Job 11:7 Can you by searching find out God? can you find out the Almighty to perfection? When the Creator formed man He placed within him a religious sentiment, a sense of a superior existence, and this being the nature of the subjective mind, the outer realm became at once peopled with supernatural creatures. The religious feeling in the soul, in the first years of its strivings, saw gods in every storm, and in every ray of sunshine, and in all the shadows of the night. Paul says God so made the rational world, that they should "seek the Lord, if haply they may feel after Him, and find Him." All the mythological and theological phenomena of the past are manifestations of this feeling after the true God. Christ stands the nearest of all alleged divinities to any historical fact. There have been claims to Divine honours set up by others. Christ stands farthest from myth, and nearest to reality. Think of the less questionable elements in this historic fact. 1. It was a great gain to our race that at last the search for an Incarnation came up to a real, visible being. Man had gone about as far as he could upon a theology of legend and absurdity. There was no valuable religious faith in the world at the time of the Advent. The Roman Empire had all forms of greatness except religious faith. Mankind will always exchange legend for history. The development of reason works against myth and in favour of the actual. Examine further the quality of this Christ idea. It was the first incarnation lying within the field of evidence. How far was this Christ an-incarnation of the Divine? 2. It should soften our judgment that we do not know the nature of Deity. There is every reason for supposing that man was created in the intellectual likeness of God, and hence for God to become manifest in Christ was only a filling to the full of a cup partly filled in the creation of man. Man himself held a part of the Divine image. Christ held it all. The picture of Jesus Christ is the best picture conceivable of a mingling of the earthly and the heavenly. The whole scene is above life and below the infinite. It was God brought down, and man lifted up. (David Swing.) Parallel Verses KJV: Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?WEB: "Can you fathom the mystery of God? Or can you probe the limits of the Almighty? |
    |