We may well bless the Name of God that He has revealed to us the worth of His beloved Son and brought us into fellowship with Himself concerning Him; for it is that that has become a fact since His Beloved is ours. What pleasure the Father found in Him as He lived His life on earth! We are glad and rejoice that it was so, that in the world, dominated by the devil, its prince, the Father found in Jesus one who in every thought, word and deed answered wholly to His mind. We have no greater joy than to follow in thought His footsteps through the world, always speaking the Father's words and doing the Father's works; never pleasing Himself, though indeed He only, of all the men that ever lived, had the right to do so, and if He had done so all that He did would have been right, but it was the Father that He Pleased, "I do always those things that please Him," He said. His Father was the sole object of His living, He had no other motive but His Father's glory.
He was here to do His Father's business, and it caused Him to wonder, and must have pained His holy and sensitive soul that His mother and Joseph did not understand this when they found Him in the temple at the age of twelve. We through grace understand it and acknowledge that it was wholly right.
We read the record of the Father's pleasure in Him, expressed in words that shall never be forgotten. "This is My beloved Son in whom is all My delight," and our hearts are moved to praise and we cannot forebear from saying, "He is worthy." Infinite perfection called for divine approbation; the heavens could not be silent, the excellent glory must speak, the Father Himself must declare His delight in the lowly Man of sorrows, and we respond to heaven's joy in Him. Those words of the Father's that thrilled the hearts of the disciples awaken a chord in our hearts, and our joy and the song that we raise thereat is our fellowship with the Father — our oneness of thought with Him by the illumination and power of the Holy Spirit.
Would it be right to say that the Father's pleasure in Him increased with every day that He lived on earth? To us it seems so, for the deeper depths of His devotion to the Father's will were more and more revealed as the opposition of sinners and the hatred of men in creased against Him, and as the cross came into view. Hard must that heart be that can pass indifferently such a saying as that that came forth from the mouth of Jesus in John 10 when the cross was not far away, "Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life that I might take it again," and if we put alongside of it that other saying, "That the world may know that I love the Father; and as the Father gave Me commandment, even so I do. Arise, let us go hence" (John 14:31), we have before us the full and uninterrupted love that flowed between the Father and the Son. And we stand by and rejoice with a deep and subdued joy that to us, even to us, this blessedness should be revealed, and that we should have our part in it, for if the Father loved Him because He laid down His life, we know that He laid down has life for us and we love Him because of it. His love to the Father and His love to us burned as one great flame that the many waters could not quench, and we love Him whom the Father loves and this is the basis and the spring of our communion with the Father.
We contemplate those words of the Lord, "Let us go hence." That hence meant Gethsemane, Gabbatha and Golgotha for Him, the agony of blood, the assaults of the power of darkness; the shame and the insults and the injustice of men; and those deeper and mysterious sufferings under the just and holy judgment of God. Never shall we understand the full meaning of that cry, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" It must be forever beyond creature comprehension; but we do know, and as divinely taught we can understand the words, "Christ also has loved us, and has given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour" (Eph. 5:2). We are assured that if the suffering He endured when He was made sin for us has endeared Him eternally to us, He must have been in those hours of darkness unspeakably precious to His Father, "an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour." If that sacrifice was to God, it was for us, and if it was precious to God, it is also precious to us, and here we are truly brought into oneness of thought with the Father concerning Him.
The Father's glory visited the Garden, even before Mary of Magdala reached it, and the empty tomb into which she peered with tearful eyes proclaimed the fact that God had raised Him from the dead, and now we know that He is set at the Father's right hand in heaven, and He has been invested there with glories that surpass all other glories; a Name has been given to Him that is above every other name; and at His Name every creature must bow the knee. We follow His exaltation to the highest place in heaven with full approval, as we have followed His humiliation with wonder. The first and the most willing of all who shall acknowledge His worthiness are surely the ransomed saints who form His church, we belong to that favoured company, and we bless the Father's Name who has exalted Him who has become so precious to us.
We await His coming again for the crowns and the kingdoms are His, and His church shall share His glory, for so has God decreed. But when the splendours and the triumphs of His kingdom shall have reached their termination, and Time shall have ceased to be, the Father's house shall abide and we shall be there "conformed to the image of His dear Son, that He might be the Firstborn among many brethren." Forever He shall be pre-eminent, the eternal object of His Father's love and of the love of all His saints, and thus it shall be that forever we shall have common thoughts with the Father concerning Him. And we shall share in the love that rests upon Him, for to us He has declared the Father's Name, that the love wherewith His Father loves Him may be in us; not only on us, but in us, the enjoyed portion of hearts that are wholly given up to Him. Thus shall our eternal joy be fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.