Who is our God? Chapter 7

IS GOD ONE PERSON?

We now reach what is perhaps the most difficult problem in all theology. Are the Father and the Son separate and distinct individuals or persons? Too long has this problem been quietly shelved by those from whom we expected illumination. That there are certain distinctions in the New Testament is undeniable. We must take the words of the Lord as we find them. The universal tendency has been to make Him more than He says, with the infallible result that His glories have been dimmed. It can never be of true faith to seek to improve upon the divine record.
Among mankind a son is always separate and distinct from his father, and it is assumed that in regard to God the same law applies. Yet we must keep in mind that in humanity no son is the exact image or duplicate of his father. He reproduces features from his mother, and not only so, but from a long line of ancestors.

God delights in human diversity. Everyone of us is unique, and God requiries our uniqueness. He is the Great Differentiator who teems forth His own peculiar Race in such diversity that no two individuals are exactly similar. Sometimes the humble believer, or even unbeliever, will ask, How can I know that God loves me, and requires me? Proof that we are of God's creation, and that He requires every human soul, may be found in the extraordinary fact that each and every human being is unique and diverse. No two human faces are entirely identical, no two voices are the same in tone and timbre, no two human gaits are quite the same, while the handwriting of each person is distinct.

God's Son, however, is unique in a very different sense. He is an exact replica, in visible form, of all that is inherently or substantially God, the invisible (Heb. 1:3). This being so, we may reasonably affirm that the Son is the visible of the invisible. In other words, the Father and the Son are complementary. No man may see anything of the Father except in the Son. No man may believe in the Father unless he believes in the Son. That is to say, however much the Father may seem to be differentiated from the Son, we cannot have the one apart from the other. We cannot have God without both Father and Son. We cannot even contemplate God without thinking of both Father and Son, or of the Father in the Son. The Son could not have existed apart from His Father, while the Father would have been no Father at all without having His own Son. As Dr. Fairbairn writes in "Christ in Modern Theology,"—The two are so associated as to be indissoluble; the correlation involves a unity, which yet does not become indentity. He is in the Father, the Father in Him; and to see the Son is to see the Father, for they two are one. Their being is so concordant that the Son can do nothing of Himself; and as the Father has worked hitherto, so He works."

There is a sense in which, as the Lord said, "I and the Father—we are One" (John 10:30). Because, as He declared "I came forth out from God, and have arrived here" (John 8:42). He proceeded forth, or emerged, out from God. Sonship, as an ideal, must have existed within God ere He could become a Father.

If the Son is in some way God, or in some respects equal with God, yet a separate and distinct Person from God, then it follows there are two Gods. But a Biunity of Divine Persons is no more scriptural or reasonable than the Trinity of orthodoxy. Those who condemn the tritheistic Trinity ought not to maintain that there are two separate Persons called God. It was largely because the idea of a tritheistic Trinity arose among the early Church Fathers, due to the Latin language superseding and displacing Greek, that Mohammedanism arose, and became one of the chief opponents of the Christian faith.

Thomas not only called the Son of God "Lord," but also "God," and was neither reproved nor corrected. The disciple who tells us this must have agreed with the opinion of Thomas.
It is this Biunity or Ditheism which produces endless distraction and uncertainty in the minds of well nigh every believer. There arises a constant and unsatisfying dualism of Christ AND God which prevents the heart and mind from attaining rest and peace. This is specially in evidence at meetings and in churches, in prayers and hymns. Have we not all heard earnest people praying, first to the Father, then to the Son as though He was another Person, unable to explain why they pray thus? It is evident that such people have not attained the simple truth of God in Christ. Not God AND Christ, but God IN Christ. Many such honest souls there are, afraid to admit their perplexity, their want of satisfaction, their distraction, just as many partake artificially in the Lord's Supper, at the wrong time of day, in the wrong order, and get no benefit beyond the unhealthy feeling that they have done their duty.

Such distraction tends to push into the background more or less either the Father or the Son. Due to apparent dualism, the vision of God as He actually is, becomes obscured.

Let us be done with all artificial observances and habits and ideas. God wishes none of them, and the sacred writers encourage none of these things. It is not for us to dwell foolishly in the dreamy land of Alazoneia (make-believe, imposture, pretentiousness; 1 John 2:16; James 4:16).

In the Son of God we ought to behold God Himself fulfilling and discharging His own righteous law, giving Himself, sacrificing Himself, suffering Himself, so that His beautifully articulated purpose of the eons may be consummated. It was no outsider or commoner whom God called upon to put into execution His plan for the universe. It must be God Himself Who accomplishes this, and not at all a person distinct or separate from God. When the Son came forth out from the Father, it was as though God, in some sense distinguished from Himself, came forth into the world and the universe, not a separate person from God. Not merely a God-filled man, but God Himself actually in Christ. Christ must be a genuine and effectual Mediator—one who unites in Himself both Godhead and manhood, so that as God finds in Him the true Man, man may find in Him the true God. Every human being, therefore, who becomes united with Him by faith, thereby becomes united with God.

In Christ God is visualized as Son, standing in relation to God as Father. In the final stage of the days, God talked to the Hebrews in a Son, or, in Son, as the Greek puts it (en huiO; Heb. 1:2). Young suggests "in (the person of) a Son," but this is misleading. Rotherham somewhere makes the excellent suggestion of "sonly." God talked "sonly" in the mode as Son. He came and talked as the Son of Mankind, the universal Son of all mankind. It is this universality of His that renders absurd any idea that He had ordinary human parents, for had He had ordinary human parents He would have possessed a distinct human individuality of His own just like all other men.
As the Son of the Deity (ho Theos), Christ is not the Deity, but is Divine. This is carefully brought out by John in chapter 1:2. It is a mistake to translate by "and God was the Word," unless we take the word God as very emphatic and in an adjectival sense. In order to make idiomatic English, it is necessary to translate as "and the Word was GOD," or as Moffatt, "the Logos was divine." Were the proper sense "God was the Word," then, to be truly consistent, we must render John 4:24 as "Spirit (is) God," or "Spirit (is) the Deity." But in idiomatic English we must say, "God is SPIRIT."

Some have objected to the term God the Son, as being unscriptural. Yet it is not unscriptural, so long as we think of this Son as being the Divine one, not the Deity. The Lord certainly never claimed to be the Deity. Perhaps no one would object to the expression the Divine Son, as His Father was Holy Spirit, yet the expression is not scriptural.

For those who think there are two distinct Persons revealed in the New Testament, it will be worth while to study the position as regards the Old Testament. There we are told of the God upon whom no man could gaze and live. Psalm 139 tells us of God the Omnipercipient, from whose Spirit we are unable to flee, who knows our every word. Knowledge of this kind is too marvellous for us; it is inaccessible, and we are unable to attain to it (verse 6). So we are thrust back upon pure faith. That is God as the transcendent One, who knows no limitations, who originates all creation.

Yet the Israelite was well aware that God had appeared occasionally, and in human form, even in the guise of frail humanity (Gen. 18:2). But what Israelite has ever claimed that in his Hebrew scriptures two separate Divine Persons may be discovered? "Jehovah our God-Jehovah one" claimed the pious Israelite, and he believed nothing else. Those individuals who encountered the Visible God never thought of inventing such an idea as a Second Person in the Godhead. He was simply known as Jehovah or Elohim. He was the visible aspect of the invisible God. Were there two separate and distinct Persons in the Old Testament known as Jehovah? If not, why can we not be as rational as the Jew when we turn to the New Testament?

It is very necessary for every believer to distinguish between God as the invisible, who transcends all limitations, out from whom are all things, and God the visible, in whom coheres all creation, who reveals God to His people, through whom are all things. But we must not press this distinction so far as to postulate two separate Divine Persons in anything like the human sense of the word person. In Christ we do not see a different Person from God, but God Himself, revealing the boundless and never-ending perfections of His nature as One who is at the same time Divine and Human. In this flawless Divine Son the Father approaches us and gives us Himself. Only in the Son may we see and recognise the Father, and only thus can Holy Spirit possess us and operate within us. Only in such a spirit may we avoid the endless distraction there is in prayer when we pray to two separate Persons, one in heaven and one present everywhere. Little wonder that so very few believers pray and can pray, when they are in a complete fog regarding the God they seek to approach. Prayer to the Father which ignores the Son, the Son who is both Divine and Human, misses its mark, and gets nowhere. All that God does become to us, He becomes in His Son. Only in the Son is the Father revealed; only in the Son does the Father come to save and bless us; only through faith in the Son, and that union with the Son which faith produces, can we have access to the Father.

Evangelical orthodoxy has gone far astray in pressing the doctrine that the Man Jesus Christ was Himself actually God, instead of maintaining that God was IN Christ, so far as Infinite Being could express Himself in a finite from. We ought to visualize GOD HIMSELF in Christ, rather than seek to prove the Deity of Christ. Bitter controversies have arisen through the Church laying undue emphasis upon the Person of Christ, instead of upon the revelation of the Father in Him. Thus Christendom has been permeated with a dualism of Christ and God, which produces endless confusion and doubt. As a spiritual personality, Christ is one with God.

We must view the acts of Christ as the acts of God, the sufferings and extreme humilation of Christ as those of God Himself, the love of Christ as the supreme love of the Father. One eternal indivisible Divine personality all along, limited by His humanity, yet making that humanity the expression of His Deity. Truly did the Father sacrifice Himself in the gift of His Son. Only GOD could have revealed such deep love, and only in such Divine humility,—not a person separate or distinct from God. Had Christ been only a human being devoted to what he believed to be God, His life and sufferings could never have been any revelation of the love of God. Should we endeavour, apart from the personal Christ, to seek for a short cut to God, the result must be that faith becomes feeble, and the joy of the divine presence fades out of our consciousness. If we would worship God, it is not some vague idea we must worship.

We must find communion with a real Divine Presence—God in Christ. Only this real unity of Person can give perfect spiritual and mental peace and rest. And it is only in Holy Spirit that we can realize this wonderful unity of the Father and the Son. And in the Lord Jesus we discover the manifestation of God as being in Himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Some, who ought to know better, have sought to drive a wedge betwixt Father and Son by averring that though the Man of Sorrows suffered continually while on earth, His Father has ever existed in the realm of perfect bliss incapable of feeling pain or sorrow. Were this in fact true, Father and Son must needs be two distinct Persons. Even those who maintain that the Son is the Emblem of all the roles that the Father assumes (Heb. 1:3), all the characteristics in which God appears, are guilty of this perversion. Because He inhabits light inaccessible, and is the happy and only Pontentate, the only One having immortality (1 Tim. 6:15-16), it is facilely assumed that God cannot undergo suffering.

Paul bore witness to the Jews from the prophets and Moses, not of a conquering Christ, but of a Christ capable of suffering.

For that is what the Greek word means (pathEtos, Acts 26:23). But Israel had no place for a suffering Messiah, just as many today have no room for a suffering God. A good human father would always suffer were his son in agony, but God must remain altogether impassive under all circumstances. Yet we are told that the suffering Son is the exact Image of His Father!
Why it is that the fact of God's love seems today so unreal, so fictitious, so artificial? Why does it not galvanize His people? Simply because God is so often viewed as impassive, and thus somewhat indifferent, if not distant. The spectacle is presented of an unnatural schism within the Godhead—the Son appeasing the Father's wrath.

Do you think that God could be happy, could be The Happy God, without undergoing great suffering? Can even any human being know real happiness, without having suffered? Such happiness would be pure selfishness, therefore very impure happiness. We recollect that the Greek words for "suffering" (paschO, pathos, pathEma) all contain also the idea of experiencing. True sympathy means suffering along with others, but also experiencing the pain or sorrow.
Are not the finest saints those whose lives are full of vicarious suffering for other saints, or for their fellow-men, or their country? This was the principle in Israel long ago, when the seers and prophets so identified themselves with the sins of the race in suffering-sorrow that they bore them up to God and sought God's mercy. Their lives had to be full of sorrow before they could sufficiently sympathize with the erring race. Typical was Hosea, with his loose-living wife. His home life was sad and he was broken-hearted. In his own domestic tragedy he beholds the tragedy of Israel. "How shall I give thee up?" cries Jehovah of Ephraim, as no doubt Hosea had exclaimed of his erring wife. Does he not feel that Jehovah also suffers as he does, because Jehovah's wife, Israel, keeps on sinning and playing with other gods?

A relative of mine once sneered at the Bible because God instructed Hosea to marry Gomer. But how else could God's Prophet realize the enormity of Israel's sins? Husband and wife are one flesh, therefore he, the righteous one, felt he was as guilty as Israel.

In a similar fashion The Son of Mankind, the unique Son and product of Mankind must have understood His close relation to a guilty race. Though without sin, He identifies Himself with the race.

If, however, Christ suffered while God remained in a state of sublime bliss, Christ could be no revelatIon of the love of God. Nothing can suffer so deeply as real love. God's vast love for the world did not make Him give up His Son so that the Son by undergoing the suffering might obviate any suffering on the Father's part. It WAS God, who, in Christ, was "throughout-changing" a world, or, who was engaged in a thorough world-changing operation (2 Cor. 5:19). The past tense here indicates something which transpired upon the Cross. This might dispose of the notion that God is now "conciliating" the world.

If God can feel and display wrath, can He not feel anguish? Righteous wrath can produce anguish, and deep suffering can produce a holy anger.

Truly it is a magnificent conception which Du Bose has given us in stating his opinion that God completes His Deity in the Incarnation and upon the Cross. Could it be otherwise? As Hitchcock says in his most useful book, "The Atonement and Modern Thought," concerning Christ. "The dualism implied in the expression 'GOD and Man' with an undue emphasis on the 'and,' veils the fact that He was GOD acting and suffering in and through and as man—the same eternal, indivisible, Divine Personality all through, conditioned by His humanity, but making that humanity the expression of His Deity. His sufferings have, therefore, a tremendous significance, not only because they are the sufferings of the Creator for His erring creation, but also because they are the sufferings of the Creator in His travailing creation."

Seeley, in "The Great Reconciliation" (1893) expresses the matter thus: "The purpose of God was. . . that He—'the unconditioned God'—would add to His Deity a nature conditioned 'in all points like as we are' (Heb. 2:17; 4:15), and live for a while as a man under the conditions under which other men live. We sometimes miss the full meaning of this union between the Creator and His creatures, through distinguishing too fully between the Persons of the Father and the Son. Human fatherhood begets a son that is a separate individual, and we are apt to think this should be true in the case of Divine fatherhood. But it is not so, or Christ could not have replied to Philip's request, 'Lord, shew us the Father,' with the startling words, 'Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father' (John 14:8-11). No man could truthfully use those words in speaking of his human father, because of the reality of the difference between the two individuals. We must believe that in some sense of the words, however mysterious, Christ and the Father are One."

In the creation the ultimate purpose of God must have been the realisation of His own perfect Divine life in human form. This is what He manifested in His Son. We discover in the Incarnation of God as Son the ruling principle of Creation. The universe was created through the Son and for Him, therefore for all Mankind, because He is THE Son of Mankind. That the Divine One should appear in human form is not only far from inexplicable or difficult to believe, but it is a moral and physical necessity for the world's development.

'When God conceived of the Creation, He did so in the Son. His ideal was sonship. But that Son was not a different Person from God as Father, He is God as Son, God in the mode or character of Son. Only in Christ do we find God manifested as God; only in that Son do we find the Father manifested as Father. No wonder that the centurion got a startling revelation of God, when he exclaimed (Mark 15:39), "Truly, this human being was God's Son." On the Cross he beheld not only a poor and weak human being, but also God. No wonder a poor Negro woman said of the Cross climax that, "it was to be expected," because it was what was most like God. So different from a well-known Negro in the United States, who was continually reading the Bible and claiming that he could always talk to God.

When a friend of mine asked him whether he knew the Lord Jesus Christ, he was dumb and flustered. His approach to that God was by way of his own visiting card, not through God's Son and he claimed that he received many answers to his prayers.

As one has well said, a real incarnation of God must be a becoming in mankind, and all real becoming is through a gradual process. The incarnation took ages to attain fulfilment. No other generation in Israel could have produced all the factors necessary for the Lord's life on earth. It was only when the fulness of the time arrived that God sent out His Son coming to be out of a woman, coming to be under law (Gal. 4:4). Very probably, no other generation of Israel was so utterly wicked and so full of its own self-righteousness, that it could be so insane as to kill the Lord of glory.

This process of becoming, on God's part, is, as we have seen, altogether in line with the meaning of the Name Jehovah. It was Jehovah, He who comes to be, He who comes to be closer and closer to mankind, who at last "becomes Flesh," arriving in human form.
But Jehovah is never two Persons. "Jehovah our God Jehovah One," was a prime truth among the Hebrews.

In a future article we hope to shew that the Incarnation affords the only satisfactory explanation and interpretation of the universe, and also of mankind and mankind's place in the universe. The universe is built upon it and around it. Surely such a stupendous event must be an act of God, and of God alone, and of the only God.

We shall now approach the matter of God's personality from another angle. Many years ago I heard a lady ask the leader of one of the Reconciliation sects, What are we saved from? The simplicity of the question stunned him, and he could give no answer. No wonder, because many have been the theories of the atonement or of salvation. Theology cannot furnish a complete philosophy or a satisfactory theory of salvation. Nor can the evangelical sects. Nor does Scripture provide a theory. But it gives something very much better. It gives the necessary facts, and it produces the salvation itself. The Lord Jesus is our salvation. He is in Himself all that salvation is or means. He is perfect holiness, therefore our sanctification. He is perfect righteousness therefore our righteousness. He is the life, therefore our life. Consequently, if we are in Him, we have salvation.

If, however, the Christ had only been an individual man picked out of other men, a specially favoured human being, who, through obedience attained to righteousness and life and glory, would He not have been merely a picture or a revelation of what all men ought to be? Where would be the living bond between Him and us? What would there be to allay any feelings of jealousy on the part of other human beings? Why should one particular individual human being be picked out from the mass of mankind?

Paul was given to us as a pattern of the Lord's entire patience towards those about to be believing for eonian life (1 Tim. 1:16). Perhaps better, a pattern-process (hupotupOsis), because real patience is a process. Paul stands before us as a concrete example of this. God delights in using concrete examples. Instead of giving an elaborate disquisition on faith, He gives one concrete example—Abraham.

Who is it, then, that displays GOD to us? Does not Paul direct us to the illumination of the process of knowledge (gnOsis) of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ? (2 Cor. 4:6). He is, as it were, God made concrete to us, so far as God can reveal Himself to mankind. As Douglas White, a medical doctor, states in his book, "Forgiveness and Suffering" (1913) the object and mission of the Lord was to shew to man, "projected as it were, on to the screen of human life, the hidden life of God; to unveil to man's inward eye the face of God; to prove to man that God's heart is a wounded heart, yet a perfectly forgiving heart, because a heart of unextinguishable love."

It is GOD whom we are to grow to know in the face of Jesus Christ, not some one distinct from God, or an outsider. In human form He displays and reflects the heavenly radiance of the Sun of Righteousness.

History reveals its most climacteric event in the Heart and Mind behind the Creation humbly becoming Flesh, as the Explanation or Logos of God, and undergoing death for Sin, thus meeting man's most desperate needs and fervent longings, and transcending man's highest aspirations.
As Du Bose writes, "We speak of the incredible and impossible self-lowering or self-emptying of God in becoming man or in undergoing the death of the cross. Is the act in which love becomes perfect a contradiction or a compromise of the divine nature? Is God not God or least God in the moment in which He is most love? Where, before Christ, or where now otherwise than in Christ, and in the cross of the Divine, suffering together with and for man, where in all the story of the universe was or is love so love, or God so God!" ("The Gospel in the Gospels").

Elsewhere Du Bose writes, "No one who rises to this height can tolerate the idea that His humanity was but that of an individual human person in whom God exceptionally revealed His presence and power. The Lord of Glory was not an individual man in God; He was all humanity in God, because He was God Himself in Humanity." Again, "I unhesitatingly recognize in Him . . . no single man filled with God, but the fulness of the Godhead present and operative in all humanity. The humanity in Him is mine and every man's; the divinity in Him is God potentially present in every man for salvation and efficiently present and saving in every man who believes." Again, "It is not so much particular statements that prove the degree and manner of God's being in Christ, as the entire phenomenon of Christ Himself whose ergon (work) or actual operation in the world was to be His most exact definition and His most perfect credential." Yet again, "The life of God was manifested in Christ not by mere declaration of it, but by the very life lived and exhibited to men; so the Fatherhood of God is revealed not by anything Christ tells us, but in the concrete and visible reality of His sonship perfected before our eyes."

Who is our God? Just He who makes Himself known in the face of Jesus Christ. In Him intense love for every soul of Adam's race is complete and inextinguishable, because in Him divine humility was perfected. Apart from deep humility no one can live or experience the unfading love of 1. Cor. 13. Because He, the Mighty One, stooped to the lowest depths, He is also the utterly loveable One, taking us very close to His heart and making His face to shine upon us.
In future chapters we hope to deal with the extraordinary title of the Lord. "The Son of Mankind," which has been so imperfectly explained, and also we must return to the Logos doctrine. Nineteen hundred years ago two of the main themes of the Evangel concerned the "Son of Mankind" and the "Logos" or Word. In this twentieth century thinking people are concerned much with two problems, the increasing social problem of the world, and the upshot of the problems of Science. Now both these problems are to be explained by understanding how and why the Lord Jesus is "The Son of Humanity," and by understanding the implications of the Logos doctrine in so far as He is the Logos, or explanatory statement—of God, of Mankind, and of the whole universe. Science should know that there cannot be any complete break between matter and spirit, because the Logos of old has bridged them.

We hope to put our readers in possession of the facts which must have been clearly understood in the first century by the saints to whom John wrote, who, an eminent scientist states, were intellectually superior to the most of modem scientists.

At any rate, we trust we shall be able to recover new and fresh and stimulating facts of revelation, which will have the effect of banishing much of the unreality and artificiality and sophistication of present day theology and teaching.

End of Chapter 7 (Alexander Thomson)