What think we of Christ?
I. The merely humanitarian view of the person of Christ involves in it: (1) the gravest intellectual difficulties. There was something peculiar in His intellectual solitude: the difference between Him and other thinkers was not such as, for example, between Shakespeare and other authors. You know all through that Shakespeare belongs to the same species as the others; but Christ constitutes an entire genius by Himself. Compare the Sermon on the Mount with the utterances of the most exalted teachers, and say if it be conceivable that He who delivered it was no more than a Jewish country artisan, whose life had been spent in one of the lowest villages of the most illiterate portion of the land. (2) But the difficulties which beset the humanitarian view of the Saviour's person from the intellectual side are as nothing compared with those which it has to encounter on the moral. Remember the honesty and integrity by which He was characterized, and then say how these qualities are to be reconciled with the claims which He put forth as One who had come down from heaven for the express purpose of teaching celestial things, if these claims were not well founded. (3) Note the testimony of history to the Deity of Christ. It is the nature of moral evil to propagate itself. Christ turned the tide for all after-time, and today the sole corrective agents at work upon the moral and spiritual condition of men may be traced to Christianity.
II. But now, supposing that we all receive Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, what then? What is involved in that reception? It involves: (1) that we should implicitly believe His teachings. It is a mockery for one to say that he believes in the Deity of Christ, and then to cavil at his words or to deny their truth. (2) If we believe that Jesus Christ is the God-Man, there is involved in that an obligation to rely alone on His atoning work for our salvation. (3) If we receive Christ as the God-Man, there is involved in that reception an obligation to obey His commandments. The practical rejection of our Lord's Divinity by the disobedience of our lives is a more prevalent heresy than the theoretic denial of His Deity, and it is far more insidious and pestilential.
W. M. Taylor, The Limitations of Life,p. 127.
References: Matthew 21:10. Preacher's Monthly,vol. ii., p. 364; J. O. Davies, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxii., p. 241.Matthew 21:12; Matthew 21:13. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iv., p. 181.Matthew 21:13. B. F. Westcott, Expositor,3rd series, vol. v., p. 458; R. Heber, Parish Sermons,vol. i., p. 1.Matthew 21:15. S. Cox, The Bird's Nest,p. 194; Outline Sermons to Children,p. 124; A. Macleod, Talking to the Children,p. 237. Matthew 21:15; Matthew 21:16. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxx., No. 1785; Homiletic Magazine,vol. vi., p. 208. Matthew 21:16. W. Wilkinson, Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 205.Matthew 21:17. W. H. Jellie, Christian World Pulpit,vol. vi., p. 230. Matthew 21:17-22. Parker. Inner Life of Christ,vol. iii., p. 99. Matthew 21:18-20. G. W. Butler, Christian World Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 298; Parker, Hidden Springs,p. 98. Matthew 21:21. H. W. Beecher, Sermons,1st series, p. 536.