Religious Reality | Page 7

went to GOD. He is the
revelation of the Father, the expression of GOD'S nature and being "in
the intelligible terms of a human life." To have seen Him is to have
seen the Father, because He and the Father are one. He is the Way, the
Truth, and the Life: the Bread that came down from heaven: the
Fountain of living water: the Lamb of GOD, that taketh away the sin of
the world.
Later Christian orthodoxy never got farther than this. All that the
formal doctrine of the Incarnation--as expressed, for example, in such a
formulary as the Athanasian Creed--can truly be said to amount to is
just the double insistence that Christ is at once truly and completely
man, and also truly and completely GOD. The paradox is left
unreconciled--"yet He is not two, but one Christ." The Godhead is
expressed in manhood: in the manhood we see GOD.
What does it mean to confess the Deity of Christ? It means just this:
that we take the character of Christ as our clue to the character of GOD:
that we interpret the life of Christ as an expression of the life of GOD:
that we affirm the conviction, based upon deep and unshakable
personal experience, that "GOD was in Christ reconciling the world

unto Himself."
What is the real question, the most fundamental of questions, which
arises when we seek to interpret the world we live in? Is it not just the
question: What is the nature or character of the ultimate Power or
Principle or Person upon which or upon whom the world depends? Is
not every religion, every imagined deity, in one sense an altar to the
unknown GOD? The venture of Christian faith consists in staking all
upon the assumption, the hypothesis abundantly verified in the life's
experience of such as make it, that the character of the unknown GOD
is revealed in Christ: that the love of Christ is the expression of the love
of GOD, the sufferings of Christ an expression of the suffering of GOD,
the triumph of Christ an expression of the eternal victory of GOD over
all the evil and wickedness which mars the wonder of His creation. If
we were to look primarily at the life of Nature, we might be tempted to
say that GOD was cruel. If we considered certain of the works of man,
we might be tempted to conclude that GOD was devilish. Looking at
Jesus we gain the assurance that GOD is Love. We behold "the light of
the knowledge of the glory of GOD in the face of Jesus Christ," and we
are satisfied.
And so we come to Jesus--the Prophet that is come into the world: and
what we shall find, if we will suffer Him to work His work in us, is this.
He will change our world for us, and will transform it. He will redeem
our souls, so that there shall be in us a new birth, a new creation. He
will show us the Father, and it shall suffice us. He will set our feet on
the road to Calvary, and we shall rejoice to be crucified with Him. He
will convert us--He will turn our lives inside out, so that they shall have
their centre in GOD, and no longer in ourselves. He will bestow on us
the Spirit without measure, so that we shall be sons and daughters of
the Highest. And we shall know that we are of GOD, even though the
whole world lieth in wickedness. And we shall know that the Son of
GOD is come, and that He hath given us an understanding, that we may
know Him that is true, and that we are in Him that is true, even in His
Son Jesus Christ.

CHAPTER III
THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SPIRIT
To know GOD and to find Him revealed in Jesus Christ is not enough.
To have set before one in the human life of Jesus an ideal of character,
a pattern of perfect manhood for imitation, if the message of the Gospel
were regarded as stopping short at that point, could only be
discouraging to men conscious of moral weakness, of spiritual
impotence and incapacity. It is probable that one of the reasons why the
plain man to-day is so very apt to regard Christianity as consisting in
the profession of a standard of ideal morality to which he knows
himself to be personally incapable of attaining, and which those who do
profess it fail conspicuously to practise, is to be found in the entire
absence from his mind and outlook of any conception of the Holy Spirit,
or any belief in the availability of the Spirit as a source of transforming
energy and power in the lives of men.