Romans 15:3

For even Christ Here first in the Epistle St Paul explicitly quotes the Lord's Example. He soon repeats the reference, Romans 15:7. The main burthen of the Epistle has been His Sacrifice; but the more the Sacrifice is apprehended, the more powerful will the Example be felt to be. It will emphatically be "not merely a model, but a motive."

pleased not himself "Not My will, but Thine be done."

To Messiah Himself, as to His people, suffering was in itself "not joyous, but grievous;" and, in that sense, it was against His will. The doing of His Father's will involved sufferings; and in those sufferings He "pleased not Himself," while yet He unutterably "delighted to do the will of Him that sent Him." (Psalms 40:8; John 4:34.)

as it is written Psalms 69 (LXX. 68):9. The quotation is verbatim with LXX. It has been doubted whether we are meant in this passage to view the Saviour as preferring the Father's pleasure, or Man's salvation, to His "own will." The context (Romans 15:1-2) favours the latter; the words of the quotation favour the former. But as the two objects were inseparable in our Lord's work, bothmay well be in view here. His "bearing reproach" was the necessary path, alike to "finishing His Father's work," and to saving the lost.

Does not St Paul here allude specially to the conflict of Gethsemane, and to the outrages which our Lord patiently bore just afterwards? He had scarcely said "Thy will be done," when the awful "reproaches" of His night of shame and insult began.

reproached thee God was "reproached" in effect, by those who, while claiming to act in His Name, were teaching and practising all that was alien to His love and holiness. Such persons, when they beheld His trueLikeness in His Son, inevitably hated and rejected it.