A history of the work of redemption. Containing the outlines of a body of…

Besides, he was persecuted in his infancy. They began to seek his life as soon as he was born. Herod, the chief man of the land, was so engaged to him, that, in order to it, he killed all the children in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under. Christ suffered banishment in his infancy, was driven out of his native country into Egypt, and without doubt suffered much by being carried so long a journey, when he was so young, into a strange country.

II. Christ was subject to great humiliation in his private life at Nazareth. He there led a servile obscure life, in a mean laborious occupation: for he is called not only the carpenter's son, but the carpenter: Mark vi.3. "Is not this the carpenter, the brother of James and Joses, and Judah, and Simon?" He, by hard labour, earned his bread before he ate it, and so suffered that curse which God pronounced on Adam, Gen. iii.13. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." Let us consider how great a degree of humiliation the glorious Son of God, the creator of heaven and earth, was subject to in this, that for about thirty years he should live a private obscure life among labouring men, and all this while be overlooked, and not taken notice of in the world, as more than other common labourers. Christ's humiliation in some respects was greater in private life than in the time of his public ministry. There were many manifestations of his glory in the word he preached, and the great miracles he wrought; but the first thirty years of his life he spent among mean ordinary men, as it were in ⟨p. 158⟩silence, without those manifestations of his glory, or any thing to make him to be taken notice of more than any ordinary mechanic, but only the spotless purity and eminent holiness of his life; and that was in a great measure hid in obscurity; so that he was little taken notice of till after his baptism.