THERE is a strong recommendatory power in the names which are given to Christ, and any person at all given to reflection must feel attached by them and constrained to accept His proffered love. Take those seasons, for example, when the mind is oppressed with a conviction of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and with a sense of its own bondage to sin’s power.
With what surprising freshness and force will such assurances and epithets strike the heart as those which describe Christ as “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”; as “the Fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness”; as “the Balm of Gilead”; and as “the great Physician!” Or in those hours when, in deep perplexity and doubt, thick gloom over-spreads the soul and our greatest temporal or spiritual interests become tangled and inexplicable to our wisdom, the mere mention of the name “Counsellor” is the revelation of our help—is like the stream of rays from a lighthouse thrown upon the waters to guide the tempest-tossed mariner.
“I am the way, the truth, and the life” says the unerring voice. Our Lord is a Sun and Shield—the true Light—the Sun of Righteousness; and by these figures is revealed to the perplexed mind the very help it needs.
There are times of depression and sadness in, perhaps, every man’s experience when he can truly say of his friends, in the words of Job: “Miserable comforters are ye all.” One feels alone in the world, weary of it. Like Hagar in the wilderness, ever feel that we are forsaken and outcast. But in the moment of our deepest depression let it be whispered in our ear that “there is a Friend who sticketh closer than a brother,” or that “we have an high priest which can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and how does the whole flow of our feelings change under the influence of a sentence or even of a word!”
Of course, we do not exclude, but by all means include, the Holy Spirit operating through Scriptural expressions and names of the Saviour, in this sublime and beautiful effect. But we are speaking now of visible means, and of their wonderful effects—so wonderful that often a single word upon which the mind never, perhaps, paused before, or a name, of which the meaning was scarcely ever thought of, becomes in a moment a light hung out from heaven, a signpost on the way of life, ministering grace and peace to the soul.
Perhaps were we to enquire minutely into causes and effects we should find that a single word fitly spoken and heard is often the means of a conversion of which the blessed consequences reach to eternity. Especially how often would it appear that the names of the Lord Jesus Christ are a tower of strength and a fountain of consolation. “The name of the Lord is a strong tower.” “He is the God of all comfort and consolation.” “God who comforteth those that are cast down.” “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him” (Psalm ciii. 13).—Christian Treasury.