&It THE GLORY OF CHRIST AS GOD-MAN. God, to enjoy inconceivable degrees of power, authority and splendour, it is proper for us to do so much honour to the man whom God the Father delights to honour, as to read and under- stand as far as we can the peculiar glories of his special ad- vancement. It has been a common practice with us, because we know that Jesus Christ is true God, and that his human nature is uni- ted to the divine, thereforewhensoever we read any glorious and sublime attributions to our blessed Redeemer in scripture, we content ourselves immediately to refer them all to his divine na- ture, as being all-sufficient to support them ; not considering that wemay perhaps by this means swallow up and bury some of the most illustrious excellencies and honours of the man Christ Jesus, nor suffer his human nature to receive that due share of glory and dignity to which the Father has advanced it. We are sometimes afraid to exalt the man whom the Father has exalted, lest we should be thought to derogate from hisgodhead. We are afraid to read the human name of Jesus in some scrip- tures which highly exalt the Son of God, lest we should be thought to weaken the force of any of those texts which are usu- ally amassed together to prove the deityof Christ, or lest we should withhold anyof them from this service. I grant that the sacred doctrine of the divinity united to the human nature in Christ ought to be supported by all just expo- sitions of scripture. It is an article that we cannot part with, out of our religion, without shaking the foundation. But Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God, never required us to strain one line of his word, or turn it aside from the natural sense, in order to support his deity. There are many passages both of the Old and NewTestament that declareandconfirm thisgreat article ; and manly of those scripturesalso wherein the human nature of Christ is jointly honoured, do yet carry in them a plainproof of the united godhead. But since there are some scriptures which in their most natural and obvious sense speak chieflyof the honours of his godhead, and others chiefly describe the exaltation of his humanity, let us do so much justice to our blessed Saviour as to read the distinct honours of both his natures in those very places of scripture where he has written them, that so we may pay him the lull glory due to his sacred and complex person as God-man. Nor can it anyway lessen the glory of our blessed Media- tor, nor derogate from the honour of his divine nature, to spew what capacious powers and sublime dignities are derived to the man Jesus either by his present exalted state, or by the influence of that godhead which has assumed him into so near an union, since we still secure to the blessed godhead all its own eminence and infinite superiority to the man.
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