The Word

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.—John 1:1.

1. The text seems speculative and hard to understand. But St. John wrote the Fourth Gospel with a practical aim, and in language which he meant to be intelligible. What his aim was he states in the end of the twentieth chapter—the chapter with which his Gospel originally ended (he himself seems to have added the twenty-first at a later time). He says: “These are written, (1) that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and (2) that believing ye may have life in his name.” No doubt his language was more familiar to his Jewish readers than it is to us. But we ought to know the Old Testament, and although the special expression he uses here, Logos or Word, is not found exactly in this way in the Old Testament, the idea is there. For in the Old Testament God constantly makes Himself known and seen. Now, “No man hath seen God at any time.” It is therefore not God the Father; but He whom the Father sanctifies and sends into the world—it is He who appeared to Abraham, to Moses, to Joshua, to Samuel. This Person may well be called God’s Word, since His mission is always to reveal the will of God, to speak for God, to speak as God. By and by this Person, whom the Old Testament writers call the Angel of the Lord, comes into the world to dwell there for a season, taking human flesh, and He is called not the Word or Revealer now, but Jesus the Saviour, for He is come to save His people from their sins.

2. St. John works backwards. He came to know the Word first as Jesus. He knew Him as a Man among men. He went with Him to the marriage feast. He saw Him sit weary on the wayside well. He was near when the cry, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me,” rent the silent night. He saw Him nailed to the cross. He knew that He remained there till He was dead. But he also at that wedding feast saw Him turn the water into wine. He heard Him say, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.” He caught the prayer, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,” and the promise, “To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” He started thus with a man among men, but a Man who was more than men, and as soon as He had ascended into heaven, John and the rest felt that the first thing for them was to know and to make known who He was. They had the facts of the life of Jesus on the earth. They saw that that human life had passed into the eternal. This, then, was what they learned first, that it had come out of the eternal. It looked before as well as after. The Jesus whom they knew had been before they knew Him. He had been the Revealer of God to men in Old Testament times, the Logos, the Word. He had been the Agent in the creation (which of itself is simply a revelation). He had been with the Father before the creation of the world. “In the beginning was the Word.”

3. St. John started with Jesus of Nazareth, and he has reached this: “In the beginning was the Word.” But he cannot rest in that. Jesus was the Word in Old Testament times and earlier, because He uttered God’s will. He came into the world to utter it. But He did not separate Himself from God by coming into the world. You must not say that the Word is here and God is yonder. If He could thus be separated from God, He could not perfectly reveal God. He must be in closest proximity, in proximity of heart and will. He must rather be God to men than represent God to men. And so the Old Testament writers speak of the Angel of the Lord, and next moment let the Angel of the Lord say, “I am the God of Abraham.” And in like manner St. John says that all the while Jesus was the Word and was coming into the world to reveal God’s will to men, He was “with God.” St. John caught the thought from Jesus, “As thou, Father, art in me and I in thee.” Indeed, St. John caught all these thoughts from Jesus, and we may trace them all from words of Christ he himself has reported.

4. Starting from Jesus of Nazareth, St. John has now reached two thoughts: Jesus is the pre-existent Word, and though He was continually revealing God’s will to the world, He never left the Father’s presence. He was more than in constant communication with God. He did more than come and go between the earth and heaven. He was always with God. He was always, not only doing God’s will, but willing it. And that leads inevitably to a third thought. If the will of the Word and of God is one, then the Word and God are themselves one. There is God the Father, whom no man hath seen or can see. There is also God the Son, who constantly made Himself seen and known from the beginning, and in St. John’s own day had flesh and dwelt among men, so that St. John and the rest could say of Him: “We have heard, we have seen with our eyes, we have looked upon, and our hands have handled.” And these two are one God. It is a long way to go from Jesus of Nazareth, “whose father and mother we know”; but the way was open and unobstructed, and Jesus Himself showed it. St. John, who saw Jesus nailed to the cross on Calvary by rough Roman soldiers, says at last, “In the beginning was (Jesus) the Word, and (Jesus) the Word was with God, and (Jesus) the Word was God.” And he writes these things “that believing ye may have life in his name.”

I

The Word

1. Let us look in at this writer’s workshop, and watch him choosing his themes and even at times his very language: or rather let us listen to the religious teacher as, with disciples around him, he proceeds to recall, and probably dictate to one of them, his reminiscences of his Lord, and, before doing so, tries to show the central importance of the life which he is going to illustrate.

That life, he has come to see more and more, was no accident in history; each saying, each action had grown in meaning as he had watched each prophecy fulfilled, and seen the power of each act repeated in the experience of the Christian Church; the life was of eternal significance; it came from God and told of God in every detail; it was the act of that God who had ever been revealing Himself: it was a link, the most important link, in a chain of continuous revelation. Now Jewish and Greek and Christian thought alike had long been feeling after some means of expressing this method of revelation, some Being who could mediate between the infinite God and the finite creature, who could act as God’s organ in creation and in providence. And the writer had seen Jesus Christ control creation, he had known His care for himself and for the Church; of this, at least, he is sure, that, however that Being is to be defined, He is one with Jesus Christ.

What title then shall he choose out of the many descriptions and definitions which had been given of Him? Among these many he has practically a choice of two alternatives, which stood out prominently from among all other titles. Shall he call Him “The Wisdom of God” or shall he call Him “The Word of God”? There was much to be said for either. “The Wisdom” would recall at once the whole Wisdom literature of the Old Testament; and it would have support in our Lord’s own words (Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:35; Luke 11:49). But it would have this drawback; it would suggest primarily the thought of a quality immanent in the mind of God, the wisdom of the Divine architect, the plan in His mind on which all material things were modelled. But our writer’s aim is rather to show how God has been revealed, interpreted to man; his thought is not primarily that the world had been the perfect work of a wise Creator and Jesus Christ the climax of His work, but that ever since creation there had been a revealing of God to man, and that Jesus Christ had been the fullest organ of that Revelation. The Word, then, will be the better title for his purpose.

2. This title will have many advantages. It will lead up naturally to the stress which the writer wants to lay on the words of Jesus as being spirit and life, and on His discourses as being the utterances of Him who claimed to be the Truth: they will be sayings of One who had already been described as “the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God.” And “the Word” also has its roots in the Old Testament; it recalls each “God said” of creation: it recalls the Psalmist’s summary of creation, and his use and that of the Apocryphal writers of “God’s Word” as the agent of His Providence in healing and delivering His chosen people: above all, it will take up the Rabbinic reverence, which when speaking of God’s manifestation of Himself to man substituted for God the title “the Word of God,” “the memra.” In using it, he will be speaking of the same Being of whom the Jewish Rabbis thought when they spoke of God protecting Noah by “his Word,” making a covenant between Abraham and “his Word,” of Moses bringing forth the people to meet “the Word of God” at Mount Sinai. There was one further reason why the title would help his purpose; for through Philo its Greek philosophical meaning had become current throughout the eastern religious world, and even in Christian circles; much of the language associated with it had been adopted by St. Paul and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews; and yet there were striking points in which the Philonian doctrine might mislead Christian disciples: he would be able to guard against this, while he stated shortly, clearly, authoritatively, what “the Word” really was.1 [Note: W. Lock, The Bible and Christian Life, 25.]

A word is the true expression of him who utters it. We have various ways of communicating with one another, but the chief of all these ways is by speech. Within this intricate apparatus, which we call the body, sits a tenant who is wholly distinct from the body. This tenant thinks, wills, feels—lives a life separate from the senses—a life sacred and invisible. How shall this tenant communicate with the outer world? By speech: alphabets and words come to his help; the lip is taught their use, and then the sacred tenant within the body can utter itself to the world. So St. John conceives God as cut off from man by many barriers; “no man hath seen God at any time, nor can see him.” How shall God communicate with the creature He has made? He does so by Christ who is His Word. Christ is the very mind of God translating itself into symbols which man can comprehend. As your word is yourself uttered, so Christ is God uttered. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”2 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Reproach of Christ, 23.]

II

The Nature of the Word

1. In the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel we have a principle by which we may harmonize the facts of Christ’s life. St. John gives us a key which proves itself by fitting into all the wards of the lock. What Christ did and said becomes explicable only by knowing what Christ is.

2. The first sentence of the Gospel offers a perfect example of the stately symmetry by which the whole narrative is marked. The three clauses of which it consists are set side by side (… and … and …); the Subject (the Word) is three times repeated; and the substantive verb three times occupies the same relative position. The symmetry of form corresponds with the exhaustiveness of the thought. The three clauses contain all that it is possible for man to realize as to the essential nature of the Word in relation to time, and mode of being, and character: He was (1) in the beginning: He was (2) with God: He was (3) God. At the same time these three clauses answer to the three great moments of the Incarnation of the Word declared in John 1:14. He who “was God,” became flesh: He who “was with God,” tabernacled among us (cf. 1 John 1:2): He who “was in the beginning,” became (in time).1 [Note: Westcott.]

3. The three propositions are brief, having a deeply marked character like oracles. The first indicates the eternity of the Logos; the second expresses profoundly the idea of His personality; the third His divinity.

i. His Eternity

“In the beginning was the Word.”

1. The phrase “in the beginning” carries us back to Genesis 1:1, which necessarily fixes the sense of the beginning. Here, as there, “the beginning” is the initial moment of time and creation; but with this difference, that Moses dwells on that which starts from the point, and traces the record of Divine action from the beginning (cf. 1 John 1:1; 1 John 2:13), while St. John lifts our thoughts beyond the beginning and dwells on that which “was” when time, and with time finite being, began its course. Already when “God created the heaven and the earth,” “the Word was.” The “being” of the Word is thus necessarily carried beyond the limits of time, though the pre-existence of the Word is not definitely stated. The simple affirmation of existence in this connection suggests a loftier conception than that of pre-existence; which is embarrassed by the idea of time.

2. The Lord Himself had spoken of His life with the Father “before the world was” (John 17:5; John 17:24): so the Evangelist must trace it back as far as creation. But his actual phrase recalls the Jewish description of Wisdom created “in the beginning” (Proverbs 8:22); and the words are thrown in the forefront of the sentence that they may recall the opening words of the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.” The life which he is going to describe affects all creation.

3. The “beginning” described by St. John in the Prologue to his Gospel is manifestly the absolute beginning, the origination of all being or existence in the universe in which we find ourselves. It is a logical rather than a chronological conception; the “all things” included in it, in their successive “becomings,” may have had no actual beginning at all in time; we cannot conceive of them as without beginning in thought, or without causal beginning. In whatever sense “being” is eternal, it is not without principium, without some “principle” of being. The “beginning” is causative and constitutive, and not merely initiative.

ii. His Personality

“And the Word was with God.”

1. The Word, already said to have been “in the beginning,” is now stated to have been “with God.” That is, not “with,” in the sense of together with, or besides; but “with” in the sense of abiding with, as when we say, “I have it with me,” or “He is abiding with us”—“with God,” so as to be in that place (if we may so speak) where God especially was present; so as to be at home with Him and inseparable from Him. Our Evangelist elsewhere expresses this in other words: “The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father”: in His closest counsels, delighting in Him, and in being the acting expression of His must holy will.

2. To this has ever been referred by the Church that sublime description in the Book of Proverbs, chap. 8, where Wisdom says, “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: while as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: when he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: when he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth. Then I was by him as one brought up with him; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.”

3. Clearly, no interpretation of these words fathoms their depth, or makes worthy sense, which does not recognize that the Word is a person. If there had been no distinct personality the Apostle might still have said, “The Word was God,” but he could not have said, “The Word was with God.” “The Word was God,” says Dr. Owen, “in the unity of the Divine essence, and the Word was with God in the distinct personal subsistence.” Jesus did not claim to be the Father, but He did claim to be one with the Father—“I and my Father are one” (John 10:30). We are encouraged to pray to the Father in the name of the Son (John 15:16), but there could be no reason for this if there were no distinction of personality between the Father and the Son.

4. The expression, “The Word was with God,” has been rendered, “The Word was towards God.” This is a very suggestive rendering. It is significant of delight in God. The Being of the Son was attracted by the Being of the Father, as some flowers are attracted by the sun. Thus it is with those who are in Christ. Sin separates men from God, but Christ brings them back to Him. In Christ they are reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:18), and those who are reconciled enjoy the privilege of fellowship with God (1 John 1:3). The passage has also been rendered, “The Word was at home with God.” “No restraint,” says Jones, “No reserve, no shyness, but open, free, confidential fellowship for ever” (see Proverbs 8:22-31). How different it was with Adam when he sinned! He was afraid of the presence of God, and sought to get away from it (Genesis 3:10).

God could be known in nature, in conscience, in history; but if He was to be thoroughly known, He must be known in a person. So Christ stands the central fount of personality, who explains, not my gifts, my attainments, my knowledge, my capacities, but me, that which lies beyond these, uses them and gives them meaning and coherence.1 [Note: The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 212.]

iii. His Divinity

“And the Word was God.”

1. The distinction of persons, so strongly emphasized by the second proposition, is in this third resolved into a community of essence: “And the Word was God.” And this community of essence is not inconsistent with distinction of persons, but makes the communion of active Love possible; for none could, in the depths of eternity, dwell with and perfectly love and be loved by God, except one who Himself was God.

2. It is now apparent why St. John chooses this title to designate Christ in His pre-existent life. No other title brings out so clearly the identification of Christ with God, and the function of Christ to reveal God. It was a term which made the transition easy from Jewish Monotheism to Christian Trinitarianism. Being already used by the strictest Monotheists to denote a spiritual intermediary between God and the world, it is chosen by St. John as the appropriate title of Him through whom all revelation of God in the past had been mediated, and who has at length finished revelation in the person of Jesus Christ.

The experience of David Nitschmann, the Moravian, is related in Wesley’s Journal, as follows:—

I then fell into doubts of another kind. I believed in God; but not in Christ. I opened my heart to Martin Dober, who used many arguments with me, but in vain. For above four years I found no rest by reason of this unbelief; till one day, as I was sitting in my house, despairing of any relief, those words shot into me, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” I thought, “Then God and Christ are one.” Immediately my heart was filled with joy; and much more at the remembrance of these words which I now felt I did believe: “The Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”1 [Note: John Wesley’s Journal (Standard edition), ii. 38.]

III

The Worth of the Word

The Apostle’s words are practical. What practical use can we make of them? There are three ways in which they bring us strength.

1. The first way in which this passage helps us is that it assures us that there is communication between God and His creatures in Christ. We can choose between two theories of the universe and only two. The first is that it is all dumb, blind matter in a process of unconscious evolution. There is no God, for none is needed. All the morality that man has, he has created for himself in his own protection. It is vain to assault those far-reaching shining heavens with prayer—they are empty. Of this theory we are ready to say, with Wordsworth, better all the childish allegory of Greek mythology than this—

Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

If that theory fails there is but one other, it is that God exists, that God has shrined Himself in man, and that God has some means of communicating with man. That is credible—for it explains the grandeur of human life. But if God really speaks with man, is it not just to suppose that it will be with unmistakable clearness and certainty? Will He not find means to make us aware of what His mind is? And when we find in Jesus, not only thoughts so high and perfect that none else are comparable with them, but a life so lofty and sublime that even the most sceptical of men see in it something Divinely beautiful—may we not say, behold this is God’s communication with us; this is His true Word; behold the very mind of the Highest is incarnated in Jesus Christ? “I can only comprehend God, as God is seen in Christ,” was the confession of Dr. Arnold and Charles Kingsley. “The acknowledgment of God in Christ, accepted by thy reason, solves in thee all questions in the earth and out of it,” said Browning; but if there had been no Christ, then the assurance that God had communicated His mind to us would be wholly vain.

What has been the greatest dread of man since he entered on conscious intelligent life? It has been the dread of God’s dumbness. The famous question put by Bonaparte to his atheistic Generals in Egypt, “Sirs, who made all that?” as he pointed to the starry splendour of the midnight sky over the Pyramids, has been a question always weighing heavily upon the heart of man. Man has never yet been wholly able to accommodate himself to a purely animal existence. He has gazed upon the solid universe with curious eyes, has felt the mystery of depth opening over depth in the blue abyss above and around him; has gone softly, haunted by the suspicion of a God hidden in stream and wood; has realized that life is an enigma for which there must needs be some answer. I look upon the ruined temples of Egypt, and inscriptions meet me eloquent of man’s search for God; I enter the tombs of the old Etruscans, and over the funeral urn is the rising sun—mute witness to a hope which survives death. That strange altar to the unknown God, which St. Paul found at Athens, is discoverable in every land, among all peoples, through all time. “Sirs, who made all this?” man asks ever and again in painful astonishment. Can it be that the Maker is dumb? Can it be that He has created children whom He disowns? Is there no voice or language in all that starry immensity, all these vague, unending fields of splendour? That God should be dumb—that He should sit far from us, He who has made us, silent as a stone amid the rush of worlds—that is the most intolerable of thoughts, that is man’s greatest dread, that is the terror which has cast its shadow on his heart from the beginning of the ages.1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Reproach of Christ, 25.]

At length he came, of lowly birth, despised

And by the world rejected; but a band

Of humble men observed and felt the power

Of kindling love and faith with which he taught.

For in him thou, the eternal Word of truth,

Who once didst grave thy precepts upon stone,

Hadst become flesh; and they beheld with awe

God’s glory in a human face expressed.

There justice sat revealed, and holiness,

And rapt devotion, as of one who felt

God’s presence everywhere, within, around.

But all in one expression were combined,

A yearning love, which came in ceaseless stream

From heaven’s exhaustless fount, and poured itself

Forth on the world, to heal and bless mankind.

There grace and truth shone star-like from the eye,

And trembled on the lips; and longing hearts,

Oppressed with sin, or hardened by the world,

Beheld and wept, and rested in that love.

And so his face in every line expressed

The Son of God, the eternal Thought for man;

And whosoe’er beheld the Son beheld

The Father who had sent him, and whose love

Had come in him to seek and save, and dwell

In manifested form in this sad world.1 [Note: James Drummond, Johannine Thoughts, 12.]

(1) The Word of God is God’s power, intelligence, and will in expression; not dormant and potential only, but in active exercise. God’s Word is His will going forth with creative energy, and communicating life from God, the Source of life and being. “Without him was not any thing made that was made.” He was prior to all created things and Himself “with God,” and “God.” He is God coming into relation with other things, revealing Himself, manifesting Himself, communicating Himself. The world is not itself God; things created are not God, but the intelligence and will which brought them into being, and which now sustain and regulate them, these are God. And between the works we see and the God who is past finding out there is the Word, One who from eternity has been with God, the medium of the first utterance of God’s mind and the first forthputting of His power; as close to the inmost nature of God, and as truly uttering that nature, as our word is close to and utters our thought, capable of being used by no one besides, but by ourselves only.

Where the bud has never blown

Who for scent is debtor?

Where the spirit rests unknown

Fatal is the letter.

In Thee, Jesus, Godhead-stored,

All things we inherit,

For Thou art the very Word

And the very Spirit!

(2) Nature is never silent, but is always uttering her secrets. On the stillest night the heart would break, the mind would reel, for brain would be injured, if no sound were. In that comparative stillness which we miscall silence, we catch the sounds unheeded amid the noises of the busy day. We detect how multitudinous are the instruments which make up the quiet concert of the world, the music of the universe so harmoniously set that we perceive not its parts. Silent Nature would be Nature dead—nay, non-existent, which is an absurdity. Nature is ever revealing, giving expression to life; and is known only by that expression. And if it be so with Nature, because in Nature, we believe, God dwells, how much more clearly must it be so with God Himself? A God silent to the sorrows, the needs, the yearnings, the mere curiosity of men, would not be God. Man thinks of God simply by the fact that God has thought of him. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

For us to hold this Catholic doctrine of Christ’s Divinity is not merely to tax or strain our credence for the acceptance of a mystery as such, or of a belief bound up with primitive Christian traditions, as well as with ecclesiastical authority in councils or the like. It is to get hold of a final decisive assurance that the Infinite God does infinitely care for man. It is after we have recited, in our Eucharistic confession of faith, the epithets belonging to Jesus as a Son of God in the fullest sense, God begotten of God, and of one substance with the Father, that we are so well able to say with thankfulness, “Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate.” Look at Bethlehem in the light of this belief, and think what a God the Father of Christ must be. The Holiest, the Mightiest, the Highest is for those who thus believe no longer a God far off. He has really come near to us, and continues to be near to us in the person of One who, being uncreate, is what no angel, not Michael himself, could be, the “adequate image” and “interpreter of the Father.” The names of Jesus and Emmanuel might in other cases only record the fact that the Lord was willing to save His people, that God was and would be with them: in this one case, as belonging to a Divine Christ, they expand from affirmations of such grounds of confidence into titles by personal right His own.1 [Note: W. Bright, The Law of Faith, 118.]

2. Next, this passage tells us that the character of Christ is the character of God. We cannot read the Gospels without a sense of the infinite piety, tenderness, holiness, and magnanimity of Jesus. Were the Gospels but a pure human idyll, still the picture they present of the character of Christ would be the loveliest known to man. The character of Christ is the character of God. He who told the stories of the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son, is God speaking out of the infinite tenderness of the Divine heart. He who healed the leper, blessed the Magdalene, forgave the thief, is God in His relation to human frailty, folly, and sin. The way in which Christ thought and acted is the precise measure of the way in which God thinks and acts. All theologies must come to that test.

All that our faith in the Incarnation warrants us in asserting is, that in Jesus Christ we have “authentic tidings of invisible things,”—that in Him the Divine and human are so united and blent that we can draw certain and reliable conclusions as to the nature of God, so far as that nature can and need be known by us. Think what this means! Think what the difference is between saying, “Jesus is only a man seeking God,—adding one more to the many guesses as to the nature of God”; and saying, “In Jesus we see God seeking man, and seeking him out of pure love in order to save him”; “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”; “The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” True: there may, there must be, mysteries in the Divine Nature far beyond what even the Incarnation can tell us. The Incarnation tells us all that we need to know. When we “have told its isles of light, and fancied all beyond,” there must yet be heights and depths, in that High and Lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, which no fancy, however soaring, can penetrate.1 [Note: D. J. Vaughan, The Present Trial of Faith, 47.]

If preachers still speak as though the Jehovah of a barbarous people were the true God whom Jesus called the Father in heaven, reject their message, for they know not what they say. If from this or that isolated saying of Christ or His Apostles visions of future torture have been evolved which revolt the human heart, and outrage its sense of pity, apply to them this simple test—Would Jesus have done this even to the most sinful of men? And if you know that Jesus would not have done it, you may be sure that God will not do it either. “I and my Father are One,” said Christ; between God and Christ there is perfect moral accord, absolute spiritual identity. “The Word was with God, and the Word was God.”2 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Reproach of Christ, 33.]

Henry Ward Beecher put before the Church the doctrine of the Deity of Jesus Christ which to me seems absolutely irrefutable. He did not merely gather texts strewn here and there over the Bible page, and piece them together and say, “This Book tells me that He was God, and I must believe it because the Book says it.” No; he went back into his own experience, into the experience of the Christian Church. And what did he find? He found there, unmistakably, a great yearning after God, a yearning so deep and persistent that only one thing could be concluded—that God put it there, and put it there as a ground of expectation that He would answer the craving which He had created. And out of that came clearly and necessarily the conclusion that the God who made man thus to need and yearn after Himself must answer him, must come to him, or must cease to be God. Thus it was that, arguing from Christian experience, Beecher learned that it was reasonable and obligatory for the God who made man to come to him, and speak to him, and work for him, and die for him. Then bringing these observations and reasonings to the light of the Scriptural revelation, and looking at the historic Christ from the standpoint of human cravings and needs, Beecher could not escape the conclusion that the Christ portrayed in the Gospels was God’s answer to man’s necessity. And in grateful surprise he cried, “Why, this is God! There is not a single thing I would have in God but I find in Christ. There is not a single thing in Christ I would not like to have in God. Why, this is, this must be, God! I worship and I adore.”3 [Note: Charles A. Berry, 159.]

In Christ I feel the heart of God

Throbbing from heaven through earth;

Life stirs again within the clod,

Renewed in beauteous birth;

The soul springs up, a flower of prayer,

Breathing His breath out on the air.

In Christ I touch the hand of God,

From His pure height reached down,

By blessed ways before untrod,

To lift us to our crown;

Victory that only perfect is

Through loving sacrifice, like His.

Holding His hand, my steadied feet

May walk the air, the seas;

On life and death His smile falls sweet,

Lights up all mysteries:

Stranger nor exile can I be

In new worlds where He leadeth me.

Not my Christ only; He is ours;

Humanity’s close bond;

Key to its vast, unopened powers,

Dream of our dreams beyond.

What yet we shall be none can tell:

Now are we His, and all is well.1 [Note: Lucy Larcom.]

3. Lastly, in this truth we have the guarantee of authority and permanence in the Christian religion. If religion is a need of the soul, and a primal fact in human life, we must have a centre of authority in religion which is immovable and immutable amid the impermanent elements of human thought. We demand that the truth which involves the most solemn of all issues shall be permanent; that its evolution shall be complete; that it shall be the sure word of prophecy, changeless and steadfast amid all the change of time and thought. And in Christ that Word is spoken. He speaks with authority, and not as the scribes. He is “the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.” No man ever yet took the Word as his guide without finding in that Word a complete code of directions for life and death; and something more than a code of directions—an inner light by which the spirit lived and walked in the light, as God is in the light. He, who in sundry times and divers manners, spake to us by the Prophets, has at last spoken to us by His Son. God’s last Word is Christ. Rest here: “He who hath known me hath known the Father also.”

If Jesus was not God, Christianity is not a religion, but a contribution to moral philosophy. It is in this latter way that it appeals to you. But mankind wants a religion: and it is as a religion that Christianity works in the world.1 [Note: Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 256.]

(1) How impermanent human thought is, we all know. Men are continually shedding their beliefs and opinions as trees shed their bark, and snakes their skins, in the process of growth. In the rapid march of human knowledge mankind is like a great army which casts its baggage away that it may move unencumbered towards the battles of the future. No man thinks in mid-life what he thought in youth. The great teachers of the world themselves have no abiding word, and often their latest teaching is a direct recantation of their earliest. But we all feel that in a true Divine religion no such process of change could be tolerated. We cannot have one religion for youth and another for age; a truth that may be true to-day and false to-morrow; a voice that contradicts itself, a revelation that varies in its message with the varying tastes of men. No; we ask, and justly ask, for religion a changeless, abiding, authoritative voice that will speak through all our perplexities the sure Word by which the soul may live. Listen, then, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Here is the true authoritative voice.

Across the sea, along the shore,

In numbers more and ever more,

From lonely hut and busy town,

The valley through, the mountain down,

was it ye went out to see,

Ye silly folk of Galilee?

The reed that in the wind doth shake?

The weed that washes in the lake?

The reeds that waver, the weeds that float?—

A young man preaching in a boat.

What was it ye went out to hear,

By sea and land, from far and near?

A teacher? Rather seek the feet

Of those who sit in Moses’ seat.

Go humbly seek, and bow to them,

Far off in great Jerusalem.

From them that in her courts ye saw,

Her perfect doctors of the law,

What is it ye came here to note?—

A young man preaching in a boat.

A prophet! Boys and women weak!

Declare, or cease to rave;

Whence is it he hath learned to speak?

Say, who his doctrine gave?

A prophet? Prophet wherefore he

Of all in Israel tribes?

He teacheth with authority,

And not as do the scribes.1 [Note: Clough, Poems, 46.]

(2) This Word of God has indeed illumined and quickened all men and all races in their several degrees, Buddha and Confucius and Zoroaster, Zeno and Pythagoras, Indians and Persians, Babylonians and Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. He has been present in universal history, as He has been present in every individual soul of man. But nevertheless He has specially visited one family, one race. There was a prerogative tribe selected in due time from the rest, a first-fruits of the nations of the earth, a peculiar people consecrated to God. Though there be many tributaries, the main stream of religious history runs in this channel. To this nation the Word of God came as to His own inheritance, spake as to His own household—spake by lawgivers and prophets, by priests and kings, spake in divers stages and divers manners, spake with an intensity and a power and a directness, with a continuity and a fulness, with which He spake to no other nation besides. In neither case was the response equal to the appeal. Among the nations at large “the light” shone “in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not”: to the descendants of Abraham “he came as to his own” vineyard; yet “his own received him not.” Nevertheless among both—among the nations whom He approached through the avenues of the natural conscience, and among the Israelites to whom He spoke in the piercing tones of inspiration, there were those who did feel His presence, did hear His voice; and these were rescued from their grovelling, material, earthly life, were born anew in Him, were made sons of God through God the Word.

There is no broken reed so poor and base,

No rush, the bending tilt of swamp-fly blue,

But He therewith the ravening wolf can chase,

And guide His flock to springs and pastures new;

Through ways unlooked for, and through many lands,

Far from the rich folds built with human hands,

The gracious footprints of His love I trace.1 [Note: Lowell, Poems, 112.]

(3) We have no need to question any value that can be claimed for writings held as sacred by others outside the Christian world. All truth is of God, and is profitable according to its degree, and its adaptedness to the genius and growth of the people who receive it. To judge and condemn other scriptures, such as the Koran, as wholly worthless and evil, is measurably to judge and condemn Him, by whose Providence the book and its religion exists, until its believers are prepared for clearer and fuller light. Yet in every such revelation, professing to come directly from heaven, even the human element is relatively most imperfect, and comparatively powerless. Such scriptures appeal authoritatively only to the devotional or emotional element in man; never to his intellect and heart. They demand reception under pain of condemnation, independent of rational perception of their truth; and they promise, as a reward of faith, a sensuous paradise to the faithful. In their words is no potency of progress beyond a certain point. On the other hand, in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures there is a clear revelation of human development, through the growth of the spiritual or Christ nature in man throughout the ages.

No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint always has a very sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint’s body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.]

In these days of the religion of this and that,—briefly let us say, the religion of Stocks and Posts—in order to say a clear word of the Campo Santo, one must first say a firm word concerning Christianity itself. I find numbers, even of the most intelligent and amiable people, not knowing what the word means; because they are always asking how much is true, and how much they like, and never ask, first, what was the total meaning of it, whether they like it or not.

The total meaning was, and is, that the God who made earth and its creatures, took at a certain time upon the earth, the flesh and form of man; in that flesh sustained the pain and died the death of the creature He had made; rose again after death into glorious human life, and when the date of the human race is ended, will return in visible human form, and render to every man according to his work. Christianity is the belief in, and love of, God thus manifested. Anything less than this, the mere acceptance of the sayings of Christ, or assertion of any less than Divine power in His Being, may be, for aught I know, enough for virtue, peace, and safety; but they do not make people Christians, or enable them to understand the heart of the simplest believer in the old doctrine. Two verses of George Herbert will put the height of that doctrine into less debateable, though figurative, picture than any longer talk of mine—

Hast thou not heard that my Lord Jesus died?

Then let me tell thee a strange story.

The God of Power, as he did ride

In his majestic robes of glory,

Resolved to light; and so, one day

He did descend, undressing all the way.

The stars his tire of light, and rings, obtained,

The cloud his bow, the fire his spear,

The heavens his azure mantle gained,

And when they asked what he would wear,

He smiled, and said as he did go,

“He had new clothes a-making, here, below.”

I write from memory; the lines have been my lesson, ever since 1845, of the noblesse of thought which makes the simplest word best.1 [Note: Ruskin, Præterita, ii. 208.]

The Word

Literature

Abbott (E. A.), Oxford Sermons, 46.

Alexander (W.), Leading Ideas of the Gospel, 181.

Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, vi. 1.

Barton (G. A.), The Roots of Christian Teaching, 25.

Bickersteth (C.), The Gospel of Incarnate Love, 127.

Bright (W.), The Law of Faith, 111.

Dale (R. W.), Christian Doctrine, 170.

Dawson (W. J.), The Reproach of Christ, 23.

DuBose (W. P.), The Reason of Life, 12.

Farquhar (J. W.), The Gospel of Divine Humanity, 15.

Kingsley (C.), Village, Town, and Country Sermons, 176.

Lock (W.), The Bible and Christian Life, 20.

Macintosh (W.), Rabbi Jesus, 151.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John i.–viii. 1.

Martineau (J.), Endeavours after the Christian Life, 498.

Ragg (L.), Christ and our Ideals, 25.

Swan (F. R.), The Immanence of Christ in Modern Life, 121.

Westcott (B. F.), The Historic Faith, 43.

Cambridge Review, iii. Supplement No. 73 (Quarry).

Christian World Pulpit, xlviii. 125 (Gasquoine); lxvi. 357 (Eland); lxxii. 138 (Whitman), 374 (Gibbon).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Christmas Day: ii. 164 (Clements), 166 (Hutton), 168 (Bright), 169 (Bagot).

Homiletic Review, l. 463 (Metcalf).