When Christ came. He, and He first, taught us that we, with our sin-stained lips, might call upon God as " Our Father which art in heaven." Thus a new relationship altogether was (not established but) revealed between the Creator and the creature, and that connection which David faintly foreshadowed when he said, " Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him," was shown by our Saviour to be not a semblance but a reality.
^ If a friend visits you, you like to show him your most valued possessions. If you are a gardener you take him to see the loveliest flower in your conservatory. If you are an artist you lead him to your studio and show him your best picture. If you are an author you place your favourite volume in his hand. Now God wishes man to know what He glories in, what He deems His best possession, what affords Him more joy than anything else. He wishes to give us the knowledge of His glory. What does He glory in ? What does He wish us to know above everything else?
Does He wish us to know His power ? Certainly not. That might impress some. But He placed our first parents in the Garden of Eden. Great loveliness was there, but no special manifestation of power. I notice that when kings and other potentates visit one another they are taken to see the arsenal, or the army, or the fleet. The host is very anxious to give the cuests a great idea of his power. This is one of the many parti- culars ill wliich the King of kings is essentially different from all
ST. JOHN I. 14 49
other kings. He put our first parents in the Garden of Eden where there was no great display of power. He might have placed them on some solitary island, around which great oceans leaped and rolled. But He has never gone out of His way to impress men with His power. Neither has He ever sought to overwhelm them with His wisdom. It is only lately that He has begun to unfold to us, on a large scale, the marvels of His know- ledge. The physical sciences are exceedingly modern. It is only in our own lifetime that God has permitted us, by the use of such modern inventions as the microscope, the telescope, and the spectroscope, to find out the wonders of His skill. He was in no hurry to impress us with that. Nothing can be more absurd, or wicked, or degraded, than the idolatrous worship of mere clever- ness. We may be as clever or as powerful as Satan himself, and yet as odious and degraded. God does not glory either in power or in wisdom.
But what God does glory in, what He has been trying to reveal to us from the beginning, what He wishes us to know more than anything else, is that His nature is love ! He wishes to persuade us that He attaches an immeasurably higher value to love than to power or to wisdom. Where shall we find words to describe the rapture of man when he discovers that " God is love"? One of the most delightful passages in human biography is in the life of Henry Ward Beecher. He was brought' up in a narrow, hard, Calvinistic school. For a long time he groped in darkness and misery. The name of God was to him a name of terror. But with glowing eloquence and delight he tells us how on one memorable day it dawned upon him that God is love. At once the whole universe was radiant with new beauty. Everything was changed. He was changed. He passed from hell to heaven, and the light of that rapturous moment never passed away. But neither to him nor to us could that vivid and full knowledge of the love of God ever have come except in the face of Jesus Christ. All previous revelations are summed up, supple- mented, and completed in Christ. " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father " (John xiv. 9). There is " life for a look " at that f ace.^
3. But the grand reason why God became man in Christ, the New Testament tells us, was that He might make propitiation or atonement for sin. This is the great reason which Anselm dis- cusses in his own way in his book. The law had something to say in Court, as it were, with regard to the bestowment of an absolutely gratuitous pardon, and the right to claim that its * H. Price Hughes, Essential Christianity, 50.
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50 THE INCARNATION OF THE WORD
principles and requirements should be duly conserved and satisfied. Now the Incarnation of the Son of God and His perfect obedience to the law, thus " magnifying the law and maintaining its honour," fully met the case. He fully met all the requirements which the law might put forth with a view to securing a free pardon, and He did it as man's Head and Eepresentative. Accordingly, when the penitent sinner accepts Christ in His incarnate fulness — His law-satisfying life and death — Christ's law-satisfying life and death practically and substantially become the sinner's own, and count for his salvation. Thus it follows that while pardon is freely given, the law is duly honoured, maintained, and even fulfilled. Christ Himself declares that He came " to give his life a ransom for many " (Matt. xx. 28). As St. John puts it, God " loved us, and sent his Son to be the pro- pitiation for our sins " (1 John iv. 10).