O God, look at Christ instead of me!

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from the lifetime of works from the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon.  The following excerpt is from Able to the Uttermost, pages 175-76, Pilgrim Publications.

"We have no comeliness, but He gives us all His beauty. When He took us He took us as we were, but He made us to be as He is." 

And now when the Lord does look upon Christ what does He see in Him? I want you to think this over. I won’t try and put it in many words, but leave it for your own private meditation. It is a subject of that sort. I, being in Christ, desire God the Father to look at Christ instead of me.

Why? Why, because, first, when the Lord looks at Jesus Christ He sees in Him His own self, for the Lord Christ is God and one with the Father, and by a wonderful and mysterious union not to be explained; so that when He looks upon His Son He must look with ineffable love and affection because He is looking upon the godhead—the perfect godhead—in the person of Jesus Christ.

There is something delightful in that—that the godhead stands for me, and God in looking at my representative sees Himself. He cannot see anything there but what shall be to Himself well pleasing. But then He sees in Christ perfect manhood. When the Lord thinks of manhood is not there enough to make Him feel weary at His heart of the very name?

Remember how, before the time of the Flood, it repented Him that He had made man upon the face of the earth; and many a time, surely, if the Lord had been as we are, we should have been destroyed.

Manhood! It must be coupled in God’s mind with everything that is ungrateful, unnatural, vain, foolish, wanton, wicked. Shocking word, the word manhood! But now when the Lord looks upon His Son, He sees perfect manhood—manhood that never had a trace of sin about it—manhood the same as ours with this one exception, that it has never gone astray in thought or word or deed.

God sees there what manhood can accomplish—manhood that has obeyed His law without a single flaw—manhood that has suffered for God’s glory, suffered even unto death. And God loves man because there is such a man as Christ Jesus—that there should be a possibility of a creature being made like man who should be able sinlessly to suffer, which I suppose angels could not do.

God looks, therefore, upon manhood on account of what Christ has been and is, and looks upon it still with love.

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