No man who robs G.o.d of equality, and who deceives men into believing that he is G.o.d, can be good--he is a wicked and blasphemous deceiver.
There is only one way in which the character of Jesus Christ can be saved on this claim of his to be G.o.d--if that claim were not true.
It can be saved only by a.s.suming that he was self-deceived; that he sincerely believed himself to be G.o.d, but was blinded and held fast by his own mistaken concept.
But the man who claims to be Almighty G.o.d, and claims it as he did, can be self-deceived only when he is a mental weakling, unbalanced in mind, or absolutely insane.
None of these things can be predicated of Jesus Christ.
On the contrary, he was the most intellectual man the world has ever known.
Mark how he met the wisdom and the genius of the men who surrounded him. Again and again they came to him with crafty and perplexing questions. With a word he solved their problems, flashed truth into their shame-smitten faces, and silenced them. In all the universe there is no soul meaner, more contemptible, more cowardly, and utterly lost to every sense of decent manhood than the man who, for the sake of entangling a good man in his speech, asks him questions in public, before an audience ready at every turn to misquote and misinterpret his slightest utterance; and that is what they did.
They came to him, not with the desire to know the truth, but to confound him, cast him down and destroy his prestige with the people. To every question he gave an answer having in it spiritual truth, but bearing the unmistakable stamp of rare wisdom and intellectual superiority.
His words, the simple speech he used in the midst of them, or alone with his disciples, have been the impulse of the mightiest intellectual activity the world has ever known. Out of his words have grown systems of theology that may well call for all there is of brain power and capacity in those who study them. Here are to be found the keenest speculations and the farthest outreach of metaphysical suggestion and the most detailed a.n.a.lysis of which the human mind is capable. Book after book, treatise after treatise, discourse after discourse, have been produced out of the simplest and most detached things he said. No man can read his speeches and not find the mind stimulated, shocked, quickened and impelled forward even upon the most daring lines of thought.
It would be easy to call the roll of the princes and kings in the realm of intellect, men whose thoughts burn and flame like great quenchless lights; men whose minds are the storehouses of knowledge, and whose utterances by word and pen have moved the quickest and most forceful lives in the world. It would be easy to call the long roll of these names shining like stars and constellations in the firmament of thought--princes and kings of intellect who acknowledge that Jesus Christ is not only superior to them morally and spiritually, but intellectually.
What man is there to-day with any degree of mental self-respect who would dare to stand up and a.s.sert himself the equal of Jesus Christ intellectually?
Without necessity of demonstration, it ought to be a truth beyond question that Jesus Christ was the most intellectual man the world has ever known.
Such a man as that could not be self-deceived.
If he were not Almighty G.o.d he knew it.
He knew it as well as these good Unitarians, and these wondrously advanced scholars who cannot get beyond the glamour of his humanity.
He knew it at first hands.
If he were not Almighty G.o.d--if he were only a man--he knew it, knew it through and through, in every fibre of his being.
There is no possibility then whatever for him to have been deceived.
If he were not deceived, if he knew he was not G.o.d, then--
HE WAS NOT A GOOD MAN.
This is his own argument:
A young man came to him and said, "Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may inherit eternal life? and he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good _but one, that is G.o.d_."
The argument is simple enough.
"You call me good. G.o.d alone is good. If I am not G.o.d, I am not good."
Not good!
Nay! If he were not G.o.d, he was the most wantonly wicked man of whom I ever heard.
If he were not G.o.d, not only does disaster fall upon himself in the total destruction of his character, and in the consequent and final driving of him from the suffrage and consideration of men, but the disaster falls upon all who have put their faith in him.
If Jesus Christ were not G.o.d, then he never forgave the sins of a single soul, and all those throughout the two thousand years who have gone into eternity trusting in his name have gone into that eternity unforgiven and unshrived of G.o.d.
If Jesus Christ were not G.o.d, then he has not forgiven the sin of a single human being alive to-day.
You had sinned! There were memories of the sins you had committed.
They allowed you no rest. They gave you anguish of mind. Others could not forgive you. You could not forgive yourself. The consciousness that you stood naked before the all-seeing eye of a holy G.o.d; that he knew the circ.u.mstances and every detail thereof, down to the very intents and purposes lying behind your deeds, and even your thoughts; that he looked into and saw all that was in your heart; in the consciousness growing clearer and stronger and more terrible each day that you had no excuse, no place that you could hold for a moment; that if he summoned you to his presence, you would stand in the white light of his unmixed holiness, and the inexorable and unrelenting wrath of his essential antagonism and just hatred against sin; all this consciousness taking voice in you and through you, cried out in your soul, "I am guilty and undone."
And this filled you with a horror of great darkness and the utter blackness of a hopeless despair. Then you heard the voice of Jesus Christ saying, "Come unto me." "Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out." You came. You fell at his feet. You owned his death as your atoning sacrifice. You claimed him as your subst.i.tute. You claimed forgiveness through his blood. He said to you, as he said to the paralytic, "Thy sins are forgiven thee." You rose and went away as when one is released from a galling chain; as when a burden that was crushing to earth has been lifted from the sore, bleeding shoulder; as when one who has been tossed on a midnight sea enters the haven while the dawn is breaking, casts anchor and touches sh.o.r.e. For years you have had peace. The memory of your sins are there (for though G.o.d when he forgives forgets them, you cannot).
Like David, perhaps, you cry, "My sin is ever before me!" The sin marks are there as the nail holes in the wall, but you have been able to look at them and have peace because you have said to yourself, "I am not an unwhipped of justice, my sins have been punished in my subst.i.tute; they have been fully answered for in his blood. He has forgiven me and justified me and made me clean. In him I stand clothed in the very "righteousness of G.o.d." I hate my sin and despise it for what it is in itself, for what it made him, my redeemer, to endure, but I have peace because he has fully satisfied in my behalf. I have actually satisfied in him and am delivered before G.o.d"s court of holiness both from the guilt and the demerit of sin. I have, in short, _gone through the judgment with Christ on the cross_. He has p.r.o.nounced forgiveness--absolution--upon me, and he has done so by virtue of his power and authority as the living one in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the G.o.dhead bodily--as my saviour and my G.o.d he has forgiven me and I am at peace."
All this you have said within yourself and testified.
But I ask you now to face the terrible fact--if Jesus Christ were not G.o.d--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 G.o.d an unpardoned and as yet unpunished criminal awaiting your doom. All this is absolutely your state--
IF--
If Jesus Christ were not Almighty G.o.d.
If Jesus Christ were not Almighty G.o.d, he had no authority nor power to forgive your sins. NO! And if Jesus Christ were not G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, his death was not an atonement.
And this surely should be plain enough.
Only G.o.d can atone to G.o.d.
Only an infinite being can satisfy an infinite being.
If Jesus Christ were not G.o.d he could not make an atonement.
If he did not make an atonement, then the world has never been reconciled to G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d what he demands, and unto man what he needs. There is no mediator between a holy G.o.d and a sinful man.
If Jesus Christ were not G.o.d, 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 const.i.tution 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?