The Fall of Peter
IN ADDITION to all His other sufferings, our blessed Lord had also to endure that of being denied by one of the little company of His confidential disciples, on whose fidelity He ought to have been able to reckon under all circumstances. His heart was not to be a stranger to any grief or pain, in order that He might be to us in all things a compassionate High Priest But how would the Scriptures have been fulfilled, had He not also experienced the fate of His living prototypes — Joseph, delivered up by his brethren, and David forsaken in the season of his calamities — or how could He have verified the prophetic language of the Psalmist, “Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and my acquaintance into darkness”? Let us join ourselves in spirit to Simon Peter. If anyone was ever ardently attached to the Saviour, it was he; but he was only partially conscious of what it was that he loved in Jesus. The mystery in His vicarious character, and the consequent necessity for the of...