Some Christian Convictions Part 4

_Communion with Jesus in G.o.d._ When the Christian through Jesus finds himself in fellows.h.i.+p with His G.o.d and Father, he does not leave Jesus behind as One whose work is done. He discovers that he can maintain this fellows.h.i.+p only as he constantly places himself in such contact with the historic Figure that G.o.d can through Him renew the experience. It is by going back to Jesus that we go up to the Father; or rather, it is through the abiding memory of Jesus in the world that G.o.d reaches down and lifts us to Himself. And at such times no Christian thinks of Jesus as a memory, but as a living Friend. To Him he addresses himself directly in prayer and praise, which would be meaningless were there no present communication between Jesus and His disciples.

We cannot say that we have an experience of communion with Jesus which is distinguishable from our experience of communion with G.o.d; we respond through Jesus to G.o.d. But if our G.o.d be the G.o.d of Jesus, we cannot think of Jesus as anywhere in the universe out of fellows.h.i.+p with Him.

His G.o.d would not be Himself, nor would Jesus be Himself, were the fellows.h.i.+p between Them interrupted; and we cannot think of ourselves as in touch with the One, without being at the same time in touch with the Other. It is an apparently inevitable inference from our Christian experience, when we attempt to rationalize it, that "our fellows.h.i.+p is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ." In communion with G.o.d we are in a society which includes the Father and all His true sons and daughters, the living here and the living yonder, for all live unto Him.

They are ours in G.o.d; and Jesus supremely, because He is the Mediator of our life with G.o.d, is ours in His and our Father.

We have already pa.s.sed over into the division of our subject which we called _the Christ of reflection_. All experience contains an intellectual element, and we never experience "facts" apart from the ideas in which we represent them to ourselves. But there is a further mental process when we attempt to combine what we think we have experienced in some relations.h.i.+p with all else that we know, and reach a unified view of existence. For example, when Paul took the gospel out of its local setting in Palestine, and carried it into the Roman world, he had to interpret the figure of Jesus to set it in the minds of men who thought in terms very different from those of the fishermen of Galilee or the scribes at Jerusalem. Similarly John, who wrote his gospel for Gentile readers, could not introduce Jesus to them as the Messiah, and catch their interest; he took an idea, as common in the thought of that day as Evolution is in our own--the Logos or Word, in whom G.o.d expresses Himself and through whom He acts upon the world--and used that as a point of contact with the minds of his readers. We have to connect the Christ of our experience with our thought of G.o.d and of the universe.

Three chief questions suggest themselves to us: How shall we picture Jesus' present life? How shall we account for His singular personality?

How shall we conceive the union in Him of the Divine and the human, which we have discovered?

The first of these questions faced the disciples when Jesus was no longer with them in the flesh. When a cloud received Him out of their sight, it did not take Him out of their fancy; finding themselves still in communion with Him, they had to imagine His present existence with G.o.d and with them. They used their current symbol for G.o.d--the Most High enthroned above His world--and they pictured Jesus as seated at the right hand of the throne of G.o.d. Or they took some vivid metaphor of personal friends.h.i.+p--a figure knocking at the door and entering to eat with them--and found that a fitting interpretation of their experience.

These were picturesque ways of saying that Jesus shares G.o.d's life and ours. While our current modes of representing the Divine do not localize heaven, the symbolic language of the Bible has so entered into our literature, that in wors.h.i.+p and in devout thought we find the New Testament metaphors most satisfactory to express our faith.

The second question was asked even during Jesus' lifetime--"Whence hath this Man these things?" The New Testament writers deal with the question of Jesus' origin in a variety of ways. The earliest of our present gospels opens its narrative with the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus as He answers John's summons to baptism. It seems to explain His uniqueness by the extraordinary spiritual endowment bestowed upon Him in manhood. The first and third gospels contain besides this two other traditions: they introduce Jesus as the descendant of a line of devout progenitors, going back in the one case to David and Abraham, and in the other still further through Adam to G.o.d. They bring forward His spiritual heredity as one factor to account for Him. Side by side with this they place a narrative which records His birth, not as the Son of Joseph through whom His ancestry is traced, but of the Holy Spirit and a virgin-mother. This gives prominence to the Divine and human parentage which brought Him into the world. In Paul and John and the _Epistle to the Hebrews_, there is incarnate in Jesus a preexistent heavenly Being--the Man from heaven, the Word who was from the beginning with G.o.d, the Son through whom He made the worlds. They present us with a Divine Being made a man. This last conception is not combined by any New Testament writer with a virgin-birth. When our New Testament books were put together, the Church found all four statements in its Canon, and combined them (although some of them are not easily combined) in its account of Jesus' origin.

Historical scholars have difficulty in tracing any of these accounts but the first directly to Jesus Himself; but they come from the earliest period of the Church, and they have satisfied many generations of thoughtful Christians as explanations of the uniqueness of the Person of their Lord. Some of them do not seem to be as helpful to modern believers, and are even said to render Him less intelligible. We must beware on the one hand of insisting too strongly that a believer in Jesus Christ shall hold a particular view of His origin; the diversity in the New Testament presentations of Christ would not be there, if all its writers considered all four of these statements necessary in every man's conception of his Lord. And on the other hand, we must point out that it is a tribute to Jesus' greatness that so many circ.u.mstances were appealed to to account for Him, and that all of them have spiritual value. All four insist that Jesus' origin is in G.o.d, and that in Jesus we find the Divine in the human. All four--a spiritual endowment, a spiritual heredity, a spiritual birth, the incarnation of G.o.d in Man--may well seem congruous with the Jesus of our experience, even if we are not intellectually satisfied with the particular modes in which these affirmations have been made in the past. The question of Jesus'

origin is not of primary importance; He Himself judged nothing by its antecedents, but by its results--"By their fruits ye shall know them."

No man, today, should be hindered from believing in Christ, because he does not find a particular statement in connection with His origin credible. Christ is here in our world, however He entered it, and can be tested for what He _is_. To know Him is not to know how He came to be, but what He can do for us. "To know Christ," Melancthon well said, "is to know His benefits."

The third question, How are we to conceive of the union of Deity and humanity in Him? is a problem which exercised the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Centuries of the Christian Church to the exclusion of almost all others. The theologians of those times worked out (and fought out) the theory of the union of two "natures" in one "Person," which remains the official statement of the Church's interpretation of Christ in Greek, Roman and Protestant creeds. But the philosophy which dealt in "natures"

and "persons" is no longer the mode of thought of educated people; and while we may admire the mental skill of these earlier theologians, and may recognize that an Athanasius and his orthodox allies were contending for a vital element in Christian experience, their formulations do not satisfy our minds.

In the last century some divines advanced a modification of this ancient theory, naming it the Kenotic or Self-emptying Theory, from the Greek word used by St. Paul in the phrase, "He _emptied_ Himself." The eternal Son of G.o.d is represented as laying aside whatever attributes of Deity--omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, etc.--could not be manifested in an entirely human life. The Jesus of history _reveals_ so much of G.o.d as man can contain, but _is_ Himself more. But we know of no personality which can lay aside memory, knowledge, etc. The theory begins with a conception of Deity apart from Jesus, and then proceeds to treat Him as partially disclosing this Deity in His human life; but the Christian has his experience of the Divine through Jesus, and his reflection must start with Deity as revealed in Him.

Still later in the century, Albrecht Ritschl gave another interpretation of Christ's Person. He began with the completely human Figure of history, and pointed out that it is through Him we experience communion with G.o.d, so that to His followers Jesus is divine; His humanity is the medium through which G.o.d reveals Himself to us. This affirmation of His Deity is an estimate, made by believers, of Jesus' worth to them; they cannot prove it to any who are without a sense of Christ's value as their Saviour. Any further explanation of how the human and the Divine are joined in Jesus, he deemed beyond the sphere of religious knowledge.

Our modern thought of G.o.d as immanent in His world and in men enables us, perhaps more easily than some of our predecessors, to fit the figure of Christ into our minds. The discovery of the Divine in the human does not surprise us. We think of G.o.d as everywhere manifesting Himself, but His presence is limited by the medium in which it is recognized. He reveals as much of Himself through nature as nature can disclose; as much through any man as he can contain; as much through the complete Man as He is capable of manifesting. Nor does this Self-revelation of G.o.d in Jesus do away for us with Jesus' own attainment of His character.

Immanent Deity does not submerge the human personality. Jesus was no merely pa.s.sive medium through which G.o.d worked, but an active Will who by constant cooperation with the Father "was perfected." If there was an "emptying," there was also a "filling," so that we see in Him the fulness of G.o.d. How He alone of all mankind came so to receive the Self-giving Father remains for us, as for our predecessors, the ultimate riddle, a riddle akin to that which makes each of us "indescribably himself." And as for the origin of His unique Person, we have no better explanations to subst.i.tute for those of the First Century; the mystery of our Lord's singular personality remains unsolved.

While our reflections almost necessarily end in guesses, or in impenetrable obscurities, our experience of Christ's worth can advance to ever greater certainty. We follow Him, and find Him the Way, the Truth and the Life. We trust Him and prove His power to save unto the uttermost. We come to feel that no phrase applied to Him in the New Testament is an exaggeration; our own language, like St. Paul's, admits its inadequacy by calling Him G.o.d's "_unspeakable_ gift." We see the light of the knowledge of the glory of G.o.d in His face; He is to us the Light of life; and we live and strive to make Him the Light of the world. Though we may never be able to reason out to our satisfaction how G.o.d and man unite in Him, we discover in Him the G.o.d who redeems us and the Man we aspire to be. Jesus is to us (to borrow a saying of Lancelot Andrewes') "G.o.d's as much as He can send; ours as much as we can desire."

CHAPTER IV

G.o.d

The word "G.o.d" is often employed as though it had a fixed meaning. His part in an event or His relation to a movement is discussed with the a.s.sumption that all who speak have in mind the same Being. "G.o.d" is the name a man gives to his highest inspiration, and men vary greatly in that which inspires them. One man's G.o.d is his belly, another's his reputation, a third's cleverness. Napoleon reintroduced the cult of the G.o.d of authority, by establis.h.i.+ng the Concordat with Rome, because as he bluntly put it, "men require to be kept in order." A number of socially minded thinkers, of whom the best known is George Eliot, deified humanity and gave themselves to wors.h.i.+p and serve it. "Whatever thy heart clings to and relies on," wrote Luther, "that is properly thy G.o.d." A Christian is one who clings to Him in whom Jesus trusted, one who responds to the highest inspirations of Jesus of Nazareth. And a glance over Church history leaves one feeling that few Christians, even among careful thinkers, have had thoroughly Christian ideas of G.o.d.

A princ.i.p.al fault has been the method used in arriving at the thought of G.o.d. Men began with what was termed "Natural Religion." They studied the universe and inferred the sort of Deity who made and ruled it. It was intricately and wisely designed; its G.o.d must be omniscient. It was vast; He must be omnipotent. It displayed the same orderliness everywhere; He must be omnipresent. In epochs when men emphasized the beneficence of nature--its beauty, its usefulness, its wisdom--they concluded that its Creator was good. In an epoch, like the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, they drew a very different conclusion.

Charles Darwin wrote, "What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature."

Christians never stopped with the view of G.o.d drawn from "Natural Religion." They made this their basis, and then added to it the G.o.d of "Revealed Religion," contained in the Bible. They selected all the texts that spoke of G.o.d, drawing them from _Leviticus_ and _Ecclesiastes_ as confidently as from the gospels and St. Paul, and constructed a Biblical doctrine of G.o.d, which they added to the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Being of their inferences from Nature. The G.o.d and Father of Jesus was thus combined with various, often much lower thoughts of Deity in the Bible, and then further obscured by the Deity of the current views of physical and human nature.

It is not surprising that few Christians possessed a truly Christian view of G.o.d.

Loyalty to Jesus compels us to begin with Him. If He is the Way, we are not justified in taking half a dozen other roads, and using Him as one path among many. We ask ourselves what was the highest inspiration of Jesus, what was the Being to whom He responded with His obedient trust and with whom He communed. We are eager not to fas.h.i.+on an image of Divinity for ourselves, which is idolatry as truly when our minds grave it in thought as when our hands shape it in stone; but to receive G.o.d's disclosure of Himself with a whole-hearted response, and interpret, as faithfully as we can, the impression He makes upon us. "G.o.d," writes Tyndal, the martyr translator of our English New Testament, "is not man's imagination, but that only which He saith of Himself." Our highest inspirations come to us from Jesus, and He is, therefore, G.o.d's Self-unveiling to us, G.o.d's "Frankness," His Word made flesh.

Responding to G.o.d through Jesus, Christians discover:

First, that G.o.d is their Christlike Father, and that He is love as Jesus experienced His love and Himself was love.

Second, that G.o.d is the Lord of heaven and earth. We do not know whether He is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent; there is much that leads us to think that He is limited. He can do no more than Love can do with His children, and Love has its defeats, and crosses, and tragedies. But trusting the Christlike Father we more and more discover that He is sufficiently in control over all things to accomplish through them His will. He needs us to help Him master nature, and transform it into the servant of man,--to control disease, to harness electricity, to understand earthquakes; and He needs us to help Him conquer human nature and conform it to the likeness of His Son. G.o.d's complete lords.h.i.+p waits until His will is done in earth as it is in heaven; but for the present we believe that He is wise and strong enough not to let nature or men defeat His purpose; that He is controlling all things so that they work together for good unto them that love Him.

And third, that G.o.d is the indwelling Spirit. The Christlike Father Lord, whom we find outside ourselves through the faith and character of Jesus, becomes as we enter into fellows.h.i.+p with Him, a Force within us.

He is the Conscience of our consciences, the Wellspring of motives and impulses and sympathies. We repeat, today, in some degree, the experience of the first disciples at Pentecost; we recognize within ourselves the inspiring, guiding and energizing Spirit of love.

While we find G.o.d primarily through Jesus, He reveals Himself to us in many other ways: in the Scriptures, where the generations before us have garnered their experiences of Him; in living epistles in Christian men and women, and in some who do not call themselves by the Christian name, but whose lives disclose the Spirit of G.o.d who was in Jesus; in non-Christian faiths, where G.o.d has always given some glimpse of Himself in answer to men's search. Christ is not for us confining but defining; He gives us in Himself the test to a.s.say the Divine.

Nor do experiences which we label religious exhaust the list of our contacts with G.o.d. Our sense of duty, whether we connect it with G.o.d or not, brings us in touch with Him. Many persons are unconsciously serving G.o.d through their obedience to conscience. It was said of the French _savant_, Littre, that he was a saint who did not believe in G.o.d. He made the motto of his life, "To love, to know, to serve"; and no intelligent follower of Him who said, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of My brethren, even these least, ye did it unto Me," will fail to admit that in such a life there is a genuine, though unrecognized communion with G.o.d. In our own day when conscience is erecting new standards of responsibility, rendering intolerable many things good people have put up with, demonstrating the horror and hatefulness of war and forcing us to probe its causes and motives, discontenting us with our industrial arrangements, our business practices, our social order, G.o.d is giving us a larger and better Ideal, a fuller vision of Himself. We know what our Christlike Father is in Jesus; but we shall appreciate and understand Him infinitely better as He becomes embodied in the principles and ideals that dominate every home, and trade, and nation.

Again, our perception of beauty affords us a glimpse of G.o.d. The Greeks embodied loveliness in their statues of the Divine, because through the satisfaction which came to them from such exquisite figures their souls were soothed and uplifted. They have left on record how the calm and majestic expression of a face carved by a Phidias quieted, charmed, strengthened them. Dion Chrysostom says of the figure of the Olympian Zeus, "Whosoever among mortal men is most utterly toil-worn in spirit, having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands before this image, methinks, must utterly forget all the terrors and woes of this mortal life." The Greek Christian fathers often tell us that the same sense of the infinitely Fair, which was roused in them by such sights, recurred in a higher degree when their thoughts dwelt upon the life and character of Jesus. Clement of Alexandria says, "He is so lovely as to be alone loved by us, whose hearts are set on the true beauty." Our aesthetic and our religious experiences often merge; our response to beauty, whether in nature, or music, or a painting, becomes a response to G.o.d. Wordsworth says of a lovely landscape that had stamped its views upon his memory:

Oft in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And pa.s.sing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:--feelings too Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.

Sh.e.l.ley, while insistently denying or defying all the G.o.ds of accepted religion, finds himself adoring

that Beauty Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world, Scarce visible for extreme loveliness.

Surely the G.o.d Christians adore is in these experiences, though men know it not. St. Augustine believed that "all that is beautiful comes from the highest Beauty, which is G.o.d." They who begin with the cult of Beauty may have a conception of the Divine that has nothing to do with, or is even opposed to, the G.o.d and Father of Jesus; but when His G.o.d is supreme, inspirations from all things lovely may vastly supplement our thought of Him. "Music on earth much light upon heaven has thrown."

Science, too, has its contribution to offer to our thought of Him who is over all and through all and in all. Truth is one, and scientific investigation and religious experience are two avenues that lead to the one Reality faith names G.o.d. Science of itself can never lead us beyond visible and tangible facts; but its array of facts may suggest to faith many things about the invisible Father, the Lord of all. Present-day science with its emphasis upon continuity makes us think of a G.o.d who is no occasional visitor, but everywhere and always active; its conception of evolution brings home to us the patient and long-suffering labor of a Father who worketh even until now; its stress upon law reminds us that He is never capricious but reliable; its practical mastery of forces, like those which enable men to use the air or to navigate under the water, recalls to us the old command to subdue the earth as sons of G.o.d, and adds the new responsibility to use our control, as the Son of G.o.d always did, in love's cause.

Philosophy, too, which Professor James has described as "our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means," helps us to make clear our idea of G.o.d. A philosopher is just a thoughtful person who takes the discoveries that his religious, moral, aesthetic, scientific experiences have brought home, and tries to set in order all he knows of truth, beauty, right, G.o.d.

In attempting to philosophize upon their discoveries of G.o.d, Christian thinkers have arrived at the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity. It was, first, an attempt to hold fast to the great foundation truth of the Old Testament that G.o.d is One. The world in which Christianity found itself had a host of deities--a G.o.d for the sea and another for the wind, a G.o.d of the hearth and a G.o.d of the empire, and so on. Today it is only too easy to obey one motive in the home and another in one's business, to follow one principle in private life and another in national life, and to be polytheists again. Christian faith insists that "there is one G.o.d, the Father, of whom are all things and we unto Him." We adore One who is Christlike love, and we will serve no other. We trust Christlike love as the divine basis for a happy family life, and also for successful commerce, for statesmanlike international dealings, for the effective treatment of every political and social question. The inspirations that come to us from a glorious piece of music or from an heroic act of self-sacrifice, from some new discovery or from a novel sensitiveness of conscience, are all inspirations from the one G.o.d. At every moment and in every situation we must keep the same fundamental att.i.tude towards life--trustful, hopeful, serving--because in every experience, bitter or sweet, we are always in touch with the one Lord of all, our Christlike Father.

In this Unity Christians have spoken of a Trinity. Paul summing up the blessing of G.o.d, speaks of "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of G.o.d, and the communion of the Holy Spirit." He says, "through Jesus we have our access in one Spirit unto the Father." He and his fellow believers had been redeemed from selfishness to love, from slavery to freedom; and they accounted for their new life by saying that, through the grace of Jesus, they had come to experience the fatherly love of G.o.d, and to find His Spirit binding them in a brotherhood of service for one another and the world. The New Testament goes no further: it states these experiences of Jesus, of G.o.d, of the Spirit; but it does not tell us the exact relations of the Three--how G.o.d is related to the Spirit, or Jesus distinct and at the same time one with the Father. So acute a thinker as Paul never seems to have worked this out. At one time he compares G.o.d's relation to His Spirit to man's relation to his spirit ("Who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man which is in him? even so the things of G.o.d none knoweth, save the Spirit of G.o.d"); and once he identifies the Spirit with the glorified Christ ("The Lord is the Spirit").

But while Paul and other New Testament writers did not feel the need of thinking out what their threefold experience of G.o.d implied as to His Being, later Christians did; and using the terms of the current Greek philosophy, they elaborated the conception of three "Persons" in one G.o.dhead. We have no exact equivalent in English for the Greek word which is translated "person" in this definition. It is not the same as "a person" for that would give us three G.o.ds; nor is it something impersonal, a mode or aspect of G.o.d. It is something in between a personality and a personification.

Let us remember that this doctrine is not in the New Testament, but is an attempt to explain certain experiences that are ascribed in the New Testament to Jesus, the Father, the Holy Spirit. Even the hardiest thinkers caution us that our knowledge of G.o.d is limited to a knowledge of His relations to us: Augustine says, "the workings of the Trinity are inseparable," and Calvin, commenting on a pa.s.sage whose "aim is shortly to sum up all that is lawful for men to know of G.o.d," notes that it is "a description, not of what He is in Himself, but of what He is to us, that our knowledge of Him may stand rather in a lively perception, than in a vain and airy speculation." But let us also recall that in this doctrine generations of Christians have conserved indispensable elements in their thought of G.o.d:--His fatherhood, His Self-disclosure in Christ, His spiritual indwelling in the Christian community. Wherever it has been cast aside, something vitalizing to Christian life has gone with it. But at present it is not a doctrine of much practical help to many religious people; and it often const.i.tutes a hindrance to Jews and Mohammedans, and to some born within the Church in their endeavor to understand and have fellows.h.i.+p with the Christian G.o.d.

We may adopt one of two att.i.tudes towards it: we may accept it blindly as "a mystery" on the authority of the long centuries of Christian thought, which have used it to express their faith in G.o.d--hardly a Protestant or truly Christian position which bids us "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good"; or we may consider it reverently as the attempt of the Christian Church of the past to interpret its discovery of G.o.d as the Father Lord, revealed in Christ, and active within us as the Spirit of love; and use it in so far as it makes our experience richer and clearer, remembering that it is only a man-made attempt to interpret Him who pa.s.seth understanding. The important matter is not the orthodoxy of our doctrine, but the richness of our personal experience of G.o.d. Dr. Samuel Johnson said: "We all _know_ what light is; but it is not so easy to _tell_ what it is." Christians know, at least in part, what G.o.d is; but it is far from easy to state what He is; and each age must revise and say in its own words what G.o.d means to it. Here is a statement in which generations of believers have summed up their intercourse with the Divine. Have we entered into the fulness of their fellows.h.i.+p with G.o.d?

Do we know Him as our Father? This does not mean merely that we accept the idea of His kins.h.i.+p with our spirits and trust His kindly disposition towards us; but that we let Him establish a direct line of paternity with us and father our impulses, our thoughts, our ideals, our resolves. Jesus' sons.h.i.+p was not a relation due to a past contact, but to a present connection. He kept taking His Being, so to speak, again and again from G.o.d, saying, "Not as I will, but as Thou wilt." His every wish and motive had its heredity in the Father whom He trusted with childlike confidence, and served with a grown son's intelligent and willing comrades.h.i.+p. Fatherhood meant to Jesus authority and affection; obedience and devotion on His part maintained and perfected His sons.h.i.+p.

Further, we cannot, according to Jesus, be in sons.h.i.+p with this Father save as we are in true brotherhood with all His children. G.o.d is (to employ a colloquial phrase) "wrapped up" in His sons and daughters, and only as we love and serve them, are we loving and serving Him. In Jesus'

summary of the Law He combined two apparently conflicting obligations, when He said, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy G.o.d with _all_ thy heart, _and_ thou shalt love thy neighbor." If a man loves G.o.d with his all, how can there be any remainder of love to devote to someone else? What we do for any man--the least, the last, the lost,--we do for G.o.d. We do not know Him as Father, until we possess the obligating sense of our kins.h.i.+p with all mankind, and say, "_Our_ Father."

Do we know G.o.d in the Son? There is a sense in which Jesus is the "First Person" in the Christian Trinity. Our approach to G.o.d begins with Him.

In St. Paul's familiar benediction, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ precedes the love of G.o.d. We know G.o.d's love only as we experience the grace of Jesus. We cannot experience that grace except as we let Jesus be Lord. Absolute and entire self-commitment to Him allows Him to renew us after His own likeness and equip us for service in His cause. He cannot transform a partially devoted life, nor use a half-dedicated man.

Those who yield Him lords.h.i.+p, treating Him as G.o.d by giving Him their adoring trust and complete obedience, discover His G.o.dhood. To them He proves Himself, by all that He accomplishes in and through them, worthy of their fullest devotion and reverence. He becomes to them G.o.d manifest in a human life.

While in the order of our experience Jesus comes first, as we follow Him, He makes Himself always second. He points us from Himself to the Father, like Himself and greater; "My Father is greater than I." There is a remoteness, as well as a nearness, in G.o.d; it is His "greaterness"

which gives worth to His likeness. To use a philosophical phrase, only the transcendent G.o.d can be truly immanent. We prize Immanuel--G.o.d _with_ us, because through Him we climb to G.o.d _above_ us. Jesus is the Way; but no one wishes to remain forever en route; he arrives; and home is the Father. Jesus is the image of the invisible G.o.d; but the image on the retina of our eye is not something on which we dwell; we see through it the person with whom we are face to face. We know G.o.d our Father in His Son. Every aspect of Jesus' character unveils for us an aspect of the character of the Lord of heaven and earth. Every experience through which Jesus pa.s.sed in His life with men suggests to us an experience through which our Father is pa.s.sing with us His children. The cross on Calvary is a picture of the age-long and present sacrifice of our G.o.d as He suffers with and for us. The open grave is for us the symbol of His unconquerable love, stronger than the world and sin and death. G.o.d's embodiment of Himself in this Son, made in all points like ourselves, attests the essential kins.h.i.+p between Him and us--G.o.d's humanity and our potential divinity.

Do we know G.o.d in the Spirit? His incarnation in Jesus evidences His "incarnability," and His eagerness to have His fulness dwell in every son who will receive Him. To know G.o.d in the Spirit is so to follow Jesus that we share His sons.h.i.+p with the Father and have Him abiding in us, working through us His works, manifesting Himself in our mortal lives.