THE REVEALER

THE REVEALER

“Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah." Deut. 6:4

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 fulfillment 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." (Deut. 6:4) That was the initial lesson, and yet Israel never learned it fully until she had passed into Babylon’s 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 realizing His ideal of humanity, made a perfect instrument through which God should reveal Himself to the heart of the race. Jesus was the EXPRESS 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 harmonizes 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, there 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 unending 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.