Thomas Watson on Christ our Prophet

Note:  The afternoon sermon last Sunday at CRBC was a meditation on Question 23 in our Spurgeon Catechism Series on Jesus our Prophet.  I closed with a summary of Thomas Watson's applicatory "usages" from this question: 

After Thomas Watson addresses this catechism question in A Body of Divinity, his study of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, he offers three practical usages or applications on Christ as our Prophet:

1.      It is useful for information.  That is tells us more about Christ, “who is the great doctor of his church.”

2.     It tells us that we are to labor to have Christ as our teacher.

“A man can no more by the power of nature reach Christ, than an infant can reach the top of the pyramids, or the ostrich fly up to the stars.”

“Knowledge is in Christ for us as milk in the breast for the child.  Oh then go to Christ for teaching.  None in the gospel came to Christ for sight, but he restored their eyesight; and sure Christ is more willing to work a cure upon a blind soul than ever he was to do so upon a blind body.”

Christ can take the dullest man and make him “a good scholar’ so that “they know more than the great sages and wisemen of the world.”

Watson also points out that Christ does this through his appointed means.  “Ministers are earthen vessels, but these pitchers have lamps within them to light souls to heaven. Christ is said to speak to us from heaven now, by his ministers, as the king speaks by his ambassador.”

3.     It tells us to be thankful:   “If you have been taught by Christ savingly, be thankful.”

Watson draws on an ancient analogy. He says if Alexander the Great expressed thanks that Aristotle had been his teacher, then, “how are we obliged to Jesus Christ, this great Prophet, for opening to us the eternal purposes of his love, and revealing to us the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven!”