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 a.s.sayed 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 pa.s.sions 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 G.o.d--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 G.o.d; for, sinlessness and holiness come alone from G.o.d and, as essential qualities, take their rise alone in G.o.d.
His power over nature proved him G.o.d.
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 G.o.d.
For two thousand years his regenerative power in a world of sin has been the proof that he was G.o.d.
For two thousand years, in every age, in every clime, among all cla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sion, 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 G.o.d; men whose every fibre was as the coa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.sion, 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 l.u.s.t 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 G.o.d 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, "O 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d alone?
That Jesus Christ was G.o.d 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 G.o.d, and the Word was G.o.d (G.o.d was the Word). The same was in the beginning with G.o.d. 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 G.o.d."
Writing to the Philippians, Paul declares, that Jesus Christ was in the "form of G.o.d," 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d the Father.
In his epistle to the Colossians, the Apostle Paul announces that this "same Jesus" is the "image of the invisible G.o.d; 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 princ.i.p.alities 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 _G.o.dhead 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 charakter and signifies an "engraving," the very engraving of G.o.d in the flesh, _the engraving of G.o.d in humanity_) and upholding all things by the word of his power. "Upholding all things!" this earth in its...o...b..t about the sun; the sun in its...o...b..t about some other sun; all suns and systems in their orbits of splendor, whirling onward in ever-widening distances over highways of infinite s.p.a.ces, through extensions that are measureless, and where time does not count. In that unmeasured expansion where the points of the compa.s.s 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 G.o.d--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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d; and who is, and who alone can be, the _visibility of G.o.d_.
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:
"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, _the Almighty_."
This is the climax.