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He comes as an infant, yet He comes as a King. He comes, offering rest, and forgiveness, and life; yet He, at the same time, makes a claim upon us which none will accept save he whose heart has been touched by the Holy Ghost. He speaks to us in grace, he looks at us in grace; yet in doing so He presents us with a cross which we must bear, with a yoke which we must take on. He announces himself as Jesus the Saviour, yet, in doing so, He lets us know that He is as a Saviour from sin, a deliverer from this present evil world. Therefore it is that He is not always welcomed; nay, so often rejected. Therefore it is that his presence in love and lowliness troubles the sons of men. They are disarmed,—perhaps attracted, by that love and lowliness; but the demands which these make upon their whole being and life, their allegiance, their obedience, their affection, are such as they will not submit to. So they are troubled, and bid Him depart out of their coasts.

He is of the same stock as we are, the same ancient root, the first man Adam, whom God created. He is bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh … In everything that is truly human He is one of us. He “knew no sin”; He was ” that holy thing” yet was He all the more human because of the absence of sin for sin is not an original part of our nature. As man, then, He sympathises; He pities; He loves. As man, He “loved his neighbour as himself,” and so “fulfilled the royal law of love.” As man, He was born, He lived, He “grew in stature, and in wisdom, and in favour with God and man.” His was thoroughly a human body and a human soul; his was thoroughly a human life and a human death. His was human hunger and thirst, human sleep and waking, human weariness and rest. His words were human words, issuing from human lips, and the utterance of a human heart. His looks were human looks, his tones were human tones, his tears were human tears. He was man all over, yet sinless; man all over, living in man’s world, yet not partaker of that world’s evil; man all over in every step He took, and every word He spoke; man all over in his daily intercourse with his fellow-men, and in his fellowship with his Father in heaven.

This is the voice of one crying in the wilderness; the voice of a second Elijah; the man of the desert; the burning and shining light; the forerunner of Messiah; the prophet of warning. He spoke to Israel; he speaks to us. It is the voice of warning; a trumpet voice; prelude to the last trumpet; herald of coming wrath and woe. It spoke first to Israel; it speaks to the church; it speaks to Christendom; it speaks to the world; it speaks to each of us.

His whole ancestry is as thoroughly human as ours can be. Every link of the chain is human … It is a long chain, sometimes almost broken or worn through; but thus all the more thoroughly human. He is the seed of the woman; the man Christ Jesus. He is very man, out of the loins of Abraham, and of the substance of the Virgin; son of Mary and son of Adam.

This is strange. Had the like happened elsewhere, in Babylon, or Rome, or Egypt,—it would not have surprised us. Or had these been “troubled,” it would have been natural enough. But it is Jerusalem! She is troubled! Nay, it is “all Jerusalem.” Troubled at the news of her King’s arrival! Not excited, or agitated, but “troubled.” Had it been said, “rejoiced,” we could have understood it, but “troubled,“—how strange! Let us inquire into Jerusalem’s trouble and its causes. The simple visible cause was the statement of the wise men that one had been born King of the Jews. And how this could trouble Jerusalem is not easy to see. For,—It contained nothing alarming. It was but of a babe that the wise men spoke; only the birth of a babe,—no more. They did not come to tell that some Eastern King had espoused the cause of this babe, and was on his way, with an army, to secure a throne for him. Their question simply pertained to a babe whom they desired to worship. It was a religious act entirely that they had come to perform. The name they gave the babe, “King of the Jews,” might trouble Herod; but surely there was nothing to alarm Jerusalem. Herod was a tyrant,—a foreign tyrant, moreover,—only indirectly a Jew; he might be troubled; but it ought not to have awakened fear in any Jew, especially in any citizen of the royal city.

Christ, at his first coming, laid the axe there; at his second coming He will lift it up and smite! The axe was laid down when Israel least thought of such a thing; when they were boasting of privilege, and calling themselves children of Abraham; so it shall be lifted up to smite, when men are saying “peace and safety”; boasting of progress and reform, and deliverance from the bigotry of narrow-minded men. Now is the age of trial, of probation. Israel’s forest was found barren, and was cut down. Now Christendom is on its trial. Shall it be cut down? It has been long spared. Is it fruitful? Thou, O man, art on thy trial? What is to be the issue when the Lord comes?

For it is only they who are not disposed to admit his entire claims that can be troubled at the announcement of his advent,—either his first or his second. Take Him for what He is; take Him for what He contains and offers; take Him for what the Father testifies of Him,—take Him entire, and you have nothing to fear.

As we take Matthew’s history literally, so do we take that of John. If we allegorize the first chapter of the one evangelist, we must allegorize the first of the other. If John does not mean that Christ was very God, Matthew does not mean that He was very man. The divine side of Christianity is as strongly shewn in the one evangelist as the human side in the other. He whom we call Lord and Master, Saviour and Redeemer, is one in whose Person the extremes of all being unite. All Godhead and all creaturehood are in Him; the fulness of the finite, and the fulness of the infinite; all the excellence of the created and the uncreated.

Why are they troubled? Some might be troubled because the tidings had come upon them in this strange and unlooked for way; others might be so because they did not know what such tidings foreboded. But the chief trouble, and that of the greatest number, would arise from the consciousness of their not being prepared. The tidings would go through Jerusalem,—poor and rich, Priest, Levite, citizen, Scribe and Pharisee,—the Messiah has come; and then this would awaken within the immediate question, Am I ready for his coming? For every Jew had, more or less, an idea of Messiah, according to the prophets; so that carnal as many of their notions were, they yet knew He was coming on an errand against evil,—on a righteous mission,—and they could not help asking, in such a case, Am I ready for Him? They knew He was to be great, glorious, just;—could they then meet Him face to face? Ah, yes, they are troubled, because they are not ready! The news went to their consciences. They might desire his advent on some accounts, but the thoughts of it troubled them because of others. He was to be the messenger of a holy God. He was to be himself a holy one. He was coming to do holy things and speak holy words. This could not but alarm them. Hateful as was the Roman yoke and Herod’s tyranny, these were better to them than the sceptre of a holy king. The news of his coming searched them. It awoke within them thoughts and fears that had lain dormant. They expected Messiah, they wished him to come; but there were so many things connected with his character and reign that made his presence undesirable, that they could not hear of his arrival and not be troubled. A man’s conscience is sometimes more enlightened and better instructed than his mind; and when an appeal is made to it by some solemnising piece of news, it immediately responds. Some sudden stroke of God’s hand upon a man, or his family, or his nation, hits his conscience with special force; and conscience asserts her supremacy … A holy man of God enters a worldly man’s house, or the house of an inconsistent Christian, and immediately the man is uneasy. His conscience is disturbed. He is troubled as was Jerusalem when the tidings came, He is come!

Yes; Christ came not to send peace, but a sword; and it was the flash of this sword that troubled Jerusalem. There is something in Christ that troubles,—alarms. We know that it shall be so when He comes the second time. They shall look on him and mourn; all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of Him. But his first advent has something about it to trouble, too. It is not all peace. Even apart from the glory, and terror, and judgment of his second there is something in the announcement of his first that startles the man and rouses the conscience. The very grace that is in it is of an awfully solemnising kind; and no man can hear of that grace without feeling that there is something in it from which he must of necessity shrink, unless he is prepared to surrender himself unreservedly and believingly to Him whose grace it is.