It is needful in all considerations of the truth of the person of the Son of God to remember that no one but the Father has full knowledge of Him. This is true whether we speak of His deity or His humanity. Only the Father knows the full perfections of what He is in His essential nature as one of the Godhead, and He only fully understands the absolute perfection of the manhood He was pleased to assume. On these points we need especially to acknowledge that real knowledge is possessed alone by God. All our knowledge is relative knowledge. He knows absolutely, intrinsically, essentially; but we do not. With us, knowledge is derivative. On all questions concerning the person of the Son of God we are dependent altogether on revelation-cannot have the least knowledge without it.

The simple remembrance of this will check any tendency to engage in speculation on what has not been revealed. It is always intruding where we have no right to go to raise questions about what God has not revealed. On the other hand, we ought not to be deterred by the greatness of the subject from entering the fields of inquiry which God invites us to search out. If we undertake to investigate such fields in the spirit of those who desire to learn what God has given, our researches will be profitable. It will not be forbidden knowledge that we are seeking, but knowledge that is intended for us to possess.

Much has been said of late in many quarters of the human limitations of the Lord Jesus. In a good deal that is current teaching on the subject there is manifest error as to His person. He is robbed of His true glory as a divine Person. In fact, the human limitations He so graciously entered into are used to deny that He was divine and thus, in such minds, the Christ of God is destroyed.

That He is God, in the true and real sense of the term, revelation abundantly asserts. He is Immanuel-God with us. If He were not divine in the highest sense, this could not be true. But to be true He must also be man in the true sense of what humanity is. He is then both God and man.

Now it ought to be evident that, as God, He knew no limitations that Deity is not subject to. He had full divine power, could and did use it. He possessed full divine wisdom. He knew all things. He knew them divinely. It was in Him as absolute, essential knowledge. It was the power and wisdom of the Godhead.

Before He became incarnate He was equal with God. It was not a usurped equality. It belonged to Him by a divine right. It was essentially His. But though being in the essential form of God He was pleased to assume the form of a servant, to enter into the human conditions and limitations of men. In this place which He took, human conditions and limitations applied to Him. It was not as God that He grew in stature and wisdom, but as man. Both these things are said of Him, but it was only true of Him as man, as being in man's human conditions.

Now He is set before us in Scripture as perfectly fulfilling these human conditions. He never drew
on His divine power and wisdom merely for Himself, however freely He used them for others. Having entered upon the path of men, He trod the path as men have to tread it. Men need the counsel and wisdom of God. They need to seek these where God has given them. In man's path the Son of God sought the wisdom of God, sought it where God had put it for men, and found it. He could say, "I will bless the Lord, who hath given Me counsel" (Psa. 16:7). In all His human conflicts He used only the means which God has provided for men to gain their triumphs-the written word of God. He did not meet the devil with His divine knowledge, but turned to what God had written for men to live by. " It is written " was His answer-His oft repeated answer. So always all along His human path He depended on the provision which God had made for those who were in the path. Wherever God had made no revelation for men there He submitted to the will of God. In matters about which God had not spoken He did not turn to His own divine knowledge. A notable illustration of this is found in the Gospel of Mark (chap. 13:32). The Lord is speaking about the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds with power and glory. But God has not revealed the day of this great event. He has not spoken a word to men on the subject of the hour when this momentous event will take place. So the Lord as the perfect servant of the Father, will not draw on His own essential divine knowledge:He will not act independently of the Father. He observes perfectly the conditions of the place He has entered upon-the human place He has taken. He says, That is a matter about which I do not find any revelation has been given. As a Man in man's place of dependence on what God has revealed to men and for men, He says, I must wait until God reveals the day and the hour:He speaks as a man dependent on the revelation of God.

Looked at in this way there is perfect consistency. There is no need of denying His deity in order to explain it. While thus we preserve the truth of His divine Person, which Scripture again and again asserts, at the same time we get a more exalted view of the absolutely perfect obedience and dependence of the blessed Lord. If the very Son of God Himself could come down into our human path of dependence, and there perfectly fulfil the human conditions of that path, what honor has He thus put upon the path. If He could put aside His absolute, perfect divine knowledge, and tread the path as if He were not a divine Person, but a mere man, and then say as in the sixteenth psalm, "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage," does He not thus teach us the perfect blessedness of the path it is our privilege to tread-a path of submission to God, of dependence upon His will, of obedience to His written Word ?

It scarcely needs that I consider other examples of this. There are, in fact, a large number of them, but it is with the point of view that I am concerned here. If we have taken the right one for the illustration that has been before us, we have found the one from which we are to look at all the rest. What is involved in the question is a right conception of the person of our Lord. To the extent in which we deviate from the truth as to His person, to that extent we rob ourselves of what lies at the very foundation of all our blessing. It is possible to lose the foundation altogether. Many have done so, and substituted for the Christ of God a Christ who is but a myth, who never existed, and who would have no worth even if he had.

The Lord help us to abide in the truth, and above all, the truth of His person-to realize that He was very God and very man; and, while we trace His human path, to realize how perfectly human He was without losing the divine glory that everywhere shone forth as manifesting Him to be One who had in grace assumed the human. C. Crain.
'DEAD TO SIN" AND"YE ARE DEAD."