The Meaning: God Was in Christ
Wing endeavoured to consider the sublime fact of the Incarnation, without attempting to fathom the infinite mystery, it is now competent to enquire what was the purpose
of the Incarnation. The question may immediately be answered in the brief statement of Paul, “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.”! All the fullness of this declaration cannot be comprehended until the final movements in the mission of Jesus have been considered, those namely of His passion, and resurrection, and ascension. It is by these that God reconciles the world to Himself in Christ. The first fact however, rendering these possible of accomplishment, is that of the Incarnation, and in it there is the great first movement towards the reconciling of man to God.
By Incarnation God has revealed Himself anew to the intelligence of man,-in such way as to appeal to his emotion, and call for the submission of his will. All this however could only be completed by the completion of the work of Incarnation, for it was only through the death of Jesus that the perfect revelation of God came to the intelligence, as it was only through that death that a reconciliation could be accomplished, which should have as its foundation fact, the forgiveness of sin, and the communication of a new life principle. All this is most clearly contained within the word of the apostle, who in writing to the Colossians declares that they “being in time past alienated and enemies in your mind in your evil works” were “now... reconciled in the body of His flesh through death.”2 Thus the reconciling work is only completed through the death of Jesus, but that final work is made possible in the fact of “the body of His flesh.” That is to say that Incarnation prepares for Atonement. The present subject is wholly that of the revelation God has given man of Himself in the Person of the Christ.
In previous studies it has been shown that man distanced from God by sin became ignorant of Him, and unlike Him. Notwith-
12 Cor. §. 19. 2Col. I. 21, 22.
standing this fact, the capacity, and indeed the necessity for God remains, even though man has lost his knowledge of Him, his love for Him, and his likeness to Him. It has been seen, moreover, that the only conception of God that man has, is what he finds within himself, and in attempting to think of God, he has consciously or unconsciously always projected his own personality into immensity. This would have been a true thing for him to do, had man remained true to the Divine ideal, for he was created in the image of God. Seeing that the shadow had become blurred, and the image defaced, in the projection of himself man has emphasized the defects, and intensified the ruin. To correct that, God became incarnate, stooped to the level of man’s power to comprehend Him, gave him a perfect Man in order that the lines projected from the perfect Personality into immensity might be true lines, and so reveal correctly the facts concerning Himself.
The present study is an attempt to examine that broad statement, first by noticing how the Incarnation has corrected false ideas; and secondly, by examining the Incarnation as the fulfilment of all that was highest in the thinking of the past, and the beginning of a new understanding.
I. Man’s ideas of God are necessarily anthropomorphic. Eliminating for the moment from the discussion the fact of the fall, it still remains true that man’s comprehension of the Eternal God must necessarily be based upon the facts of his own personality. When man stood erect in full possession of the facts of his own being, he was in very deed in the shadow and image of God. Essentially a spirit, possessed of an intellectual, an affectional, and a volitional nature, he was a medium through which these essential facts should be expressed along the line of force or power. The body of man was the medium of the spirit’s expression. Such was the Divine ideal of humanity, spirit and body; the spirit crowned, the body subservient; the spiritual nature dominant, the physical submissive thereto. Therein lay a suggestion, and indeed a revelation concerning the essential facts of Deity. God is a Spirit, intelligent, emotional, volitional. These essential facts of His being govern all the forces of His nature, and so find expression in a thousand different ways, through created things. What man’s body is to his spirit, all the created universe is to God. The Old Testament literature is full of this thought, and so God is described as clothing Himself with light, as riding upon the wings of the wind, as making the clouds His chariot. Thus unfallen man, reverently projecting the facts of his own being into immensity, would have a true conception of God. It follows by a sequence from which there can be no escape, that when man has fallen, if he still continue the same process he will create a deity, but it must be false, a contradiction of the truth, because man himself is a failure, and a contravention of the Divine purpose. In man, out of harmony with God, the spiritual fact has been neglected, with the result that the intelligence operates wholly within the realm of the material, the affection is warped and prostituted; the will has lost its true principle of action. Project these things into immensity, and there will result gods, or a god, sensuous, cruel, tyrannical. It is the story of the religions of the human race.
This has also been dealt with in a previous chapter as revealed in Baal, in Moloch, in Mammon. New emphasis is added to the fact by a consideration of the gods of Rome and of Greece. In each case the deities worshipped were so many, that no man pretended to know their number, and the character of them may be described in very few words, vindictive, lazy, trivial, always seeking their own, treating men in such way that the only reason why men still feared or served them was that they would buy off from vengeance, and prevent their cruelty. In the presence of this universal incapacity to discover God, what can be done? The answer did not come, as it could not come, from man. It came from God.
II. In Jesus of Nazareth, God gave to the world again a Man, perfect in His humanity, and therefore perfect in His revelation of the facts concerning Himself. In Jesus there was a fulfilment of all that was highest and best in the ideas of God, which had come to men by the revelations of the past. The continuous work of God from the moment when man fell from his high dignity, by the act of his rebellion, and so obscured his vision of God, was that of self-revelation. Through processes that were long and tedious, judged from the standpoint of human lives, God with infinite patience spoke in simple sentences, shone forth in gleams of light, and so kept enshrined within the heart of man, facts concerning Himself, which man was unable to discover for himself. So degraded was human intelligence, that speaking after the manner of men only, it may be said that it took whole centuries for God to enshrine in the consciousness of the race some of the simple and most fundamental facts concerning Himself. Man’s ruin was so terrible, and so profound, as witness the darkened intelligence, the deadened emotion, and the degraded will, that there was but one alternative open to the Eternal God. Either He must sweep out and destroy utterly the race, or else in infinite patience, and through long processes, lead it back to Himself. He chose the pathway of reconciliation in His infinite grace, at what cost the story of the Christ alone perfectly reveals.
It may be objected that Christ might have been immediately sent, and yet this is utterly to fail to comprehend the depth of the degradation of man. There were many lessons which the race must learn, before it was ready to receive the light that should shine in the Person of the Christ. For instance, man had lost his conception of the unity of God, and was making to himself thousands upon thousands of deities. The history of Israel is the history of the enshrining within the race of the great truth of the unity of God. “Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah.”! That was the initial lesson, and yet Israel never learned it fully until she had passed into Babylonish captivity, and returning therefrom, abandoned for evermore every form of idolatry.:
The slowness of the work was due entirely to the ruin of the only instrument through which a perfect revelation could be made. God cannot be as perfectly expressed through any symbol as through a man. Not through a system of ethics could God make Himself known, as through one who lives wholly within His law. In the fullness of time there came into human history the Revealer. Man everywhere had been attempting to discover God by the projection into infinitude of his own personality, and had utterly, and absolutely, and necessarily failed. By the coming of Christ, God gave man One Who, perfectly realising His ideal of humanity, made a perfect instrument through which God should reveal Himself’to the heart of the race. Jesus was the express
Deut. 6. 4.
Image of God. From every fact in the Personality of the Man Jesus, lines may be projected into infinity, and the infinite enlargement of the Person of Christ correctly reveals the fact of God. In Incarnation God accepts the human standpoint of appreciation of Himself, which was also His own standpoint, and enshrining Himself in human life, He thinks, He speaks, He acts through human channels.
Think then for a moment of the Personality of Christ, in order that it may be seen how within the compass of that which is knowable to man, lies a revelation of that which otherwise is utterly unknowable. In that perfect Personality there is found perfect humanity, humanity which in itself harmonises the spiritual and the material, humanity in which the spirit is dominant, and the body subservient and expressive. In Jesus the physical is not scourged, and bruised, but governed and glorified. In Him the Spirit is not imprisoned and degraded, but enthroned and dominant. He is a perfect human Personality.
When these lines of perfect humanity are flung out into the infinitudes, theré is presented to the mind the perfect Deity, the spiritual essence dominant, while all force, as expressed through creation, is subservient to spirit. Every fact of the clear shining of the wisdom of the Christ, as Man, reveals the infinite wisdom of the Eternal God. Every manifestation of the unselfish and unwearying love of the heart of Jesus, is an outshining of the eternal and undying love of God Himself. Every movement and decision of the will of Jesus, under the constraint of the Divine will, is a revelation of the action and method of the will of God, under the constraint of the Infinite and Eternal Love.
The God-man then is the gateway between God and man. Through Him God has found His way back to man, from whom He had been excluded by his rebellion. In Him man finds his way back to God from Whom he had been alienated by the darkening of his intelligence, the death of his love, and the disobedience of his will. God finds Himself in this Person and is with men. Man finds himself in this Person, and is with God.
Through the God-man, Deity takes hold upon humanity.
Through the God-man, humanity takes hold upon Deity.
This revelation of God in Jesus may be illustrated both by His teaching, and His deeds. Let there be selected any word that fell from His lips, any incident of His wonderful life, and when carefully considered, it will be discovered that there is sounding in the air the very Word of God, and appearing before the mind His activity. The simplest simplicity of humanity to be found in Jesus of Nazareth is the gateway through which the ‘reverent and submissive soul passes into the sublimest sublimity of Deity.
His teaching was the sum of all wisdom. The sweet and tender words that come like music still, to all who in the stress and strain of life hear them, “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for Iam meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light,” are yet the words that none but God could have uttered in the hearing of the restless feverishness of a fallen race. How human the utterance. Take out the words that arrest attention, “Come Sy labour sly. heavy laden. .ictirestanznyokest.egburdent Is there one of them that sounds at first like the language of the infinite God, or the speech of the perfect heaven? The whole passage thrills and throbs with a common consciousness of human life. Yet sit down in front of it, and take time to think. Press the ear closely to these little words of earthly value, and there will be heard sounding through them the deep organ notes of the Eternal Wisdom. The tender call of the man is the putting into such words as may be heard and understood by the heavy laden masses, all the deepest philosophies of life. Surely never man spake like this Man. The speech of this Man is the speech of God.
Or take His deeds, any of them. Take them almost at haphazard. The cleansing of the temple, the nursing of little children, the human interest that watched people as they gave at the treasury, the tears which chased each other down the face, the white hot anger that flamed and burned and scorched. And yet behind all is the evident going of Deity, not one of them have explanation apart therefrom. Let any man who imagines that the cleansing of the temple was a purely human act, possess himself of a whip of small cords, and attempt to drive out the vested interests and the hoary superstitions, which gather around and spoil the temple which should be a place of prayer. It is simply absurd to suppose that the men who fled from His presence were frightened of a Galilean peasant. That anger at the desecrated house of God, which flamed from His eye, and made His whole demeanour terrifying, was the flashing forth of the outraged God, Whose house of succour had been made a den of thieves. It is not conceivable that a mob of Jews would yield their money tables to the claim of a peasant fresh from Galilee. They were conscious for once of the anger of Deity..;
It was indeed a Man Who took the children in His arms and blessed them. The picture is so human, so suggestive of all that is finest and most beautiful in true manhood; and yet listen, for He is speaking, and the word is revolutionary and yet authoritative. “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto Me: for to such belongeth the Kingdom of Heaven.”1! If this Man be Man alone, He is an ignorant fanatic. The children were never counted as in the Kingdom of God, until from the sacred rite of confirmation, they became themselves sons of the law. Yet this Man, holding in His arms young children, babes, says that they are the true type of the character of such as are in His Kingdom. The centuries have vindicated the declaration, and have proved that it was the voice of God, rebuking false conceptions of human greatness, which cured human thinking, and announced the supremacy of simplicity.
And yet again, it was a great human heart that shook with emotion, and cast forth tears when from the mountain He beheld the city of His love, corrupt, and hastening to her doom. And yet it is unthinkable that that is all, for in the tears is caught the flash and glory of that Divine compassion, which pronounces doom, not with the note of exultant triumph, but with the pathos of wounded love.
The teaching of Jesus, considered and followed to its final conclusions, brings the mind into contact with the infinite wisdom of the Eternal God. The deeds of Jesus, correctly appreciated, reveal the activities of God as to purpose and method.
The Incarnation is first a revelation to man of man as first Divine intention. It is therefore also a revelation of God, for perfect man is the image of God. In Jesus there has been revealed to the race God’s purpose for every human being, a mind of royal and loyal love, and the activity of self-emptying service, as expressive of that loyalty. The greatest injunction laid upon Christian men by the writers of the New Testament is that of the Apostle, “Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”! His mind was the mind wholly actuated by the principle of love. It was submissive and regnant, submissive to the dominion of love, reigning in the power of love..
From this consideration of ideal man, there breaks upon the consciousness the truth concerning God. In Jesus, man finds Him for Whom he has been searching, and being unable to find, has created the false deities that have,cursed his whole life. According to this revelation, God’s knowledge is the knowledge of personal interest in all His creation. His affection joys in the joy of His people, and sorrows in the midst of their sorrows. His -will is ever impulsed by this perfect affection, and operates within this intimate knowledge. These truths, too large for perfect comprehension, are yet recognised as the lines project from the unique Personality of Jesus into immensity. Through the Man Jesus, man has found God. He had built upon his ruined nature a false conception of God, but now upon the perfect nature of the last Adam, man forms a correct idea of the infinite God. Jesus of Nazareth is perfect in His humanity. That humanity is the corner-stone, and if its lines are all carried forth, as in the case of the corner-stone of the pyramid, the whole fact will be included.
The value of the Incarnation then at once becomes apparent. Human misconceptions of God have created human hatred of God. The hatred of the human heart therefore is not hatred of the true God, for He is not known. In Christ He is revealed, and when men know Him as the Revealer, they love Him.
Much more of course needs to be said, as in the mission of Christ much more needed to be done, for though the light of Deity has perfectly shone in the Person of the Christ, man does not see it. Something must be done to quicken his intelligence, to open his eye. That, the Incarnation does not do. It provides the true view of God for the quickened intelligence. In the present study the subject is merely that of the Divine self-revelation, contained within the Incarnation. When man through the mystery of Atonement, is reconciled, and the miracle of regeneration is completed, then in
*Phil. 2. 5.
the vision of God granted in Christ, he will also be reconciled in intelligence, in emotion, in will.
Thus the Incarnation has made provision for the reconciliation of the whole man, but into this reconciliation man will only pass as he becomes reconciled through the death of Jesus. When so reconciled, his full salvation will proceed through the harmonising of the facts of his being, with the revelation of the possibilities thereof in the Man Jesus, under the constraint of the infinite love ’ of God revealed also in Him. “If while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved by His life.”
Romans §. 10,