Holiest of All by Andrew Murray

184 XLbe fboUeet of ail
Who in the days of His flesh. The word " flesh " i^oints to
human nature in the weakness which is the mark of its fallen
state. When Jesus said to His disciples in that dark night,
" Watch and pray ;
the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,"
He spoke from personal experience. He had felt that it was
not enough to have a right purpose, but that, unless the weakness
of the flesh were upheld, or rather overcome, by power
received in prayer from above, that weakness would so easily
enter into temptation, and become sin. The days of His flesh,
encompassed with its weaknesses, were to Him a terrible reality.
It was not to yield to this that He watched and prayed.
Who in the days of His flesh, having offered up prayers
and supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him
that was able to save Him out of death, and having been
heard for His godly fear, having gained the strength to
surrender His will and fully accept the Father's will, and the
renewed assurance that He would be saved and raised out of it,
though He was a Son,—the form of the expression implies
that no one would have expected from the Son of God what is
now to be said, yet learned obedience by the things which
He suffered. Gethsemane was the training-school where our
High Priest, made like to us in all things, learnt His last and
most difficult lesson of obedience through what He suffered.
Though He was a Son. As the Son of God, come from
heaven, one would say that there could be no thought of His
learning obedience. But so real was His emptying Himself of
His life in glory, and so complete His entrance into all the conditions
and likeness of our nature, that He did indeed need to
learn obedience. This is of the very essence of the life of a
reasonable creature, of man, that the life and the will he has
received from God cannot be de\elopcd without the exercise of