Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I might take it again. (18) No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself, I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father.
Reader! make a long pause over these blessed verses, for they are most blessed. The love Jesus here speaks of cannot possibly mean the love of God the Father to God the Son, as God; for then, in this sense, no such reason as is here assigned, would be given. Neither did God the Son lay down his life as God. And, moreover, the observation of God the Father loving God the Son would have been unnecessary in Christ to have informed the disciples. For unless the Church had faculties suitable to the apprehension, (which is impossible), we never could have the least conception what that infinite love is, which One of the divine Persons in the Godhead bears to another. But the love of the Father to Christ here spoken of by Jesus, is the love he hath to him as God-Man-Mediator. He loved him for his voluntary undertaking to become the Head and Husband of his body the Church. He loved him for all the offices connected with it, in rescuing his Spouse, his Bride, which the Father gave him before all worlds, from that dreadful state of sin and ruin into which, in the time-state of her Adam-nature, she had fallen. This, I venture to believe, was the love which the Lord Jesus here spake of, and which Jesus prized so highly. And well might all the persons of the Godhead delight in the God-Man love of Jesus to his Church. For the perfect unsinning obedience of the whole creation of God, yea, had the whole creation of God, added to that obedience, been offered up as one rich and full oblation, the whole would have been nothing in comparison to the holy life, and spotless death of Christ upon the cross, when doing away the whole penal effect of sin by the sacrifice of himself, and magnifying the law of God, and making it honorable. Reader! pause a moment longer, and then say, did God the Father thus love Christ on our account, think then how God the Father must love us. And if Jesus was so loved by the Father for us, how ought Christ to be loved by us?
I must not suffer the Reader to pass away from those sweet verses before that he hath also noticed, and with the due attention it merits, what Jesus hath said of his own sovereign power and Godhead. If no man had power to take his life from him, but as he elsewhere saith: As the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself. John 5:26. let the Reader receive from those precious words, the Lord's assurance of his nature and office as God-Man-Mediator! Oh! how infinitely great must be his nature, how full of glory and dignity his person, who thus possessed such infinite power? And how unspeakably great his love, who so loved us, as to give himself for us an offering, and a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling savor?