God visits all men every Monday and gives to each of them a breath-taking display of his glory in the world in which he's placed them. Then on Tuesdays he does the same, and Wednesdays too, and so on and on, day after day, throughout their lives, bringing to everyone a succession of unveiled wonders — dawns and sunsets, bird-songs and evening stars, children's play and loved one's smiles. All the special effects of the movie-maker are as exciting as a sparkler compared to these powerful wonders which all people experience and know to have come from God. But sparklers are rare treats, while the glories of creation are so undeviating that the former gets the sighs and the latter the yawns.

God Comes By Conscience⤒🔗

God also comes and speaks to men every day of their lives by the conscience, that great divine monitor, which he has placed within us all, and which distinguishes men from the beasts. "Well done," he is saying to them, when some acts of self-control and kind­ness have been done. "Don't do that," he says, when they are tempted to put their hand in the till, or strike out at their wives. Men can tape shut the voice of conscience so that only a mumble of protest is heard, but it can never be totally gagged. Conscience will work more effectively if an earlier grace has brought the Bible to their culture, and most effectively if the preached word of God is con­stantly enlightening the con­science.

God Comes by the Word←⤒🔗

God comes to everyone who is confronted by the Bible for "the word of God is living and active" (Heb.4:12). The word is alive because God, its author, lives, and the Bible is the channel of his power. In Acts 12:24 we read that the word of God also "grew and multiplied." For a rationalis­tic mind that's something for­eign — a word as growing, multiplying, living and active!

But that is the Bible. Men can be like Eutychus and even fall asleep while an apostle him­self is preaching, but then the fault lies in the sleeper not the book. The Bible is evoca­tive, dynamic, creative, sav­ing, sin-annulling, death-effacing, transforming and life-giving because God is all those things. In the Scriptures God comes to men, and then that word by which the uni­verse was created is heard again. To those commis­sioned to preach his Word the Son of God says, "He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him that sent me" (Luke 19:16). When the word of God is being preached an uncertain God does not hesi­tate, hover over a congrega­tion, and then make a U-turn and go back to heaven. The word "shall not return to me empty," the Lord promises (Isa.55:10-13). God deals with those who are under his word. He has identified his name and his reputation with the Bible and by that book he comes to men and women today. This is how he is known.

The Nature of the Living God←⤒🔗

Our God is one. The Father is God. The Son is God. The Spirit is God. These three are the one and only God that there is. He is one, but he is also three persons. We have no experience of any other being like that. All the rest are just one. But God is three persons as well as one being. God is also without a begin­ning, and without measure­ments, and without any change. Again, there is noth­ing to which we can compare this God. The Lord is differ­ent, and must be so, because he is God.

The Son of God←⤒🔗

The Lord Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of the eternal Father. There never was a time when they were not exactly like that. Together they made the universe, and in all its vastness focused their love upon this world of ours, in which they created man in God's own likeness. That great work was done on the sixth day, bringing cre­ation to its climax. God looked at the man he had formed, and then, as close as an embrace, he breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life, and it was no longer "through a glass darkly" that God saw Adam but he was looking upon his own likeness as in a mirror's image. Adam's time of probation ended in failure. The planet knew the chill of death, and sin spread to very corner like a horrific virus, from whose effects nothing escaped. Yet God continued to speak through creation and conscience and in grace through his prophets' words, supervising the whole process of revelation so that in the Old Testament Scriptures we have exactly what God wants us to hear.

God the Son Came into the World←⤒🔗

Then in the fullness of time God the Son himself came to the earth. He came as a man, that is, with a true human body. He who never began to be, even as the Son of God, and who always will be what he eternally was, became at that moment, in a conception within Mary, something he had never been. In the betrothed    woman  at Nazareth, months before the journey to Bethlehem and the birth in the stable, the Infinite became finite, the Eternal and Supra-temporal entered time and became subject to it: the Immutable became muta­ble: the Invisible became visi­ble: the Creator became cre­ated: the Sustainer of all became dependent: the Almighty became weak. God became man. In this simple proposition "God" is defined in terms of all the attributes and prerogatives that are dis­tinctively divine, and "man" is understood in terms of all the concomitants that are essen­tially human.

The Environment into which He Came←⤒🔗

This is the central claim of Christianity and the greatest of all miracles, that there should be in one Person the conjunction of everything belonging to Godhood, and all that belongs to manhood. The Creator has, without the loss of anything divine, added to himself all the characteristics and limits of creature-hood. If the probationary period of our first parents had ended positively with God having been obeyed and the forbidden thing having been rejected it would yet have been unimaginable humilia­tion for the Son of God to have become man. In the most ideal conditions the dis­crepancy between God and his creature is infinite. But more stupendous is the fact that the incarnation involved God coming into a sinful and sin-cursed world. The Son of God entered the darkness where men crucify other men, where they gamble while watching tortured people slowly die, where cursing and mockery abound. Jesus pitched his tent in this valley of the shadow of death, where Satan comes in full-frontal insolence and asks God to fall down and worship him.

The Body in which He Came←⤒🔗

But a more staggering con­trast is the fact of the God who is light coming into such an environment "in the like­ness of sinful flesh" (Rom. 8:3). Paul could have said that God was "made in the likeness of men" (Phils. 2:7), or "born of a woman" (Gals. 4:4), or "mani­fested in the flesh" (1 Tim. 3:16), or "made of the seed of David" (Roms. 1:3). Or think of what John said, "And the Word became flesh" (John 1:14), or what an uninspired writer, Charles Wesley wrote, "veiled in flesh the Godhead see." But Paul left aside those safely stagger­ing phrases and chose those dangerous words, "came in the likeness of sinful flesh." They teeter on the brink of peril: Isn't the impeccability of Christ at stake? Hasn't the apostle's deep commitment to enfleshment theology taken him into blasphemy? But Paul is saved from that abyss by that word "likeness." It is not that he is remarking about any trace of phantasm in Christ's body, but that the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth had all the ordinary reality of any other man. His body knew pangs of hunger, he asked more than once for water, and he needed friends. He had to pray, and some­times it was with loud sobs. He could only function with the Holy Spirit's aid. There were even those things of which as a man he was igno­rant. If anyone thrust a spear into his side he would die like anyone else. Jesus came into the closest relationship to sin­ful flesh as was possible and yet he continued to be blame­less. He assumed that very nature which in all others is sinful, but in him, by super­natural preservation, was without spot.

God the Son has the most intimate organic and genetic connection with sinful men. He was born of a woman ­and his mother herself was afflicted with the depravity which belongs to every other member of the human race. He shares not only the limita­tions inseparable from being a creature, but also a human nature afflicted with sin, yet was and remains holy, harm­less, undefiled and separate from sinners.

So, when God came to this world in the person of the Son there was a peculiar humilia­tion attached to it. The con­text of the coming was cosmic darkness and human sin. It was our own lostness that conditioned the circum­stances of his appearing. He had come to redeem from sin, and so he bore in his flesh from the moment of his con­ception the marks of vicarious suffering and the endurance of the sin which it was his mis­sion to destroy.