"By which will we have been sanctified, through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Heb. x. 10). For the Passion is the supreme oblation of the freewill of man, the re-direction into the right attitude of that high faculty by which man had sinned and fallen originally, the consecration of it to its true end, voluntary obedience to God. "Not My will, but Thine be done"; that Christ as man should bring the human will perfectly into conformity with the will of God is what "in the volume of the book"--_i.e._ in the writings of all the line of prophets--was written of Him; for this "the body was prepared" for Him in the pure flesh of the Virgin-mother; for this His "ears were opened," that as child and youth and man He might perfectly hear and obey the word of the Father. But the 15th verse of the 40th Psalm suggests {63} an obvious difficulty in the application of the Psalms as a whole to Christ personally: My sins have taken such hold upon me that I am not able to look up: Yea, they are more in number than the hairs of my head, and my heart hath failed me. How can we ascribe these words, or any of the confessions of sin in the Psalter, to the sinless Lamb of God? Are not these at least all our own? And yet He Himself must on earth have repeated them. In their original meaning they referred either to personal or national guilt. In either sense the recitation of them, at first sight, would seem to be alien and external to His pure conscience. But do they not take a deeper and more solemn tone when we consider them in the light of the prophet's great description of the Atoning Sufferer, "The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all" (Is. liii. 6), or of S. Paul's statement, "Him Who knew no sin, He made to be sin on our behalf" (2 Cor. v. 21)? Such words as these contain more than the mere bearing of the punishment of sin; they imply some inward connection between the Sufferer and the sin. Indeed, rightly understood, they help to {64} remove the difficulty that many have felt as to the apparent injustice or unreality of a vicarious Atonement. Christ was not merely a Victim suffering for human sin; He was man's Creator taking that sin upon Himself. Thus these expressions of penitence in the Psalter may be regarded as the voice of the sympathetic love of the Sin-bearer, the love which stands by the sinner's side, and feels with him so intimately that it makes its own what is not its own but utterly alien and hateful, makes it its own that it may burn it up in the flame of love. So in these Psalms we may hear the Son of Man confessing and making reparation for all the age-long sin of man; speaking of it as if it were His own sin, so closely has He made Himself one with us in our extremest need.