If truth were not more wonderful than fiction, life would be a disappointment. If God were not able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think, he would be embarrassed by our imagination. In Jesus Christ everything is at once marvelous and natural, eternal and historical, divine and human. His birth was a miracle, but if provision for the Incarnation was not made in the original design of man, then Jesus is irrelevant to our race. So Mary’s child is the first truly natural human being, worthy of the homage of peasants and sages and angels not only because he is divine, but also because he is humanity’s crown. As a boy he was as winsome as he was precocious; as a man he is a carpenter and a king. He lived by faith; to him the religious, the spiritual, and the moral took precedence over the material and temporal; yet his flesh was holy, the organ for the execution of the divine will in the world of matter, so that he did not hesitate to classify his body as the temple of God.
He was never controlled by policy; he was honest, not for profit but for truth. He drove the influential merchants out of the Temple twice. He warned of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, but refused to pronounce judgments on trifles, which would have suggested distinctions in moral character that did not exist. When a man came to him claiming that his brother had cheated him of his inheritance and asking that Jesus redress the wrong, he replied, “Who made me a ruler or a judge over you?” To him, the two brothers were alike; that is, they both fell short of God’s holiness and of man’s proper character. He was gentle with publicans and sinners, refusing to take action against them which would have classified their sin as worse than the sins of respectability, or would have suggested that mere conventional behavior was a proof of righteousness, or that secret sin, or sins of the mind, were tolerable.
When the Scribes and Pharisees brought him a woman who had been caught in adultery, he said, “Let him without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” He went to dine in the house of Zacchaeus the publican, repudiating the claims of the pillars of society in Jericho to his patronage. Thus he testified that man’s moral sickness is universal—a judgment which even the most enthusiastic humanist will not deny today. He stopped every mouth and showed that the world is guilty before God.
He had no confidence in any social system that ignored the necessity of individual spiritual and moral regeneration. The stated constitutional principle of his governmental philosophy was theocratic, and prescribed that all other good could be realized only by seeking the kingdom and accepting the sovereignty of God, and by receiving his imparted righteousness.
While declaring that mercy was available for the penitent sinner, he accepted the most uncompromising moral law for his own person, and proclaimed it as the criterion of his new society. He came not to set aside Moses’ law but to fulfill it. He declared the look of covetous lust comparable to fornication. He insisted that perfection equal to his Heavenly Father’s was required in humanity. His own claim to the Father’s favor was based on the fact of the duplication of God’s holiness in his own character and conduct as a man. Without compunction, he asserted the claim of moral perfection before his critics, challenging them to convict him of sin. His challenge is still unanswered. Robert Ingersoll, the agnostic, at the end of his life is said to have declared, “I regret ever having said anything derogatory of Jesus Christ.” With this conclusion, practically all respectable critics of religion agree.
His perfection was unmarred by any exhibition or feeling of contempt for sinners and moral weaklings. His criticisms and judgments of others were never supercilious or contemptuous. He loved children and refused to relegate them to a status of unimportance or small consequence. He did not shrink from the touch of the contrite prostitute, and gladly and publicly acknowledged her tearful devotion. Furthermore, he accepted her nomination of him as Lord and ideal personal friend, granting forthwith the forgiveness of her sins.
His refusal to recognize the claim of wealth, social status, or false religious pretension, was free from any taint of socialistic prejudice or bitterness. He treated Nicodemus, the worried Sanhedrinist, with great respect and serious sympathy, and did him the honor of presenting to him the fullest and most profound statement on record of His gospel and God’s love. He gladly accepted the charity of a few well-to-do women who helped feed and clothe him, thoughtfully receiving all favors as the beneficent and unfailing providence of his Heavenly Father. Of his own lowly social antecedents or material poverty he was never either ashamed or proud.
He never devoted his majestic genius of wisdom and ability to any act or program of personal aggrandizement or competitive ambition; rather, he deliberately humbled himself by refusing to be made king, or judge, or priest, living in complete obedience to his calling of servitude to God and his fellowman. He was always unaffected, natural, and spontaneous. He was never theatrical or pompous. Washing the feet of the disciples, facing the power of Pilate, or assailed by sin’s maximum power as he hung naked in agony and blood on a Roman cross, he maintained, without effort, his humility, calm dignity, self-possession, and love for man.
His moral perfection was subjected to the severest possible tests. Satan recognized his claim to holiness and tried to induce him to violate the law of his own humanity by claiming or accepting superhuman privileges. Satan’s theory seems to have been that holiness is native to God alone, and that it cannot be realized or maintained in mankind. So he tried to get Jesus to renounce his humanness in favor of a higher order of existence, suggesting as he did to Eve, “You will be like God.” “Man shall not live by bread alone,” answered Jesus, thus claiming for man and maintaining for himself a life in the flesh which transcends the merely physical, but does not entail the violation of the laws of corporeal existence—a life controlled and nourished by the Word of God, which attains by obedience what independence or rebellion must automatically forfeit.
“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord your God,” he answered to the invitation to test the Father’s faithful care, thereby proving his willingness to abide by the precept, “The just shall live by faith.” “Be gone, Satan,” he commanded, indicating his refusal to accept the suggestion that man’s status as lower than the angels is permanent, or that obedient, patient humanity is unfit to be set over God’s creation, or that effective government must be established by the application of enslaving force.
In Gethsemane he feared a consequence of his prospective murder which would have involved the world, adopted by him as his own, in a cataclysmic and irreversible judgment of destruction. He shrank from a fate which made him man’s ultimate sin. Evidently reassured that the atoning value of his own Person and merit abounded over all the debt incurred by sinful man and that his sacrificed life provided a wholly adequate ransom for a race enslaved by evil, he regained his confidence and composure and with unflinching heroic resolution went to Calvary, without resistance or complaint.
At Calvary, the measured limit of sin’s power and influence was hurled against him in an effort to produce a weakness or flaw in his character. This test only served to evoke the full beauty and power of his unsullied righteousness and love. “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he trusted to him who judges justly.” His reactions and behavior in death on the cross were the same as those that had characterized and controlled his life: a prayer of forgiveness for his enemies—“Father, forgive!”; compassion, and salvation, today, for the penitent sinner; love for his mother. Aware of his own perfection and certain that he had not personally contributed to the chaos of the world, he dares to ask, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” Bearing the sin of the world in his sinless self and suffering the penalty which sin inevitably produces, because he loved the world and refused to withdraw from it by praying for 12 legions of angels, he asserts, against the weight of the sin of all men, the preponderant value of his own righteousness and obedience. God gave the world up to sin and its penalty, but that penalty exhausted its power when it encountered, in the world, the immovable obstacle to sin and death, the holy Son of Man! So the darkness, otherwise permanent and fatal to all mankind, lifted, because where sin abounded, grace did much more abound; and the forsakenness is explainable by the fact that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” So even the cry of dereliction is but an expression of the holiness of Jesus and the indication of the high tide of the Incarnation. “I thirst,” he cried, denoting again the reality of his human frailty and limitations. He began his ministry by choosing to remain hungry rather than change stones to bread; he ends it in a thirst which bespeaks his unswerving loyalty and devotion to the humanity which he had chosen and voluntarily assumed as the law of his being. “It is finished,” he declares, profoundly confident of the adequacy and efficiency of his work. “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” Having withstood all tests and overcome all evil, he offers himself without spot to God, for acceptance as the true burnt offering and the atoning sin offering.
From first to last, an awareness of his moral and spiritual uniqueness and of the solitariness of his character in humanity, together with a full understanding of the solidarity of evil in all the rest of the race, never caused him to despair for other men. Rather, his outlook was basically optimistic and hopeful.
On the other hand, he regarded the individual destiny of unregenerate man as supremely tragic. He taught that to die in one’s sins forever closes the door to the possibility of achieving the supreme goal of life as intended by the Creator: transfiguration from a life of moral unworthiness and physical limitation to a new state of being—spiritual in nature, holy in character, exalted in rank above the angels, and providing free access to, and fellowship with, God. Because of the prospect of this evolution, to him the kingdom of God was the kingdom of heaven rather than a society of this world. He taught that to be lost was to miss all this and to be consigned to a nether world under the condemnation of God. The idea of inequitable punishment or perpetual criminality in the world to come is entirely foreign to his outlook and judicial pronouncements. The extreme parabolic language he uses in describing hell obviously contrasts the blessedness, freedom, and dignity of a heavenly home in the Father’s house, to a destiny which involves the surrender of all hope of attainment of man’s ultimate being as designed by God and which involves the imposition of sanctions necessitated by the unrelieved persistence of the sin principles in human nature. This he regarded as eternal slavery, as contrasted to the freedom of sonship proffered to all who love God.
His optimistic appraisal of the moral and spiritual possibilities latent in individual sinners took into account the futility of mere reformation produced by the limited moral resources of the will of fallen man. He was aware of the fact that behavior patterns could be changed by the exertions of the flesh and the development of the moral or religious conditioned reflex, but rejected such conformity to moral norms of respectability as superficial and temporary, altogether beneath the uncompromising requirements of God, the Eternal Judge. His gospel of salvation was no naïve humanistic hope in evolutionary progress or belief in the perfectability of man through educational or environmental influences. He taught that the holiness which was residual and realized in his own being alone could be brought to individual sinners by the impartation of his own life to those who believed in him. He regarded his life as seminal, originative, a life that could be communicated to other men by organic contact with himself through the operation of the Holy Spirit. He declared that he had life in himself as the Father has life in himself. Except a man be born anew, he cannot see or enter the kingdom of God, he taught Nicodemus.
He undertook, therefore, to establish a kingdom of a new humanity of which he was the Source and King: a kingdom not of this world, accessible to all who have learned of him, believe in him, and love him and his righteousness. He repudiated the status quo: “Behold I make all things new” is his purpose and promise, and St. Paul exults, “If any one is in Christ, he is a new creation!”
The phenomenon of Jesus Christ, his uniqueness and his accomplishments, can be explained only on the basis of the virginity of his mother and the incarnation of God. Presented with these staggering facts, my faith becomes more than admiration of his life and love for his person as portrayed in the indubitably true record of the Bible. It expands into a complete trust in him as Saviour and Lord. That such a commitment on my part should be the sole condition of forgiveness and new life in Christ, as prescribed by a holy and loving God, is recognizable as a just, and practical, and understandable law, devoid of any arbitrary or irrational elements. Any other suggested terms for reconciliation between a holy God and a sinful man contain elements which require that God adjust himself to moral compromise, or which ignore the reality and significance of man’s sin, or both. The terms of the Gospel of Jesus Christ appeal to my conscience, my mind, and my heart. Therefore I am constrained to prostrate myself in contrite awareness of my own infinite unworthiness at the feet of the unseen risen Christ, and in the temerity of a faith which takes God at his word, borrow the classic confession of the once doubting St. Thomas: My Lord and my God!—JAMES HYSLOP, Vice President, Consolidation Coal Company, St. Clairsville, Ohio.
