=17-47.= In the study of the discourse which follows, beware of considering it simply verse by verse. It is not a collection of incidental aphorisms, but a connected address, the theme being the character, mission, authority, and credentials of the Son of God. The Pharisees call Christ to account for healing on the Sabbath; he cites in his defence the example of his heavenly Father. They seize upon his language, deduce from it the conclusion that he makes himself equal with God, and charge him with blasphemy. This serves as the text of the discourse which follows. He declares that he comes not to draw allegiance from, but to, the Father; that he acts under the Father’s will; that to him the Father has committed the whole work of grace on the earth; that he is even now raising the spiritually dead to life; that he is to raise the physically dead to a new life; and that he will finally complete this work entrusted to him, by declaring and executing the divine judgment. The evidence of his mission and authority is not in his own words; he is testified to by John the Baptist; by his own life and work; and by the Scriptures of the O. T. He closes by pointing out the secret cause of the Jews’ rejection of him, viz., their personal ambition. Beware, too, of imputing to the words a dogmatic meaning borrowed from later ecclesiastical controversies, which they did not bear in the minds of his hearers at the time. There is little or nothing here respecting the relations of the Son to the Father, except as the language throughout implies that the Son is subordinate to and dependent upon the Father; but the relation of the Son to the human race is clearly revealed, the relation of life-giver and judge, and is certainly not that of any man, however endowed, to his fellow-men. Nevertheless this address contains the christology of Jesus Christ, his own teaching concerning his own character and work; and it clearly implies, on the one hand, that he not only represents the Father, as an ambassador might represent a king, that he is not only clothed with divine authority, as Moses was clothed, in the administration of the theocracy, with the authority of God, but that he is a partaker of the divine nature; nor less clearly, on the other hand, does it imply that his authority is derived from the Father, that his power is conferred on him by the Father, that he executes in all things the will of the Father, that he is to be conceived of not as distinct from, but as one with the Father, and that his object is in all things to be a way unto the Father. Against every form of tri-theism, against all substitution of the Son in the place of the Father, this discourse is a solemn and earnest admonition, no less than against all belittling of either his character to that of man or angel, or his mission to that of mere messenger or teacher. 17 But Jesus answered them, My[171] Father worketh hitherto, and I work. [171] chaps. 9:4, 14:10.