Humanity And God
HUMANITY AND GOD
“Ye shall be as God:”—Gen. 3:5.
“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”—S. Matt. 5:48.
Christ and Satan make their appeal to man from the same basis. They both assume his correspondence with the Divine nature and his capacity for Divine fellowship. God-likeness is recognised as his destiny. Satan prevailed in Eden by assuring man that he should be as God; Jesus opened His ministry with the promise that His followers should be perfect as the Father in Heaven. “Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil,” whispered Satan; “Ye shall be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” is the still larger promise of the Son of God. This coincidence provokes the inquiry, Is it possible man can be as God? Is this a lie on the lips of the Tempter, and mere hyperbole on the lips of Jesus?
It is a presumption in favour of its possibility that it is assumed by such opposite personalities as Christ and Satan.
Antagonism more complete than theirs it is impossible to conceive. They are as light and darkness, life and death, Heaven and Hell. There is no basis of concord between them. The settled policy and dominant motive of the Devil is to malign and slander God; the mission of Jesus is to reveal and glorify God. Yet, slanderer and revealer, maligner and glorifier take common ground as to man’s capacity and destiny. Jesus does not contradict the assertion of Satan, neither does Satan challenge the assurance of Jesus. God is represented in the Book of Genesis as endorsing the statement of the Devil, saying, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil,” and Christ’s promise of man’s conformity with God lies at the very foundation of New Testament teaching. One sought the destruction of man and the other his salvation, but they both seek to prevail by appealing to his instinctive consciousness of a Divine destiny. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to conclude that a basis agreed upon by such antagonists may be accepted as real and sound. Whatever differences there may be in motive there is a common choice of the assumed fact that man may become as God. The appeal of both is to man’s instinct for the Divine.
I. In what sense may man be as God?
There is clearly a radical difference between the promise of Satan and that of Jesus. The scenes of temptation in the Garden and the Wilderness are the key to the Devil’s meaning. To Eve he promised the possession of God-like knowledge; to Jesus, the Last Adam, he offered the possession of God-like power. Knowledge is divine, and power belongeth unto God. There is no wrong in knowing, not even in knowing good and evil. The only evil possible to knowledge is getting it by evil means. Knowledge acquired in the path of duty is a sacred possession, but knowledge gained by disobedience covers with shame. It is intended we shall know, and know even as God knows, but the knowledge of evil that comes by the experience of evil is a knowledge that darkens by enlightening. As man’s eyes open to evil by disobedience, they shut to God. Only the pure can have knowledge of evil and live. The words of Satan had a different meaning on his lips from that they conveyed to the ears of Eve. The way to knowledge is not by transgression but by obedience. It is by willing to do that we come to know.
The proposals to Jesus offer the possession of power that shall secure from suffering, exempt from limitation, and exact service and homage. If a Son of God, why hunger? If a Son of God, why bound by natural limitations? If a Son of God, why serve and toil? Conquer and command! Such a conception of Divine authority and power assumes lawlessness in God. It conceives Him as omnipotent to gratify every desire without reserve or regard. It is not an uncommon conception of the Divine prerogative. God is often envied as a magician of endless resource and power, exempt from all the limitations of law. Even Christian men covet unlimited wealth and flatter themselves with imaginary philanthropies, which simply means that if they had God’s resources they would improve on God’s administration. We often believe that God could do wonders if He would, and we are quite sure we would if we could. There is no lawlessness in Omnipotence. God is the most law-abiding Person in His universe. The God that can wish and it is done, does not exist outside man’s imagination. The power of God we may have, but that power is never capricious, lawless, or self-glorying. The kingdoms of the world and their glory we may possess, but never by bowing to the Devil and going forth to crush and grab. These come by another way, and that way is pointed out to us in the promise of Christ.
God-like possessions are inseparable from God-like qualities. “Ye shall be perfect”: that is the way to divinity’s throne. The correspondence is not in natural attributes but in moral qualities. Perfection is through sonship, and sonship is by spiritual affinity and moral correspondence. The promise of perfection marks the climax of an ethical development which assumes discipleship as a basis. The law is spiritual, and evil cherished in the heart is sin. The soul must be clean. Self-sacrifice is the law of life, and every evil thing must be cut off and cast away. Personal wrongs must be borne in meekness, and a cheerful obedience must be given to commands that may be unjustly imposed. A generous excess over exact requirement must mark the conduct, and beneficence must not be restricted to merit and appreciation. These moral qualities are necessary that we may be sons of our Father which is in Heaven. To those who are thus sons is this promise of perfection. Capacity does not always attain to realisation, but it constitutes an obligation. Correspondence of nature demands correspondence of character. Only they are truly sons who are sons indeed. They shall be as God; not in every conceivable attribute of divinity, nor of equal excellence in degree, but in every moral grace and glory we shall be of one quality with Him. We shall be righteous, merciful, and holy, even as He.
The sum of the Divine character is love. God is love. Love also is the fulfilling of the law. In love man finds the Divine perfection. The Sermon on the Mount is the interpretation of the law in the light of love. The Beatitudes set forth the character based upon and inspired by love. Love sees the spirit behind the letter and obeys. Love sees the mercy of mercilessness in sacrifice, and cuts off the offending limb that the life may be saved. Love suffers all things and is kind. Love delights to bless, and yearns most tenderly over the least worthy. Love perfects all things and is itself the sum of all perfection. “Love is of God, and every one that loveth is begotten of God and knoweth God.” The perfect in love are perfect with the perfection of God.
II. The possibility of God-Likeness is guaranteed in the correspondence of Nature between God and man
That correspondence lies deeper than external similarity. It is a correspondence of Nature that amounts to oneness with God. Many of our difficulties have arisen from regarding the two Natures as dissimilar, if not antagonistic and irreconcilable. We have looked upon God as radically different from ourselves, remote from all that was vital to our humanity, and alien to all the instincts of our nature. He has been feared and shunned as the one who above all others speaks of love, but spoils our programmes and robs us of our pleasant things. It is not that men suspect Him of malice or mocking, but it seems as if, from sheer lack of sympathy and knowledge of our nature, He inevitably comes into human life only to disturb and destroy. Providence has come to be the invariable explanation of hardship and disappointment in trouble and sorrow. Such conceptions need only to be expressed to reveal how false they are. God is not diverse and remote, much less antagonistic. He is nigh at hand and so completely of one nature with man that He shares his sorrow and joy. Of His people it is said: “In all their affliction He was afflicted, and the Angel of His presence saved them: In His love and in His pity He redeemed them; and He bare them, and carried them all the days of old.”
The sense of this nearness is the great lack of our souls. We have suffered not from the intimacy but from the remoteness of our God. To multitudes He is little more than a shadowy presence somewhere far away in the Heavens. They think of Him dreamily in His glory, and seek His favours in the hour of despair. There can be but little passion for things in the dim distance, and no enthusiasm for a personality wrapped in mystery and awe. With such a conception of God, prayer in its purest exercise is impossible. Even with earthly friendships the length and frequency of correspondence is influenced by the distance it has to travel. It seems impossible to write a short letter when it has to travel six thousand miles, and equally impossible to write very often. God is to many little more than a foreign correspondent dwelling in some far-away, unknown land, to be addressed with restraint, and sought when in need. It makes a tremendous difference when the soul realises that God is not far away but nigh at hand, not a shrouded mystery but a living personality, not an unsympathetic embodiment of power but a loving and tender Father.
Man need never be afraid of finding himself too near to God; and nothing has done more to keep him at a distance than the failure to realise the oneness of God’s Nature with his own. God made man in His own image. That image is not in the machinery of man’s bodily organism. The man is the thinking, willing personality at the back of all that. The power that is behind brain, and nerve, and muscle, that is the man. Call him soul, spirit, or what you please, there is the quality that constitutes manhood, and that is the man God first made in His own image. That is the man in whom lies that which is of the very being of God. The “image” is more than mere likeness; it is a facsimile. Jesus is “the image of God,” “the very image of His substance.” An exact and precise counterpart is the idea it conveys, and man was created the counterpart of God. “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made him but little lower than God, and crownest him with glory and honour.”
The process of creation secured his affinity with the Creator. Man is not the result of adaptation and fusion, but the creation of a vital process. God breathed into him the breath of life, and he became a living soul. This cannot mean less than that God imparted to man of the innermost quality of His own being, and that imparted quality is man’s distinctive nature. Man and God share the same living essence and are of one quality of nature. This does not mean that God is nothing more than a magnified man or that man is a miniature God; but it does mean that God is all that man is, and infinitely more. Whatever is an essential quality of manhood, man may find in his God.
Preaching one day in the open air, I quoted the passage in Genesis about God making man in His own image, when a man interrupted and asked if I would accept an amendment to the text. He suggested that to be true to the facts of the case the passage should read: “And man said, Let us make God in our image, after our likeness.” He denied that God was the Maker of man, and affirmed that man was the maker of God. The objection was greeted with applause. It was not new. I had been accustomed to hear it from secularist platforms in my youth. It is an objection that has the daring and smartness that appeals to a crowd, and has in it just enough truth to make it difficult to answer to an open-air audience. So I promptly accepted the amendment and proceeded to prove he was wrong. Anthropomorphism is not untrue. It is only false when it imposes the limitations of humanity upon divinity, and imparts to God the baser things, which are not the essence but the accretions of our manhood. For, after all, there can be no revelation of personality except through personal consciousness. Consequently man cannot know God except as he finds Him within his own personality. “The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart.” No man finds God in Nature who has not first found Him in his own soul. So the revelation of God to man comes to us through the Man Christ Jesus. God and man meet in the One Person. There is no sharp dividing line. Man and God are not diverse but one.
The definition of this relationship is completed in the revelation of Jesus. God is our Father. That the Fatherhood of God is not something different from human fatherhood is evident from His use of the one to illustrate the other. “Of which of you that is a father shall his son ask a loaf, and he give him a stone? or a fish, and he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he give him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?” Jesus revealed God by identifying Him with the life of man. God and man are Father and son. Whatever the mysteries involved, father and son must be of one nature. As the father’s very being lives in the being of his child, so is the very being of God in the being of man. The son proceeds from the innermost depths of the father’s life. Here we find bedrock. Whatever else God may be, He is our Father and we are His children. As the son is of the same quality of nature as the father, so is man of one nature with God. There may be much in the Father beyond the comprehension of His child, but at any rate the child can cling, and looking up into His face can say: “Thou art my Father and my God.” That will do. For the rest we can wait.
This revelation comes to man in his sin. By sin, God’s image in man is defaced but not erased. Mercy arrested the curse which grace removed. The Lamb of God has taken away the sin of the world. The “much more” of the covenant of grace more than repeals the covenant of death. Man’s sonship is redeemed in the blood of the Son. The fact of sin, therefore, does not affect the argument. It leaves the conclusion undisturbed, and only exalts the wonder and glory of God. Sin notwithstanding, the Divine element still remains, and sin destroyed, man is raised to conscious fellowship with the Divine nature. The destruction of sin restores manhood to its true level.
III. That man may be as God reaches its highest certainty in the fact of the Incarnation
God has become man in the person of Jesus Christ. In some quarters that may be challenged; but if there is one thing that is clear in the New Testament, it is that Jesus and God are One. He is God “manifest in the flesh”; “the effulgence of His glory, and the very image of His substance.” What light that sheds upon the essential quality of man’s nature! How real must be the correspondence between God and man, to make it possible without loss of identity or break of continuity for God to become man! The Son of God is truly man in every essential of manhood, yet very God of very God. He is the perfect example of manhood: the last Adam; the truly Representative Man. He is man as man was destined to be.
We have separated the Christ from ourselves even as we have separated the Father, and persist in thinking and speaking of Him as removed from us by a difference in nature. That He has a quality of Sonship all His own is quite true, but He is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, made in all things like unto His brethren. As God is our Father, so Christ is our Brother. We are begotten of the One Father. When we speak of two Natures in Christ we speak of necessity the language of mystery and accommodation, but we are certainly not warranted in dividing the Christ against Himself. To speak of some things as limited to His Humanity, and of others as peculiar to His Divinity, is without warrant and without sense. There is no duality in Him. He is one and indivisible. We have no ground for supposing that His experience of hunger, weariness, and suffering differed in any sense from our own. He is touched with the feeling of our infirmity, and was “in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” He was one with man. He became man.
Between this man Christ Jesus and God there was no antagonism. He was as truly one with God as He was one with men. He believed and declared Himself to be one with the Father. Here again we have divided to our hurt. As we have separated God from ourselves so we have antagonised Father and Son. A false theology has slandered and caricatured God by representing Him as a relentless Shylock grimly exacting extreme penalty from an innocent Son. The result is that the Son is loved and the Father feared. The unspoken creed of many is summed up in the words: “I love Jesus, but I fear God.”
The story is told of a Christian worker who was shocked at the answer received from a dying widow to the assurance of God’s fatherly care for the widow and the fatherless. The dying woman raised herself upon her bed and entreated: “Do not talk about God. I am afraid of God. I hate God. Every hard and bitter thing in my life has come from God.” Quietly the exhausted woman was allowed to recover strength. Then the Christian began to speak of Jesus. “Ah! yes,” said the dying woman, “He’s different, isn’t He? He was so good and kind I like to hear about Him. I could trust Him.” Different? No, He is not different. And yet what that woman said I have heard in effect a thousand times. It seems a dreadful thing to have to say, but it needs to be said, that Jesus is not better than God. He is not different; they are One. When Philip asked that they might see the Father, Jesus answered out of a grieved heart: “Have I been so long time with you and dost thou not know Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father. Believest thou not that I am in the Father and the Father in Me?” No, He is not different. God is not only as good as Jesus, but infinitely transcends all that Jesus revealed of Him, for there is a glory yet to be revealed. We have failed to catch the significance of the fact that the Son is the Father’s gift to the world. He was in the Son. All that it cost the Son to redeem the world it cost the Father. He suffered in the suffering Son. “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.” They were not in conflict, they were not dissimilar; they are One.
As Christ was one with God, so we are called to be one with Christ. Everybody admits that. It is the one end of our calling, the ultimate result of discipline, and the final perfection of grace, that “we shall be like Him.” But He is God, and if He is one with God, then oneness with Him must mean oneness with God. “Ye, therefore, shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
IV. This must be possible because it is necessary
Only the God-like enter Heaven. The necessity for holiness is based on the character of God. “Ye shall be holy, for I am holy”; and without holiness “no man shall see the Lord.”
The change in the Revised Version has been welcomed with a sigh of relief. The promise seems much more hopeful than a command. The imperativeness of that imperative perfection made us shudder. But though the tense is altered the imperativeness remains. The promise is a command. The promise is for present possession and the command for immediate obedience.
This is our high and holy calling in Christ Jesus; this is the Divine purpose in the creation and redemption of man; this is the gracious and glorious end of both providence and grace; this is the imperative demand of the Divine character and the condition of Divine fellowship; this is the crown of man’s perfection and the sum of man’s glory, that we are partakers of the Divine Nature and one with God in the glories of His perfection.