Reading the Classics with Challies - Redemption Accomplished and Applied

Reading the Classics with Challies - Redemption Accomplished and Applied

Chapter 2

John Murray's second chapter in Redemption Accomplished and Applied is rich and deep. It is a chapter one could spend a long time investigating, understanding and applying to one's life.

I particularly liked the section dealing with Christ and His learning obedience:

Hebrews 5:8 - Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.

I guess I have sometimes found the concept of a perfect man needing to learn obedience difficult. I did not doubt Christ's perfection, however I couldn't articulate or even solve the dilemna in my mind. Murray provides some very helpful insight. Murray states:

When we examine the passages the following lessons become apparent. (1) It was not through mere incarnation that Christ wrought our salvation and secured our redemption. (2) It was not through mere death that satisfaction was secured. (3) It was not simply through the death on the cross that Jesus became the author of salvation. (4) The death upon the cross, as the climactic requirement of the price of redemption, was discharged as the supreme act of obedience; it was not death resistlessly inflicted but death upon the cross willingly and obediently wrought. (22)

Murray goes on to explain and summarize how a sinless man, indeed perfect, could be perfected:

It was not, of course, a perfecting that required the sanctification from sin to holiness. He was always holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners. But there was the perfecting of development and growth in the course and path of his obedience-he learned obedience. The heart and mind and will of our Lord had been moulded-shall we say forged?-in the furnace of temptation and suffering. And it was in virtue of what he had learned in that experience of temptation and suffering that he was able, at the climactic point fixed by the arrangements of infallible wisdom and everlasting love, to be obedient unto death, , even the death of the cross. It was only as having learned obedience in the path of innerrant and sinless discharge of the Father's will that his heart and mind and will were framed to the point of being able freely and voluntarily to yield up his life in death upon the accursed tree. (23)

Murray goes on to say that Christ's learning obedience was a 'becoming equipped' with resources necessarry to meet the requirements he would face.

I'll conclude with one more quote from Murray:

It is obedience learned through suffering, perfected through suffering, and consummated in the suffering death upon the cross that defines his work and accomplishment as the author of salvation. It was by obedience he secured our salvation because it was by obedience he wrought the work that secured it. (24)