The Son Learning Obedience

A Sermon by Charles Bridges

Hebrews 5:8. Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.

A precious text, with unsearchable depths! What a sight is before us! The eternally-blessed God with the humility of a child at school, learning a lesson! What reverence we need in beholding this sight! What an infinite stoop from the glory and worship of heaven! Then what love! Then what obligation!

It is the sight of the Humanity of Christ. Separate from His Godhead, this is a cold abstraction. In union with His Godhead, it is an overflowing fountain of tenderness, grace and love. This Humanity is as essential to the great work of salvation as His Divinity. What, you say, if He had been only man and not God? What, I add, if He had been only God and not man? Let the Christian’s faith rest upon both: “Perfect God and perfect man”.² Here we see Him as man. The Apostle speaks of what He did in the days of His flesh (v 7). Yet while man, He was not mere man, but the Son; as no other son, yet as a Son learning obedience by the things which He suffered. This deep mysterious subject opens to us three things: (1) His Person, (2) His Lesson, and (3) the School in which He learned it.

1. His Person. “Though He were a Son.” So He was declared from His birth. “That holy thing,” was the message to His mother, “which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God (Lk 1:35). Not that He then began to be so. The name was no mark of His humiliation, but of His fellowship with His Father in the eternal Godhead. Here had been His home from eternity – “the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father” (Jn 1:18). This was His own witness: “The Lord possessed Me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old” (Prov 8:22). Hence the reverential enquiry after God: “What is His name, and what is His Son’s name, if thou canst tell?” (Prov 30:4). Hence the obligation long before His coming in the flesh, claiming for Him equal homage with God: “Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and ye perish from the way, when His wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him” (Ps 2:12). Who of us therefore will not respond to the noble words of the ancient Church: “Thou art the King of glory, O Christ: Thou art the Everlasting Son of the Father?”

But His dignity did not hinder His humiliation. No, it gave all the glory to His humiliation. This is the record: “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but . . . He humbled Himself” (Phil 2:6,-8). Here we see the God of glory in the lowest station of man, learning as a child.

2. His lesson: obedience. There is nothing out of the ordinary course in a son learning obedience. But that such a Son should do so! This is beyond reason; yet it is the testimony of God. It might be said: What need of the lesson? If He were the Son, invested with all the fullness of the Godhead, what obligation could there be for obedience? Truly He was indeed as the “red heifer . . . upon which never came yoke” (Num 19:2). He was in Himself under no yoke. Yet as man He stood in man’s place and took upon Him man’s obligation. He was “made under the law” (Gal 4:4). “Thus it becometh us”, He declares, “to fulfil all righteousness” (Mt 3:15).

He “learned obedience”, the obedience prescribed to Him. He did so in active exercise: “My meat”, He said, “is to do [My Father’s] will . . . and to finish His work” (Jn 4:34); “I do always those things that please Him” (Jn 8:29). He did so in passive exercise: “Not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Mt 26:39); “The cup which My Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?” (Jn 18:11). And this obedience continued without one flaw “unto death” (Phil 2:8). He could challenge His enemies: “Which of you convinceth Me of sin?” (John 8:46) – even His great enemy: “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me” (Jn 14:30).

Now contrast His course with the highest standard of human perfection. Abraham, the man of faith, failed in unbelief (compare Gen 12:1-5, with vv 11-13). Moses, the meekest of “men which were upon the face of the earth” “spake unadvisedly with his lips” (Num 12:3, Ps 106:33). Elijah could stand alone against the autocrat of Israel and his idolatrous people, and yet he quailed before the threatened wrath of Jezebel (1 Ki 19:2,3). Hezekiah trusted in the Lord, as none before or after him, yet he would buy off the Assyrian invasion by selling the ornaments of the temple (2 Ki 18:5-7, 13-16). “Ye have heard”, says the Apostle, “of the patience of Job” (Jas 5:11), but who has not heard of his impatience also? “Every man at his best state is altogether vanity” (Ps 39:5); at his best state, for is there not infirmity in the highest graces of his renewed nature?

But there was no shadow in the obedience of this Son. He was always in union with His Father’s will. There was the same perfection in His manhood as in His Godhead. No sin was there either of commission or of omission. One apostle testifies, He “knew no sin” (2 Cor 5:21); another, He “did no sin” (1 Pet 2:22); a third, “In Him is no sin” (1 Jn 3:5). This threefold testimony is as complete as words can make it.

He learned obedience, as He tells us Himself, under His Father’s divine teaching: “He wakeneth morning by morning; he wakeneth Mine ear to hear as the learned” (Is 50:4). Not indeed that the omniscient One needed instruction. Not that He learned to obey as something new; all the graces of obedience were in Him in innate perfection. But He placed Himself in the circumstances which called these graces into exercise, and thus He learned obedience in the exercise of it, as He could not otherwise have learned. Such then was the lesson.

3. The school in which He learned – by the things which He suffered. His outward sufferings were on the surface: “I gave My back to the smiters, and My cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not My face from shame and spitting” (Is 50:6). But His inner sufferings – what they were, no tongue of man or angel can tell. It is one of those things of which it must be said, “No man knoweth the Son, but the Father” (Mt 11:27). He was indeed pre-eminent in His suffering as in His glory. Grief with us is always a neighbour, often a visitor. But with Him it was His constant companion. He derived His name from it: “A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Is 53:3). He could say with touching tenderness, “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto My sorrow” (Lam 1:12).

Nor was this sorrow confined to His latter days. It was the mark of the days of His flesh. There was no interval of ease. Every step was endurance, apart from the last act; though, indeed, if there had been ease, the prospect ever before Him of the concluding scene would have made it agony. Trials were continually shifting, never ceasing. Before He could ward off a stroke on one side, the enemy made an attack on the other. Such a weight of endurance! The strongest in his own strength could never have held up under it. Yet “I was not rebellious, neither turned away back” (Is 50:5). No, truly, He went onwards with noble majesty before His disciples, to their amazement and fear (Mk 10:32). “I have a baptism”, He could say at another time, “to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!” (Lk 12:50).

Thus it was the good pleasure of the sovereign Disposer, the only wise God, “in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings” (Heb 2:10).

Now for the lessons to be learned from this holy subject:

1. Adoring gratitude. The Son of God schooled by suffering! What wisdom! What gracious consideration of us in this divine work! Why did He descend to learn in this our school, but that He might sympathise with us in all the exercises of this school? And how this thought softens the galling weight of the trial! The Son of God carried the same burden, bore it under the same yoke, was exercised in the same school, learned the same lesson! The dignity of affliction! To be one with the Son under the same Father’s gracious, wise, though often unsearchable, discipline here, after years of knowledge and experience, we long, with the Apostle, to know more and more to the end: “the fellowship of His sufferings” (Phil 3:10).

Now, child of sorrow, look at this “Man of sorrows”. Follow Him every step of His way, from the cradle – I was going to say so, but I remember He had no cradle. This comfort of the poorest of His children was denied to Him. The manger was the rough substitute. It was the same hardness to the end. “Foxes”, He said on one occasion, “have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay His head” (Mt 8:20).

Travel onward through history to its close. The professing Christian says, I have read it often; I know all about it. Have you read it so often that it has become to you a mere tale, wearisome to hear? Plain proof indeed that you know nothing of it, that you have never read it at all – never, at least, as a Christian with God impressing it on your heart. I seem as if I am looking through a telescope, and yet am unable to fix it so as to get a clear view of the great object. If I did, would you not almost see the impression in the shining of the face? For here is the great secret of God’s transforming work: “We all, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor 3:18).

1. Intense desire to imitate. Look at this holy example, and be what you behold. “Consider Him” (Heb 12:3). One great cause of our living so low is the lack of deep, pondering, and spiritual apprehensions of Him. We must study Him if we would know Him, if we would love, enjoy and be conformed to Him. Then indeed we shall receive “of His fulness”, “and grace for grace” (Jn 1:16). The Holy Spirit will perform His own work. “He shall glorify Me” (Jn 16:14). He opens the eyes to behold, the heart to delight, and by His own heavenly pencil copies feature for feature, on our character, grace answering to grace. But how faint is the impression! O for a deeper moulding in variety as in extent, feature answering to feature, until the work of transformation is complete!

2. See how the perfection of His obedience covers the imperfection of ours. “By the obedience of [this] One shall many be made righteous” (Rom 5:19). What comparison can there be between the “smoking flax” of our poor beginnings, and the inexpressibly bright flame of His obedience? Who does not see the utter lack of all proportion between them? Yet poor as it is in itself, every act, thought and word is presented before the throne sprinkled with the blood, and perfumed with the merit and intercession, of the Son of God. We are so dissatisfied that we cannot endure the thought of bringing it before God. Yet He looks upon it with infinite delight, as “not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing”. How this view lays us low in humiliation and lifts us up in confidence! The precious work before the throne not only heals the festering of conscience, but invigorates, refreshes and consecrates to the service of God. With “lips touched with a live coal from the altar”, are we ready to respond to the call, “Here am I; send me” (Is 6:5-8)?

3. Seek to bear the rich experimental fruits of the school of discipline. How the teaching rod seals the blessing of the teaching law! The lesson may be costly, but rich indeed is the compensation. There must be exercise – painful exercise. If with a will in perfect union with His Father’s will, discipline was, for this blessed Son, the appointed school for obedience, how much more needful must this school be for us, with wills so wayward, so perverse, so rebellious! The schoolboy may revolt from the lesson and break away from the discipline. But is not this the path for his own misery? Do we not find our happiness by losing our will? For surely that will, which is enmity to a God of love (Rom 8:7), must be the greatest enemy to ourselves. Never can we be surprised at any stroke that may fall upon us, so hard is it for us to bend – yet so necessary that we should bend!

If therefore the question is asked in pettish impatience under chastisement, “If I am a child, why am I thus?” the answer is ready, “You are thus, because you are a child, because the Lord loves you, and therefore chastens you.” “For what son is he whom the Father chasteneth not?” (Heb 12:6,7). It is not therefore hard, but (as the confession will be brought out) “it is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn Thy statutes”; for “before I was afflicted I went astray; but now have I kept Thy word” (Ps 119:71,67). This, then – let it never be forgotten – is God’s school. It is the stroke that humbles, the disappointment that breaks down the stubborn will, the exercise that weans from a world of vanity and sin. Nor is it for the believer’s interest or comfort to lift up a finger against his Father’s appointments. Bitter they may be to the flesh, but they are wholesome to the spirit.

Rather let his mind be absorbed in the blessedness of knowing that he is in his Father’s hands, who is too wise, too faithful, too kind to appoint anything but what in the end shall be for his happiness and for his glory. Discipline is the finishing school – the training for heaven. It allows one to mourn, not to murmur. There is peace in submission. Even when it tears the flesh, it heals the spirit. Shall the children complain of the course by which their Lord was pleased to learn obedience and to be made perfect for His work? (Heb 5:7, 2:10). Must believers not be content with school discipline until this finishing school shall have fully trained them to dwell for ever with their Father in His heavenly home?

¹Taken, with editing, from The Family Treasury for 1860. Bridges (1794-1869) was at this time an Anglican minister in Dorset. He is now best known for his commentaries, including one on the Book of Proverbs.

²From the Athanasian Creed.