Acts 4:30

Acts 4:30

The Child Christ

I. The day which beheld our Lord in the Temple among the doctors was no doubt the close of a wondering and inquiring time. I conceive of that moment that it gave point and purpose to a long series of internal questions and wondering visions. Here, I conceive, He was attempting to unseal the meaning of His own mission; and can we not conceive how, as the Eternal Wisdom spoke through Him, He would perplex the lawyers; and, perhaps, even compel some with wonder to exclaim "A greater than Moses is here." One conceives the embarrassment of the learned doctors, the masters of tradition, before the Divine simplicity of the Holy Child Jesus.

II. But it was very significant that it was after this eventful period in the Temple that we read more expressly of the humiliation of the Child Christ. "He went down into Nazareth with His parents, and was subject unto them." It is easy to see that, as gradually He was putting off His childhood, He was putting off His happiness. To become conscious is to become unhappy. Christ, I conceive, bade farewell to the enjoyment of life after that visit to the Temple; henceforth He was haunted and oppressed by the work given Him to do.

III. We have no knowledge who were the companions of the Child Christ. It is not, perhaps, unreasonable to suppose that some of those who became His apostles were His fellow-villagers in those days. Certainly they were all growing into maturity to be, to do, and to suffer with Him. He is a Child round whom, as the central figure, however humble and lowly, all the disciples, from so many quarters of the land nay, the world, are to group; all developing for eternity, saved or lost by their acceptance or rejection of that Child.

IV. The infant nature of Christ is the power by which God has moved the world. The Holy Child Jesus.Before that birth the world had only known what evil could be enclosed in man; how vile and worthless, how low and dark. But this Child all the same faculties, all the same powers shows to us human nature, with God as the Divine Artificer. Christ has consecrated childhood.

E. Paxton Hood, Sermons,p. 19.

References: Acts 4:30. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. ix., No. 545.Acts 4:31. Three Hundred Outlines on the New Testament,p. 109; C. J. Vaughan, Church of the First Days,vol. i., p. 166. Acts 4:32. Contemporary Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 36.