The Mystery of Godliness

And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness; He who was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, received up in glory.—1 Timothy 3:16.

The sudden ascension of thought expressed in the text takes us by surprise. A moment before we were occupied with the bishop and the deacon, and were entering with minute attention into their qualifications, the possible faults of their characters, and the proper state of their families; and now we are in the midst of the mystery of godliness, and by a close and sudden condensation of its history, have seen at a glance the whole course of its revelation. Yet the transition of thought is natural in itself, and especially natural with him who makes it. One great part of the Divine instruction afforded us through the mind of St. Paul lies in the close connexion which he felt between the great facts of revelation and all common thoughts and duties, whereby practical life is elevated and irradiated by the constant presence of the glorious objects of faith. Here indeed the association of thought is obvious to all. I have (he seems to say) been speaking to you of your conduct in all these points of detail; they are no trifles, they are part of your behaviour in the “house of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.” Not only the interests of persons, but also the interests of truth are involved in your guidance of these matters; for the Church exists to support that truth in the world, and to hold it up before the eyes of men. It is an institution for that end, and it is needed for that end. The truth is lodged in the world, but it finds there no sure resting-place; it will sink and settle in the yielding soil till it has partly or wholly disappeared from view, unless some substructures are laid, fitted for its permanent support; a pillar must bear it on high, a pavement must sustain its weight. These offices the Church is ordained to fulfil. In reference to God it is His house, in reference to the truth it is its pillar and its ground. Hence arises a grave responsibility for the rulers and guides of the Church, for it lies with them to see to the maintenance of this substructure in its intended state, and to keep it sound and serviceable for its appointed purpose.

1. Why does St. Paul speak of “the mystery of godliness”? In order to express both the Divine and the human aspect of the Christian faith. On the Divine side the Gospel is a mystery, a disclosed secret. It is a body of truth originally hidden from man’s knowledge, to which man by his own unaided reason and abilities would never be able to find the way. In one word it is a revelation: a communication by God to men of truth which they could not have discovered for themselves. “Mystery” is one of those words which Christianity has borrowed from paganism, but has consecrated to new uses by gloriously transfiguring its meaning. The heathen mystery was something always kept hidden from the bulk of mankind; a secret to which only a privileged few were admitted. It encouraged, in the very centre of religion itself, selfishness and exclusiveness. The Christian mystery, on the other hand, once hidden, is now made known, not to a select few, but to all. The term therefore involves a splendid paradox: it is a secret revealed to every one. In St. Paul’s own words to the Romans, “the revelation of the mystery which hath been kept in silence through times eternal, but now is manifested, and by the scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the Eternal God, is made known unto all the nations.” He rarely uses the word “mystery” without combining with it some other word signifying to reveal, manifest, or make known.

There is a modern and popular use of the word mystery, in which it means something inscrutably dark and perplexing—something hopelessly baffling to the powers of the human mind—an absolute riddle or enigma; and this modern and popular sense of the word is often enough carried back into the Scriptures and applied to the word as found there, in such a way as to hide the meaning of it. It is a very favourite word with some theologians, who are fond of shortening up an argument, when it begins to be troublesome, by saying of one subject or another, “Oh, that is a mystery!”—as if this word were the end of all questioning. Now it is well to understand that the word in the New Testament has no such sense. It means a thing once hidden, but now brought to light. It means a new discovery. It does not at all imply that the matter, when once revealed, is difficult of understanding. It may be a very simple and elementary matter, such as simple minds can easily grasp when it is brought to them. Our Lord did not call around Him, for His disciples, a group of twelve acute philosophers; but to the twelve simple and teachable fishermen whom He did call He said, “To you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God.”1 [Note: L. W. Bacon, The Simplicity that is in Christ, 81.]

2. But the Christian faith is not only a mystery; it is a “mystery of godliness.” It not only tells of the bounty of Almighty God in revealing His eternal counsels to man; it also tells of man’s obligations in consequence of being initiated. It is a mystery, not “of lawlessness” but “of godliness.” Those who accept it “profess godliness,” profess reverence to the God who has made it known to them. It teaches plainly on what principle we are to regulate “how men ought to behave themselves in the household of God.” The gospel is a mystery of piety, a mystery of reverence and of religious life. Holy itself, and proceeding from the Holy One, it bids its recipients be holy, even as He is holy who gives it.

Those for whom St. Paul wrote knew well what “mysteries of ungodliness” were; for there were several such mysteries, which formed a part of the old Pagan religions. Mysteries were certain sacred rites, in which a traditional secret was divulged to the initiated, and made the nucleus and centre of a form of worship. Some of the rites connected with this worship were horribly impure and cruel; the heathen mysteries were “mysteries of ungodliness.” But God’s revelation in Christ, the magnificent secret into which the Church indoctrinates mankind, the secret of redeeming love and grace, the secret of the atonement and its allied truths, which also is the centre and nucleus of the Church’s whole system of worship, is a “mystery of godliness”; that is, a secret which, really imbibed by the inner man, produces the fruit of godliness.2 [Note: E. M. Goulburn, The Holy Catholic Church, 263.]

3. The Apostle proceeds to give “the mystery” in the enforced terms in which the Church had received it. “Who was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, received up in glory.”

After the text about the three Heavenly Witnesses in the First Epistle of St. John, no disputed reading in the New Testament has given rise to more controversy than the passage before us. It is certain that St. Paul did not write, “God was manifest in the flesh,” but “who was manifested in the flesh.” The reading “God was manifested in the flesh” appears in no Christian writer until late in the fourth century, and in no translation of the Scriptures earlier than the seventh or eighth century. And it is not found in any of the five great primary MSS., except as a correction made by a later scribe, who knew of the reading “God was manifested,” and either preferred it to the other, or at least wished to preserve it as an alternative reading, or as an interpretation. In an old Greek MS., it would require only two small strokes to turn “who” into “God”; and this alteration would be a tempting one, seeing that the masculine “who” after the neuter “mystery” looks harsh and unnatural. But here we come upon a highly interesting consideration. The words that follow look like a quotation from some primitive Christian hymn or confession. The rhythmical movement and the parallelism of the six balanced clauses, of which each triplet forms a climax, points to some such fact as this. It is possible that we have here a fragment of one of the very hymns which, as Pliny the Younger tells the Emperor Trajan, the Christians were accustomed to sing antiphonally at daybreak to Christ as a God. Such a passage as this might well be sung from side to side, line by line, or triplet by triplet, as choirs still chant the Psalms in our churches. “Who was manifested in the flesh; justified in the spirit; seen of angels; preached among the nations; believed on in the world; received up in glory.” Let us assume that this very reasonable and attractive conjecture is correct, and that St. Paul is here quoting from some well-known form of words. Then the “who” with which the quotation begins will refer to something in the preceding lines which are not quoted. How natural, then, that St. Paul should leave the “who” unchanged, although it does not fit on grammatically to his own sentence. But in any case there is no doubt as to the antecedent of the “who.” “The mystery of godliness” has for its centre and basis the life of a Divine Person; and the great crisis in the long process by which the mystery was revealed was reached when this Divine Person “was manifested in the flesh.”1 [Note: A. Plummer, The Pastoral Epistles, 133.]

For many years the great Alexandrian MS. was supposed to read Theos, Θς, and scholars who examined it were confident they saw the line across the middle of the O. It now turns out—and the discovery is a curious one—that the supposed line is really the shadow of another letter on the opposite page showing through it, and tracing out the apparent stroke exactly across the middle of the O.1 [Note: G. S. Barrett, The Earliest Christian Hymn, 27.]

4. It is remarkable how many arrangements of these six clauses are possible, all making excellent sense. We may make them into two triplets of independent lines; or we may couple the two first lines of each triplet together and then make the third lines correspond to one another. In either case each group begins with earth and ends with heaven. Or again, we may make the six lines into three couplets. In the first couplet flesh and spirit are contrasted and combined; in the second, angels and men; in the third, earth and heaven.

I

“He who was manifested in the flesh.”

This clause of the text is one of many witnesses to the double nature of our blessed Lord—His Divine nature as existing before all worlds in union with the Father, and His human nature as actually “manifested in the flesh.”

1. If the Person spoken of in the text had had no existence before His birth, it would not have been natural to speak of Him at His birth as being “manifested in the flesh.” When an infant is born in any of our families, we do not say that it is “manifested in the flesh.” Why not? Because, although that infant now has an immortal soul distinct from its body, although linked with it, and in a certain true sense manifested through it, that soul had no existence independent of and before the body of the infant. We do not speak of a thing being “manifested” at the moment of its beginning to exist. The idea of manifestation is not opposed to non-existence, but to hidden existence; indeed, manifestation takes for granted a previous unmanifested existence. And therefore the phrase, “manifested in the flesh,” would be inappropriate and absurd as applied to an ordinary infant at its birth. We might just as well speak of a house being “manifested” in stone or brick when it is built, or of a railway embankment being “manifested” when it is thrown up. Manifestation implies the previous existence of the thing or person manifested; it marks a point in the history of the thing or person, at which it passes out of hidden, into public and visible, life. If, then, the text speaks of a manifestation in the flesh, whether it describes the person so manifested as “God” or not, it must at least mean that He existed before this manifestation took place, or, in other words, before His birth. And apart from all that follows in the later clauses of the quotation, and which at every step rivets and intensifies the argument, this description can be true only of Him who alone in Scripture is said to have existed before His birth into this world. Scripture knows nothing of any Indian doctrine of the transmigration of souls. But He who was before, and therefore greater than, St. John the Baptist; He whose glory Isaiah saw, not merely by anticipation, but in actual vision; He who already exists before Abraham was; He who was in the beginning, and with God, and by whom all things were made—He did at length, by “being made of a woman, made under the law,” make Himself manifest to the senses of man. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God … And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”

2. What were the limits, what the nature, of this manifestation? It is true, for instance, to say that God is manifested in nature; His attributes shine through His works. Again and more strikingly, He is manifested in the human conscience. That sense of right and wrong which every man finds within his soul, whether it be well-informed and educated or not, speaks of an Author. Once more, God is manifested in the course of events, in history. The action of His attributes may be traced, through slow transitions and developments, from one polity to another, one ascendancy to another, one civilization to another.

But the manifestation spoken of in the text is clearly distinct from God’s self-manifestation in nature, in conscience, and in history. It is “in the flesh.” That expression ties it down to human nature as the medium of the manifestation, and identifies it not merely with the spiritual but with the bodily part of man’s composite being. It is a question here, not of a voice in conscience, still less of inferences, however legitimate or irresistible, drawn from nature and history, but of a revelation clothed in flesh and blood, and addressed to sense. The text does not itself say that this manifestation was exhibited in a single life—the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet the rest of the passage makes it certain that this was the writer’s meaning. Unless the whole race of man was “justified in the spirit, believed on in the world, and received up in glory,” it is impossible to avoid restricting this manifestation in the flesh to the human nature, the body and soul of Jesus of Nazareth. The Apostle means that God was manifested in this one member of the human family (we may truly so speak of Him) as in no other. Others had illustrated and reflected some one or more rays of the Perfection of God; His lovingkindness, or His justice, or His veracity. In Jesus God’s moral life was manifested, not partially or in piecemeal, but in its integrity and completeness. The whole range of the Divine attributes was there; and when our Lord acted and spoke, God, in His perfect nature, became manifest to those who witnessed Him. Instead of saying that in Christ the intelligence or thought of God was pre-eminently embodied, it being implied that other elements of the Divine life were not equally so, St. Paul says that in Christ dwelt “all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” Instead of saying, “He that hath seen Me must have learnt something of what God’s mercy is, or something about His truth,” Christ our Lord says absolutely, and without any limitations or reserve, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”

Soon after he had announced to his family his decision to take orders, he wrote to a cousin:—

“ ‘What are the little things we fight for,’ says Archbishop Leighton, ‘compared with the great things of God?’ There is so much to do in the Church about which no one could doubt, that it little matters differing on points which concern no man’s relation to his Maker. There is no point I feel stronger on than the divinity of Christ, being convinced that with it Christianity must live or perish. If the Saviour of men were not identical with their Creator, I see no help in the Cross for the suffering millions of the world. The doctrine of doctrines that men need to learn and take to heart is this—that the only thing that alienates them from God is sin—that each man among us has a right, by his brotherhood with Christ, to claim his position as a child of God—and that there is nothing but his own disobedience that keeps him from his true position.”1 [Note: Edith Sichel, The Life and Letters of Alfred Ainger, 78.]

II

“Justified in the spirit.”

“Spirit” in the phrase “justified in the spirit,” does not mean the Holy Spirit, as the Authorized Version would lead us to suppose. “In spirit” in this clause is in obvious contrast to “in flesh” in the previous clause. And if “flesh” means the material part of Christ’s nature, “spirit” means the immaterial part of His nature, and the higher portion of it. His flesh was the sphere of His manifestation: His spirit was the sphere of His justification. Thus much seems to be clear. But what are we to understand by His justification? And how did it take place in His spirit? These are questions to which a great variety of answers have been given; and it would be rash to assert of any one of them that it is so satisfactory as to be conclusive. Christ’s human nature consisted, as ours does, of three elements—body, soul, and spirit. The body is the flesh spoken of in the first clause. The soul as distinct from the spirit is the seat of the natural affections and desires. The spirit is the seat of the religious emotions; it is the highest, innermost part of man’s nature; the sanctuary of the temple. It was in His spirit that Christ was affected when the presence of moral evil distressed Him. This spiritual part of His nature, which was the sphere of His most intense suffering, was also the sphere of His most intense joy and satisfaction. As moral evil distressed His spirit, so moral innocence delighted it. In a way that none of us can measure, Jesus Christ knew the joy of a good conscience. The challenge which He made to the Jews, “Which of you convicteth me of sin?” was one which He could make to His own conscience. It had nothing against Him and could never accuse Him. He was justified when it spoke, and clear when it judged. Perfect Man though He was, and manifested in weak and suffering flesh, He was nevertheless “justified in the spirit.”

That is, confessedly, a unique fact, for flesh and spirit in man have not kept pace. The more nobly a man conceives of the uses of life the farther is he from self-approval. The savage who has brought down a deer, and lies at night beside his fire with appetite extinguished, has little more to ask for, because his inner life has scarcely begun. There are men amongst ourselves whose mind is like a shut-up house; they never go into themselves, but live out of doors, and are content if their companions are pleased. But when a man is alive, and the world is great about him, and the sense of God is deep, he gets such views of what life was meant to be that all he attains looks paltry. He sees how every common task might grow to be a true Divine service, how speech might be a means of grace and cheer; but when thought is turned to fact the glamour has all gone. Thus it is that, judging by any worthy standard, no man was ever able to justify himself in spirit; for that would mean that he had answered in every particular to God’s thought of him; that, without diminution, he had conveyed the very influence he was meant to convey; that no sloth of his nature, no negligence, no shadow of inconsistency or pretence had hindered the just effect of his life. So we are bound to pause with reverent amazement before the great fact which this clause expresses. In the depth of Christ’s spirit, where He realized the reason of His being in the world and all that hung upon Him, He was justified. He had no superficial standards, yet with the fullest apprehension of all He had to do, He declared that He had done it; in clear sight of all the Christ must be, He professed that He was the Christ of God. The flesh which, in other men, has lagged behind the swift sights and desires of the spirit was in Him a fitting ally.

No one has yet discovered the word Jesus ought not to have said, none suggested the better word He might have said. No action of His has shocked our moral sense; none has fallen short of the ideal. He is full of surprises, but they are all the surprises of perfection. You are never amazed, one day by His greatness, the next by His littleness. You are ever amazed that He is incomparably better than you could have expected. He is tender without being weak, strong without being coarse, lowly without being servile. He has conviction without intolerance, enthusiasm without fanaticism, holiness without Pharisaism, passion without prejudice. This man alone never made a false step, never struck a jarring note. His life alone moved on those high levels where local limitations are transcended and the absolute Law of Moral Beauty prevails. It was life at its highest.1 [Note: John Watson, The Mind of the Master.]

It is a singular picture the evangelic portraiture of Jesus, and the first peculiarity which arrests our attention is this—that it portrays a sinless man. The evangelic Jesus is completely human, sharing all our common infirmities and restrictions. He suffers weariness, hunger and thirst, and pain. His knowledge is limited, and He confesses its limitations. Yet He is never worsted in the moral conflict. He passes through the daily ordeal stainless and blameless. The marvel of this representation is twofold. On the one hand, Jesus claimed to be sinless. Searched by a multitude of curious and critical eyes, He issues His confident challenge: “Which of you convicteth me of sin?” He often felt the pang of hunger, but never the sting of remorse; He was often weary, but He was never burdened by guilt; He abounded in prayer, but in His prayers there was no contrition, no confession, no cry for pardon. Not only before the world but before God He maintained His rectitude unfalteringly to the last. This is a unique representation. A lively and keen sense of sin is a constant characteristic of the saints.… No word of self-condemnation ever passed His lips, no lamentation over indwelling corruption, no sigh for a closer walk with God. It was not that He closed His eyes to the presence of sin or made light of its guilt. Renan, being asked what he made of sin, answered airily: “I suppress it!” but that was not the manner of Jesus. No soul has ever been so sensitive as His to the taint of impurity; no heart has ever been so oppressed by the burden of the world’s guilt. His presence was a rebuke and an inspiration; and to this hour the very thought of Him has the value of an external conscience. His spotless life is a revelation at once of the beauty of holiness and of the hideousness of sin. And not only does the evangelic Jesus claim to be sinless, but His claim was universally allowed. His enemies in the days of His flesh would fain have found some fault in Him, and they searched Him as with a lighted candle; yet they discovered only one offence which they might lay to His charge; and they did not perceive that it was in truth a striking testimony to His perfect holiness. They saw Him mingling freely with social outcasts, conversing with them and going to their houses and their tables; and they exclaimed: “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them!” It would have been no surprise to those Scribes add Pharisees had He associated with sinners, being Himself a sinner. Their astonishment was that He should do this, being Himself apparently so pure; and their outcry was a covert suggestion that, for all His seeming holiness, He must be a sinner at heart. The fault, however, lay not with Him but with themselves. They did not understand that true holiness is nothing else than a great compassion. Such was the holiness of Jesus, and it was a new thing on the earth, an ideal which the human heart had never conceived. It is very significant that our Lord’s claim to sinlessness should have been thus allowed and unwittingly attested by those who were bent upon disproving it. Bronson Alcott once said to Carlyle that he could honestly use the words of Jesus, “I and the Father are one.” “Yes,” was the crushing rejoinder, “but Jesus got the world to believe Him.”1 [Note: David Smith, The Historic Jesus, 65.]

III

“Seen of angels.”

We now come to the third clause, “seen of angels,” and it is only natural to suppose that it, too, must have some connexion with and direct relation to what has gone before. The central theme of the verse is the incarnation, and we must interpret these words in the light of the incarnation. “Seen of angels” must have been one of the great results and purposes of the manifestation of the Son of God “in the flesh.” Proceeding a step further, let us notice the word translated “seen” in this clause. It is a remarkable word, for it is the same word as we find often used in the Gospels of the appearances of our Lord after His resurrection from the dead, as, for instance, in Luke 24:34, where we read: “The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon.” The word occurs some twenty-three times in the New Testament and, as Bishop Ellicott says, it is used “nearly always with reference to the self-exhibition of the subject,” that is, it implies more than the mere act of seeing, which may be wholly independent of the person or the object seen, for it involves a voluntary manifestation of the person to whom it refers. “Shewed Himself to angels” would not be a correct translation, but would be a true paraphrase of the meaning of the words.

Fresh light now begins to shine on these familiar words. They tell us not merely that during the earthly life of Jesus He was “seen of angels,” but that the manifestation of the Son of God in the flesh was a revelation to angels as well as to men. The “mystery of godliness,” great as it is, becomes even greater and more wonderful if we regard the incarnation as not only the unveiling of the Son of God to man, but also as the revealing of Him to the angelic world. It may, perhaps, be that when that Divine Babe lay in Mary’s lap at Bethlehem, when that perfect child lived as a boy at Nazareth, when He reached His holy and spotless manhood, and spent His days in going about “doing good,” it may be that in all the scenes and events of that wondrous life, in the unutterable loveliness of His character, in the words such as “never man spake,” in those miracles of love and pity and power that He wrought, in His bitter anguish and sorrow in Gethsemane, in the awful shame and ignominy of His cross, in His glorious resurrection from the dead, angels as well as men for the first time beheld the face of their Creator and Lord, and that a thrill of wonder and of adoration ran through all the courts of heaven as the Mystery of all mysteries was “manifested in the flesh,” and was “seen of angels.”

Had the angels ever seen God before? “To stand within God’s searching sight and shrink not, but with calm delight, to live, and look on Him!” Had the angels ever done this? Do we not read of the seraphim, with their six wings, covering their faces therewith, abashed at the presence of Deity? To see God! May not this have been the lawful ambition of the angels? May not this account for the tremendous interest which the incarnation seems to have caused in their ranks, which makes another Apostle say, “Which things the angels desire to look into,” and which also leads St. Paul here to record, as one of the great parts of the incarnation mystery, that “he was seen of angels”?

The stainless sons of light, the high intelligences, the swift ministers of the will of God, had some new message borne in upon them by the Incarnation. If we think in the forms of the New Testament, we may boldly say that the angels could not know the glory of being humbled, or the new power that would be gained by laying power aside. When the Son of God emptied Himself and became a servant, what a mystery there was! and when He returned as a Captain of salvation, bringing with Him the first of a new world of ransomed men, how that mystery was justified!1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, 235.]

IV

“Preached among the nations.”

1. The revelation of God that was made to angels by seeing Christ is made to the world by the preaching of Christ. What they learnt by the eye “the nations” learn by the ear, by the hearing of faith. Indeed, there was no other way of making Christ known to the nations of the world at the time St. Paul wrote these words than by preaching Him. When this First Epistle to Timothy was written, the New Testament, as we possess it, was not in existence; a few only of the earlier Epistles, and possibly one or two of the Gospels, had been written, and were in circulation within a limited area in the Christian Church, but these were all. The great mass of the Gentile world knew nothing of either Gospels or Epistles, and in the absence of any written record of the revelation God had made of Himself in His Son, there remained only the spoken word as the messenger of the incarnation and the cross. This accounts, in part at all events, for the high place preaching held in the primitive Church and among the Apostles of Jesus Christ. They set supreme value on their work as preachers, that is, on their proclaiming—for this is what the word “preaching” really means—Christ as His heralds, going before Him and announcing everywhere His cross and His coming Kingdom.

2. But stress is laid upon the universal reference of the preaching. Christ was preached, not to one nation, but among the nations (Jews included), without distinction. This was being realized as historical fact. He was being proclaimed without respect to national distinction, without respect to social condition, without respect to culture, with respect simply to the fact that all were sinners and in need of salvation. Following upon His having taken the common nature, and His having wrought out the common salvation, the message of salvation was being conveyed with the utmost impartiality. This was part of the mystery which was then being disclosed, and which the unprejudiced agreed in calling great. It was impressive to the early Church to witness the proclamation of a world-wide salvation.

Before the coming of the Messiah the Gentiles and Jews were two peoples; a wall of partition kept them apart; and the Jews imagined that the Gentiles were excluded from the covenant mercies of Jehovah, that they were for ever to remain “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world.” By the gospel, however, this Jewish prejudice was shown to be unfounded, and men of every nation were invited to participate in its inestimable blessings equally with the Jew. At the death of the Redeemer the wall of partition which separated the two nations was broken down, and henceforth the Jew was to have no peculiar advantage over the Gentile, all men were to be addressed simply as sinners, and to all men everywhere the gospel was to carry the glad tidings of pardon through the blood of the cross.

3. These words suggest also the one and only theme of Christian preaching. It is Christ, as we have seen, who alone is the subject of this verse. “He who was manifested in the flesh,” who was crucified and “died for our sins,” who rose again from the dead and ascended on high, who is exalted “to be a Prince and a Saviour” to “give repentance” and “remission of sins,” who is the “King of kings, and Lord of lords,” “upholding all things by the word of his power,” who will come again to judge the quick and the dead—it is this Jesus, Son of God, and Son of man, Saviour, Brother, Master, Lord; it is He, and He alone, who is the “mystery of godliness” that we are to declare unto men. Christ is the gospel, and to preach the gospel we must preach Christ.

Christ, and Christ alone—in all the glory of His Person, in all the fulness of His redeeming work, in all the greatness of His love, is the message of the Christian preacher. If Christ be left out of that message, it is not a sermon, but a speech. It may be an original and eloquent speech, but it has no power to touch the deepest things in the heart of man. It is like a richly chased and jewelled vase, without one drop of water in it, held to the parched lips of the dying man, powerless to quench his thirst. But if Christ be in the sermon, its central theme, if the Incarnation, and the Atonement, and the Mediation, and the Reign of Jesus light up every word the preacher speaks, then even the humblest servant of Christ, who has but a poor earthen cup to use, will have it filled to the brim with the water of life, and weary and sinful men and women will drink of that water, and never thirst again.1 [Note: G. S. Barrett, The Earliest Christian Hymn, 145.]

“Nobody,” it has been said, “has any right to preach who has not mighty affirmations to make concerning God’s Son, Jesus Christ—affirmations in which there is no ambiguity and which no questioning can reach.” They are strong and confident words, the words of a man who is given to saying strong and confident things; there is in them, too, something of the ring of a challenge. But the confidence is justified, and the challenge is one which no Christian preacher can refuse. To make mighty affirmations concerning Jesus Christ—this is our business, this is what we are preachers for. We may make affirmations, many and mighty, concerning other matters, and gain for ourselves great glory as lecturers, or politicians, or social reformers; but if we falter here we have lost the right to call ourselves preachers.… We desire to win men’s faith for Christ. There is one way, and there is only one way, in which we can do it: we must set forth Christ Himself. Theological propositions concerning Him will avail us nothing. Christ must make His own appeal—the appeal of His words and works, of His life and death. If faith is not won by these it will never be coerced by the propositions of the Creeds. The only confession of Christ as Divine that has virtue in it is that which follows His work upon us, the intellectual interpretation of our own personal, spiritual relations to Him. Men must know themselves His debtors for salvation; they must throne Him as Lord, Lord of the will, Lord of the conscience, Lord of the affections; then when the voice from heaven proclaims, “This is my beloved Son, hear ye him,” all that is within them will leap forth to speak its great, glad, consenting “Amen.”2 [Note: G. Jackson, The Preacher and the Modern Mind, 187.]

V

“Believed on in the world.”

What reception ensued on this presentation of Christ? He was “believed on in the world.” The preaching was not vain. He was received in the character and for the purposes which were proclaimed. In the world, from which His presence was withdrawn, men ventured their all on what He had done for their souls, and committed the keeping of their souls to His hands; and they found peace, and power, and life in Him, who, though gone into heaven, yet dwelt in their hearts by faith.

When it is considered that Christianity was a stumbling-block to the Jew, and foolishness to the Greek; that, instead of pandering to the lusts and passions of men, it waged eternal war against them; and that at its introduction it was opposed to the religious views and customs of the whole civilized and barbarous world, we may well wonder that it should have been received by any considerable number of men among the nations of the earth. And the fact that Christ was “believed on in the world” may well be mentioned by the Apostle in the passage before us; for this also proves His Messiahship. If the gospel had not been from God it must have perished from the earth. It prevailed among men because God was with it; He stamped its divinity by enabling His Apostles to perform wonders, and signs, and mighty deeds among the people. The weapons of their warfare were “not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds; casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalted itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”

Last night read Carlyle’s Niagara, and after that heard James Calvert of Fiji tell an unvarnished tale of what simple faith in Christ had done among men-eaters and murderers. It is pleasant to be catholic and give honour to whom honour is due. Still it is right to be just to our own judgment. I see nothing in Carlyle that I don’t see much better said in the New Testament, and with the unspeakable advantage of an infallible recipe for doing it. A friend of mine writes, “The advantage of the Gospel is that it enables the humblest man to do what only the hero can do without it.” Carlyle’s Drill—all the world marching and wheeling and getting ready to fight! Whereas the fisherman Peter lays bonds and yokes on men which drill a man from within, and he fears God and honours the King, and knows his place, and doesn’t put sham work into his harness or his buildings. I know such men by scores and hundreds, and feel sure that there are tens of thousands. We don’t want eloquent howling to show man “what is good,” or to do justice, or love mercy, or walk humbly with God and man. I will back James Calvert of Fiji against a troop of Carlyles for the actual accomplishment of the chief good.1 [Note: Letters of James Smetham, 295.]

VI

“Received up in glory.”

1. These words are a reference, beyond all doubt, to the ascension of our Lord, and as such they fitly close this verse; for the ascension is the crown and completion of the incarnation. The most superficial reader of the Gospels must have felt the wonderful harmony of this ending of our Lord’s life on earth with all that had gone before. The one perfect and Divine life, the life of the God-man, begins with the angel’s song of “Glory to God in the highest,” and ends with the ascension into glory. It is impossible even to imagine such a life as the life of Jesus closing in the shame and darkness of the crucifixion. Death could not be the end of “the mystery of godliness manifested in the flesh.” “It was not possible,” as St. Peter said on the day of Pentecost, “that he should be holden of it.” We cannot even think that the resurrection, glorious as it was, the triumph of the Lord of Life over death, could be the termination of the mission of Jesus Christ on earth. For Him to have conquered death by rising from the tomb, and then again to have succumbed to its power and to “have seen corruption” would have been as great a miracle of darkness as Christ’s miracles were miracles of light. Something still remained, after He had risen from the dead, without which the life of Jesus would have lost its perfect and radiant symmetry of loveliness and power. One last step had yet to be taken: for the Divine Son had to regain the crown He had laid aside at the incarnation. “He who was manifested in the flesh,” who had descended from the royalty and glory of heaven to the humiliation and suffering of earth, who had “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant,” must again ascend to the throne of universal dominion, passing in solemn and glorious state from the tears and shadows and sin of earth to the light and joy and victory of heaven.

In the biographies of great men we are told of one achievement gained after another, of one honour conferred after another. But, however long and glorious the scroll which can be shown, it has to end with their bidding a long farewell to all their greatness. And, though monuments are raised to their memory, it cannot take away the essential ingloriousness of the termination to their career. With Christ it is at the earthly termination that to outward appearance He becomes great. He had indeed, like others and more than others, to undergo the ingloriousness of dying, and of being laid in the tomb. But the ingloriousness was completely reversed by His resurrection. He lingered long enough on earth for history to attest the fact that He was indeed risen. And then He made His triumphal entry into heaven.1 [Note: R. Finlayson.]

2. The ascension was, so to speak, the last sacrament of Christ’s life on earth. It closed by completing the manifestation of the Son of God. Hitherto the disciples had walked with Jesus, had talked with Him, had seen Him, had touched Him, and the visible and personal presence of Christ had been ever with them; henceforth the invisible and spiritual and universal presence of the same Lord is to take the place of the visible and local and temporal. They lost the human Jesus only to gain the Lord Jesus Christ. Hence it is that the ascension ends the gospel and begins the Acts of the Apostles, which are rather the Acts of the Holy Ghost in the Church. The last revelation of Christ is the first word in the life of His Church. The same act that closed the gospel of Jesus began the gospel of the Holy Ghost. That promise of power, that command of service, those hands lifted in blessing, that slowly disappearing Form—these were the beginning of the new life of the Church on earth. The life of Christ on earth and the life of the Church are inseparably bound together. The ascension ends the first only to begin the second.

The more we contemplate “the inner life” of the historical Jesus, the more shall we realize the inner life of the living Christ within us. Paul concentrated his attention on the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and found those events spiritually reproduced in himself in separation from sin and dedication unto God. These events must continue to be the centre of our interest also, but we may extend Paul’s method to the whole life of Jesus. This, and this only, is salvation, to be one in spirit with the Saviour, to have that mind in us which was also in Christ Jesus, that grace which exchanged riches for poverty to enrich the poor. Evangelicalism has sometimes been ethically unimpressive and uninfluential, because it substituted belief in a plan of salvation for union with the living Christ as Saviour, and because when it conceived the living Christ it was as a theological abstraction, and not as the concrete personality of the Jesus of history. The full meaning and the whole worth of the gospel of the grace of God can be discovered only in the Gospels, in the “Inner Life” of Jesus, which is not merely a past event but a present experience to all to whom Christ crucified is the power and wisdom of God unto salvation.1 [Note: A. E. Garvie, Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus, 466.]

He is gone—we heard Him say,

“Good that I should go away.”

Gone is that dear Form and Face,

But not gone His present grace;

Though Himself no more we see,

Comfortless we cannot be:

No, His Spirit still is ours,

Quickening, freshening all our powers.

He is gone—towards their goal,

World and Church must onwards roll:

Far behind we leave the past;

Forwards are our glances cast;

Still His words before us range

Through the ages, as they change:

Wheresoe’er the Truth shall lead,

He will give whate’er we need.

He is gone—but we once more

Shall behold Him as before:

In the Heaven of Heavens the same,

As on earth He went and came.

In the many mansions there,

Place for us will He prepare:

In that world, unseen, unknown,

He and we may yet be one.2 [Note: Dean Stanley.]

The Mystery of Godliness

Literature

Alcorn (J.), The Sure Foundation, 51.

Archibald (M. G.), Sundays at the Royal Military College, 196.

Bacon (L. W.), The Simplicity that is in Christ, 80.

Barrett (G. S.), The Earliest Christian Hymn, 4.

Bernard (T. D.), The Witness of God, 21.

Bonar (H.), Light and Truth, 185.

Conn (J.), The Fulness of Time, 102.

Dix (M.), Christ at the Door of the Heart, 52.

Faithfull (R. C.), My Place in the World, 217.

Goulburn (E. M.), The Holy Catholic Church, 241.

Holland (C.), Gleanings from a Ministry of Fifty Years, 110.

Horne (C. S.), The Life that is Easy, 31.

Liddon (H. P.), Christmastide in St. Paul’s, 107.

Little (W. J. K.), The Perfect Life, 245.

Macgregor (W. M.), Jesus Christ the Son of God, 230.

Mackenzie (W. L.), Pure Religion, 10.

McKim (R. H.), The Gospel in the Christian Year, 50.

Marjoribanks (T.), The Fulness of the Godhead, 30.

Martin (S.), Fifty Sermons, 73.

Martyn (H. J.), For Christ and the Truth, 139.

Milne (W.), Looking unto Jesus, 11.

Plummer (A.), The Pastoral Epistles (Expositor’s Bible), 130.

Sanday (W.), Inspiration, 1.

Swann (N. E.), New Lights on the Old Faith, 40.

Tyndall (C. H.), Electricity and its Similitudes, 17.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xx. (1881), No. 1185.

Wilberforce (B.), The Secret of the Quiet Mind, 13.

Cambridge Review, xii. Supplement No. 303 (A. Norris).

Christian World Pulpit, xlvii. 75 (L. Abbott).

Church of England Pulpit, lix. 176 (W. E. Barnes).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Christmas Day, ii. 284 (W. L. Mackenzie), 286 (H. P. Liddon); Ascension Day, viii. 491 (W. M. Macgregor), 509 (G. Wray).

Twentieth Century Pastor, xxx. (1911) 77 (W. S. Lewis).