The Lord Jesus Christ, God's eternal Son--a distinct Person in the glorious Trinity--God manifest in the flesh--God over all, blessed forever, assumed a body which was inherently and divinely pure, holy, and without the possibility of taint--absolutely free from every seed or principle of sin and mortality. Such was the humanity of Christ, that He could at any moment, so far as He was personally concerned, have returned to heaven, from whence He had come and to which He belonged. I speak not here of the eternal counsels of redeeming love, or of the unswerving love of the heart of Jesus--His love to God--His love to God's elect, or of the work that was needful to ratify God's everlasting covenant with the seed of Abraham and with the whole creation. Christ's own words teach us that "it behoved Him to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day." (Luke xxiv. 46.) It was necessary that He should suffer, in order to the full manifestation and perfect accomplishment of the great mystery of redemption. It was His gracious purpose to "bring many sons unto glory." He would not "abide alone," and therefore He, as the "corn of wheat," should "fall into the ground and die." The more fully we enter into the _truth_ of His Person, the more fully do we apprehend the _grace_ of His work. When the apostle speaks of Christ's being "made perfect through suffering," it is as "the Captain of our salvation" that he contemplates Him, and not as the Eternal Son, who, as regards His own abstract Person and nature, was divinely perfect, and could not possibly have aught added to Him. So, also, when He Himself says, "Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected" (Luke xiii. 32.), He refers to His being perfected, in the power of resurrection, as the Accomplisher of the entire work of redemption. So far as He was personally concerned, He could say, even on His way forth from the garden of Gethsemane, "Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He shall presently give Me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?" (Matt. xxvi. 53, 54.)