The fact that Jesus fulfilled His duty as our Redeemer does nothing to minimize the voluntary nature of His service. We perceive something of how costly Christ’s doing His duty was when we consider Gethsemane, His arrest, His beatings and mockings, His scourging and His crucifixion.
Later in the Hebrews Epistle, the writer speaks of Jesus enduring the cross for the joy set before Him (Heb. This is the point that the writer of Hebrews makes when he cites Psalm 40:6 regarding Christ’s having come into the world to do His Father’s will (Heb. In short, the Son of God came into the world in the likeness of sinful flesh to do the will of God. In order for us rightly to conceive of our duty before God, we must rightly understand the motivating principal of Christ’s life on earth. Practically, this works out for many Christians as though their personal delight were a trump card that reigns over all other considerations. Theologically, Christians tend to despise duty as if it were inconsistent with the love and grace of God in Christ, and as though it fostered a legalistic pride in those endeavoring to know and do their godly duty. The disintegration of lines of authority in the Church as well as in general society, the exaltation of pleasure and immediate gratification, the cult of the individual with its downplaying of corporate relations and responsibilities – all of these factors conspire to make duty sound quaint, irrelevant, and undesirable. There are reasons why the concept of Christian duty is misconstrued and despised in our day.
Despite what the Westminster Confession’s Larger Catechism declares about the Scriptures principally teaching us what we are to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man (LC #5), we can find ourselves greatly tempted to believe that godly duty for the Christian is at best not necessary, and at worst a dreadful concept to be avoided.
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