Devotional 47: The Humiliation of Christ: His Incarnation and Suffering

The Confession Read

This office the Lord Jesus did most willingly undertake; which that he might discharge, he was made under the law, and did perfectly fulfill it; endured most grievous torments immediately in his soul, and most painful sufferings in his body; was crucified, and died; was buried, and remained under the power of death, yet saw no corruption. On the third day he arose from the dead, with the same body in which he suffered; with which also he ascended into heaven, and there sitteth at the right hand of his Father, making intercession; and shall return to judge men and angels, at the end of the world.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 8, Section 4

Introduction

The olive trees of Gethsemane are among the oldest living things on earth. Botanists have carbon-dated their trunks to nearly a thousand years, and if those gnarled trunks could speak, they would tell what they witnessed on a Thursday night two thousand years ago. Three men lay sleeping against the press of exhaustion and grief. A fourth man knelt a stone's throw away, and the sweat that fell from His brow was not the ordinary sweat of a warm Jerusalem evening but something thicker, darker, as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground. What was happening in that garden? What inward weight could press blood through the pores of a man's skin? Luke the physician tells us Christ was in an agony, agōnia in Greek, a word that originally meant a contest, the climactic exertion of an athlete straining toward the finish. The agony of Gethsemane was not the agony of a man hoping to escape. It was the agony of a man resolving to stay. His own words tell us everything: "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt." There, in that single petition, is the whole of Section 4 compressed. Christ did most willingly undertake the office of Mediator. He knew exactly what that undertaking would cost Him. He had counted the cost before the foundation of the world, when the eternal Son said to the eternal Father, "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God." And now, in a garden whose name means "oil press," the place where olives are crushed until their essence flows, the willing Mediator was being pressed, and the willingness held. He did not flee. He did not call for legions of angels. He drank the cup. This section of the Confession is unlike any other in Chapter 8. Where earlier sections focused on a single aspect (the eternal decree, the incarnation, the Spirit's anointing), Section 4 sweeps across the entire landscape of the Mediator's accomplishment: His willing self-offering, His law-keeping, His suffering and death, His burial and resurrection, His ascension and session, and His final return as Judge. It is the gospel in miniature, the apostolic kerygma distilled into a single paragraph. And it begins where the gospel always begins: not with what we must do but with what He has done, most willingly, for us.

Scripture Foundation

The apostolic witness to Christ's willing self-oblation finds its concentrated expression in the tenth chapter of Hebrews, where the inspired author places upon the lips of the eternal Son the words of Psalm 40: "Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me: in burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure. Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me,) to do thy will, O God." The key to this passage lies in the exclamation idou: "Lo." It is the herald's cry announcing the entrance of the King. The Son does not come reluctantly, prodded by the Father's command into an obedience He would rather avoid. He comes with the wholehearted eagerness of One whose every desire is aligned with the Father's purpose. The body prepared for Him is the human nature assumed at Bethlehem; the will He comes to do is the will that leads to Calvary. And He comes Himself, not an angel, not a proxy. The Son. The same voluntariness resounds in our Lord's own words recorded in John 10:17-18: "Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. 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." Observe the logic: the Father's love for the Son is expressed in the Son's authority to lay down His own life. The cross is no accident that befell a helpless victim. Men nailed Him to the tree, but they could not have touched Him had He not permitted it. The soldiers who seized Him in the garden fell backward at the sound of His voice; they could not have bound Him unless He submitted His wrists to the cords. "No man taketh it from me" is the testimony of the only man who ever lived who could truthfully say such a thing. Every other death is an invasion; His was a donation. The Confession moves from willingness to law-keeping, and Paul supplies the controlling text in Galatians 4:4-5: "But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons." The phrase "made under the law" translates genomenon hypo nomon, "having come to be under the law." The eternal Son who gave the law on Sinai now submits to its jurisdiction. He who was Lawgiver becomes Law-keeper, placing Himself beneath the moral demands that bind every descendant of Adam. This active obedience, His lifelong conformity to every commandment, is no incidental feature of His work. The Mediator could not offer a sacrifice for sin if He Himself were a sinner. From the temple courts where the twelve-year-old declared He must be about His Father's business, to the baptismal waters where He insisted on fulfilling all righteousness, to the cross where He could say, in truth, "It is finished": He kept the law perfectly, providing the righteousness His people lack. But the law required more than active obedience. It required that the Mediator bear the curse for those who had broken it. Matthew's account of Gethsemane furnishes the scriptural portrait of the soul-sufferings. In Matthew 26:37-38, the evangelist records: "He began to be sorrowful and very heavy. Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." The word "very heavy" is adēmonein, used in classical Greek to describe the disorientation of one who does not know where to turn. "Exceeding sorrowful" is perilypos, surrounded by grief on every side. Christ's anguish reached depths no mere physical suffering can explain; it was the horror of the sinless One encountering the sin He had undertaken to bear, the recoil of holy nature from the curse He was about to become for us. Luke adds the physiological detail in Luke 22:44: "And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground." The medical literature recognizes hematidrosis, the extrusion of blood through the sweat glands under extreme psychological stress. Christ's body was already breaking under a weight that had not yet touched it. The bodily sufferings followed, and the Confession passes over them with a terseness that testifies to their reality: "Was crucified, and died." No description of the scourging, the thorns, the spikes. The Divines assumed their readers knew what crucifixion entailed. What concerned them was the theological meaning, supplied by the apostolic preaching in Acts 2:23-24: "Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it." The death of Christ was simultaneously the most heinous crime ever committed by human hands and the most deliberate act ever ordained by divine counsel. And death could not keep its prey. "It was not possible," ouk ēn dynaton, that the grave should hold the Author of life. The impossibility was moral: death had no claim upon a sinless man, and when the wages of sin had been paid in full, death's power was broken. The Confession notes that Christ "remained under the power of death, yet saw no corruption," echoing Peter's citation of Psalm 16 in Acts 2:27: "Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption." The word "hell" is hadēs, the realm of the dead. Though Christ truly died and His soul entered the state of the dead, His body did not undergo the decomposition that attends fallen humanity. The corruption that follows sin could not touch the sinless One. Paul provides the primitive creedal summary in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4: "Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures." The phrase "according to the scriptures" insists that these events were the fulfillment of a plan announced from the beginning. The ascension is attested in Mark 16:19: "He was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God." The session at the Father's right hand signifies both rest and rule. But the work of intercession continues. In Romans 8:34, Paul asks: "Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us." The present tense ("maketh intercession") is the heartbeat of Christian assurance. Christ is not a distant memory of a completed transaction. He is a living Advocate, perpetually presenting His finished work before the Father, perpetually answering every accusation that the law, the devil, and the conscience can bring. The section closes with Christ's return as Judge. In Acts 10:42, Peter proclaims that Christ "was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead," and in Acts 1:11, the angels promise that "this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven." The Jesus who returns is the same Jesus who ascended, the God-man with the wounds still visible, the marks of His finished work become the credentials of His judicial authority. To the believer, these are the pledges of acquittal. To the impenitent, they are the evidence of rejected mercy.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines constructed this section as a condensed ordo salutis Christi, an ordered summary of the Mediator's saving work from His pre-temporal willingness through His eschatological return. In doing so, they were answering errors that the seventeenth century had revived with fresh vigor. The opening phrase, "did most willingly undertake," strikes at the Socinian reduction of Christ's work. Faustus Socinus and his followers denied the Son's pre-existence and treated Christ's "undertaking" as the decision of a human being to live an exemplary life, a decision that could have been otherwise. The Divines answer with the superlative "most willingly," one of the few rhetorical intensifiers in a document known for theological precision. It insists that the Son was not a passive instrument but an active, eager participant in the eternal counsel. The Father did not force the Son into the office of Mediator. The Son volunteered, and He volunteered with the whole consent of His divine will. When the eternal Son said "Lo, I come," He meant it with all the infinitude of divine love. "He was made under the law, and did perfectly fulfill it." This clause encapsulates the Reformation's recovery of Christ's active obedience. Medieval theology had understood Christ's satisfaction almost exclusively in terms of His passive obedience, His suffering and death. The Reformers insisted that Christ satisfied the law in two ways: by fulfilling its precepts (active obedience) and by enduring its penalty (passive obedience). The law demands perfect righteousness from every descendant of Adam; Christ rendered it. The law pronounces a curse upon every transgressor; Christ bore it. Both are imputed to the believer. The righteousness you could not achieve is given. The penalty you could not pay is discharged. The Divines compacted this double obedience into two clauses, but the distinction is essential to a right understanding of justification. "Endured most grievous torments immediately in his soul" touches a point of controversy among the Reformed themselves. Some theologians, following the Lutheran tradition, emphasized Christ's descent into hell as a literal post-mortem experience of the damned. The Reformed generally understood the descent clause in the Creed to refer to Christ's state of death. But the Divines were equally insistent, against any rationalizing tendency that would reduce the cross to physical pain only, that Christ's soul-sufferings were real and essential. The cry of dereliction ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?") was not a rhetorical performance. It was the genuine experience of judicial abandonment, the Son enduring the God-forsakenness that sin deserves. What happened during those three hours of darkness was a transaction between the Father and the Son that no finite mind can comprehend. The word "torments" is deliberately strong, guarding against any domesticating of Calvary into a mere martyrdom. "Was crucified" rather than the more general "was executed." Paul makes the connection explicit in Galatians: "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree." The mode of Christ's death was not arbitrary. Roman crucifixion, hideous as it was, was the instrument by which the curse of the law was visibly, publicly transferred to the sin-bearer. The Divines chose their words to preserve the biblical typology of the tree. "Remained under the power of death, yet saw no corruption" weaves Psalm 16 with the apostolic interpretation. The Divines affirmed both the reality of Christ's death and its uniqueness: His soul and body were truly separated, yet His body did not decompose. The preservation of Christ's body was a fulfillment of prophecy and a pledge of His resurrection. Death held no legal claim upon a man who had no sin of His own. "On the third day he arose from the dead, with the same body in which he suffered." The phrase "same body" is directed against those who taught that Christ's resurrection was purely spiritual, that His body perished and His spirit alone survived. The Confession insists on physical, bodily resurrection. The tomb was empty. The wounds were visible. Thomas could touch them. Jesus ate broiled fish. The risen Lord was not a ghost but the same Jesus, in the same human nature, now glorified and no longer subject to death. The ascension and session ("ascended into heaven, and there sitteth at the right hand of his Father, making intercession") bind Christ's present activity to His completed work. The right hand of God is the position of supreme authority. But His session is not a retirement. He sits as King, ruling all things for His church. He sits as Priest, perpetually presenting the efficacy of His once-for-all sacrifice. The intercession of Christ is not a new sacrifice nor a plea for the Father to be merciful despite His justice. It is the living presentation of the sacrifice already offered, the perpetual application of its benefits, the constant advocacy of the One who has satisfied every claim the law could bring. Finally, "shall return to judge men and angels, at the end of the world." The comprehensive scope is significant. Christ will judge all men, the living and the dead. But He will also judge angels. The fallen angels, reserved in chains of darkness, will receive their final sentence from the lips of the Mediator whose work they sought to frustrate. There is no corner of creation, no rank of being, outside His jurisdiction. The One who humbled Himself to the cross is the One before whom every knee will bow.

Theological Depth

The Reformed tradition has produced a wealth of reflection on the themes that Section 4 compresses into a single paragraph. Four voices illuminate different facets of the Mediator's work. John Flavel, in his devotional classic The Fountain of Life, devotes sustained attention to Christ's willingness. If Christ undertook the office willingly, Flavel argues, He will not abandon it unwillingly. The same heart that prompted Him to say "Lo, I come" prompts Him to continue His intercession. The same love that carried Him to the cross keeps Him at the Father's right hand. Flavel presses the pastoral logic with characteristic warmth: if Christ came to His work with joy, why do you come to Him with suspicion? If He was willing to be made under the law for you, why do you fear that He is unwilling to receive you under the gospel? The Father's will and the Son's will are one in the matter of your salvation. There is no reluctance in heaven toward the penitent sinner. Flavel also gives particular attention to the soul-sufferings of Christ, arguing that they preceded and exceeded the bodily sufferings in intensity. The body can only suffer what the nerves transmit, and physical pain has natural limits. But the soul can suffer in ways that transcend the body's capacity. The sinless soul of Christ, in direct contact with the curse of sin, experienced a weight of divine displeasure that no physical torment could equal. This is why the agony in the garden nearly killed Him before any soldier had touched Him. What Christ endured was not the fear of death (martyrs have faced death with composure) but the actual pressure of the wrath due to His people's sin. The cup He prayed to have removed was the cup of divine wrath, and He drank it to the dregs. Jonathan Edwards, preaching a century after Flavel, approached the voluntariness of Christ's undertaking from a different angle. In his sermon "The Excellency of Christ," Edwards argues that what makes Christ supremely excellent is the conjunction in His person of qualities that never coexist in human experience: infinite majesty and infinite meekness, perfect justice and perfect mercy, transcendent holiness and condescending love. The willingness of Christ to undertake the office is the expression of this conjunction. As God, He possessed all things and needed nothing; as Mediator, He emptied Himself and became poor. As Judge, He has the right to condemn; as Savior, He laid down His life to redeem. Edwards shows that Christ's willingness is not a grudging decision to do something contrary to His nature but the delighted expression of His nature. The Son does not become something other than Himself when He undertakes the office; He becomes what He always was: the image of the Father, whose character is to love and to save. The cross was not an interruption of the divine life but its supreme disclosure. Charles Hodge, in his Systematic Theology, treats the active obedience of Christ with characteristic Princeton precision. He clarifies that the law under which Christ was made was the moral law of God that binds all rational creatures, not merely the ceremonial law of Moses. Christ's obedience to the moral law was the deeper obedience, the obedience Adam should have rendered and did not. Hodge distinguishes that Christ rendered no obedience for Himself; He needed no righteousness of His own, being the Lord of life from eternity. Every act of law-keeping was performed for those whose nature He had assumed, to provide the righteousness they lacked. Hodge also addresses the pastoral question that naturally arises: if Christ kept the law perfectly, does His example not become a crushing standard? His answer is that Christ's obedience functions first as a substitute before it functions as a pattern. The believer is not called to replicate Christ's obedience as the ground of acceptance; that ground is Christ's obedience imputed. But once accepted, the believer finds Christ's law-keeping becoming the pattern toward which the Spirit conforms him. The law that once condemned now instructs. The obedience that was once impossible is now a beloved path, walked not to earn life but from life already received. William Symington, whose work On the Atonement and Intercession remains a thorough treatment of these twin doctrines, draws out the connection between Christ's death and His intercession. Symington argues that the intercession is not a separate work, added to the atonement as a supplement, but the continual presentation of the atonement's efficacy. The high priest of the old covenant entered the holy of holies with blood; his appearance was the proof that the sacrifice had been accepted. Christ entered the heavenly sanctuary with His own blood, and His presence at God's right hand is the eternal proof that His sacrifice has been accepted. Symington further notes that Christ's intercession is particular: He prays not for the world in general but for those the Father has given Him. This is not a limitation of His love but a concentration of it. Those for whom He died are those for whom He prays, and those for whom He prays can never finally perish. The intercession of Christ is the unbreakable chain linking the cross to the final glory of every believer.

Puritan Application

First, let the willingness of Christ's undertaking shape the whole temper of your approach to Him. Many believers live as if they must persuade an unwilling Savior to be gracious. They come to the throne apologetically, hesitantly, as if imposing upon Christ's patience. But the Confession teaches that Christ undertook your salvation "most willingly." He did not need to be persuaded by the Father; He did not need to be won over by your earnestness. The will that chose to become incarnate, to be made under the law, to endure torments of soul and body, to be crucified and buried: that was a willing will. When you sin and must return in repentance, you come to the One who most willingly shed His blood for the remission of sins. When you suffer and need comfort, you come to the One who most willingly endured Gethsemane so that He might be a merciful High Priest. When you face death, you call upon the One who entered death ahead of you and emerged the Conqueror of the grave. Let the superlative do its work: He did not undertake your salvation reluctantly, partially, or provisionally. He undertook it most willingly, and what He undertook most willingly He will complete most certainly. Second, let the truth that Christ was made under the law liberate you from the tyranny of self-justification. Every person outside of Christ labors under the law's demand for a righteousness we do not possess. The natural response is to attempt to produce that righteousness: by moral effort, religious observance, favorable comparisons. But the law requires perfection, not "good enough." And the astonishing news of the gospel is that perfection has been provided. Christ was made under the law and did perfectly fulfill it. His obedience is counted as yours through faith. The righteousness you could never achieve by a lifetime of striving is given as a free gift, received by empty hands. This means you can stop performing, stop pretending, stop the exhausting project of manufacturing a righteousness that will pass muster. Christ has passed muster on your behalf. His law-keeping is yours. His record is yours. The law that once thundered from Sinai now sings from Calvary, because the Lawgiver kept the law, and the Law-keeper bore the curse, and the curse-bearer rose from the grave, and all of it — all of it — is credited to the account of every sinner who trusts in Him. Third, let the soul-sufferings of Christ be your refuge in seasons of spiritual darkness. There are times when God seems absent: when prayer feels like speaking into an empty room, when Scripture lies flat, when the sense of God's love withdraws. In such seasons, the temptation is to conclude that God has abandoned you. But the gospel will not permit that conclusion. Christ endured the reality of which your experience is only the shadow. His cry of dereliction was not the cry of a man who felt abandoned; it was the cry of the Son who was abandoned, judicially and truly, beneath the weight of sin that was not His own. Because He bore the substance of divine forsakenness, you will never bear more than the shadow of it. The Father who hid His face from the Son on the cross will not hide His face from you. The darkness you feel is not the darkness of judgment but of a cloud that will pass. God left His Son so that He might cleave to you. God forsook the Beloved so that He might never forsake the beloved who are in the Beloved. This is the logic of substitution, and it holds when every other comfort fails. Fourth, let the intercession of Christ be the ground of your assurance. The Confession places Christ's intercession between His session and His return, and the sequence is deliberate. Christ sits enthroned as the One whose work is complete. From that throne He intercedes, not as a suppliant begging an unwilling Judge but as the Advocate whose presence proves the case has been won. And He will return as the Judge who has already been judged in your place. If Christ prays for you (and He does, if you are united to Him by faith), then your perseverance depends not on the steadiness of your grip on Him but on the steadiness of His grip on you. He did not forget Peter when Peter denied Him; He had prayed for Peter before the denial occurred, and Peter was restored. The intercession of Christ is the perpetual occupation of His exalted life. Every moment, without interruption, the Son presents His finished work before the Father, and in that presentation every accusation is silenced. "Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us." Not "who will make intercession." "Who maketh intercession." Present tense. Active voice. The advocacy of Christ is happening now, as you struggle with sin, as you doubt your standing. The answer lies not in the quality of your faith but in the constancy of your High Priest, and He has never lost a case. Fifth, let the return of Christ as Judge fill you with sober hope rather than dread. For the unbeliever, Christ the Judge is terror, and rightly so. But for the believer united to Christ, the Judge is the Savior. The hands that will hold the scales of justice are the hands that were pierced for your transgressions. The voice that will say "Come, ye blessed of my Father" is the voice that cried "It is finished." There is no contradiction between Christ as Savior and Christ as Judge. His judgment is the public vindication of His saving work, the manifestation before all creation of what has been true since the foundation of the world: that the Lamb who was slain is worthy. Live in the light of that day. Let the certainty of Christ's return shape your priorities, your stewardship, your love for His appearing. The Mediator who most willingly undertook your salvation will most willingly return to consummate it. And when He appears, you will be like Him, for you shall see Him as He is.

Prayer

O Lord Jesus Christ, eternal Son of the Father, who didst most willingly undertake the office of Mediator, we bow before thee in humble adoration. Thou wast not coerced, thou wast not reluctant. From all eternity, thou didst say, "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God," and in the fulness of time thou didst come, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem us who were under its curse. We confess that we have valued thy willingness too little. We have approached thee as though thou must be persuaded to be gracious, when in truth thou hast been gracious from before the foundation of the world. We have feared that our sins have exhausted thy patience, when thou didst bear the full weight of those sins upon the tree and didst cry "It is finished" with the satisfaction of a completed work. Forgive our small thoughts of thy great heart. Enlarge our confidence in thy willing love. O thou who didst endure most grievous torments in thy soul, we bring thee the torments of our own souls: the guilt that haunts us, the shame that silences us, the fears that stalk us in the night. Thou knowest what it is to be sorrowful unto death, to be surrounded by grief with no escape, to cry out and feel that heaven is silent. And because thou knowest, thou art able to succor us. Meet us in the depths where we are. Speak peace to the conscience that still hears the law's accusations. Remind us that the law has been fulfilled, the curse borne, the debt paid, and nothing remains to be laid to the charge of those who are in thee. O risen and ascended Lord, who sittest at the right hand of the Father making intercession for us, we lean upon thy present advocacy. We trust not in the strength of our faith or the consistency of our walk but in the constancy of thy priestly work. Thou dost ever live to intercede for us, and because thou dost live, we shall live also. Let thy intercession be our confidence when our prayers falter. Let thy righteousness be our plea when our own righteousness fails. Let thy wounds be our answer when the accuser brings his charges. O coming Judge, grant us grace to live in readiness for that day. Let the hope of thy appearing purify our hearts and direct our steps. We do not dread thy coming, for thou art our Savior before thou art our Judge, and the verdict thou wilt pronounce was secured at Calvary. Keep us watchful, keep us faithful, keep us longing for the day when faith shall give way to sight and we shall see thee, not veiled in humility but revealed in glory, the Lamb upon the throne, worthy of all blessing and honor and power forever. To thee, O Christ, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, be all praise and dominion, now and unto the ages of ages. Amen.