g him out to others,
saying "Come and see." This divine mystery is the subject of these words
read, but the mystery is somewhat unfolded and opened up to you in them,
yet so as it will not diminish, but increase the wonder of a believing
soul. It is ignorance that magnifies other mysteries, which vilifies
thorough knowledge; but it is the true knowledge of this mystery that
makes it the more wonderful, whereas ignorance only makes it common and
despicable.

There are three things then, of special consideration in the words, which
may declare and open unto you something of this mystery.

First, What was the ground and reason, or occasion of the Son's sending
into the world; next, What the Son, being sent, did in the world; and the
third, For what end and use it was,--what fruit we have by it.

The ground and reason of God sending his Son, is because there was an
impossibility in the law to save man, which impossibility was not the
law's fault, but man's defect, by reason of the weakness and impotency of
our flesh to fulfil the law. Now, God having chosen some to life, and man
having put this obstruction and impediment in his own way, which made it
impossible for the law to give him life, though it was first given out as
the way of life; therefore, that God should not fail in this glorious
design of saving his chosen, he chose to send his own Son, in the likeness
of flesh, as the only remedy of the law's impossibility. That which
Christ, being sent into the likeness of flesh did, is the condemning of
sin in the flesh, by a sacrifice offered for sin,--even the sacrifice of
his own body upon the cross. He came in the likeness not of the flesh
simply, for he was really a man; but in the likeness of sinful
flesh,--though without sin, yet like a sinner,--as to the outward
appearance, a sinner, because subject to all those infirmities and
miseries which sin did first open a door for. Sin was the inlet of
afflictions, of bodily infirmities and necessities, of death itself; and
when the floods of these did overflow Christ's human nature, it was a
great presumption to the world, who look and judge according to the
outward appearance, that sin was the sluice opened to let in such an
inundation of calamity. Now, he being thus in the likeness of a sinner,
though not a sinner,--he, for sin, that is, because of sin, that had
entered upon man, and made life impossible to him by the law; by occasion
of that great enemy of God which had