Our Lord’s Divinity

“When He the Spirit of truth is come, He will guide you into all truth; for He shall not speak of Himself: but whatsoever He shall hear, that shall He speak; and He will show you things to come. He shall glorify Me: for He shall receive of Mine, and shall shew it unto you” (John 16:13, 14). Such were the words of our Lord to His disciples on the night of His betrayal, when, knowing that His hour was come when He should depart out of this world unto the Father, He uttered His loving words of consolation to those whom for a while. He was to leave behind on earth, and promised them after His departure the gift of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.

Probably more than fifty years had elapsed since these words were spoken, when the disciple who among those sorrowing hearers was the one selected to preserve and record the discourse of that night, was also inspired, under the guidance of that same Holy Spirit which according to his Lord’s promise had been given abundantly to him and to his brethren on the Day of Pentecost, to write, to his little children in the faith, the witness of their aged father and teacher, to tell them what the testimony of that Spirit was, and by what means His presence and His truth were to be discerned. And very remarkable is the language in which that witness is given, both in 1 John 5:6, and in other and similar passages of the same Epistle. He does not tell us, as many later teachers have told us, that the evidence of the truth of the Christian faith is to be found in the moral excellence of its teaching and example. He does not tell us that the Spirit, speaking to our own hearts, and through our own enlightened conscience, bears witness that our Lord Jesus Christ was a great preacher of righteousness and holiness and brotherly love; that His own human life was a great moral example of the duties which He taught, of holiness and purity, and mercy, and love, and devotion of Himself for others; and that these things carry with them their own evidence of their own truth and goodness. All this is most true and most important, but it is not the truth on which the Epistle dwells in this place. The criterion to which he directs his readers as the means of discovering the presence and teaching of the Holy Spirit is of a different kind. It consists partly of the confession of a revealed theological truth which no effort of human reason could have discovered without the aid of revelation, or can even verify by its own testimony after it has been revealed; and partly of the assertion of an historical fact concerning the life of Christ upon earth—a fact for which the immediate evidence is to be found in the testimony of those who were witnesses of that life and which other men must receive, not as certified by their own experience, but in reliance upon that testimony. Of his own authority as an eye witness of his Master’s life and acts, St. John speaks in the opening words of this Epistle, yet coupling his evidence with the assertion of an eternal dogmatic truth beyond the testimony of sense: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (for the life was manifested and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested unto us: )—that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you” (1 John 1:1–3). And in the fourth chapter, after exhorting his readers, not to believe every spirit but to try the spirits, whether they are of God, he points out the manner of that trial in these remarkable words: “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every Spirit that confesseth that Jesus is come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of Anti-christ whereof ye have heard it should come and even now already is it in the world.” And in the fifth chapter, he appeals again to the witness of the Spirit in the words of I John 5:6—words somewhat differing in themselves from the former, but, as we shall see, expressing the same meaning: “Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God? This is he that came by water and blood, ever Jesus Christ: not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth.”

These two passages mutually illustrate and explain one another, the former especially, using language more literal and direct throws light when rightly understood, upon the more remote and figurative expressions of the latter. From the contrast, which is so sharply exhibited, between the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Anti-christ, we may infer that there existed when St. John wrote, and indeed at an earlier period (1 Cor. 12:3 may perhaps refer to an earlier form of the same error) a teaching professing itself to have sprung from Divine inspiration, the characteristic of which was a denial that Jesus Christ was come in the flesh, or, as it is worded in the second passage, that Jesus is the Son of God. It is important to the right understanding of both passages, that we should ascertain as nearly as possible, what is the exact nature of the false teaching here alluded to, and what the opposing truth, the confession of which is made an evidence of the teaching of the Spirit who is truth, the Holy Ghost granted by the Lord to His Church.

Had the Anti-christian sprit been merely spoken of as denying that Christ is come, we might be disposed to refer the Apostle’s words to a contrast between the Christian belief in a Messiah who was already come, and the Jewish expectation of one who was still future. But there are two circumstances which make this interpretation inadmissible; first, the union of the name of Jesus with that of Christ, “Every spirit that confesseth not Jesus Christ is come”; and secondly, the addition of the words “in the flesh.” An unbelieving Jew, denying that Jesus was the Christ, was under no temptation to deny that such a man had actually been born into the world, and had lived and died; nor would there from his point of view, be any significance in the implied distinction between coming in the flesh, and coming in some other way.

The words of the Apostle acquire, however, a natural and a probable interpretation, when we examine the witness of history concerning certain forms of Anti-christian teaching, which grew into vigor and permanence within a very few years after this time, and in the germ and beginning were, there is every reason to believe, already in existence when he” wrote. The false teaching in question assumed two principal forms, both of which are repudiated together in one sentence, “Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.” The distinctive feature in one of these forms of error consisted in an attempt to distinguish between the person of Christ and that of Jesus, the distinctive feature of the other was a denial of our Lord’s true human nature. The one class of false teachers maintained that Jesus of Nazareth was a mere man, born after the manner of other men, but that Christ was a Divine being, who descended upon Jesus at His baptism to fit Him for His work upon earth and who left Him again before his final suffering: the others asserted that Christ had no real human body at all, but only an unsubstantial phantom, which assumed the appearance without the reality of human nature and human suffering. And if we may trust the tradition which represents these two forms of heresy as offshoots of the teaching of that Simon who in Samaria bewitched the people and was reverenced as the great power of God, and when, in addition to this reputed origin, we call to mind the spurious miracles and prophecies put forward by later representatives of this kind to teaching (e. g., Menander; lef. Eusebius, H. E. 111, 26, and in the next century Basilides, Ibid, 4:7) we shall not marvel at the contrast, which the Apostle draws in such stern and uncompromising language, between the Spirit who is truth, and the lying spirit of Anti-christ.

Bearing these circumstances in mind, we find a natural interpretation of the apparently obscure language of St. John: “Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God? This is He that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ, not by water only, but by water and blood. Ami it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth.” It is as if he had said, “Believe not those who tell you that there is a difference between Christ the divine being and Jesus the human instrument. Jesus, the Incarnate Word, is Himself the Son of God: there is no distinction of persons in His twofold nature, but one single Christ, very God and very Man. Believe not those who would teach you that Christ came by water only; that he was united to Jesus in the Baptism in Jordan, but partook not of his suffering on the Cross. There is but one Jesus Christ, who came to us as our Redeemer in both alike; in the water, wherein He was baptized to fulfill all righteousness’ and in the blood which He shed on the cross for the remission of sins. The article breaks the parallel with John 1:13, and is thus against the explanation attempted by Burton, Bampton Lectures, p. 190. (The view taken above of this part of the text is in substance that of Waterland, Works III, p. 550. The explanation of the remainder is chiefly from Burton). And it is the Spirit of truth, the Holy Ghost, who bears witness to these things; that Spirit who at His baptism descended upon Him, when He, the Man Christ Jesus, was proclaimed by a voice from Heaven as the Son of God; that Spirit which spake by the prophets, and testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow (1 Peter 1:2); that Spirit through whose guidance he who saw those sufferings bare record and knoweth that his record is true; through whose guidance he was taught to see in the words of Zechariah uttered in the person of the Lord Himself, “They shall look upon me whom they have pierced,” a distinct avowal that he who to mere human sight was the sentenced malefactor, hanging on the cross of shame, was to the eye of faith the Lord Himself, the Divine Word manifested in the flesh.

The particular form of false doctrine against which St. John appeals to this witness of the Spirit, has long since passed away and been forgotten, but the witness of the Spirit abideth forever, and testifies to the same truth, now as of old. And even the false teaching itself, obsolete and monstrous as it may appear, even in the slight sketch which I have given of one only of its features, is not without its lesson which we may learn and profit by at this present time. Such unnatural and grotesque fictions as that which separated Christ from Jesus, and still more, that which represented the human body of Christ as an unsubstantial phantom, bear witness by their very strangeness and absurdity to the character of the teachings of the Christian Church in the Apostolic age. No attempt is made by these heretics to explain away the supernatural origin of Christianity, to represent it as the product of merely human agents and merely natural causes. No attempt is made to adopt what to a modern unbeliever seems the more rational and probable supposition, to represent our Lord as a mere human teacher whose real influence was owing only to His personal character and gifts. No attempt is made to show that the belief in His Divine nature was the result of enthusiasm or exaggeration, or misunderstanding, or imposture. And surely this circumstance is not without significance to those who look back upon it in a later age. It is a remarkable proof how thoroughly the Christian teaching of that day was pervaded and penetrated through its whole texture and substance with the fundamental belief in the Deity of Christ,—that no sect or heresy pretending in any manner to attach itself to the Christian name, as these heretics did, could break away from the acknowledgment of this belief in some form or other. So saturated with this conviction were the minds of all men who had come in any way under the influence of Christian teaching, that it seemed easier and simpler to make the natural give place to the supernatural than to cast the supernatural out of their creed. It seemed simpler to deny the plainest fact of history, the veracity of the natural senses, the testimony of those who had seen with their eyes and handled with their hands the Word of Life, than to reject altogether a doctrine telling of that which was divine and invisible which no sense could perceive, which no eyewitness could guarantee, which no history could transmit as a fact in the experience of a past generation; which appealed wholly to faith and not to sight. We can hardly overestimate the importance of the testimony, coming as it does from without no less than from within. It not only shows the central, the vital, the indispensable position which the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity occupied in the early preaching of the Gospel, but it shows also how the longing and the yearning of the world without met this preaching half way, and felt the need of what it taught even while corrupting it by the wildest fancies of man’s invention; it shows how human society, worn out and demoralized, its intellectual power exhausted and barren of results, its moral tone-degraded to the lowest point of possible corruption, felt, as it were instinctively and unanimously, that its renovation, if it was to come at all, must come from more than human power. The whole creation was groaning and travailing together, waiting for its redemption, and none but God could satisfy the universal need.

The witness of the Spirit, sent by Christ to abide with His Church, tells us how that need is satisfied. The restless yearning of a world lying in darkness and feeling after it knew not what, the grotesque fancies of a philosophy making visible the darkness which it strove to illuminate, come in contact with that which alone could supply the one and supersede the other, the divine teaching of that Spirit who came to guide us with all truth. The teaching of that Spirit, as proclaimed by the Apostle, embraces the twofold doctrine of the true Godhead and true Manhood of Christ. Were He merely man, there could be no marvel that He should have come in the flesh. Were He merely God, there would be no truth in the assertion of His Incarnation. The truth thus delivered in the one central, vital, cardinal doctrine of the Christian Faith, which, under the abiding influence of that same Spirit,—the Church has been commissioned to hand down to all later generations. On the day of Pentecost, with the cloven tongue as of fire resting upon him, and the newly bestowed gift of the Holy Ghost prompting his utterance, St. Peter bore witness of this twofold truth, in the words “God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye had crucified, both Lord and Christ.” And to the same effect, the Church has embodied in her formal confessions of faith, the same recognition of the divine and human, of the eternal Sonship, the miraculous birth, the human life and suffering, the glorious resurrection and ascension of her Divine Master. “I believe in God the Father Almighty, and Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell. The third day He rose again from the dead, and ascended into heaven.” Whensoever and wheresoever, throughout the assemblies of men meeting in the name of Christ, this confession of faith is uttered, then and there does the Church repeat to the widely-spread kindreds and successive generations of men committed to her charge, the witness of the Spirit of truth which testifieth of Christ. Whensoever and wheresoever through the preaching of this doctrine, the heart of any one sinner among men is taught his own sinfulness and helplessness and his indispensable need of that Divine Saviour, then and there is repeated that conviction which, as on this day, followed upon the first preaching of the Apostle under the influence of the Holy Ghost then sent upon them, when the hearers were pricked in their hearts, and said, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” And to us, as well as to them, is the answer of the Apostle given, “Repent and be baptized every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and ye shall receive the Holy Ghost.” Yes, to us as well as to them, is that promise given: to us as well as to them, if we ask in faith, shall the promise be fulfilled, not the less really because inwardly, not the less supernaturally because no visible miracle marks the fulfilment. He comes not indeed to us with the rushing, mighty wind and the cloven tongues of fire, yet there is a presence now as to the prophet of old, not in the wind, not in the fire, but in the still, small voice. In the inward and spiritual grace conveyed by those holy Sacraments which Christ Himself ordained, in the deep feelings of the heart which find their utterance in prayer; in the penitence which looks to Christ alone for redemption from sin; in the gratitude which breaks forth in praise and thanksgiving to Him; in every sincere utterance of the name of Christ by those who bow in worship before Him, is fulfilled throughout all ages the assurance of the Apostle to those whom he had turned from dumb idols to God, “No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor. 12:3).