It needs to be strongly emphasized that all the forms of the power in question are moral. The power to forgive sins, to judge men as moral beings, to give eternal life to men as moral beings, to lay down one's life in perfect self-sacrificing love and service for others' good, to exercise the moral government of heaven and earth, — to do all the.se things, to have the right and the power to do them, manife.stly means the possession and the exercise of moral power of the highest jiossible order. Again, it is evident that this power in its nature and in all its forms of manifestation belongs to the supernatural order of things. Hut in the sphere of things into which the oriler of ideas considered here introduces one, the supernatural and the natural are one. It is within the sphere of the moral order of things that Christ, in His moral position as Mediator between God and men, exercised, or exercises, the forms of His power alluded to. And within this moral sphere there is no absolute distinction between the natu- ral and the supernatural. Here all that is in harmony with God's will and purpose is in Him, and He is in it. This is the real tnith ; and whether it be called natural or supernatural is only a difference in name.
Once more, all tlie forms of power that Christ claimed for Himself were His by delegation from God. But this does not mean that He had the right and the power to exercise them in a imrely official capacity, without their having any relation to and dependence on what He was as a mora) Being. He was invested with them by God, as all but one of the passages referred to above indicate. But one of the passages tells us that He had power on earth to forgive sins as the Son of mnn ; and another, that God had given Him authority to execute .Judgment hecaitse He was the Son of man. He was both the Son of God and the Son of man in all that He was as a moral Being when on the earth, exercising the high moral powers that He claimed to possess. And it is as the same moral Being, now glorified, that He exercises every moral power that He claimed as His own by Divine gift and prerogative. In other words, the power to do all the things that have been specified is His be- cause of what He is as a moral Being. To forgive
FORCE
FORCE
607
sins, to judge men, etc., are all acts of moral power wliich belong to the administration of the moral order of the world as it now is v:ith Christ in it as the one only Mediator between God and men. And the reason why the administration of all things belonginLj to tho mmal relations between God and men is m His hands, is— that in His life and death on earth He carm-d tlie moral right to occupy this momentous jiosition of mediation and power. For He lills this position and administers its powers as one \\ho has pro\cd Himself all that God can be to men, and all that every man ought to become and be to God. He is thus, because of what He is, the Divinely human and the humanly Divine, true way of forgiveness, of judgment, of life, and of moral government for men. Krom His Father's own commandment He had the jjower to lay down His life, in living and in dying to qualify Himself for this destiny of absolute pre-eminence in the moral universe. And as the Father com- manded Him, so He did. Therefore His name is now above every name (Ph 2^-", Jn IT^""'^").
Avva)i.i.s is the other word which is translated 'power' in tlie E\^ of the Gospels. It is note- worthy that none of the Evangelists includes the word ' energy ' (^i'^p7eia) in his terminology ; a word which St. Paul employed to denote the efi'ectual working of God's redeeming power as manifested in (1) the raising of Christ from the dead, and in the setting of Him at God's right hand in the heavenly places, i.e. in the moral order of things (Eph l''-*-^) ; (2) the Divine grace that was bestowed on St. Paul himself by the working in him of Divine power (Eph 3") ; (3) the working of the same Divine power in the creation or e'.olu- tion of an order of moral unity in the relations of all men to one another in Christ ; (4) the work- ing of the same power as in Christ as destined to fashion the resurrection body of believers into the glorious likeness of His own, ' according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself (Ph 3-'). But the absence from the Gospels of the term ' energy,' which occu- pies a place of such extensive and high importance in St. Paul's general conception of essential Christi- anity, does not imply the absence from them of that order of Divine working for which the word stands in the Apostle's writings. The entire body of moral phenomena, reproduced by the Evangelists in their several records, and in wliich the power of God in Christ was manifested, was a revelation of the Divine energy in St. Paul's sense of the word. But, further, the meaning of the word ivipyaa. is included in that of the word Siiva/xis as the latter is used in the Gospels ; for in them it signifies, on the one hand, the possession of power capable of action ; and, on the other, power mani- festing itself in a state of activity, in which case it appears in the form of energy. Power, then, as dipaiui, holds a fundamental place in the Gospels as records of how Christ conceived it and mani- fested it in His activities.