The Purpose of God in Eternity Concerns His Son

From T. Austin-Sparks' message The Kingdom That Cannot be Shaken: 

"The purpose of God was from eternity concerning His Son. There are two things there. It is not something which has come in at a later point; it precedes what we understand by time, it precedes this creation, this history; it is something which arose before the foundation of the world, and the purpose before times eternal was concerning His Son. That takes it back before Adam. That gives it a very much larger significance than the creation itself. It is from eternity and therefore it is not just bound up with unfallen Adam, it is bound up with God’s Son.

"The Lord Jesus did not come in just as a rescuer of man and of man’s lot. We should almost be led to believe by certain emphases that redemption is the greatest thing in the universe, and that all God’s interest is in redemption, and that we should be occupied solely with redemption.

"Redemption is a great thing. We can never, never exaggerate, and I doubt whether we shall ever know what a great thing redemption is; and yet, great as redemption is in its scope, in its depth, in its cost, redemption is only incidental to the eternal purpose.

"Christ came in to time to rescue His own inheritance. In that, of course, man is rescued, but it is something very much bigger than that. It relates to the Son primarily, and until the Lord’s people get the right attitude, the right point of view, that is, that all things in God’s full and final concern are centred in God’s Son, they have not come into line with all God’s resource.

"While the direction is toward ourselves-- redemption, sanctification, glorification, and so on--or toward anything less than the Son Himself, we have not got God’s dynamic for accomplishing His work, and therefore it becomes necessary, as the sufficient, the adequate basis of the Holy Spirit’s operation, that there should be a revelation of Jesus Christ in the heart, for it is in relation to Him and what God has purposed concerning Him that all the energies of God are released and made active."