiest in Himself, and capable of making us great and happy; yea, therefore, made Man, that He might communicate to us His greatness and happiness, and shall any of us be so far lost to all sense of what is great and happy, as not to admire this character? Shall men adore and idolize the true patriot, whose breast burns with love for his country, and who freely hazards his all to save it? And shall the very same men be wanting in esteem for the great patriot of the whole world? How absurd, how inconsistent would this be? What a contradiction is it to throw away our admiration upon lesser excellencies, and to have none to spare for Him who had every excellency that can adorn the human nature, either for beauty or use; and who, consequently, had every thing that could make him altogether lovely!

If I should stop here, enough has been said to place the Man Jesus high above the sons of men; but I have mentioned the least and lowest part of His character. He is not only great and good, but had also one thing peculiar to Himself, that no sinful frailty or weakness ever sullied His greatness or goodness. He was a perfect Man. You will not find any other character without its spots and blemishes, because there is no man living without sin, our nature itself being sinful, and sin is the cause of all our imperfections. The darkness of the understanding in the things of God comes from sin; and the weakness of the memory, and the continual inclinations of the will to evil, and the strong and unlawful attachment of the hearts to the world, and the things of it, spring from the same fountain of sin. But the holy Jesus had no sin, and consequently none of the imperfections which sin has brought upon us. When a truth was proposed to His understanding, there was no obstruction to the faculty; He comprehended it clearly and fully. His will was in harmony with God’s will—’I delight,’ says He, ‘to do Thy will, O My God;’ and He did it with all His heart, always and perfectly. And accordingly we read of Him in the Psalms, ‘that he spake the truth in His heart,’ His tongue and His heart always went together—’He had clean hands,’ not once defiled with any sinful pollution—’and a pure heart,’ not one evil thought had ever arisen in it—nay, ‘His mind had never been lift up unto vanity,’ not one vain thought had ever passed through His mind, Judge then how perfectly immaculate He must have been; for who is there among us who has not had a thousand, yea, ten thousand, vain and wandering thoughts? Who does not find them passing through his mind against his will, and intruding into his hours of devotion, from which he had shut them out, and haunting him even at the Lord’s table? But Christ’s pure and spotless mind never admitted one vain thought. He was the very image of God, in which the first Adam was made, and He did not deface it as the first Adam did, but He kept it holy and undefiled. The Scripture assures us of it—’He was made sin for us Who knew no sin.’ He asserts it of himself—’The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me.’ Happy for us, Satan could find in Him no part of our fallen image, and therefore the accuser of the brethren could lay no charge against His Person, nor consequently against the merit of those actions and sufferings, whereby, we, who have by nature borne the image of the earthy, nay, through grace, bear the image of the heavenly Adam, who is the Lord from heaven.

“If you see anything wanting in Him, it is an argument of your own imperfection, for He, whose all-searching eye trieth the very hearts and reins, saw no way of wickedness in Him. He pronounced Him to be His beloved Son, in Whom He was well pleased, and He honoured Him with a wonderful glory, never communicated to any creature, but to the Man Jesus; He was united to God the Son in so close and intimate a union that God and man were one Christ, as much as the reasonable soul and flesh are one man. Oh, how great is the mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh! how can we sufficiently admire and adore it! And how greatly should it endear to us the humanity of our Lord, that it was the sacred temple of the Godhead, inhabited by God the Son, and honoured by the more immediate presence of the Father and Holy Spirit; for it pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell, even the fulness of the God-head bodily. Surely then the Man Jesus was altogether lovely, since He was lovely in the eyes of the eternal Trinity, Who vouchsafed to dwell and make their abode in Him. Pardon, Lord Jesus, our low opinion of the dignity of Thy human nature.

“All our hopes of heaven are founded upon this truth, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself; for if the Man Jesus was not united to the most blessed God, our religion is the grossest idolatry, and Christians are of all men most miserable. But the Scripture has left no room to doubt of the two natures in one Christ. The Word was God, and the Word was made flesh, says St. John, so that God the Word was made flesh and incarnate. God was manifest in the flesh, says the beloved apostle Paul. And the reason was, He was manifested for our salvation. And it was expedient that the Saviour should be both God and Man, because He was to obey and to suffer for us as man, and to merit by His obedience and suffering as God, and thereby to be a complete Saviour. Accordingly, He who thought it no robbery to be equal with God the Father, took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made man. He obeyed, He suffered, He became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross; and when all the ends for which He obeyed, suffered, and died, were answered, then it was not possible that He should be holden any longer of death. Justice released Him the third day from the prison of the grave, and He rose again triumphant from the dead; whereby believers had full evidence given them that all the demands of the law were satisfied, that Christ’s sufferings had made a full atonement for which they should have suffered, that He had taken out the sting of death, and had opened to them the gate of everlasting life.”

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