The Divine Man | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 17, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 48.

The Divine Man.

It was a saying of the great Napoleon, "There is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous," and the saying has been amply illustrated in the utterances of great men. But in all the utterances of Christ there is nothing puerile, nothing insignificant, nothing unworthy of a God. There is a wondrous mingling in his words of dignity and benignity, of holiness and goodness, of warning and compassion. Pure precepts are blended with precious promises, and solemn denunciations with tender appeals. There is nothing deficient, there is nothing redundant; his every deliverance is at once apposite and exhaustive. The point is so clear as to admit of no evasion; the requirement is so searching as to afford no excuse. The most astute casuists come with their crucial questions thinking to confound him, but only to be impaled themselves on the point of some more formidable questions, there to writhe in hopeless uncertainty. At length, Pharisees and Sadducees, joining in one final effort, brought their preconcerted problems to him like so many entangling nets; but only to find their artifices unavailing, and themselves knotted in difficulties from which they vainly essayed to escape. The baffled critics retire in confusion, and are not presumptuous enough to renew the assault. "No man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions."

Thus the words of Jesus are unmistakably indicative of his divinity. Sometimes he asserts it in express terms; but when he does not expressly assert it, it still sublimely appears in every sentence he utters; and his whole mein and manners are always in correspondence with his words. As he was the Solomon that was always wise, and the Aaron that was always oracular, so he was the Moses that was never once deficient, and the David that was never once unkingly. When did he ever act in a way unworthy of a God? When did he not appear supreme over the natural and the supernatural? When did he not prove himself Lord of Heaven and earth, alike in providence and in grace? Wherein could we wish his doings or his demeanor to have been in any way different from just what they actually were? When was the scepter out of his hands? When did he lose his self-possession? When did he show himself to be acting in a character that was assumed for a purpose, a character that was not really and truly his own? Why is it that the child of the Virgin, and he only, is called "the holy child"? Why is it that no other man but the Man of Nazareth, could say to his accusers, "Which of you convinceth me of sin?" Why is he the only man whom flatterers could not spoil and whom deceivers could not dupe? Why stood he so calm amid the surging mob clamoring for his crucifixion? Did not the stern soldier under the cross give the true solution of all this when he cried, "Truly this was the Son of God"?

The works that he did, as he himself said, "bare witness" to this great fact. The water changed into wine, the angry sea sinking into sudden calm, the multitude more than sufficiently fed with a few loaves and fishes, the blind and deaf, the lame and leprous cured, the devils cast out, the dead raised up,—these miracles proclaimed the author of them divine. After all these comes the chief, the crowning miracle, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. A mighty angel appears to the awful astonishment of the Roman guards, and rolls away the stone from the mouth of the sepulcher. The glorious form of the Redeemer emerges thence, and is fully recognized as such by his adoring disciples at his various appearances during the forty days following. He then sublimely ascends in the exercise of the same almighty power by which he had risen.

His is the power, and his alone, that can redeem the soul. No limited help, little or much, will reach the case; it requires mightiness, a Redeemer "mighty to save." None but a divine man could have borne the conflicts and agonies of the wilderness, of the garden, of the cross; none but the arm of omnipotence could ever have lifted the helpless soul out of the pit of destruction to the fields of immortality. Who shall refuse to love and to trust such a Saviour, stooping from the throne to take the vilest and the guiltiest to his embrace? O, break, hearts of stone, break in penitence and melt in contrition and yield in obedience to the command of your Creator and Redeemer.—Sel.