The Image of God (Continued)

Who is the image of the invisible God. — COLOSSIANS i. 15.

“PRESCRIBING a tribe of pagan Africans, Dr. Living stone says, Like most others, they listen with respect and attention, but when we kneel down and worship an unseen Being, the act and position appear to them so ridiculous, that they cannot refrain from bursting into uncontrollable laughter. Accustomed from our earliest childhood to worship the unseen, we wonder at these merry savages; and yet, by nature like them, we are all creatures of sight and sense. Hence our desire to see any remarkable person; hence the pleasure we take in the portrait that embellishes the biography of a great or good man, or in the statue which preserves his features and adorns his tomb. Some may call the publican’s a childish curiosity. But we sympathise with Zaccheus, when, having heard that Jesus was passing, he left the receipt of custom to join the throng; but, lost there, shot a-head of the multitude, and climbed a friendly sycamore, to catch a passing glance at the wonder-working man. We esteem it not the least of the blessings which shall be enjoyed in heaven, that we shall see Jesus there; see him as he is; gaze with fond, adoring love oil the very face and form which our faith has so often tried to fancy, and painters of the greatest genius have utterly failed to express.

A sense of guilt makes man afraid of God. Conscience makes cowards of us all; so that, as Adam fled from his presence to the bushes of the garden, many fly even from the thought of him, in whom, but for sin, they would have lovingly confided. But for the fears of guilt, the contemplation of God’s works would kindle a devout curiosity to see the hand they sprung from. And when, so rapt in admiration as for the time to forget that we are sinners, we gaze on the spangled firmament, or look out on the blue rolling ocean, or, from the peak of some lofty mountain, look over a tumbling sea of hills, or down on the glorious landscape, as in the mingled beauty of dark green- wood, and golden fields, and silver streams, and castle-crowned summits, and scattered villages, and busy towns, it stretches away to the distant shore, the soul has some longing for a view of God more palpable than it gets. We almost wish that he were not invisible, and enter, in some measure, into the feelings of Moses on Mount Sinai. The everlasting thnnderings were grand, vividly the lightning flashed and flickered, awfully sublime were the dark cloud and voices of the mount, but they were not God. The heart craved for some view of himself. And so, highest example of perfect love casting out fear, with the lightnings playing around him, and the earth shaking beneath his feet, bold man! he bowed his head, and bent his knee, and said, Show me thy glory.

Being, as we have already shown, so much creatures of sight and sense, this incident leads me to remark —

I. That God, as revealed visibly in Jesus Christ, meets and satisfies one of our strongest wants.

Our Lord’s divinity, which is to some like his death, to the Jew “a stumbling-block,” like his resurrection to the Greek, foolishness, does not stagger my faith in the Bible. On the contrary, Christ’s divine nature strengthens my belief in its divine authority; and, in the light of that doctrine, the sacred volume appears all the more plainly to be both the power of God and the wisdom of God. That doctrine, as I hope to show you, goes to establish, not shake its claims to be devoutly received as a revelation from heaven.

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.” So runs the second commandment; and, if I am to judge from the universal practice of mankind, there is not one of the ten commandments which runs more counter to our nature. That remark may surprise you. But in proof of it —

1. Look at the heathen world.

For long dark ages the whole earth was given up to idolatry, with the exception of a single nation. The Hebrews stood alone. They worshipped in a temple without an idol, and rejected the use of images in the services of religion. Go back to remotest time. Start from the age either of those old Assyrians, whose gods we have been digging from the ruins of Nineveh, or of those older Egyptians whose mummy forms, with their dog and hawk-headed divinities, lie entombed on the banks of the Nile; and, coming down the course of time to the last-discovered tribe of savages, we find that all nations, writh scarcely an exception, have been idolaters. All have clung to the visible, and employed sensible representations of the divinity; theirs a sensuous worship, whether they adored one or ten thousand gods. Nor is this wonderful. To fix the mind and affections on an invisible Being seemed like attempting to anchor a vessel on a flowing tide or rolling billows. These offer nothing to hold by. And, as a climbing plant, for lack of a better stay, will throw its arms around a ruined wall or rotting tree, rather than want something palpable to which their thoughts might cling, men have worshipped the Divine Being through images of the basest character and most hideous forms. We gaze with blank astonishment on the gods of many heathen races. We ask, is it possible that rational beings have bent the knee to this painted stick, that, with a bunch of feathers stuck on its head, and two bits of inlaid pearl-shell for eyes, presents but the rudest resemblance to the form of humanity? Not only possible but certain. Talk of “the dignity of our nature!” How that ugly idol, with man supplicating its help and trembling before its wrath, refutes the notion, and proclaims the fall! Contrast Adam, erect in his innocence, and lifting up an open countenance to the heavens, with that dark, crouching, miserable savage, who kneels to this stick. What a fall is there! How is the gold become dim? how is the most fine gold changed? Then,

2. Look at the evidence of this proneness to sensuous worship as it appears in the history of the Jews. Even among God’s chosen people, how did this propensity to idolatry constantly manifest itself, just as I have seen broom, and furze, and heath, and such other wild plants as were natural to the soil, spring up in cultivated pastures — ready to resume possession, should the husbandman relax his efforts to keep them down and root them out? There could be no greater folly on the part of the Israelites than to venerate the gods of Egypt. If the gods whose aid the Egyptians invoked had been else than “vanity,” the Hebrews had still been slaves; and yet so prone were they to idolatry, that they set up a golden calf at the very foot of Sinai. Again, the grass was hardly green on David’s grave, when his son, forfeiting his title of the wisest of men, allowed himself to be seduced by heathen women to lend his countenance to idolatry; the abomination of Moab stood in front of the temple, and Ashtaroth, enthroned on Olivet, looked down with haughty contempt on the courts of Zion. Again, when the kingdom was broken up through the insane folly of Rehoboam, see how the ten tribes, like a bark parted from her anchors and borne by a strong tide on a fatal reef, drifted on idolatry. A few years suffice to engulf the whole nation into the deepest, grossest paganism. Ere one half century has passed, Elijah stands alone; faithful among the faithless; he only by any public act protesting against the universal idolatry; he cries, I, even I only, am left. Thus rapidly, when abandoned by God to the power of their passions, do both men and nations sink. As the history of many still proves, nothing is so easy as the descent into hell. Then,

3. We find evidence of this propensity to idolatry even in the Christian church. We have not to rake up the ashes of Jewish history, nor disturb the graves of ancient Nimrods and Pharaohs, nor import their rude idols from Polynesian shores, to prove the deep longing that there is in our nature for a God whom our senses may embrace. How deeply has Christianity herself suffered from this cause? Look to the church of Rome! Her temples are crowded with images. Fancy some old Roman, rising from his grave on the banks of the Tiber. Looking on the sensuous worship of modern Rome, the honours paid to a doll decked out to represent Christ’s mother — multitudes prostrate at the feet of stone apostles — the incense and prayers oifered to the lifeless effigy of a man, here hanging in -weakness on a cross, or there sitting in triumph on the globe where he sways a sceptre, and treads a serpent beneath his feet, what could he suppose but that the “eternal city” had changed her idols — not ceased from her idolatry; and, by some strange turn of fortune, had given to one Jesus the old throne of Jupiter, and assigned the crown which Juno wore in his days to another queen of heaven? In that bestial form at the foot of Sinai, with the shameless, naked, frantic crowd singing and dancing and shouting around it, the scene which filled Moses with great indignation, strikes us with great astonishment. How, we ask, with God thundering above their heads, could they fall into such gross idolatry? And yet have not we stood astonished to see a rational creature bending head and knee to a tinselled image, amid circumstances, too, which made the act appear peculiarly surprising and degrading? There, the worship of a creature insulted the glory of God’s grandest works; nor did Popery ever seem to us more hateful, more dishonouring, and more debasing, than amid scenes whose magnificence raised the soul to God, as on eagles’ wings. There, a blind leader of the blind, she was turning away the faith, and love, and worship of his creatures from him whose voice was heard in the roar of the Alpine cataract, whose mighty hand was seen in mountains that stood piled to heaven, crowned with their eternal snows, and of whose great white throne of judgment one fancied they saw a solemn image in that pure, lofty, majestic, snowy dome, which glistened in sun beams, high over mountains and valleys already wrapped in evening gloom.

Now, in what way are we to account for this universal tendency to idolatry? It is not enough to call it folly. I ask, what led to such folly, and led all men to it? — philosophers with fools, the wisest with the weakest, of the heathen? It admits of but one explanation — the feelings from which idolatry springs are deeply rooted in our nature.

You tell me that God is invisible, infinite, incom prehensible. You teach me that neither in wood, nor stone, nor colours, nor even in my mind’s fancy, may I impart to him form or figure; neither features to express his emotions, nor hands to do his work; neither eyes, although they beam, nor a heart, although it beat with love; and you warn me, moreover, that, even in imagination, to clothe the Divine Being in a form the most venerable and august, is to be guilty of a species of idolatry. But it seems as difficult for me to make such a being the object of my affections, as to grasp a sound, or to detain a shadow. This heart craves something more congenial to my nature, and seeks in God a palpable object for its affections to cling to. That is our want. And now see how that want is met by the gospel, and is provided for by Him who “knoweth our frame, and remembereth that we are dust.”

Nothing appears to me more remarkable in providence, or more clearly to attest the being and attributes of an all-presiding God, than the perfect adaptation of creatures to the circumstances in which they are placed. See how the summer, that brings back the swallows to our door, in myriads of insects produces their food; how those creatures that burrow in the soil have bodies shaped like a wedge, and fore-feet so formed as to do the work of a spade; how the animals that inhabit arctic climes are wrapped in furs, which man, for the sake of their warmth, is glad to borrow, and to which God, for the protection of their lives, has given the colour of the snow; how, furnished with hollow bones and downy .feathers, birds are adapted to float in an atmosphere of thin transparent air; and how other creatures, slow of motion, and unarmed for battle, and thus helplessly exposed to their enemies, carry a strong castle on their backs — retiring within their shell, as men into a fortalice, safe from all attack. The student of nature thus recognises, with adoring wonder, the harmony which God has established between his creatures and their circumstances. Now the divinity of our faith is not less conspicuous to the believer’s eye, in respect of its per feet adaptation to the peculiarities, or, if you will call them so, to the infirmities of our nature. In his incarnate Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, God presents himself to me in a form which meets my wants. The Infinite is brought within the limits of my narrow understanding; the Invisible is revealed to my sight; I can touch him, hear him, see him, speak to him. In the hand he holds out to save me, I have what my own can grasp. In that eye bent on me, whether bedewed with tears, or beaming with affection, I see divine love in a form I feel, and can understand. God addresses me in human tones; God stands before me in the fashion of a man; and, paradox as it appears, when I fall at his feet to say with Thomas, My Lord and my God, I am an imageworshipper, yet no idolater; for the Being before whom I bend is not a mere man, nor a graven image, nor a dead thing, but the living, loving, eternal, “express image” of the “invisible God.”

II. Consider in what sense Jesus Christ is “the image of the invisible God.”

This term, image, is to be taken here in its widest, most comprehensive sense. It means much more than a mere resemblance; it conveys the idea of shadow less than that of substance; and is to be understood in the sense in which Paul employs it, when he says of the Mosaic institutions — “The law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image” or substance, “of the things.” An image may be moulded in clay, or cut in marble, or struck in metal, or so formed on the watery mirror, that, when blustering winds were hushed, and no ripple disturbed the lake, we have lain over our boat to see the starry firmament imaged in its crystal depths, and wish it were thus in our bosom — a heaven above repeated in a heaven below. Then there are living as well as dead images. And, as a Christian’s life, without any occasion for his lips telling it, should proclaim him to the world a child of God, so I have known an infant bear such striking resemblance to his father, that what his tongue could not tell, his face did; and people, struck by the likeness, remarked of the nursling, He is the very image of his father. Such was Adam in his state of innocence. Endowing him with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness, God made good his words, Let us make man in our image.

Now it may be said that, as our Lord, like the first Adam, was a pure and holy creature, “harmless,” and “undefiled,” he is therefore called the image of God.

Yet that does not exhaust the meaning of this terra; nor is it at all on that account that Paul speaks of him as “the second Adam,” but because, as their representative and federal head, Jesus stood to his people in the same covenant relationship as our first parent did to all his posterity.

Nor have they sounded the depths, seen to the bottom of this expression, who say that, since our Lord was endowed with power to do the works of God, to work many mighty miracles, he might therefore be called the image of God. For many others, both before and after him, were in that sense equally images of God. How godlike was Moses, when he raised his arm to heaven, and thunders rent the answering skies; when, giving origin perhaps to the heathen legend of Neptune and his trident, he waved his rod upon the deep, and, billow rolling back from billow, the sea was parted by his power! What a godlike action Joshua’s on that battle field, when he met, and where he conquered five kings in fight! God fought for him with hailstones, and he fought for God with swords; and no more than devils of hell could stand before us, did prayer always summon heaven to our aid, could mortal men stand before such onslaught — “Kings of armies did flee apace;” that day five crowns were lost. But, apparently a most inopportune event, ere Joshua has reaped the fruits of his victory, the sun, emerging from the dark hail-cloud, has sunk low in the sky. His burning wheels touch the crest of Gibeon, while the pale moon, marshalling on the night to protect the flying enemy, is showing her face over the valley of Ajalon.

Joshua sees, that, as has happened to other conquerors, darkness will rob him of the prize; nor leave anything more substantial in his hand than a wreath of laurel, the honours of the day. Inspired for the occasion, he lifts his bloody sword to the heavens, he commands their luminaries to stop; and when, like high-mettled coursers which, knowing their masters’ hand, instantly obey the rein, the sun and moon stand still, hang motionless in the portentous sky, how grandly does he stand there, a visible image of God? Yet, where is Joshua, or Moses, or Elijah, or Paul, or Peter, or any of all the servants by whom Jehovah wrought such wonders in the days of old, called an “image of the invisible God?” Where are these men set forth as mysteries? Where are they represented as “God manifest in the flesh?” Of which of them did God himself say. Let all the angels of God worship him? A blind superstition may worship them; but yonder, where Moses bends the knee by the side of Mary Magdalene, and Joshua bows low as Kahab, and Paul sings of the mercy that saved in himself the chief of sinners, they worship Jesus, as in his double nature both God and man; a visible manifestation of the Invisible; “the only begotten of the Father; distinguished from all other images, whether impressed on holy angels or on sainted men, as “the express image of his person.” Herein lies the amazing breadth, and length, and depth, and height, of the love of God; for you he gave that image to be broken — shattered by the hand of death. Blessed be his name, He died, the just for the unjust, that we might be saved.

III. Let me direct your attention to some illustrations of this truth.

“Shew us the Father,” said Philip to our Lord. Had he said, Cleave me that mountain, divide this sea, stop the sun, lay thy finger on the hands of time, he had asked nothing impossible; nothing more difficult for Jesus than saying to a cripple, Walk, or to the dead, Come forth. Yet impossible as was that for which Philip asked, since “no man hath seen God at any time, nor can see him,” and strangely bold as was his request, it was followed by a happy issue. What clear testimony does our Lord’s reply bear both to his own divinity and to his father’s loving, pitiful, tender nature! “He that hath seen me, Philip,” seen me weeping with the living and weeping for the dead, seen me receiving little children into my arms to bless them, seen me inviting the weary to rest, pitying all human suffering, patient under the greatest wrongs, encouraging the penitent, and ready to forgive the vilest sinners, “he that hath seen me, hath seen the Father.” In me, my character and works, you have a living, visible, perfect “image of the invisible God.”

In selecting some of the divine attributes to illustrate this, I remark —

1. In our Lord Jesus Christ we see the power of God.

An Arab, a wild son of the desert, one more accustomed to fight than to reason, to plunder a caravan than to argue a cause, was asked by a traveller how he knew that there was a God. He fixed his dark eyes with a stare of savage wonder on the man who seemed to doubt the being of God; and then, as he was wont, when he encountered a foe, to answer spear with spear, he met that question with another, How do I know whether it was a man or a camel that passed my tent last night? Well spoken, child of the desert! for not more plainly do the footprints on the sand reveal to thy eye whether it was man or camel that passed thy tent in the darkness of the night, than God’s works reveal his being and power. They testify of him. His power has left its footprint impressed upon them all.

Now, whose footprint is that on the ground there before the tomb of Lazarus? Was it God or man that passed that way, leaving strange evidence of his presence in an empty grave? There, the revolution of time has brought round again the days of Eden; for, unless it be easier to give life to the dust of the grave than to the dust of the ground, the spectators of that stupendous miracle, who stand transfixed with astonishment, gazing on the dead alive, have seen the arm of God made bare; and, from the very lips that cried, Lazarus, come forth, have they heard the voice which said of old, Let us make man in our image. Nay, a day of older date than Eden’s has returned. To make something out of nothing is a work more visibly stamped with divinity than to make one thing out of another — a living man out of lifeless dust; and ere our Lord left the world, he was to leave behind him, in an act, not of forming but of creating power, the most visible footprint and impress of the great Creator. The scene of it may be less picturesque, less striking to common eyes, than when Jesus rose in the boat to rebuke the storm; than when, leaving Galilee’s shore to cross the lake, the waters sustained him, and he walked, like a shadowy spirit, upon the heaving billows; than when he stayed a funeral procession at the gate of Nain, and, going up to the bier, laid his hand on the corpse of the widow’s son, and, changing death to life, left him folding her in his fond embraces; yet our Lord never appeared more the express image of his Father, than on yonder green grassy mountain side. The calmness of the scene, the meanness of the company, if you will have it so, the poverty of the fare, amid these accessories, that are but dull foils to the sparkling gem, Jesus stands forth in the glory of a Creator. At his will, the bread multiplies; it grows in the hands of disciples; five thousand men are filled to repletion with what had not otherwise satisfied five; and, thing unheard of before, the fragments of narrow circumstances and a scanty table far exceed the original provision. The materials of the feast filled one basket, but the fragments fill twelve. Who does not see the day of creation restored in that banquet? In the author of this, the greatest of all his miracles, who does not see “the express image” of him who made things that are out of things that were not, said of matter’s first-born and purest element, Let there be light: and there was light?

2. In Christ we see the image of a holy God. Many years ago a horrible crime was committed in a neighbouring country. It was determined that the guilty man, whoever he might be, so soon as he was discovered and convicted, should die. He had fled; but the eye of justice tracked him to his hiding-place. Dragged from it, he is arraigned at the bar; and fancy, if you can, the feelings of his judge, when, in the pale, trembling, miserable, guilty wretch, he recognised his own son — his only son! What an agonizing struggle now began in that father’s bosom! He is torn between the conflicting claims of nature and duty. The public indignation against the criminal is lost in pity for the father, as he sits there transfixed with horror, over whelmed with grief, while his child, with clasped hands and eyes that swim in tears, implores a father’s pity. Duty bears nature down. He pronounces sentence of death; but in passing it on his son, he passes it on himself. Nature would have her own. He rises; he leaves the bench; he hastens home; he lies down on his bed; nor ever rising from it, dies of a broken heart. God cannot die; yet, when, rather than his holy law should be broken with impunity, he gave up his love to bleed, his beloved son to die, a substitute for us, oh, how did the blood which dyed that cross dye his law in colours of the brightest holiness! What sermon like that on the text, “It is an evil thing and bitter, that thou hast forsaken the Lord thy God.” Nor, as in that dying Saviour hung high under a frowning heaven, as beneath that bloody tree, where Mary receives into her arms the dead body of her son, and weeping women in bitter anguish kiss his wounded feet, is there in hell

o or heaven a scene so impressively, awfully illustrative of the angels’ anthem, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.

3. In Christ we see the image of a God willing and able to save.

Let me take an illustration of this from an act of salvation which he performed under circumstances of the greatest difficulty and disadvantage. The scene is laid at the cross. Jesus is dying; agonising pains, the shouts of the pitiless multitude, their insulting mockery, and the deep darkness of the hour, combine to disturb his mind. If he can save then and there, save when his hand is nailed to the tree, what may he not do, now that he is exalted to the right hand of God, with all power given him in earth and heaven? I would awaken hope in the bosom of despair, I would like to cheer God’s people, and I would try to encourage the greatest sinners to turn with faith to this refuge of the lost; let us therefore draw near, and see how his divine ability to save, streaming like a sunbeam through a riven cloud, revealed him, even when hanging on the cross, as the adorable image of an invisible God. And may the Holy Spirit bless the sight to you!

It is easy to save one who has fallen into the flood some distance above the cataract, where the river, not yet hurrying to the fall, flows placidly on its way. But further down the difficulty becomes great, every foot further down the greater; for the current moves with faster speed and growing force, till at length it shoots forward with arrowy flight, and, reaching the brink, leaps headlong into a boiling gulf. Now, away among the mountains, I know such a place, where once three shepherds, brothers, were to leap, as they had often done, from rock to rock, across the narrow chasm through which the swollen waters rushed onward to their fall. Bold mountaineers, and looking with careless eye on a sight which had turned others dizzy, one bounded over like a red deer; another followed — but, alas, his foot slipping on the smoothly treacherous ledge, he staggered, reeled, and falling back, rolled over with a sullen plunge into the jaws of the abyss. Quick as lightning, his brother sprang forward — down to a point where the waters issue into a more open space, just above the crag over which they throw themselves into the black, rockgirdled, boiling cavern. There, standing on the verge of death, he eyes the body coming; he bends — his arm is out — thank God, he has him in his powerful grasp. Bravely, brotherly done! Alas! it is done in vain. The third brother, sad spectator of the scene, saw him swept from his slippery footing: and, in their death not divided, as of old they had lain in their childhood, locked in each other’s arms they went over, horribly whelmed in the depths of the swirling pool. Not so perished our elder Brother, and the thief he stretched out his hand to save. He plucked him from the brink of hell; he saved him on the dizzy edge of the dreadful pit. Poor wretch, ah! he hangs above the gulf; he is half over; just then he turns a dying eye on a dying Saviour, and utters but one cry for help. The arm of inercy seizes him; he is saved; now heaven holds him crowned in glory! What a revelation of Jesus as the express image of him who has power to save at the very uttermost! What an encouragement to you, though the chief of sinners, to cast yourselves at Jesus’ feet! Do it. Do it now. May heaven help you to do it now! Another moment, and you may be beyond the reach of mercy. Another moment may be a whole eternity too late.