Preparation for sufferings. Or The best work in the worst times Wherein the necessity,…

4. Remember how ready the Lord Jesus was to suffer the hardest and vilest things for you. He had a bitter Cup put into his hands to drink for you, into which the wrath both of God and man was squeezed out. ¹Never had man such sufferings to undergo as Christs. Whether you consider (1) the dignity of his person, who was in the form of God, and might have stood upon his Peerage and Equality with him, he is the sparkling Diamond of Heaven, Acts 7.56. The Darling of the Fathers Soul, Isa. 42.1. glorious as the only begotten of the Father, John 1.14. yea glory it self, James 2.1. yea, the very brightness of glory, Heb. 1.3. He is the delicia Christiani orbis, fairer than the Sons of men: And for him to be so debased, below so many thousands ⟨p. 134⟩of his own Creatures, become a Worm, and no man; this was a wonderful humiliation. It was Jeremiah's lamentation, that such as were brought up in Scarlet, embraced Dunghills; that Princes were hanged up by the hands, and the faces of Elders were not reverenced. But what was that to the humiliation of the Lord of Glory? Or (2) that he suffered in the prime and flower of his years; when full of life and sense, and more capable of exquisite sense of pain than others: For he was optime complexionatus, ²of a singular Constitution; and all the while he hanged on the Tree, his sense of pain not at all blunted or decayed, Mark 15.37, 39. Or (3) the manner of his death. It was the death of the Cross, which was as a Rack to Christ: for in reference to the distention of his Members upon the Cross, is that spoken, Psal. 22.17