2.  And now, after all that, would you think it going too far if I were to say that in making Himself like unto all His brethren, our Lord made Himself like Mr. Ready-to-halt too?  Indeed He did.  And it was because his Lord did this, that Mr. Ready-to-halt so loved his Lord as to follow Him upon crutches.  It would not be thought seemly, perhaps, to carry the figure too close to our Lord.  But, figure apart, it is only orthodox and scriptural to say that our Lord accomplished His pilgrimage and finished His work leaning all along upon His Father’s promises.  Esaias is very bold about this also, for he tells his readers again and again that their Messiah, when He comes, will have to be held up.  He will have to be encouraged, comforted, and carried through by Jehovah.  And in one remarkable passage he lets us see Jehovah hooping Messiah’s staff first with brass, and then with silver, and then with gold.  Let Thomas Goodwin’s genius set the heavenly scene full before us.  “You have it dialoguewise set forth,” says that great preacher.  “First Christ shows His commission, telling God how He had called Him and fitted Him for the work of redemption, and He would know what reward He should receive of Him for so great an undertaking.  God at first offers low; only the elect of Israel.  Christ thinks these too few, and not worth so great a labour and work, because few of the Jews would come in; and therefore He says that He would labour in vain if this were all His recompense; and yet withal He tells God that seeing His heart is so much set on saving sinners, to satisfy Him, He will do it even for those few.  Upon this God comes off more freely, and openeth His heart more largely to Him, as meaning more amply to content Him for His pains in dying.  ’It is a light thing,’ says God to Him, ’that Thou shouldest be My servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob—­that is not worth Thy dying for.  I value Thy sufferings more than so.  I will give Thee for a salvation to the ends of the earth.’  Upon this He made a promise to Christ, a promise which God, who cannot lie, promised before the world began.  God cannot lie, and, most of all, not to His Son.”

And, then, more even than that.  This same deep divine tells us that it is a certain rule in divinity that, whatsoever we receive from Christ, that He Himself first receives in Himself for us.  All the promises of God’s word are made and fulfilled to Christ first, and so to us in and after Him.  In other words, our Lord’s life was so planned for Him in heaven and was so followed out and fulfilled by Him on earth, that, to take up the metaphor again, He actually tried every crutch and every staff with His own hands and with His own armpits; He actually leaned again and again His own whole weight upon every several one of them.  Every single promise, the most unlikely for Him to lean upon and to plead, yet, be sure of it, He somehow made experiment upon them all, and made sure that there was sufficient and serviceable