His Own Son

The Apostle Paul has been leading us to consider the high privileges of sovereign mercy granted to God’s beloved people. Step by step he has been showing us the components of covenant grace. Link by link he has revealed the unbreakable chain of divine purpose. God’s great salvation originates in everlasting love and culminates in the church’s eternal glory. Every stage is carefully planned and executed to glorify God, honour the Son and bless the chosen vessels of mercy. 

God is for us

Paul’s expressed purpose is to encourage the Lord’s people in their troubles and show how ‘the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us’. He tells us ‘all things work together’ for our good. This includes all the divine persons and all the elements of the everlasting covenant. Let there be no doubt, God is for us. Now Paul gives evidence for this claim. 

Christ was not spared

God is so completely ‘for us’ that He ‘spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all’. This is the greatness of the commitment God has made for the salvation of His people. The only just and fair price for our redemption was the life blood of Jesus Christ, God’s own Son, and this was the personal cost the Father was required and willing to pay. God ‘spared not his own Son’.

God’s own Son

Paul tells us God ‘sent his own Son’ and ‘spared not His own Son’. This is God the Father though not to the exclusion of God the Holy Spirit, as we learn from Isaiah 48:16, or indeed, God the Son who ‘humbled himself’ and willingly agreed to come. Jesus Christ is God’s own Son, the only begotten of the Father. Angels are sons by creation; redeemed men by adoption. Christ is by nature God’s true and proper Son, being the same in substance with Him and equal in power and glory.

A heavy price

From this we learn a sinner’s salvation does not come cheap. Your salvation and mine costs us nothing personally. It comes as a free gift of God’s grace. Yet, mercy laid a heavy burden on the just and holy God. God gave something up when He ‘spared not His own Son but delivered Him up for us all’ and however this ‘something’ is to be properly expressed we should not be unmindful that a cost was borne by the Father upon the giving of the Son.

A fine type

There is a close connection between this act of God in sparing not His Son and that of Abraham in Genesis 22 when he offered Isaac on an altar on Mt. Moriah. Verse 12 in that chapter reads ‘thou hast not withheld thy Son, thine only Son from me’, which has been rendered, ‘thou hast not spared thy beloved Son for me’. God did not spare His Son for us. He did not withhold Him but willingly gave Him that we might live.

Christ our Guarantee

Here we can measure God’s everlasting love for ‘us all’ who are predestinated, called and justified in Jesus Christ. Paul is showing us the magnitude of God’s commitment for us, and the certitude of His promises to us, by the greatness of His gift. The Lord Jesus is God’s beloved Son in whom He is well pleased, yet even He was not spared in bringing many sons to glory.

A heavy load

God ordained that our Lord Jesus Christ be not spared the humiliation of taking our human nature. Nor was Christ spared ‘the contradiction of sinners against himself’. He was not spared the cruel suffering of the cross or tasting the bitterness of death for us all. He was not spared the unfathomable breach of fellowship within the Godhead when His Father forsook Him in the hours of darkness. 

Complete atonement

In sparing not His Son it pleased the Father to lay on Him the full tally of the iniquity of us all. For the deliverance of His people it pleased the Son to bear all that was agreed in the covenant of peace. Christ made full atonement for every sin of every chosen sinner. He suffered the whole payment of our debt that law and justice might be fully satisfied. 

 Amen.