But one will never get to understand this Jesus until he gets a
good look at man as he was once, and as he is now. The key to
understanding Jesus is man, even as Jesus is the key to God. One must
use both keys to get into the inner heart of God. To get hold of that
first key one must go back to the start of things. The old Book of God
opens with a picture that is fascinating in its simplicity and strength.
There is an unfallen man. He is fresh from the hand of God, free of
scar and stain and shrivelling influence. He is in a garden. He is
walking hand in hand with God, and working side by side with God:
friendship and partnership. Friends in spirit: partners in service.
The distinctive thing about the man is that he is like God. He
and God are alike. In this he differs from all creation. He is God's
link between Himself and His Creation. Particular pains is taken by
repetition and change of phrase to make clear and emphatic that it was
in the very image of God that man was made. Just what does it mean that
we men were made in God's likeness? Well, the thing has been discussed
back and forth a good bit. Probably we will not know fully till we know
as we are known. In the morning when we see Him we shall be like Him
fully again. Then we'll know. That morning's sun will clear up a lot of
fog. But a few things can be said about it now with a positiveness that
may clear the air a bit, and help us recognize the dignity of our being,
and behave accordingly.
Man came into being by the breath of God. God breathed Himself
into man. The breath that God breathed out came into man as life. The
very life of man is a bit of God. Man is of the essence of God. Every
man is the presence-chamber of God.
God is a Spirit. Man is a Spirit. He lives in a body. He thinks
through a mind. He is a spirit, using the body as a dwelling-place, and
the mind as his keenest instrument. All the immeasurable possibilities
and capacities of spirit being are in man.
God is an infinite spirit. That is, we cannot understand Him
fully. He is very close to us. The relationship is most intimate, and
tender, yet His fullness is ever beyond our grasp and our ken, Man is
infinite in that he knows that God is infinite. Only like can appreciate
like. He can appreciate that he cannot appreciate God, except in part.
He understands that he does not understand God save in smaller part. He
knows enough to love passionately. And through loving as well as through
knowing he knows that there is infinitely more that he does not know.
Only man of all earth's creation knows this. In this he is like God. The
difference between God and man here is in the degree of infinity. That
degree of difference is an infinite degree. Yet this is the truth. But
more yet: man has this same quality wayward. He is infinite in that he
cannot be fully understood in his mental processes and motives. He is
beyond grasp fully by his fellow. Even one's most intimate friend who
knows most and best must leave unknown more than is known.
God is an eternal spirit. He has always lived. He will live
always. He knows no end, at either end. All time before there was time,
and after the time-book is shut, is to Him a passing present. Man is an
eternal spirit, because of God. He will know no end. He will live always
because the breath of God is his very being.
God is love. He yearns for love. He loves. And more, He is love.
Man is like God in his yearning for love, in his capacity for love, and
in his lovableness. Man must love. He lives only as he loves. True love,
and only that, is the real life. He will give up everything for love.
He is satisfied only as he loves and finds love. To love is greater than
to be loved. One cannot always have both. God does not. But every one
may love. Every one does love. And only as there is love, pure and true —
however overlaid with what is not so — only so is there life.
God is holy. That word seems to include purity and righteousness.
There is utter absence of all that should not be. There is in Him all
that should be, and that in fullness beyond our thinking. Man was made
holy. There is in the Genesis picture of Eden a touch that for
simplicity and yet for revealing the whole swing of moral action is most
vivid. In the presence of conditions where man commonly, universally,
the world around, and time through, has been and is most sensitive to
suggestion of evil there is with this first man the utter absence of any
thought of evil. In the light of after history there could be no
subtler, stronger statement than this of his holiness, his purity, at
this stage.
And in his capacity for holiness, in that intensest longing for purity, and loathing of all else, that comes as the Spirit of God is allowed sway, is revealed again the
capacity for God-likeness. It is the prophetic dawn within of that
coming Eden when again we shall see His face, and have the original
likeness fully restored.
God is wise, all-wise. Among the finest passages of the
Christian's classic are those that represent God as personified wisdom.
And here wisdom includes all knowledge and justice. That the Spirit of
God breathed into man His own mental life is stated most keenly by the
man who proverbially embodied in himself this quality of wisdom. "The
spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord searching out the innermost
parts." The allusion is clearly to intellectual powers. There is in man
the same quality of mental keenness that searches into things as is in
God. It is often dulled, gripped by a sort of stupor, so overlaid you
would hardly guess it was there. But, too, as we all know, it often
shines out with a startling brilliance. It is less in degree than with
God, but it is the same thing, a bit of God in man. This explains man's
marvelous achievements in literature, in invention, in science, and in
organization.
Two light master-strokes of the etching point in the Eden picture
reveal the whole mental equipment of the man. The only sayings of
Adam's preserved for us are when God brought to him the woman. She is
the occasion for sayings that reveal the mental powers of this first
man. Fittingly it is so. Woman, when true to herself, has ever been the
occasion for bringing out the best in man. "And the man said, this time
it is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; this shall be called
woman, because out of man was this one taken. Therefore doth a man leave
his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife, and they become one
flesh." . . . "And the man called his wife's name Eve; because she was
the mother of all living." Here is revealed at a glance the keen mental
powers at work. Here is the simplicity of statement that marks the
speech of strong men. The whole forest is in a single acorn. The whole
of a human life is in the primal cell. The chemist knows the whole body
by looking into one drop of blood. Here is revealed in one glance the
whole man. Mark the keen sense of fitness in the naming of woman — the
last and highest creation. Adam was a philologist. His mind was
analytical. Inferentially the same keen sense of fitness guided in all
the names he had chosen. Here is recognition of the plan for the whole
race, a simple unlabored foresight into its growth. A man's relation to
his wife, his God-chosen friend, as being the closest of life, and above
all others is recognized, together with the consequent obligation upon
him. She comes first of all. She becomes the first of all his
relationships. The man and the woman — one man and one woman — united,
make the true unit of society. Any disturbance of that strikes at the
very vitals of society.
And God is a Sovereign — the sovereign of the vast swing of
worlds. Man likewise is a sovereign in the realm of nature, and over all
the lower creation. He was given dominion, kingship, over all the
earth-creation. Man is a king. He is of the blood royal. He was made to
command, to administrate, to reign. He is the judge of last appeals on
the bench of earth.
But there is more here. The chief characteristic of an absolute
sovereign is the imperial power to choose, to decide. Man was made an
absolute sovereign in his own will. God is the absolute sovereign. He
has made man an absolute sovereign in one realm, that of his will, his
power of choice. There is one place where man reigns alone, an absolute
autocrat, where not even God can come save as the autocrat desires it,
that is in his will. And if that
"can" bother you, remember that
it was God's sovereign act that made it so. So that God remains
sovereign in making man a sovereign in the realm of his will. There
every man sits in imperial solitude.
Here then is the picture of man fresh from the hand of God. A
spirit, in a body, with an unending life, partly infinite, like God in
his capacity for love, for holiness, and wisdom, with the gift of
sovereignty over the lower creation, and in his own will. Like Him too
in his capacity for fellowship with God. For only like can have
fellowship with like. It is only in that in which we are alike that we
can have fellowship. These two, God and man, walking side by side,
working together, friendship in spirit; partnership in service.
This man is in a
garden of trees and bushes, with fruit
and flowers and singing birds, roses with no pricking thorns, soft green
with no weeds, and no poison ivy, for there is no hate. And he is
walking with God, talking familiarly as chosen friend with choicest
friend. Together they work in the completion of creation. God brings His
created beings one by one to man to be catalogued and named, and
accepts his decisions. What a winsome picture. These two, God and a man
in His likeness, walking and working side by side; likeness in being;
friendship, fellowship in spirit; partnership, comradeship in service.
And this is God's thought for man!
Gordon.