Sinai marked the relation of God to Israel when Jesus came, and the worship of the golden calf may be taken as marking their relationship to God . . . The Lord Jesus was caused to appreciate to the full the relation in which Israel (and Himself because of Israel) was standing before God.
(Observations, p. 29).
The thing more than any else distinctive of these sufferings of Jesus of which I speak, that God pressed the . . . terrors of that mountain with the fire and darkness and tempest . . . upon the apprehension of His soul, according to His own power and holiness, and caused Him to feel as a part of that which was exposed to the judgments of His heavy band.
(Remarks, p. 14).
He was made to feel that His association with those thus standing in the fearfulness of their distance from God was a real thing, and that it was so regarded by God.
(Observations, p. 36).
The exercises of soul which His elect, in their unconverted state, ought to have, and which they would have, if it were possible for them to know and feel everything rightly according to God, such exercises, yet without sin, Jesus had.
(Observations, p. 26).
Jesus as man was associated with this place of distance in which man in the flesh was, and He had, through obedience, to find His way to that point where God could meet Him.
He stood in a place dispensationally lower than that into which He has now brought us His Church.
(Remarks, p. 31).
If, then, the soul of Jesus realized – experimentally realized, and that too under the hand of God, and to a degree we little think of – the fearful condition of Israel [and as we have seen Himself because of Israel]. . . How joyful to His soul the sense of the introduction of new things and new everlasting blessings [in baptism] (p. 22).
The difference between Sinai the mountain of blackness, and Zion the place of light and grace and blessing, the place of the Church of the firstborn, might be used to illustrate the difference between the two dispensational positions held by the Lord Jesus in the midst of Israel previous to His baptism and that which He dispensationally and ministerially took when anointed by the Holy Ghost.
And if it be asked, “Was, then, the Lord Jesus subjected during His life to all the inflictions that were due to man as man, and to Israel as Israel,” I answer No . . . His faith, His prayer, His obedience, all contributed to preserve Him from many things to which He was by His relative position exposed, and by which He was threatened.
(Remarks, p. 8).
Since He was not, until the cross, punished substitutionally, why was it that He was chastened at all? How could it be but because He was made experimentally to prove the reality of that condition into which others, but more especially Israel, had sunk themselves by their disobedience to God’s holy law, a condition out of which He was able to extricate Himself and from which He proved that He could extricate Himself by His own perfect obedience.
(Remarks, p. 12).
There are only three ways in which suffering from God can reach any of His servants here . . . either because of personal transgression – or substitutionally – or because of association with others who are under chastisement, can we be at any loss to say to which of these classes we assign the living sufferings of the Lord Jesus? We agree (?) in saying they were not substitutional, neither were they because of personal sin; if therefore they existed at all, and the scripture I have just quoted proves that they did exist, it must have been because of association or connection with others.
These afflictions were not vicarious.
(Observations, pp. 22, 23).