By the Late DAVID DICKSON, Irvine.
(Continued from page 56).
Let us consider but one of the passages of our Lord’s exercise (John xii., 27, 28). “Now” (says he) “is my soul troubled”: wherein, behold the perplexity of His mind, smitten with the horror of the curse due to us coming upon Him. Then comes forth, “What shall I say?” wherein, behold reason standing mute and altogether silent, He only lets forth the confession of His perplexity. Presently after this, He subjoins, “Father save me from this hour”: wherein, behold holy nature, trembling and shrinking to fall into the wrath of the Father, and according to the principles of holy nature, testifying the simple abhorrency of His soul from such an evil as is the wrath of God His Father, which, had it not been for love to save our souls, He would not have yielded His human nature to endure or bear it. Therefore He, considering that we were but lost for ever, if He should not suffer wrath for us, He repeats the sum of the covenant of redemption agreed upon, “But for this cause came I unto this hour.” And last of all, He shuts up His speech and exercise in the triumphing voice of victorious and untainted faith, “Father, glorify thy name”; and here He rests: wherewith the Father was so well pleased, as that from heaven He speaks to the hearing of the multitude standing by, “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.”
Among the deepest degrees of the sufferings of Christ in His soul, we reckon that desertion, whereof Christ on the cross gives an account, crying out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” By which speech, He does not mean, that then the personal union of the natures was in Him dissolved, nor yet that God had withdrawn His sustaining strength and help from the human nature, nor that the love of the Father was taken off Him, nor that any point of the perfection of holiness was taken from Him; but His true intent is to show, that God for a time had taken away sensible consolation and felt joy from His human soul, and so justice might in His sufferings be the more fully satisfied. And this is the forsaking of Him here given us to understand. In which desertion, Christ is not to be looked upon simply as He is in His own person, the Son of the Father, in which He is always well pleased; but as He stands in the room of sinners, surety and cautioner, paying their debt; in which respect, He behoved to be dealt with as standing in our name, guilty, and paying the debt of being forsaken of God—which we were bound to suffer fully and for ever, if He had not interposed for us.