[From the author’s book,
Manifested in the Flesh]
The natural does not
ascend to the divine or the supernatural. The bridge is gulfed only by
revelation and by the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Salvation therefore is not
by man nor by means of man’s politics, or by any other effort of man.[1]
[E]ven now those
barbarians who have an innate savagery of manners, while they still sacrifice
to the idols of their country, are mad against one another, and cannot endure
to be a single hour without weapons:but when they hear the teaching of Christ,
straightway instead of fighting they turn to husbandry, and instead of arming
their hands with weapons they raise them in prayer.[2]
And Jesus came and
spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. (Matthew 28:18)
The fact that the Son of God
was manifested in the flesh has far reaching implications. The basic formula of
Christ as fully God and fully man extends to the way we understand
religion and salvation personally and collectively. God speaks to us through
the Mediator, the man Jesus Christ (1 Tim.
2:5-6, Heb.
1:1-2), the Word made flesh, and through the written Word of the
Scriptures. Any attempt by any individual or group of individuals to present
some other path, revelation, method of relating to God, or means of salvation,
necessarily rejects the truth of God and replaces it with the religion of
fallen man—a false incarnation.
The End of Mysticism
Since Christ is both fully man and fully God, a
correct understanding of His Incarnation corrects errors on two fronts: those
who would diminish His deity and those who would deny his true humanity. The
former run into the error of seeing Christ as only a man: a special man,
perhaps, but only a man, nonetheless, and therefore, unable to save man from
depravity. The opposite error is the subject of my book: the denial of Christ’s
humanity. This scenario reduces Christ to a phantom of human imagination. He may
be a “god,” but since this god has no historical manifestation, then he suffers
the fate of all the gods of human history: he is relegated to mythology. More
importantly, since this alleged god cannot reveal himself in history, then it
is left to man—each individual man—to define this god as they like.
This “personal Jesus” view is simply another version
of what has always been known as “mysticism.” Mysticism is the belief that one
only needs to know God through their own inward witness, and not through an
objective revelation such as the Scriptures and the Incarnation of Christ. The
problem with mysticism is that once the Scriptures and Christ’s perfect
humanity have been set aside, the resulting images of God begin to look more
and more like the people who make them. Talk of Christ as an historical reality
ceases, and talk of “What Christ means to me” grows more popular.
Mysticism reduces God to a spirit only, and denies that He has ever entered
history in a defining way. Thus the defining is left to the individual; and, as
a result, every man creates his own god and his own rules.
Late Oxford professor O. C. Quick explains the dangers
of such unguided mysticism. He begins,
We need a guide along the path who is familiar also
with the surrounding country. We are on the edge of an abyss, the moment we
emphasize the reality of the inner communion with God in such a way that God
Himself begins to be represented simply as an inward presence pervading human
life or the life the world as a whole.[3]
He continues, exposing the relativistic nature of
mysticism:
It is well to assert that the Word of God is very nigh
to us, in our mouth and in our hearts, and that He Himself is closer to us than
our own bodies. Yet it is fatally easy to pass from that assertion to the
thought that we are ourselves divine, that to vex ourselves over sins and
limitations is a waste of energy, that all we have to do is realize how great
and good we may be—and forthwith the mists of our doubts and the shadows of our
failures will vanish in the new light shed by the revelation of our own higher
and diviner self.[4]
Notice that the elements which mysticism partakes of
parallel those of the mystery religions: exclusive knowledge (of self),
enlightenment, and man as divine. All of this becomes a logical option to man
the minute we forget that Christ came as the full and perfect revelation of
both God and man. The lust to touch God purely through personal inward
reflection denies that God has already descended to man, and died in his place.
Mysticism does preserve the all-important spiritual
side of religion—that God can and does reveal Himself in a very real way
through individual experience and inward witness. But as far as it pursues a
direct line to God to the exclusion of Christ’s very real historical
manifestation in the flesh, mysticism denies the truth rather than preserves
it. In such a case,
we cannot escape the practical result, that the centre
of gravity in our religion shifts from our Lord to our own souls. . . . It will
be to our own experiences, our own feelings, our own achievements, that we
shall turn in our search for communion with God. We shall judge Christ by them,
instead of judging them by Christ. The last stage will be reached when we
regard the Godhead Itself as no more than an experience of our own; and just
when we think we have scaled heaven itself, we shall in reality have done no
more than drag down with us into the pit where we have fallen a god of our own
imagination. For our religion will be self-centered, and nothing can draw us,
out of the morass save the divine compassion of the Savior we have
misunderstood.[5]
This “practical result” is the great sin of our
era—relativism—and it lies behind the re-emergence of mystery religions, new
age movements, self-help-style Church movements, Oprah-book-club-style
“spirituality,” and modern Gnostic-like movements that promise that the way to
God is found through personal knowledge or personal experience.
The Incarnation of Christ signals the bankruptcy of
all pretended mysticism. In order that man have a truer understanding of the
nature of God than that available through his own feelings, the Son of God
descended and manifested Himself in the flesh. He thereby revealed God
perfectly to men, revealed man perfectly to man, and represented man perfectly
to God. No individual or organized group of individuals can pretend to have any
greater personal experience of God than the simple person of Jesus Christ as
revealed in history and, especially now, in the Scriptures. The minutest
deviation from the definitive revelation of Jesus Christ is an error of the
human heart, and a false path to God.
Liberty
A recurring theme of modern man is emancipation or
liberty. In many of the wars and revolutions of the modern period, the rallying
cry involved some notion of freedom or independence. Yet we still have a world
of oppression, war, and debt—and these grow as we speak. This is because all
modern revolutions have been political at heart, and not ethical. They
have aimed to rearrange the conditions of society rather than to renew the
hearts of men. Where man seeks to achieve any level of goodness apart from the
true revelation of God and man in Jesus Christ, the effort will devolve into
some form of coercion or chaos.
Nietzsche’s attempt at replacing Christ with a “higher
man” provided following generations with plenty of intellectual ammunition with
which to assault Christian liberty. Under the plan of elevating man to a status
where he could truly enjoy life, Nietzsche set in motion the wheels of the war
machines of human avarice. He, in a sense, saw this coming. He knew that the
overthrow of traditional values, which he saw as lies (funny that someone engaging
in a war on morality would worry about lies), would mean the end of human
peace. He writes,
For when truth enters into a fight with the lies of
millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of
mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of. The concept
of politics will have merged entirely with a war of spirits; all power
structures of the old society will have been exploded—all of them are based on
lies: there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth.[6]
This being first published in 1908, the astute
observer will note that history has proven Nietzsche correct in this regard.
The war against Christianity has indeed been disastrous on all fronts. This is
the inevitable result when man—collective man, governmental man, tyrannous man,
machine-gun, tank, helicopter, nuclear missile-armed man—does not submit to a
higher divine law, but sets his own law and agenda.
Against all the failures of man, Christ has revealed
the true path to human liberty: “If ye continue in my word, then are ye
my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you
free” (John
8:31-2). The foundation of human liberty is found in following Christ, the
living Word of God. Thus, a proper understanding of Christ becomes all too
important for social order.[7]
By understanding Christ alone as truly divine and yet fully man, entered into
history, we deny that either divinity or true humanity can be found in mere
human institutions. No individual and no institution—State, school, or
church—can claim ultimate authority in the earth. Christ rules all of heaven and
earth (Matt.
28:18), and His Incarnation makes this possible. Where mysticism leaves
open the question of God to each individual—of who shall be God incarnate, or
who represents God—Christianity claims that Christ is God Incarnate and He
represents God. If man answers the question for himself, then some collective
agent of man will eventually triumph. It will be either the power of the mob,
or the power of a tyrannical state. There will be a higher man, but he will
likely be in a black suit with a tax invoice, or in a blue suit with handcuffs
and a gun. The State becomes the ultimate representative of man, the highest
appeal in the earth, and therefore an incarnate deity. It takes on a messianic
role, claiming to provide for the welfare and safety of its people. Men become
subjects to the care of the State, rather than free men under God. God provided
a way out of human tyranny in the Incarnation of Christ: no State has a
legitimate claim to ultimate authority, because Christ is the true King of
kings in the earth.
True freedom can only be found in the shadow of God’s
wings. Likewise, true safety, welfare and salvation. All of the things that
modern man desires, but denies in principle through his self-centered humanism
and mysticism, God has provided through Jesus and His teachings. Only when the
State bows beneath the rule of the King of kings will men begin again to
experience a free society; for only when the power of both individual and
collective man is checked by the ethical rule of law will man be free from the
haunt of his tyrannous fellows. The Incarnation lays the foundation of this
liberty, for only there is man seen as a new creature, able to follow God’s
ethics, and only there is God manifest in history so that no other ruler has
ultimate authority in the earth.
Conclusion
We must not follow a man-made god, but rather the One
true God-made-man. We must not allow human imagination to intrude upon the
“express image” of God in Jesus Christ. The Incarnation of the Son of God meets
the needs of human salvation and godliness at all levels (2 Pet. 1:3).
It exposes the easiness of a mere “inner” spirituality as spiritual laziness
and self-centeredness, in that Christ truly manifested in the flesh in history.
Thus the mystic must deal with the historical revelation of God before and ever
above his own feelings. As well, the Incarnation denies tyranny and demands
that all civil rulers reign justly beneath the Prince of the Kings of the earth
(Ps.
2:10-12; Matt. 28:18; Rev. 1:5-6).
The law of God is revealed as the path of order and peace in the earth, and the
lust to rule on the part of mere men is checked by the rule of Christ on earth.
If we truly mean it when we pray, “Thy will be done in earth, as it is
in heaven” (Matt.
6:10), then we must take the true understanding of Christ as fully God and
fully man, and apply that truth to all of life.
https://americanvision.org/15356/manifested-in-the-flesh-implications-of-the-incarnation/
