1. An afflicted God. — There is no ground for the objection that suffering is impossible to God, because of the perfection of His nature. To be unsympathetic is no proof of perfection in any being. The most perfect father is by no means he who is most heedless of the feelings, and unaffected by the sufferings, of his children ; nor the most perfect king he who is indifferent to, and unmoved by, the state of his subjects. And certainly it is a most arbitrary and groundless view of the perfection of the Divine Being, which pronounces it impossible for Him to be painfully affected by the sufferings of His own. So far as we know anything of moral perfection, we see that it is sympathetic just in proportion as it rises in degree. Love is the glory of God, as it is the goodness of man, and love is essentially sympathetic.
May it not be that this suffering is essential to the very highest blessedness ? Is it not manifestly far more consistent with it, to say the least, than indifference or insensibility ? With Bushnell, we cannot help thinking that such suffering must be joy itself, the fullest, and profoundest, and sublimest joy conceivable. There was never a being on earth so deep in His peace and so essentially blessed as Jesus Christ. Even His agony itself is scarcely an exception. There is no joy so grand as that which has a form of tragedy. We are never so happy, so essentially blessed, as when we suffer well, wearing out our life in sympathies spent on the evil and undeserving, burdened heavily in our prayers, struggling on through secret Gethsemanes, and groaning before God, in groans audible to God alone, for those who have no mercy on themselves. What man of the race ever finds that in such love as this he has been made unhappy ? Therefore, when we say that God suffers in sympathy with His people, we do not deny that He is the ever-blessed God ; we do rather by implication affirm His infinite blessedness.
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2. Afflicted in all our afflictions. — " In all their affliction he was afflicted." Consider how many there are who suffer — and how varied their sufferings are. Think of the long pro- cession of Zion's pilgrims who have watered their course with tears, and left on the flinty rock or the burning sand the marks of their bleeding feet. Think of the sighing and groaning of the prisoners, the victims of human oppression, which have reached the Divine ear. Think of the noble army of martyrs, who after suffering inhuman tortures have sealed their testimony with their blood. Think of the sufferers in less public spheres who have had wearisome nights and troublesome days appointed to them. Think of the Christian homes which have been darkened by poverty and suffering and bereavement, and of the myriads of Christian hearts on which from time to time dark shadows have fallen. Think of the many afflictions of the righteous, and of God as sharing in them all. And then say what individual sufferer can know anything of the extent of His, who has shared in the aggregated sufferings of His people throughout all generations, taking upon Himself the individual sorrows of every one, so that, " In all their affliction he was afflicted."
3. The fulfilment in Christ. — Here we have one of the tenderest conceptions of God that the Old Testament can give us : the conception of God suffering for and with His people. It would not be correct to say that this was a prediction of Christ ; but it would be true to say that, here as elsewhere, Christ came not to destroy, but to fulfil ; that, in His person, He did fulfil the highest and deepest conceptions of God as, shall we say, capable of feeling with men, of descending, as it were, to their level, of bearing their burdens, of fighting their battles — and in this sense is not this picture an anticipation, an unconscious anticipation, of the Incarnation and the Passion of God as exhibited in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord?
When Jesus came and lived among us the heart of God was laid bare, and every one can see in the Gospel that patient wistful love which inhabits the secret place of the universe. As the father sits upon the housetop, and watches the crest of the hill, that he may catch the first glimpse of the returning
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prodigal ; as the householder makes ready his feast and sends for his ungrateful guests ; as the vine master appeals to his disloyal tenants by his own son, we learn the expectation of God. As Jesus takes into His arms little children whom superior people have despised, and casts His charity over penitent women whom Pharisees cannot forgive, and mourns at the tomb of Lazarus over a friend whom He cannot afford to lose, one learns the graciousness of God. As Jesus turns sadly from Nazareth, the city of his youth, which had refused Him, and reproaches Capernaum, the city of His choice, which did not believe in Him, and weeps openly over Jerusalem, which knew not the day of her visitation, one learns the regret of God. And as Jesus appeals to the disciples, " "Will ye also go away ? " and prophesies with a sad heart that every one of His friends will forsake Him, and is cast into a deep gloom by the betrayal of Judas, we learn what is almost incredible, but most comfortable, the dependence of God. The Cross is not only in the heart of human life, it is also in the heart of God. He is the chief of all sufferers, because He is the chief of all lovers.