After all, the errors of Christians on this subject, in these latter days, are of a very different kind from those of the Jews. There is little danger of men keeping the Sabbath too strictly. The thing to be feared is the dispo- sition to keep it loosely and partially, or not to keep it at all. The tendency of the age is not to exaggerate the fourth commandment, but to cut it out of the Decalogue, and throw it aside altogether. Against this tendency it becomes us all to be on our guard. The experience of eighteen centuries supplies abundant proofs that vital religion never flourishes when the Sabbath is not well kept.
We learn, for another thing, from these verses, the dignity and greatness of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Jews, we are told, sought to kill Jesus because He said " that God was his Father, making himself equal with God." Our Lord, in reply, on this special occasion, enters very fully into the question of His own Divine nature. In reading His words, we must all feel that we are reading mysterious things, and treading on very holy ground. But we must feel a deep conviction, however little we may understand, that the things He says could never have been said by one who was only man. The Speaker is nothing less than " God manifest in the flesh. (1 Tim. iii. 16.)
He asserts His own unity with God the Father. No other reasonable meaning can be put on the expressions, — " The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do : for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. — The Father loveth the Son, and showeth him all things that himself doeth." Such lan- guage, however deep and high, appears to mean that in operation, and knowledge, and heart, and will, the Father and the Son are One, — two Persons, but one God. Truths such as these are of course beyond man's power to explain particularly. Enough for us to believe and rest upon them.
He asserts, in the next place. His own Divine power to