the vast majority of cases, the title is not a
mere designation of human authority, but is an attribution to Him of
divine nature and dignity. We have, then, to ascribe to Him, and to
call on Him as possessing, all which that great and incommunicable
Name certified and sealed to the Jewish Church as their possession
in their God. The Jehovah of the Old Testament is our Lord of the
New. He whose being is eternal, underived, self-sufficing,
self-determining, knowing no variation, no diminution, no age, He
who is because He is and that He is, dwells in His fulness in our
Saviour. To worship Him is not to divert worship from the one God,
nor is it to have other gods besides Him. Christianity is as much
monotheistic as Judaism was, and the law of its worship is the old
law--Him only shalt thou serve. It is the divine will that all men
should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father.

But what is it to call on the name of Jesus? That name implies all
the sweetness of His manhood. He is our Brother. The name 'Jesus' is
one that many a Jewish boy bore in our Lord's own time and before it;
though, afterwards, of course, abhorrence on the part of the Jew and
reverence on the part of the Christian caused it almost entirely to
disappear. But at the time when He bore it it was as undistinguished
a name as Simeon, or Judas, or any other of His followers' names. To
call upon the name of Jesus means to realise and bring near to
ourselves, for our consolation and encouragement, for our strength
and peace, the blessed thought of His manhood, so really and closely
knit to ours; to grasp the blessedness of the thought that He knows
our frame because He Himself has worn it, and understands and pities
our weakness, being Himself a man. To Him whom we adore as Lord we
draw near in tenderer, but not less humble and prostrate, adoration
as our brother when we call on the name of the Lord Jesus, and thus
embrace as harmonious, and not contradictory, both the divinity of
the Lord and the humanity of Jesus.

To call on the name of Christ is to embrace in our faith and to
beseech the exercise on our behalf of all which Jesus is as the
Messiah, anointed by God with the fulness of the Spirit. As such He
is the climax, and therefore the close of all revelation, who is the
long-expected fruition of the desire of weary hearts, the fulfilment,
and therefore the abolition, of sacrifice and temple and priesthood
and prophecy and all that witnessed