Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded

4. The Deity of the Lord Jesus — The Necessity for it

We can understand the envy with which the kings of Egypt would view the rise and progress of Israel. They had held that nation as slaves for many generations but had been compelled by the will of Jehovah to release them, and had seen Jerusalem become the most magnificent and wealthiest city on earth under the rule of David and Solomon. Small wonder that at the first evidence of weakness Shishak came up against that city with a great army and pillaged the Temple and the king’s house, and took away the priceless treasure of them, including the shields of gold that Solomon had made. Then Rehoboam, that feeble and foolish son of a great father, does not appear to have put up any resistance; he let the glory of the city go without protest. What did it matter? He could substitute brass for gold, and brass looks like gold, almost; peace seemed cheap at the price. And so it was when he went up to the house of the Lord, brazen shields went up before him instead of shields of fine gold, and when his religious duties were done they were committed to the guard for safe keeping as though they were the real thing (1 Kings 14).

What the king of Egypt did to Jerusalem, the devil, who is the god and prince of the world, has done for Christendom. For ages he had held mankind in darkness and bondage, but deliverance came at the advent of the Lord Jesus, who lived among men and died and rose again. Then God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached to the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory. Multitudes were delivered from the kingdom of darkness and translated into the kingdom of the Son of the Father’s love, and there was established on earth the kingdom of heaven which was enriched by heavenly treasure: the pure gold of God’s truth concerning His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

But with the decline of living faith and the rise of profession with out reality in these modern days, the devil has seen and seized his opportunity, and has laid his envious and ruthless hands upon these treasures and has robbed Christendom of its shields of gold. He could not have done it if there had not been traitors within who were pledged to hold and fight for these treasures of “the faith once for all delivered to the saints.” They have been his allies in this.

The truth as to the person of the Lord is the finest of the gold of our faith; what He is in His own eternal being gives character to it all — “God was manifest in the flesh,” not, “Jesus was a manifestation of God,” as some say, but that He is Himself, in His own person, God. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. … 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” (John 1:1-14). But this fine gold has been surrendered at the devil’s bidding; and leaders in Christendom who ought to have defended it to the death, have surrendered it with other priceless treasures for popularity with the world and in fear of “modern scholarship.” Indeed they seem to be well pleased to let these great truths go, for their insubject minds prefer their own investigations to God’s revelation, and man’s effort to uplift himself is more to them than God’s intervention for his redemption, and they have seized the opportunity to substitute their own base brass for God’s fine gold. A Christ of their imagination is more to their liking than the Christ of God, a Christ who is stripped of the glory of His eternal Deity, and being stripped of that supreme glory is stripped of every other glory that could be acceptable to God and of use to men. And they think that they are the gainers by the change. “We are rich and increased with goods” they boast, “and have need of nothing,” and they know not that “they are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked” and need to turn again to our Sovereign Lord and buy of Him gold tried in the fire that they may be rich (Revelation 3:17-18).

The pretence of approach to God is kept up, but the brazen shields go before them instead of shields of gold, and God will not have their counterfeits. “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man comes to the Father but by Me,” are our Lord’s own words, and they are recorded for us in that Gospel which reveals to us the glory of His divine and eternal being, which indeed is not absent from any part of Scripture; and nothing less than this wilt do for God. The brazen imitation may suit and fascinate men, but it is an abomination to God, nothing but the pure gold can He accept, and in vain is their worship of Him as long as they teach the doctrines and opinions of men for the gospel of God concerning His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. And nothing but the pure gold of this gospel will satisfy the soul of a man when he is fully awakened to his deep need. When the light of God streams into his conscience and he sees the exceeding sinfulness of his sin, and the greatness of his peril and how far his sin has removed him from God, he will spurn the brass of man’s imaginations as a mockery and a sham and confess that there can be for him no salvation in any other Name, but the Name of JESUS — Jehovah the Saviour. As to this, the late Handley Moule wrote, “The human soul, once fully awakened to its needs, to its mysterious greatness and to its mysterious but awfully real sinfulness, can find rest only in the Saviour, who is, in equal truth, one with man and one with God. Such a Saviour bridges as with living adamant the gulf of doom and sin which severs creature from Maker. A saviour who is not quite God is a bridge broken at the farther end.”

It is here I would begin; before endeavouring to show that all Scripture bears witness to the fact that Jesus is the eternal Word, “the Christ, who is over all, God, blessed for ever,” I would urge the necessity for it. It is a necessity to God, if He is to be known by His creature, and to find His delights in the sons of men, redeemed from all iniquity and purified to Himself as a peculiar people, zealous of good works; and a necessity to man if he is ever to know God as his God, to be forgiven, and at peace, and find his soul’s everlasting satisfaction in Him. The human soul would grope in vain for light if it were not so; it would cry out hopelessly in its misery, for there would be none to help; there would be “neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded,” as it was when the prophets of Baal cried all the day long to their false god (1 Kings 18:29). We should be a lost race, wandering stars cut off from our central Sun without hope of restoration to our true orbit and with no outlook but the blackness of darkness for ever, if Jesus were not God; “the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father.”

Consider the cry that broke out of the awakened soul of that pagan jailer at Philippi, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” What answer could satisfy that bewildered man, trembling on the brink of a lost eternity? There was but one answer that could satisfy him. Suppose instead of that one and only answer Paul had said, “Believe in Adam, or Abraham, or Moses or John the Baptist.” What a mocker of the man’s misery he would have been; or suppose he had said, for he was a greater man than them all, “Believe on me and thou shalt be saved.” Would not the soul and conscience of the jailer have revolted against the outrage and have turned from him as a blasphemer and an imposter? But how fitting, how satisfying was the answer that he did give, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved and thy house.” The whole gospel of God was involved in that answer; it put that seeking sinner into vital contact with Him who of aid had said, “Look to Me and be ye saved all ye ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none beside Me” (Isaiah 45:22), it satisfied him, for it gave him a perfect, because a divine, Saviour.

The necessity for the Word to become flesh did not arise only when that great event took place, it was there from the beginning when sin entered into the world. The patriarch Job felt the necessity and voiced it in memorable words when he said, as he searched for a way by which a man could be just with God. “He is not a man as I am, that I should answer Him, and we should come together in judgment. Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both. Let Him take away His rod from me, and let not His fear terrify me: then would I speak, and not fear Him; but it is not so with me” (Job 9:33-35). It is not difficult to interpret what his feelings were, for they are the feelings of all who are awakened by God’s Spirit to their need. He said in effect: “I know that I have sinned against Him, and if He were a man as I am, I could, having the feelings of a man, understand how I have offended Him; I could go to Him and make restitution for the wrong I have done to Him and so be at peace. But He is not a man as I am, and I cannot measure the demands of His justice against me. The gulf between us is unmeasurable from my side; He is almighty, holy and just, and I am weak, sinful and unholy, and there is no one that I know of to stand betwixt us, who could speak from Him to me, and from me to Him.” See how accurately his awakened conscience had gauged the situation: he desired one who could stand betwixt God, infinitely holy and just, and the sinner, guilty and afraid, and put his hand upon them both: He must be equal to God and equal to men. And says Job, “I do not know such a one. I have felt the need for Him, I have longed for Him and sought for Him but I have not found Him.” And Job, be it noted, who expressed his soul’s deep longing in these words, was the man who came nearer to perfection than any man of his day; and if he was hopeless and despairing because he had no Daysman, it is plain that the Daysman, the Mediator could not arise among men if He is to come at all He must come from above and when He comes, He must be able to put His hand upon God; He must be God’s equal; pure as God is pure, holy as God is holy, great as God is great: no one less could intervene, or be of any use in this supreme matter to Job or to any other man. Yet He must come low enough to put His hand upon men. He must pass by angels and be one of us, yet sinless, or His touch would defile the throne of God and be unavailing for us. He must represent God and yet be able to identify Himself with us and to take up our vast indebtedness and speak for us. He must be God and man.

Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity, and the One whom Job could not find on earth has come from heaven, and JESUS, the Virgin’s Son, is Emmanuel: GOD WTH us. Being God, He knew according to God’s perfect estimate what the effect to the universe of man’s sin was. He knew how the majesty of God was challenged by man’s disregard of His will, and what the demands of the eternal throne were in regard to the violation of its just decrees. He knew how man’s pride and self will had made him the lawful capture of Satan, and how great was the gulf that separated him from his God, and how powerless he was to right the wrong. He knew the penalty that had to be paid and the work that had to be done and knowing all this He came, saying, “A body hast Thou prepared Me … Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of Me) to do Thy will, O God” (Hebrews 10:5-7). He became the Son of Man, that He might stand in the place of men, and be lifted up as their substitute and representative and meet the bill of their indebtedness. This involved Him in all the sorrows of Calvary, and there “He gave Himself a ransom for all.” If He had not become man He could not have died, if He had not been God His death would have been without value, but now His death accomplished and the ransom paid, He is “the one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus.”

He stooped from His eternal glory and was made in the likeness of men and being found in fashion as a man, He put His hand upon us, degraded though we were, and He did it tenderly, graciously, so that we are not afraid. He is full of grace and truth and there is no terror for us in His hand; we do not shrink from Him, for He has touched us with the hand of a man, yet He was never less than God, and God has touched us in Him. He has put one hand upon us and the other He has placed upon the throne of God. With the one hand He has offered the fullest satisfaction to every righteous claim of God and with the other He bestows fullness of grace upon men. He brings us to God and gives us a place in His presence without fear, and in everlasting peace, a place established upon an infallible and immoveable foundation of divine righteousness laid down by Him who is God and Man in His own blessed person.

But if the necessity on man’s side was great, it was even greater on God’s side: the fulfilment of His purposes and the revelation of the deep love of His heart towards men as well as the glory of His Name all depend upon the Deity of the Lord Jesus. How could God reveal Himself to men who were cut off from Him by their sins? How could He win their hearts from their fear and hatred of Him and deliver them from the darkness in which they groped? How could men love God if they did not know Him, and how could they know Him, since “no man has seen God at any time unless the only-begotten Son which is in His bosom come forth to declare Him?” It was certainly necessary that these things should be done if ever that great word was to be fulfilled, “And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying. Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, not crying, neither shall there be any more pain, “for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:3-4). Before all this could be an accomplished fact the sin of the world must be borne away, and who could do that? It is recorded that, “John (the Baptist) sees Jesus coming to him, and says, Behold the Lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). We are familiar with the words, so familiar that we are but lightly impressed with their immensity and meaning, “The sin of the world!” Think of it! Think of the sin of one city, what man could take that away? or of one street in a city, or of one house in that street, or of one man in that house? Could any man take away his own sin and stand before God, “holy and without blame before Him in love”? for nothing less than that will suit Him. The questions have only to be asked to prove to all who are not wilfully blind that this work could only lie in the hands of the eternal God. Yet as John saw that lowly Stranger from Nazareth moving towards him among the multitudes of Israel, he proclaimed Him to be the taker away of the sin of the world and in that word he proclaimed His Godhead power and worth. No wonder that he was compelled to add, “This is He of whom I said, After me comes a man which is preferred before me: for He was before me.”

That which is written in Revelation 21 shall come to pass for “the words are true and faithful” (verse 5). The same voice that cried, “It is finished” on the cross at Golgotha shall be heard saying, “It is done” and God shall rest with the multitude of His redeemed sons, in His own love that has been declared by the Son, and shall be all and in all. Meanwhile He declares, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life.” God Himself is the Fountain, and the thirst of the human soul can only be assuaged and satisfied with God, and God is fully revealed to us in JESUS. For “God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit seen of angels, preached to the Gentiles, believed on in the world received up into glory.”