1. The Divine and the human. — The sending of the Son took effect in the birth of Jesus, and the Apostle puts it under two forms, both of which are plainly designed to present Christ's manhood as His full identification of Himself with us. The Son of God became the son of a woman ; from His mother He drew a true and complete humanity in body and soul. The humanity which He received was sufficiently kindred with the Divinity which received it to make it possible that the one should dwell in the other and be one person. As born of a woman the Son of God took upon Himself all human experiences, became capable of sharing our pure emotions, wept our tears, partook of our joys, hoped and feared as we do, was subject to our changes, grew as we grew, and in everything but sin was a man amongst men.
What does this mean but that, when God gave His supreme
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revelation of His own essential nature in its relation to humanity, He came not as an alien to our planet but as a native ? Not in angelic form, robed in the brightness of a far-away mystery, lifted high in His temple — not so did He come ; but as a Man, as a definite individual, along a recognized line of descent, with the marks of the village on His face and form, one of the common people, a Hebrew of the first century. That, to St. Paul, was the outstanding and amazing mystery of the Incarnation — that there should be so little outward mystery about it ; and the outstanding wonder of it was that through its common everyday human aspect there shone forth from the heart of it an inner mystery of quicken- ing light and power which made life glorious for all who accepted it as God's truth for them.
2. Born under law. — The Incarnation is the revelation of the binding force of natural law, to the necessities of which God Himself yields up His Son. It is the loud proclamation of the deference God pays to that Nature which is His own creation. Where, indeed, can we learn more emphatically than from the cross of Christ the validity, the sanctity of those natural conditions which God, of His own will, obeyed, even to the death of His Son, rather than break ?
Christ was under law in that the will of God dominated His life, but He was not so under it as we are on whom its precepts often press as an unwelcome obligation, and who know the weight of guilt and condemnation. If there is any one characteristic of Jesus more conspicuous than another it is the absence in Him of any consciousness of deficiency in His obedience to law, and yet that absence does not in the smallest degree infringe on His claim to be " meek and lowly in heart." " Which of you convinceth me of sin?" would have been from any other man a defiance that would have provoked a crushing answer if it had not been taken as a proof of hopeless ignorance of ^elf ; but when Christ asks the question, the world is silent. The silence has been all but unbroken for nineteen hundred years, and of all the busy and often un- friendly eyes that have been occupied with Him and the hostile pens that have been eager to say something new about Him, none has discovered a flaw, or dared to " hint a fault."
That which is really startling in the birth and life of Christ is.
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not the extent of its miraculous display, but its strange and severe limitation ; not in the degree to which He exercised His Godhead, but in the degree to which He emptied Himself of it. That is what bewilders and astounds us far more than any miracle. Men talk as if we Christians were brimming with a childish and reckless exuberance of supernaturalism. How distorted a mis- conception ! Is not the wonder all the other way ? Is it not amazing that a creed which starts with such tremendous assertions about the Person of its Founder should keep itself so well in hand, 80 rigidly under control, that its main force is spent in exhibiting the loyalty with which this only-begotten Son of God submitted to every ordinance of man and of nature, how He bent Himself down to the hard and narrow frontiers of His natural lot ? For one man who is disturbed by the miracles we preach, there are twenty who are upset by the rigorous absence of miracle from our account of salvation. " Why this slow and painful dealing with sin and with sorrow ? " they ask impatiently, " Why does not God act with greater freedom ? Why does He not lay bare His holy arm ? Vf hy this roundabout method of redemption ? Why this cruel insistence on His Son's suffering and death ? Why give Him over to the hour of darkness ? Why not take away the bitter cup ? Why not rend the heavens and come down ? " We know but too well the appeal, the passion, the misery of those questions ! ^