03.11. CHAPTER XI.THE MYSTERY OF THE GOD-MAN

CHAPTER XI. THE MYSTERY OF THE GOD-MAN.

"He took not on Him the nature of angels; but He took on Him the seed of Abraham." Hebrews 2:16. The mystery of the God-Man! Such a mystery implies both glory and obscurity; and a careless, irreverent handling of such a theme only lessens the glory and deepens the obscurity. No human philosophy can clear away the cloud which has ever hung about Christ. Concede the truth of the Bible portrait, the accuracy of the scriptural representation, that Jesus Christ was "God manifest in the flesh;" that He, for the first and only time in history, exhibited in Himself the union of the human and the divine natures in one person; that He was a proper Son of God and proper Son of Man, and you have necessary mystery. We are so constituted that we can understand nothing which is not in accord with our experience. Everything that is new to us is comprehended only by the aid of that which is old; we find in it a combination or arrangement which is novel, yet the principal elements, which are combined and arranged, are more or less familiar. What we call "invention" or "discovery" does not proceed by huge strides or leaps, but step by step. Some new feature is added to that which is already familiar. An old machine is put to new uses or takes a new form; a common agent is linked to new and perhaps strange appliances, as when steam or hot air is employed as a motive-power; two or more long-known appliances are united, to accomplish what neither could alone; but, in a peculiar sense, "there is nothing new under the sun." Even such a startling marvel as Edison’s phonograph is simply the application of certain facts and principles, well understood in the scientific world, viz: that sound, like light and heat and color, is a mode of motion; that the differences in sound are due to the varying rapidity of vibrations of air; that these vibrations may be made to impress and record themselves upon a sensitive surface, like tin-foil; and that, under proper conditions, the impressions so recorded may again reflect or reproduce vibrations similar to the first, as the stereotype casts made from type may be used to mould new type. "New inventions" are simply improvements upon the forms, methods, modes of appliance, or combinations and conditions of elements and principles already known. We rise to the height of each new discovery upon the step furnished by that which preceded; and so we are prepared to understand what is new and strange. If today some entirely new principle should be revealed, which should contradict all previous notions and revolutionize our whole theory of mechanics effecting combinations before believed to be impossible, and by means and modes hitherto unknown it could be to all of us only a mystery. Men skilled in mechanics and in science and philosophy would simply confess, "We do not comprehend this;" and it would only be when familiarity with the fact of its reality had destroyed its novelty, that we should be able to think of it without surprise and wonder. Admitting that Jesus was indeed the God-man, the hope is vain of either escaping or explaining the mystery which invests Him; for he presents the phenomenon of history, original, unique, solitary; no being like Him, before or after. Here is a combination heretofore supposed to be contradictory and impossible! God is infinite; space cannot contain Him, nor time limit Him. Man is finite, fenced in by definite bounds. How can the unlimited and limited combine and unite? All our previous notions of things are contradicted in the God-man. God is omnipotent; yet here is God, submitting to the laws and limits of a human body, which can occupy but one place at any one time, and must, by the law of locomotion, take time for a transfer from place to place. God is omniscient; yet here is a being claiming equality with Jehovah, yet affirming that there are some things which as a man, and even as the Messiah, He knows not. God is omnipotent; yet the God-man says He "can do nothing of himself," and that it is God dwelling in Him that "doeth the works.”

How can we understand or explain this sublime and stupendous mystery? We cannot. Allow the fact to be true; concede and confess the reality; the gospel itself attempts no solution of the enigma, because we can interpret that which is new only with the aid of that which is old; and here no aid can be gotten from that which is old. Christ is wholly new - a man with human infirmities, without human sin or sinfulness; poor, yet having at His disposal universal riches; weak and weary, yet having the exhaustless energy of God; unable to resist the violence and insults of His foes, yet able to summon legions of angels at a word or wish; suffering, yet incapable of anything but perfect bliss; dying, yet Himself having neither beginning of days nor end of years. Can you or I understand a being who in Himself presents such a combination?

What is there in our experience or observation to help us in the interpretation of a mystery so profound as that of the God-man? Nothing absolutely nothing? Should we start with the faintest hope of removing or penetrating the cloud surrounding Him, we should only be proclaiming our own folly, and not only so, but degrading this sublime personage to the low level of our common humanity; for the expectation of fully understanding and comprehending Him implies another expectation - that we shall find in Him nothing essentially above the plane of purely human character and career. To admit that He may be more than man is to admit that we may find in Him what we cannot explain. But mark, that the very mystery which invests Christ, and of which we cannot divest Him, is an argument for His reality as the God-man; for, as we could not understand such a being, neither could we, of ourselves, imagine or invent a God-man. This important thought needs to be expanded and emphasized. We have seen that we can understand only what accords with our experience. So does our experience assist us in all creations even of imagination and fancy. What we call original conceptions are only original forms or combinations of older ideas. A painter may use a brush to represent a scene, the like of which never existed; but he is putting together things which he has seen. Even a crazy artist, who might paint trees with feathers for foliage, and mountains with ice-fields at their base and tropical gardens at their summits, or men with eyes in their feet, and hands growing out of their heads, would only be putting together, in grotesque shapes and strange union, things which he had seen. And so man never conceives anything absolutely new; without his experience to aid him, he could invent nothing new, or if he did, it could be only absurdity and contradiction.

Among the fabled creatures of mythology were the centaur, faun, mermaid. The centaur was a monster, half man and half horse, said to have inhabited a part of Thessaly. But such creation involves an absurdity; for the arms of the man correspond to the forelegs of the horse, and a compound like this involves a double set of bones and muscles and organs, such as pertain to the upper part of the trunk. The faun had the legs, feet and ears of the goat, with the rest of the body human. But here again is absurdity; for a goat is a grass-eating animal, and man is not; and there are constitutional differences that defy combination. The mermaid was half woman, uniting to the human head and body the tail of the fish. But the fish is anatomically a different creature, with totally different habits; the fish breathes in the water, where man drowns. And so all these inventions of fable are absurdities. When man tries to form a new creation, even of fancy, by combining things which do not exist together, he blunders into grotesque absurdities.

Now, whence came the idea of the God-man? There was nothing in man’s experience to suggest it, and yet, with all its mystery, there is no absurdity. The person and character and career of Jesus are exactly what might be expected if God actually became man; and yet there was no experience to help even in the forming of such a new and harmonious conception. Men had often imagined the "gods as coming down, in the likeness of men;" the pagan religions are full of such incarnations; but they are not at all like the mystery of the God-man, for they represent God as taking on Him a human form only; they are manifestations of God. Here is the only true incarnation of God in a human body, with a human soul; and yet there are no absurdities. It is not two beings somehow united, nor two persons with two minds, two wills, two conflicting existences, wedded in impossible bonds; but one being, harmonious, symmetrical, consistent not God in man, or God and man, but the God-man.

We ask again, whence came such an idea and ideal? Deny the reality, and your denial compels you to account for the conception! The attempt to escape one mystery involves you in one even greater. Here is a labyrinth; you are lost in a maze of perplexing paths; you may flee from the perplexity of the God-man to the denial of His reality, but neither path leads you out of the labyrinth. And there is but one path that does. Here is the clue: admit that Christ was an absolutely new being, the union of the divine and the human in one person, and that the evangelists simply give an honest portrait of this marvelous personage, without attempting to explain the profound mystery which hangs about Him, and you have a plain, straight road out of the labyrinth! Here, as the innocent Irish maid said, is "the entrance to get out at." And the only possible or rational solution of the enigma is faith in the witness of the Word to Christ, and in the witness of Christ to himself; for if the reality did not exist, the conception is more marvelous, mysterious, miraculous, than the person of the God-man himself!

While confessing the mystery of the God-man, and having no design or desire to attempt the absurd task of clearing up the mystery, into the depths of which "angels desire to look," there are many things about the person of Christ and the whole subject which may be seen in much clearer light than they commonly are.

There is a wide difference between mystery and mist; and, while standing in awe before an impenetrable mystery, we may penetrate the mist. In other words, false or partial conceptions, or half- truths, make the mystery needlessly greater, and involve us in useless doubt, and tempt us to dangerous denial and disbelief of truth and fact.

Let us then seek to pierce, or rise above, the mist of vague, partial, mistaken notions, with which we often surround the God-man, and get clearer views at least of the mystery itself. And, if we still find, that He soars, like a mountain, far above our sight or thought, into altitudes so sublime, that even on wings of imagination we cannot follow him; perhaps we may still get near enough to see the mountain, without needless mist or haze, or even the dimness of distance between.

There is an old fable of the Knights and the Shield. Some proud old baron had exalted a shield by the roadside, as the pious monks of Germany set the crucifix in shrines along the routes of travel, that the devout passer-by may tarry to pray before the sacred symbol of his faith. One day two brave knights of yore met at a castle, nearby where the famous ancestral shield stood. And one said to the other, "Have you seen the baron’s shield?" "I have." "And how do you read the inscription?" And he gave the words, as he had been able to read the half-worn motto. But the other insisted that he was wholly wrong: he had himself read it carefully and it was entirely different. And then they grew angry and would have fought, but a stranger passing by, and hearing their contention, counseled them to go together and examine the shield once more. And lo, they found that the shield had two sides and each side its own motto. They had approached it from different directions, and each read the side that faced him. Each was right, because he told the truth; each was wrong, because he told but the half-truth which was all he knew. In all that follows, let us bear in mind that here is a being to whom there are two sides or aspects. Whether we see one side or the other will depend on the direction from which we approach, and the point of view we occupy. And if we do not wish to be misled by half-truths, we must look at both sides; and, in all our study of the God-man, keep in mind both the divine and the human elements so mysteriously mingled. Only so shall we prevent adding to mystery our own misapprehension. The Bible is confessedly the most remarkable book of the ages: and Jesus Christ is confessedly the most remarkable person of the ages. And this book and this person are so remarkably connected, that the mysterious link which unites them is not less wonderful than the book and the man themselves. On close examination and comparison of the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Child, we have found that he bears to them so close a relation that they actually contain a minute history of Jesus centuries before his birth. Here is a biographical sketch, a kind of portrait of a man, prepared, without doubt, hundreds of years previous to his advent. The very year and place of his birth, his life and death, his crucifixion and resurrection, with many of the most marked features of his character and career, even to the beast on which he made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and the treacherous bargain by which a disciple betrayed him, the exact sum which was the traitor’s hire, the insults that were heaped upon him at his trial, the mockeries that derided his dying agonies, and the peculiar facts of his burial: these and many other minute matters, are recorded long before one of the events either happened, or could have been foreseen by the most sagacious conjecture.

Take a man of intelligence, a stranger to the Christian religion; place before him the Jewish Scriptures, calling special attention to the portrait which they furnish of one whom they call "God’s Servant" or "Anointed." Then ask him to note that the Old Testament writer lived more than three centuries before the Christian era; and that we have historic proof that these Jewish Scriptures, in their complete form, were in the hands of the Jews for three hundred years before that era began. Then place before him a copy of the Christian Scriptures, and ask him to read the gospels, and note that they were never in existence till at least four hundred years after the last Old Testament writer laid down his pen. And, without suggesting any divine or supernatural element, either in the writings, or in the person of Christ, leave him to compare the two. With what amazement would he find all the main facts, recorded in these gospel narratives, long before anticipated in these writings? The fact of this correspondence is so familiar to us, that its force is greatly lessened. But imagine an instance in our own day. It seems but yesterday that Mr. Lincoln died by the hand of an assassin: and his history, from his lowly beginnings as the child of poverty, up to his heroic end, as the martyr of liberty, is familiar even to our children. But what if, in the works of Francis Bacon, there were found an exact and minute sketch of this coming President, three hundred years before; not one particular of which failed to correspond with the facts! and how would our amazement increase, should we find a score or more of writers in different centuries and countries, long before Bacon, supplying other and equally important material for this prophetic biography! With what august wonder would we compare the facts, so well known to us, with the forecast of them in these writings of the by-gone centuries! and with what candor would we inquire for an explanation !

II. Of this mysterious correspondence between the Jewish Scriptures and the person of Christ, those Scriptures themselves give a solution. They declare that this wonderful person is the Son of God and the Messiah, anointed of God for the salvation of men; and that, so important was his advent, that the holy men of old were inspired of God to tell, in advance, the story of his life and death!

Let us again suppose this unprejudiced stranger, who has with amazement traced the history of Christ in the prophecy of the Old Testament, to meet, in those very Scriptures, this explanation. Would he not be disposed to regard this as a rational solution of the problem? It is an accepted canon of criticism, that if an hypothesis supplies a satisfactory basis for the harmonizing of facts or truths, it is not worthwhile to look further: we may accept it as the truth. Thus Kepler, after repeated trials, struck the real law that rules in the solar system; and, as that law which was at first only a supposition, has so far reconciled all known facts, and solved all apparent difficulties, we do not hesitate to call his guess, a discovery! Certainly, there is about the exact fulfillment of the prophetic portrait in the person of Christ, a problem demanding a solution; and, if the solution, afforded by the Scriptures themselves, proves a satisfactory one, why should we hesitate to accept it? Does the Person of Christ then correspond to this Bible basis of solution, viz: that he was son of God as well as son of man, and anointed for a special office, namely, to fulfill the law in a perfect life, and then atone for sin by a vicarious death?

It is proper to examine this great question in a scientific spirit. We have already considered Jesus Christ simply as an historic personage, a man of singular symmetry of character, who towered above the level of ordinary men as the peaks of the Himmalayas tower toward the stars; and now we look at him as the Messiah of Scripture, and as claiming to unite in himself both the divine and human natures.

How shall we explain the mystery of this complex person and character, on a Bible basis? The solution is given us by Paul, Romans 1:3-4 - "Concerning His Son Jesus Christ who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead." Accept this solution, and the problem is solved. Not that this Incarnation of God in human nature, this mediation between the finite and the infinite, the union of God and man in one person, is without mystery; not that we can distinguish the divine from the human - define their boundaries and determine their limits; say just where one ends and the other begins; not that we claim to be able to answer the question how two natures can combine in one person, and not destroy individuality and identity. I am a mystery to myself. I see a body; a mind, or thinking power; a heart, or loving power, united in myself; each capable of individual activity, and yet all making one man. I do not dispute the fact while I cannot penetrate the mystery. Even so, "I bow before the mystery of His complex person, and do not ask to have it resolved!" For if I know that there combine in me two natures, the physical and the spiritual, and the complexity is still a perplexity, is it reasonable to reject the fact of Christ’s complex person because I have no philosophy for the fact?

III. The Scriptures boldly present both sides of the God-man. The son of man appears every where there is a human mother, and a human birth - a human nature and growth in wisdom and stature - he has needs like men; feels weakness and weariness, hunger and thirst, craves human companionship and friendship, sympathy and love - is a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, touches humanity with the tenderness of conscious brotherhood; indeed as we, following his career, behold him growing, weeping, suffering, dying, there is so much of the man in all this - such experience is so intensely human, that it veils and obscures the divine element. And yet the Bible does not hide these human infirmities, but makes them a necessity to his completeness as the God- man.

Php 2:7 : "He took upon him the form of a servant," and the fashion of a man. "He emptied himself" of his divine glory, and laid his divine attributes, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, under temporary voluntary limitations; it was a part of his humiliation, that he condescended to human infirmities, to accept as his lot human want and woe, so far as consistent for a sinless man; that he might be a brother to man, the representative man himself, and a "merciful and faithful high priest," able to sympathize with, and succor, the tempted, because himself having been tempted or tried. This is the Book’s explanation of the person; and of the perplexing problem of his double nature as the God-man.

Yet he boldly affirmed concerning himself the essential quality with God which left him free to lay aside, even as he had assumed, the form of a servant. "I have power," said he, "to lay down my life" that, any martyr might say, choosing to die for the truth’s sake: but he added, what no created being could say, "I have power to take it again." As we turn over page after page of the sacred book, we get a glimpse now of his humanity and now of his divinity. It is like a dissolving view, now his human nature is clearly seen, and again his divine appears with equal clearness; and one melts into the other, so that we cannot say where one ceases, and the other begins, to appear. We are constrained to say, He is divine. Yet this strange personage weeps at the grave of his friend Lazarus, proving himself "of like passions" as ourselves, of active, tender, personal sympathy, uniting a perfect humanity with his divinity; not God in a human body, but God with a human soul. The divine speaks sublimely, "I am the resurrection and the life;" "Thy brother shall rise again;" "Lazarus, come forth!" The human speaks, in groans within himself; in tears of conscious bereavement; in the question, "Where have ye laid him?" And how consistent with the grandeur of the God-man is the sublime majestic reserve which he manifested. A human being, conscious that he was about, in the exercise of divine power, to restore the dead to life and to the weeping sisters of Bethany, would have approached the sepulchre with the excitement of conscious prerogative, with evident emotion and expectation - but the Lord Jesus moves as calmly and composedly as though calling the dead to life were as simple and as common as to speak the most ordinary words of a master to a servant. There is no pompous flourish - no show of needless energy. Angels might have been summoned to remove the stone - but man could do that, and so he simply said "take ye away the stone;" and then used the life-giving word to accomplish what man could not. How like a man is the human element in all this: yet how unlike a man is that other element, which links the Christ to the invisible, omnipotent, eternal!

IV. That there is not only a mystery but a paradox, in this complex person, we are quite ready candidly to confess. But the contradiction is, after all, only apparent. Project your parallel lines far enough, and they converge. Our main difficulty lies in forgetting that this personage is wholly unlike any other. Of God, we have some conception to guide us in interpreting His words and works. Of man, we have a more complete knowledge, to aid us in understanding man. But here, for the first and only time in history, appears one who asserts of himself, "I am the Son of God," "I am the son of man," in whom "dwelt all the fullness of the God-head bodily;" yet who "took on him the seed of Abraham." In all your progress through the apparent contradictions of the Bible portrait of Jesus, this idea of His complex person needs to be borne in mind; for it is the key that unlocks all perplexities. You expect to see now the human element made prominent, and, again, to see the divine equally conspicuous; and it is a very notable fact that in the Gospel according to John, which most completely gives us Christ’s witness concerning himself, He twelve times calls himself "Son of Man," and just as many times "Son of God," as though himself pointing us to both sides of the shield, and by repetition impressing the necessity of avoiding the falsehood which really lies in a half-truth. No part of the problem of Christ’s witness concerning himself has caused more perplexity to Bible-readers than His contradictory declaration as to His equality with God. At one moment we hear Him say, "I and my Father are one," and that the Jews understood Him to mean the unity not of mere sympathy, but of equality, is plain; for "they took up stones to stone Him" for the blasphemy of making himself equal with God. And yet He said, "My Father is greater than I;" and to unravel this tangled skein of perplexity, men have suggested that He was only a created being, or an inferior order of divine being Divinity, but not Deity. Is it well to resort to a solution that itself presents a new problem, demanding a new solution? If Christ were a creature, then His testimony to himself is false; if an inferior order of divine being, the unity of the Godhead is lost, and we have not only polytheism, but different grades of gods! But we are perplexed to know how a being can be divine and yet not have divine attributes; yet, if omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, can there be degrees in omniscience, etc.? Can one God know all and do all and be everywhere, and another know and do more than He, or be anywhere where He is not? If we are going to hold such absurdities as these, let us admit that the bulls of the Irishman afford us a good type for doctrinal and theological statements. On matters which perplex the wisest, it is with becoming modesty that one ventures even a suggestion. Absolute equality may co-exist with relative inequality, and absolute inequality with relative equality; and these terms imply no real contradiction. We venture an illustration, with the caution that an illustration is not an analogy. An analogy is supposed to fit at every point; an illustration only at the precise point at which it is applied. What we seek to illustrate, is the statement that absolute equality and relative inequality are consistent, and conversely, but we are not illustrating the mode of the divine existence, etc. A firm is composed of three men, who are absolutely equal in amount of capital invested, in capacity for business, in share of profits; if you please, in culture, social standing and personal worth. Yet they agree that in all the purchase of goods no one shall act on his own responsibility, or except by instructions; or it may be agreed that one man shall keep the books or hire all clerks, in which case either of the others may properly say, "I have no authority in this matter." Or, again, a college faculty, composed of men every way on absolute equality, may consent that one shall act as president, and may put in his hands the entire control. Here is absolute equality, with relative inequality. On the other hand, a father sets up three sons in business as partners. They are of different ages, grades of culture and capacity; yet they are to share alike in privileges and profits. Here is absolute inequality, with relative equality and no inconsistency.

These illustrations do not even touch the mystery of the Trinity and the double nature of the God-man; yet if we but understand our Lord as speaking at one time of that which is divine in himself, and again of that which is human - now in terms absolute, and now in terms relative - all difficulties are at least relieved, if not dissolved and dispelled! In the capacity of a man, He was inferior to God; in his character and office as Messiah, he was under subjection to Him that "sent him;" as a Son, he owed filial obedience to the Father. Now, if such terms as these express His essence. His whole nature, His complete self, then to apply to Him divine titles, offer Him divine honors, or pay Him divine worship, is certainly idolatry. But if these terms express not His substance and essence, but His office and relation, then we are justified in looking back of these inferior titles to find His essential self. And the careful search into the Scriptures will show us a glory, like that of the sun, behind the veil of His humanity. He was on one occasion instantly transfigured so that His face shone as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light, and no human eyes could look on His glory.

V. But why should He, if true God, decline the homage of men, saying to the young man who addressed Him as "good Master," "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one; that is God?" This seems the more perplexing since He allowed disciples to hold Him by the feet and worship Him, as well as to address to Him the most unmistakable words of homage.

We must consider that Christ’s true God head was not understood by the common multitude, who saw in Him simply a remarkable man. To receive such homage as belongs only to God, from one who regarded Him as only a man, would be to encourage virtual idolatry. The good caliph, Haroun Alraschid, was wont at night to go in citizen’s dress, disguised, through the streets of Bagdad, in order to learn accurately what wants among his subjects needed to be relieved, and what woes redressed. And the Emperor Joseph II, of Germany, went incognito on extensive tours through Hungary, Bohemia, France, Spain, Holland his true self not being suspected. It is very plain that for these rulers, while in disguise, their true character unrecognized, to accept from a citizen-subject any homage or obedience, due only to the caliph or king, would be to encourage treason! The fact that the person in disguise was the sovereign, could not change the disloyalty of the act while the subject did not know him as such.

If on such occasions, officers of state had to the disguised king breathed state secrets, they would have been arraigned for treason; although the king had the right to receive the communication, the officer had no right to communicate to one whom he did not know to be the king. If Joseph II, while hearing such a traitor speak, had said, "Why do you breathe this in my ear? none should hear this but your sovereign," we should see no inconsistency.

It was part of Christ’s humiliation that while in disguise, he should not accept unintelligent homage. To those who saw his true self whose eyes pierced the veil of his humanity, he never said, " Why callest thou me good?" etc., but, with the calmness of the divine majesty, he permitted Peter to say, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God;" and then declared that, upon that confession of his divine Messiahship, he would, as on a rock, build his church, against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail!

We repeat that we are not concerned with the mode of the divine existence or the union of two natures in one person. The question is, were there marks of the true man and the true God, apparent in Christ? if so, is not his own solution the rational one? And, without abandoning scientific calmness and candor, we have only to lay aside all bias of prejudice to see that here is the only perfect solvent, leaving behind it no residuum of difficulty.

VI. There is a subtle argument deftly used by such as Strauss and Renan, against the supernatural element in Christ Jesus, which may be easily seen to be sophistical and fallacious. It is said that, if Jesus were indeed the son of God, there would be about his whole character and life, as well as his words and works, a plain supernatural aspect; that the very naturalness of the whole story shews the work of man’s hand. It is all just as a good and great man would be likely to be and do, but not on a scale befitting the God-man. If God really came down to dwell among men why did not the very light of his eye, his form and feature, his very tread, proclaim the divine Creator, and Lord? But all this life is in tensely human. This very fact and feature of Christ’s life and its record, afford a grand argument, for the truth of the gospels. Had impostors been at work, fabricating a story of God manifest in the flesh, to impose on human credulity, we should have had no such simple, natural portrait. The infant Savior would have been represented as, from birth, a perfect prodigy of unnatural and super natural wisdom and power. Whenever the human mind has tried to construct a superhuman childhood, there have been extravagance and exaggeration; as in the myth of Hercules, who, while yet an infant in the cradle strangled two huge serpents with his tiny hands. And in those apocryphal gospels, which pretend to supply the defects of the true narratives, the years of our Saviour’s infancy and boyhood are crowded with marvels and miracles. Dumb beasts and even dumb idols bow in adoration before the child, as he is borne down to Egypt to escape the sword of Herod, and trees bend to do him homage; and, while yet a boy, less than seven years old, he amuses his play-fellows by transforming balls of clay into flying birds, bids the running stream become dry, changes his companions into goats, works all manner of miracles through the magical power of the bed on which he slept, the towels which he used, and even the water in which he was washed! now using his divine energy to excite the curiosity, and now to arouse the fears, of his playmates. When the inspired evangelists draw the portrait of the infant Savior, we have a truly human child, born indeed of a virgin, but increasing in wisdom and stature, like other children, according to the laws of human growth; at twelve years of age, in the temple, hearing the Jewish doctors and asking them questions, and surprising them by his understanding and answers. "There is nothing premature, forced or unbecoming his age, and yet a degree of wisdom and an intensity of interest in religion, which rises far above a purely human youth.”* What was it that restrained the evangelists from adding to the portrait of the God-man, features obviously fanciful and ideal.

* Schaff, "Person of Christ."

We have only to suppose that God’s own son did take upon him not only the form, but the nature, of man, and did live purposely as far as possible on the level of humanity, that he might shew man how to live; and nothing can be more beautifully natural, than the recorded life of Christ. We can see how there came to be that rare blending of the high and humble, the sublime and simple, the divine and human, which marks this portrait in the gospels only. Had men invented this history they would have presented us with the human aspect or with the divine, alone; or, if the union of the two were attempted, we should have "a mass of clumsy exaggerations" or absurd contradictions.

Concede that the evangelists had the reality before them, and everything appears natural and consistent. Does it, therefore, follow that without the reality before them they could be thus natural and consistent? Reason may approve many things which it cannot prove; that which, when presented before us, may commend itself as perfectly reasonable and consistent, we might have been unable to devise or discover. A problem that perplexes us for years may have a solution so simple that, when known, it seems no problem at all; but that is a child’s way of judging. What no man could invent may, when God unfolds it, seem eminently simple and natural. It is therefore a fallacy to argue that, because these gospel narratives are so natural, therefore they are fabrications of man! For thousands of years mankind has been working at, but never working out, this problem trying to invent a satisfactory incarnation, to get God manifest in the flesh. The Greek, Roman and Hindoo mythologies are full of these attempts; but men even among those very pagans say these must be myths; "they are unnatural, contradictory, inconsistent." At last there is a true incarnation, and now the wise owls of modern skepticism squint and wink at the God-man and say, "All this is so simple and natural that it must be a myth." Truly, the men of this generation are hard to suit; pipe for them a joyful strain and "they will not dance;" play a mournful melody and they will not "lament." If an incarnation is unnatural, it is mythical; if natural, it is mythical. God solves the problem over which the race has been studying for four thousand years, and the solution seems so simple that the wise men deny that there was any problem, after all.

Yet in skeptical essays it is a favorite argument against the Bible doctrine of vicarious sacrifice for sin, that there is nothing in it that needed the divine mind to frame it. It is simply an innocent man suffering for the guilty, and so illustrating the inviolability of law and the grandeur of voluntary self-sacrifice.

Suppose this were all the deep meaning there is in the death of Christ. How happens it that all the pagan attempts to devise a way by which the guilty soul might escape, and yet divine justice be satisfied, have been confessed failures! Men have planned to save the sinner, while the plan has not saved God from complicity and compromise with sin; or they have planned a salvation from penalty without a salvation from guilt. God tells us how all desirable ends may be compassed. Justice and mercy may be harmonized, as the cherubim on the ark, though looking in opposite directions, faced each other; and the sinner is saved from the punishment of his sin, and, better still, from sin itself.

It is both absurd and dishonest to say that, because the gospel scheme of salvation is so simple and satisfactory, it bears traces only of a human hand. As well say that because the sun’s ray brings us at once light, heat and life -just what earth needs, and all in one sunbeam - the sun is a human invention; that the problem is so simple in solution that it bears no marks of a divine mind.

God is always simple, even amid the most complex mystery. It is man "who darkens counsel by words without knowledge;" who cumbers his words with affectation of learning and logic, and his works with pompous pretension. Only the grandest of men learn the divine art of artlessness - of perfect naturalness and simplicity.

VII. At this point, the external and internal evidences of Christianity touch so closely that it becomes not only contact, but almost coincidence. In a previous chapter the proof of miracles was considered; but there is a moral argument which may be drawn from the miracles of Christ. The witness which miracles furnish must largely hinge upon their character. If they are mere displays of power, gratifying the popular greed for novelty, appealing to curiosity, serving mainly to supply stimulus for those who, like the "Athenians, spend their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing," the whole character of the miracle-worker is degraded by his pandering to this insatiate appetite for what is new and strange.

If the Son of God should today, for the first time, appear on earth in human form, with signs and wonders as the proof of the divinity that veils itself in His humanity, we should look for signs such as become so august a person. Mere displays of power, such as descend to a level with the trivial tricks of a juggler, however they might puzzle us to explain, would not impress us as worthy of the Lord of all. It was said of Hercules, god of physical force, that "whatever he did whether he stood or walked or sat or fought he conquered." That fine conception has in it an artistic finish as exquisite as the touch of a master sculptor, like Praxiteles; it suggests that a true god will always carry the air and mien of a god. With or without his crown and scepter, robed in glory or clothed in sackcloth, awake or asleep, speaking or silent, in work or war or rest, he will still be divine. And if Christ were the God-man, everything He did must have been consistent with such a character.

Now, look at His miracles. When men crowded about Him, asking for a sign, pretending that they desired Him to work wonders to convince them of His divine mission, He calmly but firmly refused to degrade divine power to the low level of human curiosity. He would not harness the fiery steeds of Omnipotence, which roll the very suns through space, to the petty chariots of a race-course, to make dull eyes stare with idiotic amazement.

What signs did He furnish, to satisfy the honest heart that would find the God in the man Christ Jesus? "The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up." (Matthew 11:5) Not mere works of power, but works of love, attesting indeed divine authority, but revealing also divine sympathy; such works as a Father would be likely to use to reveal to His estranged and erring children His Fatherhood. When Jesus Christ undertook to show to men the sealed credentials of His mission as the Messiah, in what sublime characters they were written! They had about them the handwriting of God; they shone with a light and luster like that of suns and stars. But as we look closer, they seem to be written also in blood and tears. There is in these displays of divine power a divine tenderness and gentleness more impressive than the miraculous element itself; they are moral miracles, and the purest and most loving nature most feels their force. Christ might have spent the three years of His public ministry tearing up sycamore and cedar trees by the roots and hurling them into the sea, by a word; commanding mountains like Hermon to be removed from their place; causing the sun to veil his shining face, and then uncover it at his bidding; making the sea to raise itself up, and stand like a column. These would have been grand displays of the power and authority of God, but they would not have unfolded the divine love and sympathy. What did He do? He wrought such wondrous works as showed men, in all conceivable circumstances of human want and woe, a divine readiness to give help and hope.

Behold the divine Christ come down from the mount, where he had spoken that imperial sermon of our holy religion; and what was His first work, proving and approving His right to teach with authority, and not as the scribes, who only referred men to a higher authority? Among the multitudes that followed Him, there came a leper and worshiped Him, saying, "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean."

"And Jesus put forth his hand and touched him, saying, I will! be thou clean! and immediately his leprosy was cleansed!"

Here was divine power indeed, so grandly exercised that we are reminded of Him who, in the profound gloom of primeval darkness, said, "Let light be! and light was!" who "spake and it was done; who commanded and it stood fast." But, least of all, was this a word of power: it was a touch of Love! A leper was a loathsome wretch - a living corpse, an exile from human society, whose presence was uncleanness, and whose touch was contamination. Leprosy was regarded by a Jew as the awful incarnation of sin, its power and its penalty - a living, breathing, walking parable of death and judgment. A leper wore his leprous robes that even his dress might distinguish him: and, lest he might come into actual contact with humanity, he went everywhere crying, "unclean! unclean!"

Observe the pathos of that phrase, "touched him." Christ’s word was enough, even at a distance! but that poor leper had been wont to have human beings shrink from him and bid him stand afar off. It may have been many years since he had felt the sympathetic touch of a hand, uncursed by this scourge of God! and therefore the man of sorrows "put forth his hand and touched him." He wished to show that leper that, back of the divine power that healed, was a divine Love. That touch is the key to Christ’s miracles: they told of a throbbing heart, that combined the unspeakable strength and tenderness of a father’s and mother’s devotion. On one of the battle fields of the late war, a young soldier was wounded so badly that no human skill could assure recovery. He grew rapidly worse, and in his delirium called piteously for his mother. The gentle surgeon, at the hospital, telegraphed her at once, and she arrived at midnight. He met her at the entrance of the ward, and restrained her impatient feet: "Madam, your son hangs between life and death; a moment of excitement, and there may be no hope. You must not see him now." For three long hours she waited outside the ward, near enough to see her darling boy, though dimly, and catch with the quickness of a mother’s ear, each groan of pain. At last she laid hold of the surgeon’s arm: "Doctor, I shall die if I stay here. Let me go in and sit beside him. I will not speak: only let me do what the nurse is doing, soothe his brow and smooth his pillow.” The nurse was called, and the mother took her place by the cot, once more enjoined by the surgeon to do nothing by which she might be recognized. She sat in silence - the face of the dying soldier turned to the wall. He groaned feebly. She, to quiet him, laid her hand on his hot forehead. Instantly he turned himself about, and said, "Nurse, how like my mother’s hand!" Even to that delirious lad, there was that, in a mother’s touch, which no stranger could counterfeit. And so in that touch of Christ, upon that loathsome leper, there is revealed all the Fatherhood of God! That was like the Father’s hand, it was the Father’s hand!

We lay no undue stress upon the moral force of Christ’s miracles! To overlook this, is to fail to see the most important and powerful feature of the divine manifestation in Christ; and to fail to feel the weight of that grand logic which speaks to the hearts of men! In proportion as the human nature approaches the divine, it responds sympathetically to human sorrow and suffering. When God came down to men, the most touching proof he gave of his presence was found in the tenderness of his ministry to human want and woe. And even his works of power were most remarkable for their exhibitions of a divine heart throbbing through a divine hand! Did the Star in the East guide the magi to the manger where He lay? The whole Bible - the book of the ages, is but the Star to shine for him and guide to him; the light in the deep darkness to move across the heavens, and over his cradle to rest, then to fade into a paler glory, before the day-dawn. The whole Scripture testifies to Christ, leads to Christ, rests in Christ, and fades before Christ as before a superb splendor - a greater glory obscuring the less. But that star guided only the magi - and them only for a season - this Word is the star that waits on Him, and will never cease to burn or shine as the guide to seeking souls, till the last of those who look anxiously for a redeemer shall find the place of his cross and empty tomb! The question which Pilate asked, each of us is compelled to answer: "What shall I do with Jesus?" No formal disclaiming of responsibility can wash our hands clean of responsibility. If Jesus is the Christ, the anointed of God, the Savior of men, he that despises or rejects him crucifies him afresh. The Jews took the responsibility from which Pilate shrank, and said "His blood be on us and on our children." What a prophecy lay in that awful prayer. For eighteen hundred years his blood has been upon them and their children. The fire, the sword, the pelting hail of human hate, the scourge of hostile law and popular scorn, have pursued them everywhere from pole to pole and from the rising to the setting sun. The question "What think ye of Christ?" even skepticism finds it equally hard to evade or to answer. Even could we explain miracles by some ingenious natural theory, the greatest miracle of all is the person of Christ. If he were a mere man, we know not how to account for his words or works; his relation to the Hebrew Scriptures and his relation to the Christian church. If he were the God-man, all is easily explained, but such an admission must be fatal to the whole fabric of skepticism. On the one hand the skeptic cannot explain Christ, on the other he cannot defend himself. For if Christ be more than man, to reject his words, and rebel against his authority must imply guilt and peril. The God-man! The daysman betwixt us both, who can lay his hand upon us both, because he is of us both! The way of God to man - the way of man to God; the true Jacob’s ladder between heaven and earth. God above it, to come down - man beneath it to go up! The God-man, in himself our pledge that as God in Christ became a partaker of the human nature, so man in Christ becomes a partaker of the divine nature. Born of a woman, made like unto us, that we might be born of God and be made like unto Him! The God-man is not only a mystery and a miracle, but a prophecy and a promise. He tells us what man shall be, when by faith in Jesus, he is forever more made like unto the Son of God.

They used to say of Mozart, that he brought angels down; of Beethoven, that he lifted mortals up. Jesus Christ does both, and here lies the central mystery of the God-man, a mystery which is blessedly revealed to him who by faith has personal experience of his power to save!