THE MYSTERY AS TO THE SECRET THINGS

THE MYSTERY AS TO THE SECRET THINGS

At this point the temptation is to ask questions. These may be asked, but they cannot be answered. Here is the sphere in which faith becomes operative, for here the mystery is seen as to its secret things which belong to God. How can there be united in one Person, perfect and complete Deity, and perfect and complete humanity? It is impossible to reply to the "how." Will not these things, however, so contradict each other as to make both impossible? The only answer is that they did not and that through all the life of Jesus, there were constantly manifested the essential and absolute nature of Deity, and the undoubted facts of humanity. There are no essentials of human nature that cannot be discovered in the story of this Person. His spiritual nature is evidenced by His unceasing recognition of God. His mental capacity is manifest in the marvelous majesty of His dealing with all problems. His physical life is seen moving along the line of the purely human in its hunger, its weariness, its method of sustenance, and its seasons of rest. The human will is seen, but always choosing, as the principle of activity, the DIVINE WILL. The emotional nature is manifest in the tears and the tenderness, the rebuke and the anger, gleaming with soft light, flaming as the lightning. The intellectual nature is seen so perfectly balanced, and so wonderfully equipped, that men marveled at His wisdom, seeing, as they said, that He had never learned. Yet moreover, the essentials of Deity are seen. Such wisdom, that the ages have failed to understand perfectly the deep meaning of His teaching. Such power, that through weakness He operated towards the accomplishment of works that were only possible to God. Such love, that attempts to describe it, but rob it of its fairest glory.

And yet again, in this Person, is seen the merging of the Divine and the human, until one wonders where is the ending of the one and the beginning of the other. Denouncing and proclaiming doom upon guilty Jerusalem, the voice is yet choked with emotion, and the face is wet with tears. That is surely human. And yet it is essentially Divine, for while the expression of the emotion is human as all tears are, the emotion expressed is Divine, for none but God can mingle the doom of the guilty with the tears of a great pity.

It would seem as though there were no adequate naming of this Personality, but that created by the combination of the two names in one. He was the GOD-MAN. Not God indwelling a man. Of such there have been many. Not a man Deified. Of such there have been none except in the myths of pagan systems of thought; but God and man, combining in one Personality the two natures, a perpetual enigma and mystery, baffling the possibility of explanation. It may be asked how if indeed He were God He could be tempted in the realm of humanity, as other men are tempted? It may be objected that had He been God, He could not have spoken of the limitation of His own knowledge concerning things to come. When asked to explain these things, the only possible answer is that they do not admit of explanation, but they remain facts, proving His essential humanity; while on the other hand are the undeniable proofs of His Deity, in the activity of raising the dead, and in the matchless wisdom of His teaching, and ultimately in the revelation of God, which has taken hold of, and influenced the whole conception of Deity during the passing of the centuries since His life upon earth.

This mystery and revelation uniting God and man in a Person is the center of Christianity, and is without parallel, and without possibility of explanation by analogy.

It has been objected that this is the creation of the imagination of man. This however is to presuppose the possibility of an exercise of the imagination, to which it is wholly unequal. Imagination can only rearrange known facts. The poems of the poet may be new, and the picture of the artist also, but in each case upon examination they will be found to be new, in their combination and representation of old facts. The union in a Person of God and man is something undreamed of, unknown, until it broke upon the world as a fact in human history.