Ephesians 4:13 Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man… I purpose to inquire, What, from the New Testament, was Christ's own teaching respecting His relations to man? 1. Christ confirmed and enlarged the ethical truths which existed in His age. Whatever was just, and pure, and true, and good, from whatsoever quarter it may have been derived, and whether it was held by the Jews or by the enlightened heathen, was accepted at His hands. The moral precepts of the gospel were not originated by the Saviour when He came upon the earth. They belong to a system of natural ethics. They are the outworkings of natural laws which were made when man was made, and when the world was made. They were partly found out, they were imperfectly known, they shone dimly, before the coming of Christ; but they were unveiled at the time of Christ's advent more perfectly, and accepted more fully, and carried back to their true source, and arranged so, with reference to their real character, as that they should become transcendently more fruitful than ever they had been in isolation and twilight under heathen civilization. 2. He delivered men from bondage to vehicles and forms of worship; not, however, that He might destroy these things, not that He might detach them from these things, but that He might deepen their sense of the truths and principles which these things had been employed to express. He taught that, whenever there was any conflict between the inward principle and any external law, or custom, or ordinance, the law, or custom, or ordinance, must go down. He taught that the physical must be subordinate to the spiritual, for whose sake it was originally created. He taught that the spirit was to be master of the flesh. 3. Our Saviour cleansed and amplified the knowledge of spiritual truth, and carried that truth far higher than it had ever gone before. 4. He added to the realm of spiritual truths most important elements which had never before been clearly known. The nature of God; the certainty of immortality, etc. 5. More important than all was the fact of the vital intercourse between God's soul and ours. 6. Christ came, by His sufferings and by His death, to open the way for the universal forgiveness of sin, and for redemption from it. 7. The last point that I shall make in this category is that Christ taught Himself to be Divine; and that His divinity is such a true divinity as makes it proper for men to offer, and for Him to receive, all that it is possible for a human soul to give to its God. (H. W. Beecher.) Parallel Verses KJV: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ: |
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