, two points
that I think of importance. Observe that remarkable form of speech, 'I
am come.' May we not fairly say that it implies that He existed before
birth, and that His appearance among men was the result of His own act?
Does it not imply that He was not merely born, but _came_, choosing to
be born just as He chose to die? In what sense can we understand the
Apostle's view that it was an infinite and stupendous act of
condescension in Christ to 'be found in fashion as a man,' unless we
believe that by His own will and act He came forth from the Father and
entered into the world, just as by His own will and act He left the
world and went unto the Father?

But I do not dwell upon that, nor upon another very important
consideration. Why was it that Jesus Christ, at the very beginning of
His mission, felt Himself bound to disclaim any intention of destroying
the law or the prophets? Must not the people have begun to feel that
there was something revolutionary and novel about His teaching, and that
it was threatening to disturb what had been consecrated by ages? So that
it was needful that He should begin His career with this disclaimer of
the intention of destruction. Strange for a divine messenger, if He
simply stood as one in the line and sequence of divine revelation, to
begin His work by saying, 'Now, I do not mean to annihilate all that is
behind Me!' The question arises how anybody should have supposed that He
did, and why it should ever have been needful for Him to say that He did
not.

But I pass by all that, and ask you to think how much lies in these
words of our Lord: 'I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.' They imply
a claim that His life was a complete embodiment of God's law. Here is a
man beginning His ministry as a religious teacher, with the assertion,
stupendous, and, upon any other lips but His, insane arrogance, that He
had come to do everything which God demanded, and to set forth before
the world a living Pattern of the whole obedience of a human nature to
the whole law of God. Who is He that said that? And how do we account
for the fact that nineteen centuries have passed, and, excepting in the
case of here and there a bitter foe whose hostility had robbed him of
his common sense, no lip has ventured to say that He claimed too much
for Himself when He said, 'I am come to fulfil the law'; or that He
falsely read the facts of His own experience and consciousness when He
declared, 'I have fini