has 'magnified the law and made it
honourable,' and in His sinless death He endures the consequences of
sin, not as due to Himself, but because they are man's. But we must
carefully keep in view, that as we have already pointed out, we are to
think of Christ's mission as His coming as well as the Father's sending,
and that therefore we do not grasp the full idea of our Lord's enduring
the consequences of sin unless we take it as meaning His voluntary
identification of Himself in love with us sinful men. His obedience was
perfect all His life long, and His last and highest act of obedience was
when He became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.

This is the only means by which the burden of law in any of its forms
can be taken away from us. For a law which is not loved will be heavy
and hard however holy and just and good it may be, and a law which we
have broken will become sooner or later its own avenger. Faithful in
_Pilgrim's Progress_ tells how 'So soon as a man overtook me he was but
a word and a blow, for down he knocked me and laid me for dead. . . . He
struck me another deadly blow on the breast and beat me down backward,
so I lay at his foot as dead as before, so when I came to myself again I
cried him "Mercy," but he said, "I know not how to show mercy," and with
that knocked me down again; he had doubtless made an end of me but that
one came by and bid him forbear. . . . I did not know him at first, but as
he went by I perceived the holes in his hands and in his sides.' He was
born under law that He might redeem them that were under law.

The slaves bought into freedom are received into the great family. The
Son has become flesh that they who dwell in the flesh may rise to be
sons, but the Son stands alone even in the midst of His identification
with us, and of the great results which follow for us from it. He is the
Son by nature; we are sons by adoption. He became man that we might
share in the possession of God. When the burden of law is lifted off it
is possible to bestow the further blessing of sonship, but that blessing
is only possible through Him in whom, and from whom, we derive a life
which is divine life. There is a profound truth in the prophetic
sentence, 'Behold I and the children which God hath given me!' for, in
one aspect, believers are the children of Christ, and in another, they
are sons of God.

We have been speaking of the Son's identification with us in His
mission, and o