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Updated: May 23, 2025
If the spirit of man were fulfilled of the Spirit of God, the body would simply be a living house, an obedient servant yes, a humble mediator, by the senses, between his thoughts and God's thoughts; but when every breath has, as it were, to be sent for and brought hither with much labour and small consolation when pain turns faith into a mere shadow of hope when the withered limb hangs irresponsive, lost and cumbersome, an inert simulacrum of power, swinging lifeless to and fro; then even the physical man understands his share in the groaning of the creation after the sonship.
They seem to start from the declaration of the Lucianic creed, that the Lord's sonship is not an idle name. Now if we reject materialising views of the Divine Sonship, its primary meaning will be found to lie in similarity of essence. On this ground the Sirmian manifesto is condemned. Then follow eighteen anathemas, alternately aimed at Aetius and Marcellus.
And all which they have accordingly done, to the great dishonor of God, reproach of religion, and the profession of it. Besides, that their doctrine as to Christ's person, which denies his divine nature and sonship, saps the very foundations of that and all his other offices.
If Jesus Christ was 'declared to be the Son of God with power by His Resurrection from the dead, and if in that Resurrection, as is most surely the case, the broad seal of the divine acceptance is set to the charter of our forgiveness and sonship by the blood of the Cross, then joy and peace come to us from Him and from it.
He who loves the glory of God will be very jealous of any word that would enhance his greatness by representing him incapable of suffering. Verily God has taken and will ever take and endure his share, his largest share of that suffering in and through which the whole creation groans for the sonship.
IV. Last of all, no Christ without faith. It is not enough, brethren, that we should go through all these previous steps, if we then go utterly astray at the end, by forgetting that there is only one way by which we become partakers of any of the benefits and blessings that Christ has wrought out. It is much to say that for inheritance there must be sonship.
How He does this is explained in Gal iv. 6, “Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” When we have received Jesus Christ as our Saviour and accepted God’s testimony concerning Christ that through Him we have become sons, the Spirit of His Son comes into our hearts filling them with an overwhelming sense of sonship, and crying through our hearts, “Abba, Father.” The natural attitude of our hearts towards God is not that of sons.
Yet he knew what it was to be tempted, to question his Sonship, when the devil said unto him, Matt. iv. 3, "If thou be the Son of God;" and he knows what such a distress as he himself was into, wrestling with an angry God, hiding himself and forsaking, will work in a poor sinner; and being a merciful and sympathising High Priest, he cannot but pity such as are under such a distemper, and, as a gracious Head, sympathise with them.
Now should inward sonship and the spirit of glad sacrifice be born in the hearts of men; for the divine obedience was perfected by suffering. He had been amongst his brethren what he would have his brethren be. He had done for them what he would have them do for God and for each other.
In the capacity for thus recognising its identity of nature with "the Father" is it that the potential fact of sonship consists, for the prodigal son was still a son even before he began to realise his relation to his "Father" in actual fact.
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