Not merely like a man, but man indeed

Less than God could not have borne your sin so as to put it away; but the infinitely glorious Son of God did actually stoop to become a sin-bearer. I wonder how I can talk of it as I do.

 It is a truth scarcely to be declared in words. It wants flame and blood and tears with which to tell this story of an offended God, the Heaven-Maker and the Earth-Creator, stooping from his glory that he might save the reptiles which had dared to insult his honor and to rebel against his glory; and, becoming one of them, to suffer for them, that without violation of his law he might have pity upon the offending things — things so inconsiderable that if he had stamped them all out, as men burn a nest of wasps, there had been no loss to the universe. But he had pity on them, and became one of them, and bare their sins. Oh, love ye him; adore ye him; let your souls climb up to the right hand of the majesty above, this morning, and there bow down in lowliest reverence and adoring affection, that he, the God over all, whom you had offended, should his own self bear our sins.

Though thus God over all, he became a man like unto ourselves; a body was prepared for him, and that body, mark you, not prepared alone, and made like to man but not of man. No, he was not otherwise fashioned than ourselves, he came into the world as we also come, born of a woman, a child of a mother, to hang upon a woman’s breast; not merely like to man, but man, born in the pedigree of manhood, and so bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, yet without a taint of sin. And he, in that double nature but united person, was Jesus, Son of God and Son of the Virgin; he it was who “bare our sins in his own body on the tree.”

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "Death For Sin, And Death To Sin," delivered November 16, 1873. Image by itslegitx on Flickr under Creative Commons License.