(1) The first note in the early preaching of the Acts of the Apostles is the proclamation of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The first thing the Gospel says is " Jesus is Lord." It is that " God hath made that same Jesus both Lord and Christ" (Acts ii. 36). And this should be first in the preaching of the Gospel still. For the first business of the evangel is to bring to man the consciousness of sin. Now there is no way of bringing a man to consciousness of sin so powerfully as by bringing him into the presence of Christ as Lord.
IF Mount Sinai never made me afraid in my life. I was born of Christian parents, nurtured in a Christian home, and I never
12 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
cease to thank God for it. I passed into personal relationship with Christ witliout volcanic consciousness. I cannot find you the day of my new birth. I came into the presence of Sinai ; was overawed by its majesty, was conscious of the stupendous dignity, but I never said in its presence, " I am a sinner." But there came at last with the passing of the years the consciousness of this Christ. I came into the Presence of Him with His supernal loveliness, with His self-emptying love. And when I stood in His Presence and saw Him — nay, I have never seen Him yet in all His glory ; it is too bright for the feebleness of a sinner's sight — when I began to measure my life no longer by standards of a law written upon tables of stone, no longer by the standards of my neighbours or friends or the average man — that dreadful average man who is ruining so many ; but when I began to measure my life by the standard of that one Supreme Life, when I came into the presence of the Lordship of Christ, I went down into the dust and said, "If that was the ideal, then God have mercy upon me a sinner." ^
(2) The second note is the proclamation of the Cross, the sacrifice for sin. When the spirit is bowed, and a man becomes conscious of the paralysis and the power of sin, we show him the vision of this same King going to death.
(3) The third note is the preaching of the Eesurrection. For He went to the cross willingly. No man took His life from Him ; He laid it down of Himself " that he might take it again." In the vision of the Lord I come to know my sin ; in the mystery of the cross my conscience is satisfied with pardon ; now I need strength to stand and power to do. Christ rose to com- municate a dynamic by which I may live. Pardoned in His death, I am saved in His Life.
(4) There is a fourth note. It is the proclamation of the perpetual presence of that Lord, that Saviour, that Eisen One. He ascended on high and " gave gifts."
1[ On one occasion, when Tennyson was rusticating in a country place, he asked an old woman if there was any news. She replied, " Why, Mr. Tennyson, there's only one piece of news that I know, and that is, Christ died for all men." He responded, " That is old news, and good news, and new news."
* G. Campbell Morgan.
ST. MARK 13
III. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
1. That is, the Gospel of which Jesus Christ is the subject, the good news concerning Him who, when this book was written and this title placed in front of it, was known to the Church as Jesus the Messiah. " The wonderful name Christ is first added to the proper name Jesus after He had shown Himself to be the divinely consecrated king whom the Old Testament predicted (Acts ii. 36). But the Evangelists write the double name Jesus Christ above the portals of their Gospels (Mark i. 1; John i. 17) as an anagram or emblem of the entire following history, simi- larly as the Torah stamps the name Jehovah Elohim as such an anagram upon the entrance of the sacred history." ^
1[ There is some doubt as to the genuineness of the words " the Son of God " here. But the doubt was not sufficient to compel the Kevisers to place the words in the margin. If accepted aa part of the text, says Professor Menzies, they must be understood, like all the terms in this verse, in the Pauline sense. In the body of the Gospel, Jesus is spoken of as Son of God by the demons (iii. 11, V. 7), and by the heavenly voice at the baptism (i. 11), and at the transfiguration (ix. 7). In these cases the phrase is an official Messianic title, denoting the representative of God who is empowered, like David of old, to execute Divine purposes. It implies no doctrine as to His extraction or essential nature. In Paul, on the other hand, the Son of God is a heavenly figure (Eom. i. 4 ; Gal. iv. 4), who was with God before He appeared in the world, and has now been exalted to still higher honours than He enjoyed before. In this verse the words must express the writer's own view of Christ's nature ; and as he writes for Gentiles, only the latter, metaphysical sense of the phrase can be thought of. The doctrine of the Son of God could not arise on Jewish soil, but to Greek-speaking people it presented little difficulty. The root of the Christian doctrine is undoubtedly to be sought in Jesus' own teaching as to His relation to God, and in Paul's development of that teaching.-