Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: December 23rd

THE BELOVED SON

This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. - Matthew 3:17

All Christ’s work for us, and its sweetness and preciousness to us, all His power as the Revealer of God and of man, all His power as Redeemer, Saviour, Sympathizer, Helper, Friend, Judge, Recompense, Life, all depends on and stands or falls with this conception of His birth into the world as the coming, by His voluntary act, of the Eternal Word into the brotherhood of our humanity. "Forasmuch as the children were partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise," and yet how differently, actively, " took part of the same."

And then from this flows the other great thought which our Lord announces, that His birth is the assumption of a true and yet a unique manhood. He is "Son of man," body, soul, and spirit, one of us; "bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh," knowing the aspirations of the spirit and the limitations of the body; proved to be the Son of David, and the Brother of us all according to the flesh, in that He hungered and thirsted, and wearied and wept, and suffered and died; proved to be a man in spirit and in heart like us all, in that He sorrowed and rejoiced, was grieved and was angry, willed and purposed, thought and loved.

And not only is a perfect and a true manhood revealed to us in the name by which He comes so near to us all, but a manhood which, in all its reality, was yet singular and unique. Others are "sons of men"; this is "the Son." In Him, as it were, is contained all which is proper to humanity, and is scattered elsewhere through the race. He is the one pearl of great price, the entire and perfect chrysolite. To Him all other men are but as fragments. He alone is the full true Man, according to the Divine ideal; the second Man, the Man Christ Jesus. In Him all the strengths, beauties, holinesses, proper to, or possible to, humanity are gathered, and abide. Others, saints, sages, preachers, teachers, by the side of Him are like a tiny cup of water by the side of the ever-flowing fountain. You might take millions of blocks to be fashioned into the fairest forms of manly strength and womanly beauty, out of this great marble cliff, in which everything that is lovely and of good report, all that is virtuous and deserves praise, is found in stainless perfection.

In every religion is some tradition that "The gods are come down in the likeness of men." Is this but one more dream like those others, expressing unfulfilled longings and vain desires? Nay, this is the reality, of which those are but confessions of the need. They are man’s wistful and half-despairing hopes. This is God’s answer, meeting and surpassing all their expectations, giving a real, perfect, and eternal incarnation, instead of apparent partial and temporary assumptions of shadowy manhood.