herish, that something corresponding
to the pain and loss that shadowed the patriarch's heart flitted
across the divine mind when the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour
of the world. Not merely to give, but to give up, is the highest
crown and glory of love, as we know it. And who shall venture to say
that we so fully apprehend the divine nature as to be warranted in
declaring that some analogy to that is impossible for Him? Our
language is, 'I will not offer unto God that which doth cost me
nothing.' Let us bow in silence before the dim intimation that seems
to flicker out of the words of my text, that so He says to us, 'I
will not offer unto you that which doth cost Me nothing.' 'He
_spared_ not His own Son'; withheld Him not from us.

But passing from that which, I dare say, many of you may suppose to
be fanciful and unwarranted, let us come upon the surer ground of the
other words of my text. And notice how the reality of the surrender
is emphasised by the closeness of the bond which, in the mysterious
eternity, knits together the Father and the Son. As with Abraham, so
in this lofty example, of which Abraham and Isaac were but as dim,
wavering reflections in water, the Son is His own Son. It seems to me
impossible, upon any fair interpretation of the words before us, to
refrain from giving to that epithet here its very highest and most
mysterious sense. It cannot be any mere equivalent for Messiah, it
cannot merely mean a man who was like God in purity of nature and in
closeness of communion. For the force of the analogy and the emphasis
of that word which is even more emphatic in the Greek than in the
English 'His _own_ Son,' point to a community of nature, to a
uniqueness and singleness of relation, to a closeness of intimacy, to
which no other is a parallel. And so we have to estimate the measure
of the surrender by the tenderness and awfulness of the bond. 'Having
one Son, His well-beloved, He sent Him.'

Notice, again, how the greatness of the surrender is made more
emphatic by the contemplation of it in its double negative and
positive aspect, in the two successive clauses. 'He spared not His
Son, but delivered Him up,' an absolute, positive giving of Him over
to the humiliation of the life and to the mystery of the death.

And notice how the tenderness and the beneficence that were the sole
motive of the surrender are lifted into light in the last words, 'for
us all.' The single, sole reason that bowed