Clefts of the Rock Author:John Ross Macduff Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. " This is the confidence that we have in Him''— "AND THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH "— John L 14. T N the previous chapters, the endeavour was made, as... more » fully as our limits would admit, to adduce scriptural proof in support of that foundation-article of our most holy faith, the supreme divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ: " The Word was God." Let us, with a similar devout and reverential spirit, now turn our thoughts to another great cleft in the Rock of Ages, the correlative doctrine of the Saviour's Humanity; when (adopting the translation or paraphrase of the apostle's words, made by an exegetical writer of the fifth century), " hiding His own dignity, He took the condition of extreme humiiiation, and clothed Himself in the human form." " The Word was made Flesh!" What a transition ! What a stoop for that Infinite Being whom we found proclaiming Himself the Alpha and the Omega, writing His name on the Talace-walls of Eternity, "I AM THAT I AM!" for " The Ancient of days " to assume the nature and take the form of a cradled infant, sleeping on a virgin mother's breast!—the Plant of heavenly renown to become "a root out of a dry ground," without beauty or comeliness! We have no plumb-line to sound the depths of that humiliation—no arithmetic by which it can be submitted to any process of calculation. To use an illustration, which has been appositely employed; if we can entertain for a moment the startling supposition of the loftiest created spirit in heaven abjuring his angel-nature, and (suddenly metamorphosed,) becoming an insector a worm, we can, in some feeble degree, estimate the descent involved in the transformation ; because, however great the disparity, they are both creatures of God, though at the antipodes of being. But, for .the Illimitable, Everlasting Jeh...« less