MEDITATIONS ON SACRED HUMANITY - KING OF KINGS (Chapter 11)
By J. C. Philpot
Chapter Eleven from the book - Meditations on the Sacred Humanity of The Blessed Redeemer
If favoured with that "anointing" from above which "teacheth of all things, and is truth, and is no lie," dropping into our heart and from our pen, our "meditation of him will be sweet" to both writer and reader. And indeed, if in any art of our Meditations on this sacred subject we especially need the unction of his grace to lead us into the truth, to endue us with the spirit of faith so as to receive into a believing heart what the Holy Ghost has revealed in the inspired word, to be kept from unhallowed, presumptuous speculation, whilst treading such sacred ground, and to unfold with any measure of holy and heavenly wisdom the mysteries of the kingdom of grace and glory of our risen and ascended Lord, it is now, when we approach that part of our subject where we have to contemplate him as seated at the right hand of the Father. We have seen him rising from the dead and ascending up on high, and our last view of him was his triumphant entry into the courts of heaven, or, as the Holy Ghost expresses it, "received up into glory." 1Ti 3:16. The subject, then, of our present Meditation will be a view by faith of what Jesus now is at the right hand of the Majesty on high.
But before we enter upon this most blessed theme, as the proposed subject of our Meditations was "The Sacred Humanity of our adorable Redeemer," it may not be out of place to cast a glance at this sacred humanity in its present exalted state of majesty and glory.
The exaltation of human nature, what the scripture calls "the flesh and blood of the children," Heb 2:14, meaning thereby the whole of our humanity, body and soul, as a necessary but most blessed consequence of its intimate and indissoluble union with the divine Person of the Son of God, is the greatest display of the wisdom, love, and grace of a Triune Jehovah that could be afforded to men or angels. In our present time-state, whilst groaning in our earthly house of this tabernacle, surrounded by evils innumerable without, and burdened with a body of sin and death within, we can only apprehend and realise by faith what our nature now is in union with the Person of the Son of God, and what it hereafter will be in that great day when he shall come "to be glorified in his saints and to be admired in all them that believe," when he "shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself." Php 3:21.
Viewed, however, by mortal eyes, as an object of existing sight and sense, human nature can now only be seen in its debased, degraded condition. The original beauty and glory of man, as made in God’s image, after his own likeness, were utterly lost in the Adam fall. Sin has marred body and soul, filling the former with disease and pain, and the latter with pollution and corruption. Of this we have daily experience, not only in its most pressing and painful form as the poison in our own body and soul, often making us groan, being burdened, as regards ourselves, but as witnessing also with grief the pain and misery of others by which we are surrounded, and seeing spread before our eyes the vile abominations which run down our streets like water. But this is not all. Though even of this world’s present misery and sin but an infinitely small fraction has pressed on our heart or entered our eyes or ears, we have not seen, and God grant we never may see, how human nature thoroughly let loose can both sin and suffer. What sins it is capable of we feel in ourselves, for in our own hearts lie deeply imbedded and struggling for life and growth the vital seeds of every foul and damnable crime; what it has done, and is ever greedily, exultingly, remorselessly doing in others, abandoned to its lusts, we see or read in daily act. Even in this civilised land what foul crimes are continually surging up to view, as if from a bottomless deep, where sin is ever seething and boiling as in a flaming cauldron.
But in this present life human nature is no more what it will be hereafter in the unregenerate, than what it will be hereafter in the regenerate. Its future capacity for sin is no more known by the iniquities which it now throws up into open view than the depths of the sea by the seaweed cast upon the shore. Take all the depths unfathomed, unfathomable, of your own heart, or look at the vilest wretch whom sins of every shape and name have debased to the lowest pitch, steeped to the neck in blood and crime, so sworn a foe of all laws, human and divine, that, if to be taken in no other way, he must be shot down like a wild beast for the security of the lives of the community; when you have probed the depths of your own heart, or painted in your own imagination the blackest wretch that the hulks have ever held, or vomited forth on a penal colony, you have not then seen or imagined in your mind the millionth part of what human nature really is as sunk and debased by the Adam fall. The very present constitution of the human body, the limited powers of the mind, the laws of society, the restraint of God’s providence, and a thousand other visible or invisible checks, now keep human nature shut up in itself, as a wild beast in an iron cage. Nor will earth ever witness the full outburst of the fury of sin as blazing forth in the body and soul of man to its utmost height. Hell, and hell alone will fully manifest, as hell, and hell alone will fully develop human nature as burning with the most intense and unquenchable enmity and blasphemy against God and the Lamb.
But take the converse. We have taken a glimpse at human nature debased and degraded, polluted by sin and set on fire of hell. Now view human nature pure and holy, unspotted, unfallen, and especially look at it as exalted above angels, principalities, and powers in the glorious Person of Immanuel, God with us. There we see humanity in intimate personal and indissoluble union with Deity. 0 the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God in suffering man, made after his own image, to sink so low, and in the Person of his dear Son to exalt it so high that the same nature should be in hell and in heaven; in hell, outvying devils in blasphemy in heaven, in union with Deity. It is at human nature thus exalted that we would now chiefly look; and if we have thus briefly touched upon man as debased and degraded by sin, we have thrown in these gloomy colours merely by way of contrast. As in a picture the dark shades set off and more clearly bring out the bright lights, so the very degradation of human nature by sin and its miserable consequences only more clearly brings out into open view the stupendous grace displayed in its glorious exaltation in the Person of the Son of God.
These thoughts, though at first sight perhaps somewhat discursive and foreign to our subject, may, with God’s blessing, prepare our minds to approach that portion of our heavenly theme on which we now attempt to enter.
We have, in our past Meditations, beheld the blessed Lord ascend up on high, and have by faith traced his course up to the very gates of heaven; we have seen his angelic convoy, viewed his dismayed foes, and heard the shouts of exultation from the heavenly host which welcomed him home. We have now, then, to consider the place to which he thus triumphantly ascended, and the end and object of his triumphant entry there.
The place into which he ascended is heaven, by which we mean the immediate residence of God in all his majesty and glory. The blessed Lord is said Heb 4:14 to have "passed into," or rather, as the word literally means, " through the heavens," i.e., the material heavens, both the watery heavens, Ge 7:11 De 28:12 Job 38:29 Job 38:37, and the starry heavens; Ps 8:3 Ps 19:1; and to be "made higher" than they, that is, not only actually but locally. Heb 7:26. It is, then, into "the heaven of heavens," Ps 148:4, or "the third heaven," 2Co 12:2, that the Lord ascended when he went up on high. He is therefore said to be "set on the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens." Heb 8:1.
We shall chiefly direct our present thoughts to the blessed Lord in the immediate presence of God as Zion’s enthroned King.
Just before the Lord ascended up on high he "came and spake" unto his eleven disciples: "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth." Mt 28:18. Previous to his resurrection his was a state of humiliation and suffering, for "he was made a little lower than the angels;" Heb 2:9; "humbled himself, and became obedient unto death;" Php 2:8; was "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;" Isa 53:3; yea, "a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people." Ps 22:6. But when he arose from the dead, his humiliation was past, and his glory began, as Peter speaks, "Who by him do believe in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory." 1Pe 1:21 . Thus his resurrection was the commencement of his mediatorial reign, and his ascension and going up into heaven was the entering into possession of it, as he himself said to the two disciples, when journeying with them to Emmaus: "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?" Lu 24:26.
