Christ, Christianity and the Bible

All this you have said within yourself and testified.

But I ask you now to face the terrible fact – if Jesus Christ were not God – this terrible fact – that you have been deceived.

You have had a false peace.

You have been living in a fool’s paradise.

You are before God an unpardoned and as yet unpunished criminal awaiting your doom. All this is absolutely your state —

IF —

If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God.

If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God, he had no authority nor power to forgive your sins. NO! And if Jesus Christ were not God I know not where to bid you turn. You must carry the load of your sins all your days; and when you die, go into eternity and face a holy God who tells you by every law and fact of nature that he never forgives in a single case till he has first punished the sin and with it the sinner.

If Jesus Christ were not God, his death was not an atonement.

And this surely should be plain enough.

Only God can atone to God.

Only an infinite being can satisfy an infinite being.

If Jesus Christ were not God he could not make an atonement.

If he did not make an atonement, then the world has never been reconciled to God nor brought up on mercy ground. Instead of being lifted up to the plane of grace and mercy, the world is still under the condemnation and judgment of God, no longer under a suspended sentence, but sheer and defenceless, with nothing to hinder the crash of doom at any moment.

There is no hope. There is no daysman. There is no one to offer unto God what he demands, and unto man what he needs. There is no mediator between a holy God and a sinful man.

If Jesus Christ were not God, then he did not rise from the dead. He did not bring life and immortality to light, and, as for me, the preacher, I have no light to hold out to you in the all-embracing gloom and night of death.

There is no hope.

If a man shall tell me there is no hereafter, that death ends all, I shall take up the law of induction and argue him to a standstill along the line of unfathomable mysteries and inexplicable psychological phenomena in the constitution of man, and the inexplicable absence of the phenomena in the state of death, inexplicable upon any known materialistic ground, and I shall laugh at his inability to maintain his thesis beyond the poor shred of a hypothesis. If a man shall tell me as the result of pure reasoning that he concludes for the endless existence of the soul after death, and shall do this even upon the plane of induction, I shall turn and tell him that all his argument is based upon inference and not fact, finding its largest emphasis in the region of the unknowable and guessable – in the things he cannot explain, where certain conclusions can neither be successfully affirmed, nor successfully denied, and where, by consequence, he may console himself, if he wish, with his side of the guess; and I shall feel a keen sense of sorrow at his inability to hold his premise in the final region of the sure.

And what does all this mean?

Is it playing fast and loose with the mind? Am I turning in upon myself and playing the mere harlequin in the arena of mental gymnastics?

No! there is sane meaning to this double method – it is this: as much may be said along one line of reasoning as the other. Each is a non-sequitur to the other. Each negatives the other and leaves us with reason’s torch inverted – the light out, the darkness deeper than ever; and standing on the threshold of the grave we are forced to cry out in the sharp agony of a continual self-smiting perplexity:

“To be or not to be —that is the question.”

Question it is – always a question – always coming back from the side of every dead body – always coming back from the clod-filled grave – coming down from age to age, coming back a question no man, not the wisest mere man who ever lived, could answer, or any living wise man can answer to-day.

If Jesus Christ were not God it cannot be answered; for if Jesus Christ were not God, he did not rise from the dead and by divine power carry himself out of the region of death forever.

If Jesus Christ were not God, you may go and sit by the tomb of your dead and weep bitter (because hopeless) tears.

If Jesus Christ were not God, then he was not a redeemer and saviour. All the beautiful things that have been taught about him as such are false. All the hopes of heaven, the beauty of the celestial city, the tree of life, the river of crystal, the company of the saints, the arch-angelic song, the meeting and the knowing of those who long ago have left us – none of these things are so.

If he were not God, then it is not true that he sits upon the throne, high and lifted up, listening to the plaints of the weakest heart that shall trust him, and hearing the sound of every falling tear.

If Jesus Christ be not God, then the whole system of Christianity built upon his person and work falls to the ground, is broken into fragments, and like wind-swept dust can never be gathered.

If Jesus Christ be not God, the New Testament record of him is untrue. The New Testament impeached in its prime particular becomes a worthless book – a book full of exhortations to holiness and truth, in the name of him who is proven to be (if he ever lived at all) a blasphemer, a deceiver of men and the concrete of human wickedness. If the New Testament is not true, neither is the Old; for the Old Testament finds its meaning and value only in the Christ of the New Testament. Take Jesus Christ out of the Old Testament (which you must do if you set aside the New; for he alone fulfils the types, the symbols and the prophecies of the Old Testament; he alone makes its testimony and history intelligible; he alone gives unity, harmony and authoritative meaning to its exhortations) – take Christ out of the Old Testament and you take away its one and only key.

And mark you – when Christ goes out of the Bible as God – God goes out of the Bible. The deity which has preserved it, the power which has made it living and unchangeable in the midst of change and death, will have been dethroned.

Without Christ as God you are without any sane and satisfying knowledge of God.

Where will you turn to find God and know him to your comfort? You might as well look into the bottomless pit as into your own heart.

No more satisfactory will it be to look into the heart of others. We are all built on the same plan.

The difference is only in degree or extension.

The basilar fact is, God cannot be found in any natural man.

You cannot find or know him to your heart’s content in nature.

What kind of a God does nature reveal to you?

I will answer for you – a God who puts you in this world and does not tell you whence you come, whether from the all mud or the Almighty, from an angel or a devil, from jelly or genius, from the heights of heaven or the depths of hell. A God who puts you here and fills you with questions he alone can answer and – refuses so to do. A God who calls you into the world and gives you eyes to see everything but yourself. A God who hides you from yourself, so that you do not know whether you are a function or a soul; whether you are matter or spirit; whether you are a personality or a cellular part of a general whole – called man. A God who gave you mind with seemingly infinite possibilities in thought, and gave you a body that is finite and temporary in construction. A God who gives you an intellect which grasps after eternity, and is always saying on the summit of any endeavor achieved, “What next?” and yet is limited to a few inconsequent years. A God who sets you face to face with the imminency of death, and never allows you to know at what moment you must go, and gives you no hint of the beyond – or whether there is a beyond.

In France they do not tell the man who is to be guillotined till a few moments before the fatal hour. He is sleeping on his couch. He is dreaming of pleasant fields, of running streams, of boyhood’s days, of to-morrows that shall be better – a heavy hand is laid on his shoulder – he starts up in bed – the gray light of early morning is filtering in through the barred window of his cell – stern-faced men are standing before him – they say, “Your hour is come; follow us.”

It is terrific.

But this is the case of every human being.

No one can tell when the summons may come – or where.

A man was sitting in his room at close of day. It had been (so he said) the best day of his life. He had said to his wife that he never loved her more than he did then (and they had been married many years), never did he feel more content that they had chosen to walk together through life than then. He was full of plans for himself and for her (saying with great earnestness that their last days should be their best days). She answered back that she was glad with a great gladness that it was so. She turned away for a moment to glance in another direction, still speaking to him. When she looked back he was gone – gone while the love words and the hope words were still on his lips – the finger of death had touched his heart – a voice had whispered in his ear, “Come.” There was only a lifeless bit of clay where a moment before had been a body pulsing with life, with love, with hope.

It is terrific – doomed – and not knowing how soon the bolt will strike. What sort of a God is this who laces your body with a network of laws, the breaking of the slightest of which – all unknown to you – may send you forth upon a path of diseased and tortured existence – in which the body from whence you cannot escape shall be to you as a chamber of horrors – a place of the thumbscrew, the rack and the fagot. What kind of a God is that who allows the aged to linger out in a miserable prolongation of wretched days, a burden to themselves, a burden to others, and takes away the widow’s only son – her only support? Who is the God who creates one man with all the equipment for life, and another man with all the lack of it? What kind of a God is this who looks down out of the heaven of day and the heavens of night, and sees all the sorrow, the anguish, the pain, the unspeakable tragedies, and sends no wing of angel to cleave the pitiless sky, no voice out of the silence to console, no hand to help?

What man is there of you, if he had the power, would not banish sickness, sorrow, pain and death?

What man is there of you who, if he could, would not make every human being well and happy?

What then? What is the conclusion of the matter concerning you? Simple enough – you have the heart to do it, but not the power.

What is the conclusion concerning this God of nature? He has the power – but does not manifest the heart.

What will you say of this God of nature in such a scheme?

What can you say but that your heart is better than the heart of the God which nature reveals?

Can you hear, understand and love a God like that?

Can you climb through nature up to nature’s God and say, “I have found him, I know him?”

You can climb up, but where will you find him?

You will find him wrapped in the black thundercloud or girded with the robe of the lightnings: You will find him the God who splits the earth in twain with the earthquake’s riving blow, loosens the bands of the sea, sends tidal waves in surges of destruction, pours out the lava streams from the volcano’s cone, as kings pour wine from an earthen cup, spilling the wine and breaking the cup; the God who turns an earthly paradise (like Messina) into a fire-smitten desert, and a city of the living into a cemetery of the unburied dead.

When your heart aches, will such a God care for you? Will his thunders console you? When your soul is dark, will his lightnings illumine it? When you yearn for love, will his inexorable law supply it?

Ah, sirs, without Christ you are without a God whom you can love, whom you can trust, to whom you can go, and in whose strength you can lie down and – at last – be folded in peace.

If Jesus Christ is not God, if the only God to whom you can go is the God of nature, then you might as well fall down in the sand at the base of the far Egyptian sphinx, open your eyes for a moment to the blue sky that spreads away to the horizon before its staring face, its cold, chiselled, inscrutable smile, and the next moment shut your eyes against the pelting dust the idle winds blow thither.

Ah! Nature is a sand-dune – and the God of nature is a Sphynx.

Do you care to kneel and worship there?

If Jesus Christ be not God the disaster is not alone to him, but to you – to me.

If he were not God, then we are in a world where the very day is no better or brighter than a starless midnight.

If Jesus Christ were a good man, a supremely good man and a supremely intellectual man, then he was and is (as he claimed) Almighty God.

The New Testament says he was a supremely good, and a supremely intellectual man.

For two thousand years the most brilliant men in the world have corroborated this record by freely testifying that Jesus Christ was a supremely good and a supremely intellectual man; all this being so, I change the conditional form of the proposition to the indicative and declarative and now say:

Since Jesus Christ was a supremely good and a supremely intellectual man, he was, therefore (as he claimed), Almighty God.

He could not be a supremely good and a supremely intellectual man and claim to be God unless he were God.

Since he claimed to be God, therefore, he was God.

Yes; he was God.

The evidences are manifold.

He was sinless.

He said:

“Which of you convinceth me of sin?”

For two thousand years he has been in the concentrated light of a hostile world’s merciless investigation. The light has been turned on the land in which he lived. Every rod of ground over which he travelled has been dug up, or surveyed, or trodden. His words have been weighed, balanced to a nicety against any probability of error, mistake, imagination, fancy or misquotation. His words have been split open as men break open rocks. All the contents of his words have been put in the crucible of criticism. Every thought has been insistently and unsentimentally assayed for, even, the suspicion or the slightest hint of an alloy. His teachings have been chemically dissolved and turned into their component parts. The saline base of truth has been sought for at any risk to the compounded speech he made.

And after all! not one self-respecting, authoritative lip has uttered a charge against him.

In the hush of a world that cannot even murmur, he steps forward and once more rings down his challenge:

“Which of you convinceth me of sin?”

He stands out among his fellows as a white shaft under a starless midnight. He rises above the passions of men as an unshaken rock in the midst of a wild, lashed sea. He is to man’s best character as harmony is to discord, as a smile is to a frown, as love is to hate, as blessing is to cursing, as a garden of lilies to a desert of sand, as heaven is to earth, as holiness is to sin and as life to death.

If he were sinless, he was absolutely holy; he was so holy that his very presence brought out the sin in others. Sinful men and women fell at his feet and confessed their sins. At sight of him demons tore their way out of the bodies they possessed and fled as clouds of darkness before the sun, crying as they fled, “Thou art the holy one of God – hast thou come to torment us before the time?” Tormented as they were even then, as sin always is when confronted by holiness; as vice is before virtue; as a lie is before the truth.

He was sinless.

He was holy.

His sinlessness and holiness cannot be accounted for on natural grounds.

All his natural ancestry were sinful.

His sinlessness cannot be accounted for unless he were God; for, sinlessness and holiness come alone from God and, as essential qualities, take their rise alone in God.

His power over nature proved him God.

His look changed water into wine, his word gave sight to the blind, healing to the deaf, speech to the dumb. At his word the lame man leaped as a hart, the leper was cleansed. He said, “Peace, be still,” and the wild tempest of the sea was hushed, and there was a great calm, a calm like unto the stillness of the unruffled rest of God.

For two thousand years his regenerative power in a world of sin has been the proof that he was God.

For two thousand years, in every age, in every clime, among all classes of men, from the refined infidel to the vilest sinner, from the cold atheist to the brutal idolater, men have been changed – transformed. Men who have been the bond slaves of passion, whose daily lives have been the output of iniquity, whose deeds have been for destruction, whose words have been poison, and whose inmost thoughts have been as the vapors of miasma – these all – have been transformed into fountains of purity, into angels of mercy, or as illuminated missals have been written full of the name and the glory of God; men whose every fibre was as the coarse and tangled threads of a brutal unrefinement have become men whose every line of character was as the woven gold of Ophir – and the speech that once smote with discord the ears that heard it has become as the sound of singing across silent waters and under listening stars. And you ask these transfigured human beings, as you find them travelling along the highway of twenty noteful centuries, what it was that so changed them, put such new force and impetus in them, making them to be as men new created, and they will tell you that Jesus Christ came along that way, they saw in his face the stain of blood, the marks of nails were in his hands and feet, he had the appearance of one who had been cruelly slain. He stopped, looked at them and said: “Come unto me.” They obeyed, they fell at his feet. He touched them, a strange, keen sense thrilled through them. He said to them, “Arise.” They arose and found themselves new men – men twice begotten.

Ask the drunkard who tried to be sober, broke every pledge and drank in his cup the very life blood of those he loved and who loved him – how at last he found strength to say a final “no,” turn from the accursed thing, and enter a world all new in which to live, a freeman and no more a slave – he will tell you, “Jesus Christ did it all.”

Ask any of the bond slaves of passion, men who have been gripped by every form of human desire, and whiplashed, and stung, and tortured by their gratification, and driven to fresh and maddening excess by the never satisfied and always burning lust within (ever crying like the horseleach’s daughter, “Give, give”); ask them how it is that to-day they are freemen and walk as kings, and they will tell you that Jesus Christ laid hold of them, and by the might of his power, the tenderness of his love, and the wealth of his grace, made them free.

And this has been going on for two thousand years.

The story has recently been told of a great thinker lecturing one day before a large audience of medical students – some eighteen hundred men who pressed in to hear him. He took from his desk a letter, and holding it up before him, said something to this effect:

“Gentlemen! I have here a letter from one of your number, in which he tells the story of his life – a record of shame, of sinful indulgence, that makes me shudder even to look at the letter. At the close of this fearful confession he asks, ‘Can your God save such an one as I am?’”

Stopping for a moment and surveying his audience, the speaker said: “When I came to the city this afternoon (it was the city of Edinburgh) there was a beautiful, fleecy cloud spreading itself like a thing of glory in the upper sky, and I said, ‘0 cloud, where do you come from?’ and the cloud answered me and said, ‘come from the slums and the low, vile places of the city. The sun of heaven reached down and lifted me up and transfigured me with his shining.’”

Looking about upon the now deeply impressed throng, the speaker, after a solemn pause, said:

“I do not know whether this young man is here or not, but if he is, I can say to him that my Saviour and my Master, Jesus Christ, he who is our great God and Saviour, he can reach down from the highest heaven to the lowest depths into which a human soul can sink, and can lift you, and lift you up and up, till he shines in you and through you, and transfigures you with the light of his love and glory.”

He can.

He does.

He is doing it now.

And who is he who can do this but the living God alone?

That Jesus Christ was God is the testimony of the men who lived in intimate communion with him and knew him best.

John leaned on his breast at supper. John heard and knew the beating of the Master’s heart, and John says:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (God was the Word). The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made… And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth.”

Again this same John writes:

“Jesus Christ.. THIS IS THE TRUE GOD.”

Writing to the Philippians, Paul declares, that Jesus Christ was in the “form of God,” laid aside his glory as such, took upon him the “form” of sinful man, became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, carried his humanity through hades and the grave, rose out from among the dead, and took that humanity to the throne of the highest. There God the Father reclothed him with the unbegun and uncreated glory which he had laid aside, gave him a name which is above every name, even the name of Jesus, and has highly and eternally ordained that every knee in the wide extended universe shall bow, and every tongue confess, that he is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

In his epistle to the Colossians, the Apostle Paul announces that this “same Jesus” is the “image of the invisible God; by him were all things created that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions, or principalities or powers; all things were created by him, and for him.”

To the same Colossians he further writes:

“In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.”

To the Hebrews he says: “He is the brightness of the Father’s glory, and the express image of his person” (the word “image” is χαρακτὴρ and signifies an “engraving,” the very engraving of God in the flesh, the engraving of God in humanity) and upholding all things by the word of his power. “Upholding all things!” this earth in its orbit about the sun; the sun in its orbit about some other sun; all suns and systems in their orbits of splendor, whirling onward in ever-widening distances over highways of infinite spaces, through extensions that are measureless, and where time does not count. In that unmeasured expansion where the points of the compass are lost and “dimension” is a meaningless term; in that incomprehensible and indefinable vastness, filled with the might and the majesty of form, of weight, of motion and limitless power – all things – are hanging on his word and obeying his will.

Not only does the New Testament proclaim him God – the Old Testament does likewise, and with unmistakable speech.

The prophet Isaiah says:

“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, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father.”

Micah, the prophet, glorifies the little town of Bethlehem, least as it is among the thousands of Judah, and foretells that he who shall be born there, and is to be ruler in Israel, is he “whose goings forth have been from old, from everlasting.” He who has been the outgoing and the forth-putting of the invisible God; and who is, and who alone can be, the visibility of God.

When we turn to the New Testament once more, we are given a vision of him, in Patmos, where he appears to that beloved John who had leaned so heavily on his heart in the days of the earthly pilgrimage. It is a vision of wonder, of glory, and divine splendor. He is seen as a man – as one who had become dead, who was now alive, who had conquered both death and the grave. His face shone with the light of the noonday sun, his eye glances were as a flame of fire, and when he spoke, his voice was as the sound of many waters; and this is what he said for himself: