Page:Groves - Darbyism - Its Rise and Development and a Review of the Bethesda Question.djvu/26

 very matter, which in another he so violently condemned, is a matter of serious enquiry. Certain it is that both before and since, Mr. Darby’s own writings on this very subject of our Lord’s experiences have been such, as to all divinely instructed Christians must appear as far from the simple statements of Scripture, as anything written by him whom he op posed, and separation from whom he has made a fundamental element in his creed. Of the later developments of Mr. Darby’s views on this solemn subject of the sufferings of Christ, we shall write hereafter; and will only here allude to a few expressions made use of by him. Mr. Darby writes: that “Jesus was for forty days in the wilderness, under the weight of actual separation from God, exactly as on the cross, when under the wrath of God” (Words of Truth, vol. iii. p. 364); that “Jesus took the place of Cain in the earth, the place of the estrangement of the soul from God” (Ibid, p. 360); that he was “the brother of the Cain world” (Christian Witness, vol. iii.) ; that Christ entered in exercise of soul, into “the sense of guilt under a broken law,” &c. (The Sufferings of Christ, p. 31). In reading these and similar expressions it has to be borne in mind that Mr. Darby holds—and we believe rightly—that our blessed Lord stands before us as actually bearing sin only on the cross, so that these expressions cannot be explained as referring to anything vicariously borne for sin. Mr. Newton on the contrary now holds the whole of the Life of Christ to have been one great sin-bearing, till it was consummated on the cross, and therefore explains expressions he may now make use of in accordance with the theory he at present maintains; which enables him to say that, which would be fatal error when spoken from Mr. Darby’s point of view. While saying this, it does not in the least justify or palliate Mr. Newton’s remarks about the Lord in the year under contemplation; holding, as he then did, that sin-bearing was confined to the cross.

The difference between Mr. Newton’s views at this time, of which we write, and Mr. Darby’s views as since more fully brought out, is rather in regard to the time when these experiences became our Lord’s, than in the experiences themselves. Both have maintained the spotlessness of the person of the blessed Lord, but both, with Mr. Irving who went before them, sought in their own way so to view the person of the Lord as to bring him within the range in which each thought the full sympathy of the Saviour possible, seeking, as we feel assured, wrongly, the fulness of the sympathy of Jesus, in his manhood apart from his God-head. Fallen man with all his experience of sin, is only able (μετζιοπαθειν—see Heb. v. 2) to suffer and sympathize up to his own little measure, as the Greek