It is wonderful how the depth of the love of Christ is opened out in John 12. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit." How it thrills the heart to think that the Lord Jesus should have gone out of the world like that! He became Man that He might associate us with Himself for ever. This comes out more fully in that communion of Divine joy indicated in the 8th of Proverbs, where Wisdom's voice is speaking. What a scene of Divine communion opens out before us! The Father and the Son sufficing for each other! "When He appointed the foundations of the earth then I was by Him as one brought up with Him, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him, in the habitable parts of His earth." These words indicate the direction of the activity of the heart of God as to where His love was going out. They rejoiced mutually in each other, sharing each other's thoughts. How blessed to have such intimation of the direction in which their hearts were going! And in this communion of Divine love the heart of the Son went where the heart of the Father went, to find His joy where the Father found His. "My delights were with the sons of men."

How wonderful the thought that it should be revealed to us, that we might know that we were objects of delight to the Father and the Son in this communion of joy before the foundation of the world. In no other way could we be taken into association with Him.

So He took the step and was found in the body prepared for Him. He came to carry out His Father's will. How much alone He was in the perfection of that path we can never fathom. He had no principle in His heart which ever governed the heart of man. The more we think of Him in that path, the more we follow in deepening appreciation of Him. But there were deeper depths of isolation before Him. What was the meaning of that anguish in Gethsemane's garden? We cannot follow into that experience of being totally abandoned by God. "The cup which My Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?" And all this was experienced that He might take us up into the place He has won for us in resurrection.

Gethsemane with its unutterable woe was but the anticipation of what yet lay before Him, and was passed through in the unclouded sense of that presence with Him still, but that presence must be withdrawn from Him when He who knew no sin had to be made sin for us. He was to be alone as He never was before. He who only knew Divine love, as infinitely the Object of it, was then to know the forsaking of God. In presenting the sorrow in communion to the Father, it only made more intolerable the thought of passing out of that communion into the experience of abandonment, but He gave Himself to the full accomplishment of the Divine will.

Thus God was glorified, and salvation is ours who believe in Him, but it is the character of that salvation as satisfying the heart of Christ, and not its mere fact, that occupies us now. This comes up as we see Him raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, to be alone no longer in this new place.
Then comes its precious announcement through Mary of Magdala as He forbids her attempt to renew her relations with Him as Messiah after the flesh, on the ground of far richer relationships that He was about to introduce. "Touch Me not, for I am not yet ascended unto My Father." In anticipation of that moment when He was to take His full counseled place as Man in the glory of God, He sends her to the disciples with its revelation:"I ascend unto My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.'

John's writings do not carry us beyond what is individual in our association with Christ, but there is another aspect. Through Paul, the full light of the glory in which He has now taken His place falls upon our hearts. We look up and see Him in His full position, and learn that position is ours. The Man Christ Jesus takes His full place in glory and sends down the Holy Ghost to dwell in the believer. In Ephesians we find this place presented as the fruit of the eternal counsels of God. We are seen in Him holy and without blame, in love before the eye and heart of God, and in relationship as sons, and this is the eternal thought of God about us. The sons of men with whom were His delights are now revealed and set in their place as such. T. Oliver (Galashiels)