064. THE PROCESS BIOLOGICAL, NOT MECHANICAL

THE PROCESS BIOLOGICAL, NOT MECHANICAL

I never should have come to God at all, if it had not been for God’s decree of electing grace and Christ’s execution of that decree when he came to me in my sins and entered my heart with his renewing power. And why should we think that the world will be renovated in any other way? When I think of the occasional dissensions among missionaries, and the occasional falls of ministers of the gospel, I am convinced that a mightier power than that of man must be at work, or the church of Christ would long since have collapsed and died. In the Papal Manufactory of Mosaics at Rome I once saw an artist fitting and polishing rough bits of stone of many shapes and colors, and with them constructing a face of Christ that exactly reproduced the head of the Saviour in the Transfiguration of Raphael. But Christ himself is doing a greater work than that. He is taking the rough stones of humanity all about us, and is not only making them individually into children of Abraham, but out of them collectively he is building up a redeemed humanity that reflects his own glorious image. Christ’s method is that of joining himself to corporate humanity; and the last seal of the book of God’s decrees will not be opened until Christ has gone forth conquering and to conquer through all the earth and has subdued to himself the last rebellious soul of man. And when the day of that consummation dawns, redeemed humanity will not look over the walls and towers of the New Jerusalem and say: "This is great Babylon that we have built;" but will rather cry: "Not unto us, not unto us, but to thy name give glory!" and will ascribe the power and the salvation to God and to the Lamb. But the process by which the world is thus renewed and transformed into the church is not a mechanical, but rather, a biological one. Christ takes hold of humanity not from without but from within. We do not make void the law of human activity, when we rest all our hopes upon the purpose of God to give the world to Christ. Nay, rather, we establish that law. The Christ who fulfills the decrees of God is not separable from the church. Christ has a body, and that body is his people. In human salvation he has limited himself by joining himself to the church. As my soul can work only by using my physical organism, brain and tongue and hands, so Christ under the limitations which he has assumed can work only through his body, the church. Christ and his people are one, in a deeper and more real sense than we have ever imagined. We are his brain, his tongue, his hands, for translating the decrees of God into history. The "Ask of me" which God the Father addresses to God the Son, he addresses to all who have become sons of God through union with the only begotten Son, and the command is the church’s summons to prayer. "Ask of me, and I will give," is God’s assurance to the church that prayer uttered in the name of Christ shall not be in vain. "Ask of me, and I will give thee the heathen for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession," is the promise that in answer to her prayer the whole world shall be given to the church.