THE CROWNED
CHRIST
"And upon His head were many crowns" (Rev. xix.
12.)
CHAPTER I
The Deity of
Christ
For one who is in possession of the New Testament, it
scarcely needs to quote a text to prove the deity of Christ. It is only will
that can fail to find it there; though it would be another thing entirely to
say that there are no difficulties in the comprehension of it. Of course there
are difficulties. That a babe born in Bethlehem, growing in wisdom and stature
in the carpenters house in Nazareth should be at the same time the God of
all men, this is a difficulty, which no one thinks of denying. The Old
Testament states it, however, and draws attention to it twice over, for the
wonder of it, in words that were written, as every Jew is clear, long before
the day of Christ. So Isaiah ix.6: "Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is
given, and the government shall be upon His shoulder: and His name shall be
called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Father of eternity, the Prince
of peace." And again, Micah v. 2: "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be
little among the thousands of Judah, out of thee shall He come forth to Me who
is to be Ruler in Israel, whose goings forth have been from of old, from
everlasting."
Mystery it surely is, but no less clear that the fact is
affirmed, and affirmed of One to whom from the beginning, as the "Seed of the
woman," the generations of men looked forward - to whom, since He came, the
generations have looked back; and He the unique Man in human history! The
marvellous explanation suits well the marvel of fact, while it concentrates
every faculty of the soul upon it. He who made the world, from whom it had
slipped away, has entered it again, in strange guise indeed, but so as to show
the most tender interest in it. When we know Who it is, the self-abasement, the
child-speech of the Eternal, learning the conditions of creaturehood, but so
far removed from paradise: what a revelation is in this obscurity He has
assumed!
Himself has come after us: who, after all, so likely as He?
Shall we measure Him by the height of His throne - and then He is far from us
indeed; or by the depths of a divine nature, which has planted even in man
(capable of being seen in him still, spite of his ruin) the capacity of a
self-sacrificing love, which can only be the dim reflection of his Maker?
Can it be another than He - a creature - to whom He has left it to win
our hearts away from Himself by the glory of so great a work achieved for us?
No, impossible! And when we realize this work, not as provincial merely, as
done for a mere corner of creation, but as under the eyes of angelic
principalities and powers, "that He might show in the ages to come, the
exceeding riches of His grace, in His kindness to us," - how impossible for it
to be any other than Himself who should do this, for it to be no manifestation
of God at all, but of some creature merely; God, in His central glory of being,
yet unknown!
"All things were created by Him and for Him" (Col. i. 6)
is said of Christ; and such sayings are more positive affirmations of His
Godhead than the most direct statements could be. How impossible to imagine a
mere creature centre for the universe to revolve about, or even an inferior
God! Go back to the account of creation, and how naturally it reads now of Him
who is God and with God, as the gospel of John declares Him, "Let Us make man
in Our image, after Our likeness." Or again, look forward in thought to where
we are carried in that prophecy of Isaiah with which we began, by that title of
His, not "the everlasting Father," as the text of the common version has it,
but as the Hebrew and the margin of the Revised, "the Father of eternity:" the
One who having made all things at the beginning, shall give them at the last
their final shape.
Thus we realize that at the Centre of the universe
there is not merely a Power that controls and holds it together - which is
again true of Him "in whom all things consist" (Col. i. 17) - but a Heart:
perfectly told out as the moral Power which is manifested now as the "Beloved"
of "Love" Itself. Here in the Incarnation and Atonement it is told out to us.
There could be no other. It is no satellite which has become a sun, but the
diffusive Sun itself - yea, the Sun of all suns.
Think of One who could
say of Himself that He was the "Light of the world" - excluding all other!
Light; self-witnessing, as light is: so that rejection of it could only be on
the part of men who "loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were
evil." And this light was not merely that of His sayings, a message that He
brought, a revelation which was committed to Him, though there was that also:
but He was Himself the Light, as He says, in the exactest possible way defining
this - "As long as I am in the world, I am the Light of the world" (John. ix.
5).
His sayings would, indeed, live after He was gone; the revelation
He made remains for other days. None the less, it would be night for the world
when He was gone out of it. Nothing could replace the Sun. Of course, there are
little "lights" enough - torchlights, bonfires, here and there a calcium light:
but no one of these could be confounded with the sun. Even the moon shines by
its light, and nature itself bears witness which we do well to listen to, that
the light of the world must be a light outside the world; nothing bred of it is
competent for its illumination.
"God is light:" and here is One who
claims to be in the world so absolutely that, that if a disciple express still
a desire to have the Father shown to him, He can rebuke him with "Have I been
so long time with you, and hast thou not known Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me
hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father?" (John xiv.
9).
Nothing could be more absolute in statement that as to God
Himself, morally, there was none else to see - there was no one back of Him,
who was "the brightness" - or, as in the Revised Version, "the effulgence of
(the Fathers) glory, the exact image of His Person" (Heb.i. 3), "the
Image of the invisible God" (Col i. 15).
He is thus the Revealer, or
(according to the title which John alone gives to Him,) the "Word of God." The
opening of his gospel, which is that in which the divine glory of Christ is the
theme, presents Him in this character. "In the beginning" - when anything that
had beginning began - the Word (not began, but) was. Revelation began with
creation: the work must necessarily in some sort bear witness of the Worker;
but this is not enough to say here; for the Personal Word, there at the very
beginning of creation, speaks of design on Gods part that He should be
known. He must intend, therefore, to have those to whom He can speak; and the
Word of God is thus the Creator: "By Him were all things made; and without Him
was not anything made that was made." Creation is, in scarcely a figure, the
actual speech of the Word of God.
"The Word was with God" - a distinct
Person; "and the Word was God" - a divine Person; and "the same was in the
beginning with God" - always personally distinct, as always in communion with
the Father.
It is too little remembered - to some seems to be unknown -
that the Word was the Creator. The so-called Apostles Creed ascribes
creation solely to the Father. Scripture says of the Father, "of whom are all
things," and of the Lord Jesus Christ "by whom" (1 Cor. viii. 6). Paul in
Colossians, as already quoted, declares of Christ that "all things were created
by Him and for Him" (i. 16). John may enable us to understand better this last
expression. As the Word, the Revealer, we can see that He has special relation
to what He has made; so that when we find that it is He, the "Word," who is
"become flesh" this coming into His own creation, with all the wonder of it,
has a divine suitability; and we, "created for Him," are thus to have the whole
heart of God declared to us, and to be brought nigh in accordance with the
eternal counsels of love, in which all the Persons of the Godhead have their
part.
We pass on to Johns epistle, and we find Him there before
us as the "Word of life," where the same idea of revelation attaches to it:
"for the Life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness and show
unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested unto
us." This is thoroughly in keeping with the character of the epistle, but we
have not yet reached to this.
And once again, in the book of
Revelation, Christ is presented to us as the Word of God, where He is still
manifesting God as ever, but in judgment. Here as Rider upon the white horse,
the sword of judgment proceeds out of His mouth.
For us how blessed to
realize in this title of the Son of God the divine purpose, from eternity, of
revelation, and that we were given of the Father to the Son, from the beginning
of creation according to this purpose - "created for Him." The Lords
words in His prayer to the Father for those given to Him out of the world,
though seeming to have a narrower scope, only show us the same purpose in
progress, now defining itself in view of human sin and its fatal consequences.
To those given to Him He manifests the Fathers name, and communicates the
Fathers words. One who had his place with them had dropped out; but he
was a "son of perdition."
There is no need to entangle ourselves with the
questions that arose early in the Church with regard to the doctrine of the
Word or Logos. Scripture is transparently clear with regard to it; and upon
such subjects not a ray of light is to be got elsewhere.
Being, then,
such as we see, we do not wonder that He claims to be the self-existent One, as
in His words to the Jews: "Before Abraham was I AM" (John. viii. 58). This is
the incommunicable name of Deity, by which He revealed Himself to Moses and to
Israel: "I AM hath sent me to you" (Exod. iii. 14). Being always the Word, the
Revealer, this older voice was, of course, His own. He is thus the Abiding, the
Unchangeable, the Eternal. Jehovah is but the synonym of this; and so the glory
of Jehovah, which Isaiah saw in his day, is declared to be His glory: "these
things said Esaias when he saw His glory, and spake of Him" (John xii. 40, 41
with Isa. vi. 9, 10). The Old Testament thus, as well as the New, is full of
His Presence; only that now He has taken that tabernacle of flesh to display
His glory in, in which all His purpose to be near us, all His delights with the
sons of men, have fully come out. He is now truly Immanuel, "God with us;" and
the blessedness of that for us will fill eternity.
That He should claim
equal honour with the Father Himself is in this way clearly intelligible, as it
of itself also declares fully who He is: "that all men should honour the Son
even as they honor the Father" (John v. 23) is the most emphatic assertion of
equality; which Thomas "my Lord and my God" (20: 28) yields Him, with
full recognition on his part of the truth of his too tardy faith.
Go To Chapter Two
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