When satan said "I will" to God, setting his creaturely will in opposition to that of his Creator, he broke the unwritten law that in God's universe there can be but one will and that the will of the Maker of all things. Lawlessness then became a fact in the celestial realm. It entered the world and began coursing through the veins of human life when God's first man broke God's law and disobeyed God's command.
From that day on down through the centuries until the angels sang the first Christmas carols over the manger cradle in Bethlehem there had never lived a man who had been perfectly obedient to God, who had fully kept God's law. Men had turned to their own way and done that which was right in their own sight. Even among those who through faith followed the Lord there was not one who lived only and wholly in the will of God.
But through the incarnation there entered into human life a second Man in whom mankind was again to be put to the test; a last Adam in whom the human race had its only and final hope of restoration to God.
The first man, Adam, and the whole race latent in him had gone down into ruin and rejection through disobedience. Now God had sent forth a second Man, a last Adam, who might lift the race into restoration and reconciliation upon the one condition of obedience. It must, however, be obedience from the beginning to the end of life; obedience at all times, in all things, under all circumstances, to all limits, in spite of all but in the spirit; obedience to the whole will of God as the unalterable rule of life; such obedience as made the will of God the center of His life, the circumference, and all in between. The ruling passion of His whole being must be "God's will - Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else."
Romans 5:19, "For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous."
Would the Son of Man be able to qualify for Saviourhood under such a condition? Would He choose in all things to will Godward?
In coming into the world Jesus had declared that the purpose of the incarnation was to do His Father's will.
John 6:38, "For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me."
Part of Him humbling in becoming the Son of Man was His willingness to leave the place of equality in sovereignty as God to take the place of subordination in subserviency as man. The Father's will was the Son's delight; it was the very sustenance of His life.
John 4:34, "Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work."
He came, He lived, He worked, all with one purpose and one passion - to do His Father's will. And what was the Father's will in relation to the human race and to the incarnation of His Son?
John 6:40, "And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day."
God's will was that every sinner should see in His Son a Saviour and believe on Him as such that the Father might lift from him the sentence of death and raise him up into eternal life in Him.
~Ruth Paxson~
(continued with # 4)
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