Man Knowing God Through Christ
ieee restoration of man to God necessarily issues in the restoration to man of the knowledge of God. The original purpose of man’s creation was that he should be a being capable of the consciousness of, and in communion, and co-operation with, God Himself. To all this he is restored in Christ. As the vital union between God and man is created and maintained by the Spirit, so also is the work of revealing God to man that of the Spirit. He “the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God;” and these “Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love Him”;
that is, the things of the love of God in Christ, which man in clouded intelligence was ignorant of, “unto us God revealed them through the Spirit.”1 Thus while in Christ God has provided Himself with a Medium of self-revelation, Christ is revealed to man by the Spirit. This scheme of revelation must be understood, if there is to be a true appreciation of the revelation itself. The whole perfect system is revealed in the last discourses of Jesus with His disciples, prior to His Passion. When Philip, speaking in larger degree as the mouthpiece of fallen humanity than he knew, said to Jesus “Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us,”2 there was neither doubt nor uncertainty in the Lord’s reply. He distinctly declared, “He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father.”3
This declaration is in perfect harmony with the inspired statement of John that “no man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.”4 There is no way by which man can know God save through Christ. All attempts on the part of man, to formulate a
*; Cor, 2.9; 10: John 14. 8. 3John 14. 9. ‘John 1. 18 conception of God, or declare a doctrine concerning Him, are futile, save as conception and doctrine are based upon, and perpetually true to, the Revelation He has made of Himself in Christ. Recognising man’s inability to know God apart from Himself, the Lord also recognises that men were unable to understand the revelation of God in Himself, save as it should be explained by that Spirit Who “searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” He therefore immediately followed Philip’s question with the promise of the Spirit, and such teaching concerning Him, as should fit the disciples for His coming and work. From the body of that. final teaching, three main statements will be sufficient, as giving the teaching of Christ under this head. 1. “The Holy Spirit — He shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you.”? 2. “The Spirit of truth — He shall bear witness of Me.”* 3. “The Spirit of truth — He shall glorify Me: for He shall take of
Mine, and shall declare it unto you.”
These words clearly demonstrate two things. First, that the work of the Spirit is essentially that of revealing Christ to those in whom He has taken up His abode; and secondly, that man can only know Christ through the Spirit’s illumination, as man can only know God through Christ’s revelation. Any Christology which is not the direct issue of the Spirit’s teaching is false; for the mystery of His Person, and the meaning of His work, are alike inscrutable to the mind of man in its darkened condition, and can only be apprehended as the light of God falls upon them. Through Christ, the Spirit of truth indwells the believer, and through the Spirit of truth therefore Christ becomes the indwelling One; and as He by the Spirit is made known to man, man is restored to the knowledge of God, which he had lost through sin.
Man’s knowledge of God through Christ by the Spirit may be contemplated therefore by considering; first, the unveiling of Christ by the Spirit; second, the apprehension of Christ through the Spirit; third, the consequent knowledge of God.
I. The Spirit’s revelation of the Christ has been individual and historic. He commenced His work with individuals, and then for t Cor. 2. I0. John 14. 26. John 15. 26. ‘John 16. 13, 14.
the sake of the generations to come, proceeded, in co-operation with such individuals, to prepare for the future. By personal revelation of Christ to individuals, He prepared men for the creation of a written record concerning Christ. He then through men thus prepared became the Author of the new record. That record being completed, He has given an exposition of it through the centuries, in constant co-operation with men. The Spirit commenced His work when upon the day of Pentecost He baptised the company of waiting souls into new union with God in Christ. In tracing His work therefore, it is necessary to begin with the Acts of the Apostles, while of course in a study of His revelation, the structure of the New Testament is the true order. In the Acts of the Apostles, the Spirit is seen communicating life to individual men, and then directing them definitely and immediately in all the affairs of their life. One of the special notes of the narrative of the early Church is that of how men were specifically led by the Spirit, and yet, it is always to be observed that their action under His guidance, is that of loyalty to Christ. The Spirit hinders or impels, but they are restrained when He hinders, or go forward when He impels, as loyal to Christ. Thus it is evident that while these men were conscious of the immediate interference of the Spirit, they recognised that that interference was an interpretation to them of the will of their crowned Lord.
Eventually, for the consolidation of the Church in its relation to Christ, and for the continuity of its consciousness of Christ, it was necessary that such record of Him as a Person in history, as should form a perpetual basis for the Spirit’s interpretation, should be written. Out of this necessity came what are known now as the New Testament Scriptures. In these writings the Spirit’s one subject is Christ. In the Gospels there are recorded such facts concerning His Person and teaching as are necessary. In them He is seen very largely in splendid loneliness, separated from, while yet in the midst of men; glorious in true Kingliness, as Matthew’s story shows; patient in unceasing service, as Mark’s record reveals; supreme in the realisation of the Divine ideal of humanity, as Luke’s evangel demonstrates; and mysterious in the essential majesty of
Deity, as John’s writings declare. wie Then follows that treatise in which Christ is manifest in new union with men, continuing the work commenced in loneliness, in co-operation with such as are united to Him by the Holy Spirit. This record has to do almost exclusively with Christ as He calls outsiders to Himself for the remission of sins, for the renewal of life, for the restoration of the lost order. Passing from this the Spirit in the great didactic writings reveals Christ as realised in the believer, and as expressing Himself through the Church. While in the Acts He is almost exclusively seen calling the outsider, in the epistles He is seen again almost exclusively in His relation to those who have come in obedience to His call. Then in the Apocalypse, to a man who is “in the Spirit,”* there is granted Christ’s own vision of His coming victory, and the consummation of all the purposes of God concerning men, realised in Christ.
At this point the writings being complete, the Spirit did not cease His work, but rather commenced it, in all its fullness and beauty. Through the centuries of the Christian era, there may be traced an ever-broadening and deepening apprehension of Christ, due invariably to the Spirit’s revelation to the Church of Christ, a revelation constantly proceeding in harmony with the inspired Writings, so that nothing has been revealed in addition to the facts recorded therein, while yet in an ever-enlarging understanding of their meaning, there has come this ever-increasing appreciation of the Christ.
It may be safely affirmed that the Person and work of Jesus are more perfectly understood than they have ever been, and that He, by the Spirit, is demanding and receiving a larger and profounder loyalty, than has ever been the case before. This statement is made with a very keen recognition of the fact that the conflict which has been going forward in the outworks of the Christian revelation, is gathering around the central citadel of the Person of Christ. In view and in presence of that conflict, there is no fear in the heart of such as are conscious of the continued presence and work of the Spirit. The issue must be a new vindication of the Personality of the God-man, and a new appreciation of that concerning Him which will ever be beyond the possibility of formulated statement on the part of man,
Thus it is seen that the Holy Spirit of truth, through processes of
*Rev. I. 10.
MAN KNOWING GOD Dam OUCH HR EST e373
infinite patience, whether it be to the individual, or in the history of the Tace, continues His sacred work of revealing Christ, interpreting His Word, and administering His work.
I. Leaving the subject now in its historic setting, it will be well to consider somewhat more carefully the apprehension of Christ through the Spirit by the individual. The first work of the Spirit of God towards this end is that of the preparation of the spirit of man. That spirit originally created as a medium for the knowledge of God, was polluted, and disorganised by sin, and therefore became useless for the fulfilment of its original intention. By the impartation of Christ to the spirit of man, the Holy Spirit of God cleanses from pollution. By uniting the spirit of man with Christ He readjusts the instrument, and by lifting man into the place where he looks out upon all things in fellowship with Christ, He focuses the lens, that so the pictures may no longer be distorted, blurred, and inaccurate, but definite, clear, and precise. This preliminary work of the Spirit is most immediate and most gracious. And yet its value is only known in the results which follow.
Man’s experience of this work is not in a new self-consciousness, even though it be that of purity and illumination. It is rather an experience of the issue, that namely of a new apprehension of Christ, and consequently a new knowledge of God.
Then follows necessarily the work of the Spirit in presenting the Object to this restored instrument. That Object is Christ. The method of the Spirit here is always governed by the individual necessity of the believer, and by capacity. It may be safely affirmed that the Spirit of God has no stereotyped system of theology to teach men. The great facts concerning Christ are never taught by the Spirit to companies of men, but to individual lives, and the lesson now being learned by any single person, is the one necessary for the growth of that particular individual. To some to-day He will reveal the Master’s sympathy, to others His severity; and so, according to the necessity of each, will He minister the revelation of the living Lord.
It is equally true that He does not measure His teaching by the standards of time, but by the capacity of the disciple, revealing only
that which each is able to bear. His method is moreover perpetually characterised by the fact that every individual revelation of Christ to the spirit of the disciple has within it some new claim, demanding immediate obedience, and the measure of the obedience is the measure of an increased capacity for yet new revelations.
Thus man, indwelt by the Spirit, is the subject of a perpetually growing consciousness of the sublimities of Christ, through a perpetually growing understanding of His simplicities. Thus it is that while the youngest believer may seem to be in possession of all the facts concerning Christ; as the years pass, through the varied disciplines of life, and the operation of an abiding communion, it is seen that the things known were hardly known, that the facts recognised were imperfectly realised; and gradually and yet surely with the passing of the years, through every window, new light is streaming, and new meanings are dawning on the soul. In the earliest years of discipleship there must be recognition of the simplicity of Christ, as the story of His life is read; of His perpetual serenity as He passed through scenes that might have been expected to disturb the stoutest heart; of the sweetness of His disposition, in spite of all the occasions which so often end in the embittering of the human heart; of the severity of His Spirit against all forms of wrong and of tyranny; and of His ever active sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men. All these things, however, are only learned as to their fullness of value, and of meaning, as the Spirit reveals them according to the demand of occasions, and the capacity of the learner. Through this great process it is discovered that the simplicity of Christ is due to His sublimity of the consciousness of the straightness of the line of truth; and His serenity is due to the abiding sense of the permanence of righteousness; and His sweetness manifest because of His understanding of the ultimate victory of love; while His severity is the necessary out-flaming anger of that love against all that for the time may seem to violate it; and His sympathy is the natural, spontaneous relation of essential love to all the consciousness of those upon whom such love is set.
Thus the issue of the indwelling Spirit is not merely the unveiling before the Spirit of man of the fact of Christ; but also the preparation of the spirit of man, which issues in a true and ever growing apprehension of the unveiled One.
Il. Thus God is known to man, and that after the method of the original Divine intention through a Man Who is His express Image. Redeemed man acts upon the same principle as fallen man in his search after God, with a distinction and a difference both in method and in result. Man’s darkened understanding still conscious of his need of a god, projected himself into immensity, with the result that his conception of God was that of a monster, because not only were the essentials of his nature, intelligence, emotion, and will, magnified in the process, but their degradation. Restored to God, man still projects Man into infinity, but not himself. It is now by the magnifying of the Man Christ Jesus, Who by the Spirit indwells the believer, that God is found. The intelligence of Jesus, characterised by clearness, freedom from questioning, and unanswerable statement of truth, surprises and startles the soul anew in every fresh understanding of it through the Spirit’s interpretation. And as these lines are projected from the wisdom of Christ into infinity, the mind catches some conception of what the wisdom of the infinite God is in its perfectly clear understanding of all things, so that “in Him is no darkness at all.”! His freedom from perplexity carried out into the immeasurable, aids man in his apprehension of that great reason for the quiet calm of Deity, in the midst of the things which, coming of their imperfect understanding, so trouble and vex the heart of the finite. Every century of consideration of the Word of Jesus proving as it has, that His teaching was not a deduction from appearances, but the uttering forth of eternal principles in the speech of man, has given to men a new conception of the authority of God, as based upon the necessity of the things that are.
Perhaps the supreme consciousness of God, however, has come by the projection into immensity of what may still be spoken of as the emotional fact in the Person of Jesus. In Him love proceeded out of the necessity of its own might, and expressed itself in self-forgetfulness to the point of absolute sacrifice, and that without regard to any worth in the object upon which it was set. In Him moreover, love was patient, optimistic, powerful. No lack of response was sufficient to quench its ardour, no degradation sufficient to extinguish its hopefulness, no opposition equal to overcome its might.
y John 1. 5.
It was this revelation of His love that made it possible for there ever to have been written the statement, so simple and sublime, so sweet in its constraint, so manifold in its beauty, that heaven’s music will be needed to express its harmonies, while earth’s discords are being changed by it towards the heavenly symphony, “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have eternal life.”* It was surely with his eyes resting upon the Man of Nazareth, and his heart speaking of his consciousness of the marvel of the love of the Perfect One, that Paul wrote his classic passage descriptive of love.*
And yet again, the action of the will of Jesus as responsive ever to the supreme will of His Father, and moving always under the impulse of love, has revealed for evermore the truth of unutterable value, that the will of God operates not arbitrarily, but under constraint, the constraint of the essential fact of His own nature, that of an infinite and immeasurable love.
Thus Jesus the perfect Man, standing before the soul in all His perfection, is the gateway through which the mind passes out to a conception of God which arrests, subdues, and commands the loyalty of the life. It is in His presence that man exclaims, “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us: this is Jehovah; we have waited for Him, we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.”
To say this is to declare also the difference in result. Man of old, projecting himself until he found an enormity, learned only to hate and to fear his conception of God. To-day, man, projecting the perfect One finds infinite satisfaction in the revealed Father, and his heart goes out in adoring love, and his life is spent in glad service. Thus in Christ, man is restored to the knowledge of God by the enlightening of his intelligence, and the presentation thereto of all the gracious facts, in such way, and in such measure as he is able to bear, and capable of receiving.
John 3. 16. “1 Cor. 13. ‘Isa. 25. 9.