Alone.

J. A. Trench.

from 'Truth for Believers' Vol. 3. — Miscellany.

Alone in the desertion of His own. (John 16:32.) Alone in the very perfection of His path as Man here walking before God in obedience and dependence, the declared object of the Father's delight, leaving one such path across the moral waste of this world, if there was but one — but alone in it — no heart of man to estimate it — no beauty discerned in Him that we should desire Him, nothing in man's heart to answer to anything in God's, as the declared object of His delight was there only to be despised and rejected of men. It was proved then that there was none that He could raise to His own level as Man walking here.

Except the precious seed corn fall into the ground and die it abideth alone. (John 12:24.) He might have taken His place at the right hand of God in His perfection as Man but that it would have been to be alone there for ever. This would not satisfy Him. He descends to die. This led me to Psalm 22: where He was alone as forsaken of God … God is glorified in Him and as the result He is glorified as man in God — but He is no longer alone. And thus opens the scene of our association with Him — He is no sooner heard from the transpiercing horn of divine judgment against sin than His heart turns to it … and this but gives effect to the eternal counsels of the heart of God, for His delights were with not merely the Son of Man, but with the sons of men. And He has come out of the darkness in which He was alone, as no heart can fathom it, into the light and joy and conscious acceptance of His work. We share the whole of it — first as now in Him — brought to His own place before the Father and God individually; second, as united to Him as the ascended and accepted Man in the glory of God, and only wait, thirdly, for the Shout with which He comes to see the fruit of the travail of His soul in having us with Him and like Him in the everlasting glory.