The Infinite Dignity of the Person of Christ

Sometimes we need a jolt to awaken us out of our apathy and to reinvigorate our passion and love for God. For me, a thinker like Jonathan Edwards often provides that jolt. Again, coming from his work The Religious Affections, Edwards seeks to point his reader to the true realities of the greatness of God. Often we simply read the Bible and gloss over revealed truth, but this revelation from God is the pathway to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8). As we continue to apprehend God in his being and character, we understand his love and holiness more readily. This fuller understanding leads to a more robust love of God, which in turn shows our smallness of love and compels us to greater love and holiness, by his grace. The point is the more we see God, the more our character is affected for the glory of his name, and thus we must seek to know God for who he is and live in response to that knowledge.

But that is the nature of true grace and spiritual light, that it opens to a person’s view the infinite reason there is that he should be holy in a high degree. And the more grace he has, and the more this is opened to view, the greater sense he has of the infinite excellency and glory of the divine Being, and of the infinite dignity of the person of Christ, and the boundless length and breadth and depth and height of the love of Christ to sinners. And as grace increases, the field opens more and more to a distant view, until the soul is swallowed up with the vastness of the object, and the person is astonished to think how much it becomes him to love this God and this glorious Redeemer that has so loved man, and how little he does love. And so the more he apprehends, the more the smallness of his grace and love appears strange and wonderful: and therefore he is more ready to think that others are beyond him.

Jeremy Kimble (PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Cedarville University. He is an editor for Credo Magazine as well as the author of That His Spirit May Be Saved: Church Discipline as a Means to Repentance and Perseverance and numerous book reviews. He is married to Rachel and has two children, Hannah and Jonathan.