Do we know God, and do we know Christ ar»glit ? are the two great questions to be considered. God known out of Christ is a consuming fire, and will fill us with fear only. Christ known without God will not be truly valued : we shall see no meaning in His Cross and passion. To see clearly at the same time a holy, pure, sin-hating God, and a loving, merciful, sin-atoning Christ, is the very A B C of comfortable religion. In short, it is life eternal to know rightly God and Christ. " To know God without Christ," says Newton, " is not to know Him savingly."
Traill remarks, " The secret moth and poison in many peo- ple's religion is, that it is not Christianity at all. God out of Christ is a consuming fire ; God not worshipped in Christ is an idol ; all hopes of acceptance out of Christ are vain dreams ; a heaven out of Christ is little better than the Turk's paradise."
The Greek of the phrase, " that they might know," would have been better rendered, " to know." It is the same phrase that is so rendered in John iv. 34 : " My meat is to do the will." Literally, this is, " My meat is that I may do the will."
Let us learn that knowledge is the chief thing in religion, though we must not make it an idol. Most wicked men are what they are because they are ignorant. Godly people are often described in Scripture by one single phrase : " They kno w God."
The argument which Arians and Socinians have always loved to found on this verse appears to me extremely weak. Their idea, that our Lord did not lay claim to divinity, because He speaks of the Father as the " only true God," is foolish and unreasonable. Chrysostom, Cyril, Toletus, and others, remark very sensibly, that the word " only " was not meant to exclude the Son and the Holy Ghost, but only those idols and false gods with which the heathen religions had filled the earth when Christ appeared. The very fact that eternal life consists in knowing not only God, but Christ, goes far to prove Christ's divinity.
Manton remarks that the expression in this verse had a two- fold object ; firstly, to exclude the idols and false gods ; and secondly, to show the order and economy of salvation."
Let us note that this is the only place in the New Testament where our Lord calls Himself " Jesus Christ."
4. — [I have glorified Thee on the earthJ] The meaning of these words I take to be this. " I have now glorified Thee during my life on earth by keeping Thy law perfectly, so that Satan can find no defect or blemish in Me, — by witnessing faithfully to Thy truth in opposition to the sins and false teaching of the Jews, — by showing Thee and Thy mind towards man in a way that was never known before."
[/ have finished the work...to do.l The meaning of theoa