I remember a great and celebrated but eccentric
preacher, Sam Jones, said that when the average
preacher took a text, it reminded him of
an insect trying to carry a bale of
cotton.
And this text this morning, which comes in
the natural course of things, is so overwhelming
that I stagger under it.
Maybe you, some of you are preachers here,
certainly the Gray and Dr. Smalley and others
of you here, you missionaries, and our brother
here from Holland, maybe you have this experience
too, that the more wonderful the text, the
tougher time you have to preach on it.
And I suppose that two of the hardest
verses for me ever to preach on is
John 14.1, "...let not your heart be
troubled."
I have difficulty with that.
It's just too full.
It's like listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
It overwhelms you.
Then another one is John 3.16. I
think I've never preached on that but three
times in my life that I can recall.
It's just too much.
It's so big I don't know what to
do with it.
It crushes me.
I feel better handling something that doesn't make
the contrast so frightful between my ability to
expound and what I have to expound.
Now we come in the natural course of
things without choosing it.
It's here without choice.
In the book of Hebrews, you know it
starts out by saying, "...God, who at sundry
times and in divers manners spake in time
past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath
in these last days spoken unto us by
his Son, whom he hath appointed the heir
of all things, by whom also he made
the world."
Now, we've dealt with that up to there,
sceptrally, as best we could.
Now we come to this wonderful passage, "...who
being the brightness of his glory, and the
express image of his person."
Or to change the construction a bit, to
get a flat sentence, his Son is the
brightness of God's glory and the express image
of his person.
That's what it says.
This harmonizes with what Paul said in Colossians.
He said, "...Jesus Christ, which is the image
of the invisible God, the firstborn of every
creature, and that in him dwelleth all the
fulness of the Godhead bodily."
We have here, then, the Godhood of the
Eternal Son.
This is believed by all branches of evangelical
Christians.
In fact, the beautiful word, evangelical, if you
like it that way, the beautiful thing about
the evangelicals around the world is they are
together on this.
They may have different opinions about modes of
baptism or the coming of the Lord or
church polity, but all evangelicals agree on the
Godhood of the Eternal Son.
Jesus Christ is God, that he is of
one substance, was the Father begotten, not created.
He is God.
This we believe in, and we must be
very careful and very bold, almost if need
be belligerent, in our defense of this truth.
Let nobody by soft words argue you into
a position where you admit that Christ is
anything less than the very God of very
Gods.
Um verum deo vero, I believe, is the
old creedal statement of it, the very God
of very Gods.
We believe this.
Now, it says here that this one named
Jesus Christ, this one about whom the writer
was writing, he is the brightness of God's
glory, the Eternal God.
This was a Jew writing, and he was
writing the Jews, and he was talking about
the one who was the God of Abraham
and the God of Isaac and the God
of Jacob.
He said that there was another one who
had come and had been made flesh, but
that that one was none other than this
same God.
He was not the Father, for the Father
was never incarnated and never will be.
But he is the Eternal Son, and he
is the brightness of the Father's glory and
the sunshine of the Father's faith.
I think we ought to do a little
defining here when it comes to the word
glory.
The word glory is one of those beautiful,
awful words that have been dragged down and
have made to lose their meanings.
This word glory, some people think of it
as an aureola, a sort of shining halo,
and a lot of the old artists have
made the glory of Jesus Christ to be
a luminous neon hoop around his head.
Whenever you see a picture of Jesus, you
see a shining hoop around his head, that's
the glory, they say.
Well, the glory of Jesus Christ wasn't a
hoop.
The glory of Jesus, the glory of God,
is not a yellow light shining.
What is the glory of God?
I think it is very necessary that we
decide on this, because we are likely to
adopt in our thinking the current popular words,
and we never ought to do it.
Not only the preachers, not only the teachers,
but everybody, everybody, the mother of ten and
the man whose job it is to sweep
the streets.
If he is a Christian man, he ought
to be a student, a philosopher, a theologian,
a poet.
And there is no reason why he can't
be.
And we ought always to think accurately and
correctly about things.
Now, we may do what I do, use
ninety words to say it when ten would
have done, but we'll forgive that for human
weakness.
But there is one thing we must never
be guilty of, and that is using a
theological word in a popular sense, unless you
explain that that's what you're doing.
So when we say the glory of God,
we don't mean yellow lights and hoops, we
mean that in God which excites admiration and
wonder.
That in God which excites admiration and causes
the very seraphim to veil their faces in
his sight and say, Holy, holy, holy is
the Lord God of hosts.
The glory of God which gives him universal
fame.
The glory of God is that which wins
from created beings love and worship, almost boundless,
not quite, for there's nothing created that is
boundless.
Only God can have the word boundless applied
to him with accuracy.
Everything else has boundaries, even the broad-winged
seraphim before the throne, Michael the archangel who
stands up for the people of God.
His wing spread is tremendous, but it's measurable,
so he's not boundless.
Nothing is boundless.
We talk loosely about the boundless sky, and
it's not boundless.
You can bound it, but you can't bound
the everlasting God.
And so that in God which is boundless
and which brings admiration and worship of all
intelligent and moral beings, that which makes God
famous throughout his created world, that is God's
glory.
It is the character of God that is
the glory of God, my brethren.
It is not what people think of God,
though God is not glorified until people think
gloriously about him.
God once dwelt in light no one could
approach to, and in light there was no
to approach.
But God, as I said in my last
sermon before this one, that God was vocal
in his, he wanted to give himself and
express himself.
He had to have some body that he
could express himself to.
And so he created the heaven and the
earth and filled the heavens above with creatures
and the earth beneath with men, that they
might respond to that in him which is
admirable.
And that response is glory.
And it's that which God is that brings
the glory, that is God's glory.
So when we say that Jesus Christ is
the brightness of God's glory, we say that
Christ is the shining of all that God
is.
He is the shining forth of all the
wonders that are in God.
He is the shining forth of all that
which makes cherubim veil their faces, and cherubim
cry, Holy, holy, holy.
He is the shining forth of the effulgence
of that in God which bluntly and simply
is God.
Christ has the same relation to God as
the sun rays have to the sun.
You know, when the sun rays shine down
from the sun, it's a part of the
sun shining itself out, articulating itself to the
worlds that are within range of its beams.
And they can take the rays of the
sun and analyze them, the scientists can, and
tell you what the sun is made out
of by the kind of light that is
emitted by it.
Because the sun and the light of the
sun are one, and the God who is
the eternal Elohim, the eternal Jehovah, that God
shone forth as Jesus Christ, and all that
Jesus Christ gave when he shone forth, all
that he expressed was simply God.
And when God expressed himself, it was Christ.
This, I say, is vastly important, and we
must be very sure that we believe it
with all our hearts.
And he is the expressed image of God's
person.
The word for person is a very difficult
word.
You know how it caused difficulty among the
theologians down through the centuries?
It's sometimes called substance and sometimes called essence.
Hypostasis is that which stands under that which
is the real, back of that which seems
to be.
And Jesus Christ is the very image of
that which stands back of and underneath, which
can't be understood by the human mind.
He is the very expressed image.
And the word expressed image here means pressed
upon wax, something pressed upon wax.
The incarnation was the seal, but both that
which was sealed and the one who sealed
both were God.
He gave visible shape, Christ gave visible shape
to the Deity, and so that when the
invisible God became visible, he was Jesus Christ.
When the intangible God became tangible and dwelt
among us, so our hands have handled of
the word of life, it was Christ.
When the God who could not be seen,
nor heard, nor touched, nor tasted, came among
us, it was Jesus Christ.
Now that's what the man of God says
here.
I'm not arguing for this, I'm simply trying
to state the best I can what the
Holy Ghost said through the man who wrote
the book of Hebrews.
Now the question of the ages has been,
what is God like?
I don't suppose there's anybody here that has
had a child that has grown past three
or four years of age that hasn't been
asked the question, where is God, what is
God like, can God see me, and all
such questions, and they are serious questions asked
by serious little minds.
But not only the little mind of the
child asks what is God like, but the
philosopher asks what is God like, and the
religionist and the thinker generally will want to
know what kind of God is God.
And Philip in the 14th of John made
the same request, and he made that request
for all mankind.
He said, Show us the Father and we'll
be satisfied.
That's what they wanted all through the centuries,
and Paul said later that they had felt
after God if perchance they might find him.
I had said and I repeated it, and
I remember I wrote it in something, and
Dr. Edmund of Wheaton College wrote me and
told me he'd always believed that.
I was glad to have it expressed, that
this yearning after God, this presence in the
universe of the living, vibrant voice of God
that causes the human heart to reach out
after God, yet because sin has blinded us,
we don't know where to reach.
Because sin has made our ears heavy, we
cannot hear that voice clearly.
So we are like birds that have no
tongue, but that have in them the instinct
to sing.
It was Keats who told of the bird,
the nightingale that had lost its tongue, and
because it had in it the song of
the nightingale but had not the tongue of
the nightingale to express it, it died of
suffocation in its valley.
I've always thought that was a brilliant and
beautiful flight of fancy.
But a nightingale without a tongue, what with
the nightingale's heart and the nightingale's love of
music, died of frustration in its valley because
it could not express itself.
I believe that God made man in his
own image, and when he made him in
his own image, he put something in that
man that's not satisfied.
He has set eternity in their hearts, says
the Old Testament.
And while we have time in our hands
and time in our feet and time in
our hearts and time in our lungs and
kidneys and livers, and they get old and
time cuts them down, in our hearts we
have eternity.
And one of the woes of the fallen
world and of fallen men is the constant
warfare between the eternity in your heart and
the time in your hands.
Some of you may have known my dear
good friend Brother Dr. T.
J.
Bach, B-A-C-H.
The name I never can pronounce, because I'm
not deaf.
But this dear Brother Bach, oh, he's very
old now, he is the President Emeritus of
TEAM, the Evangelical Mission Team.
I've known him for a great many years,
and knowing Brother Bach is just like coming
up to a warm fire on a cold
day.
You find him warm.
He wrote me a letter, just a jolly
friendly little letter to tell me about something
he'd seen in the Alliance Witness.
He added below, as a kind of a
postscript, he said, It's no sin to get
old, but it's awfully inconvenient.
That's what I mean, that the inconvenience of
having time cut your body down while eternity
can't touch the heart of you.
The question now we want to ask, and
the question every human heart asks, because it's
got eternity in it, the question is, what
is God like?
Show us the Father.
A man by sin can't see God, though
God stood across the road from him.
You remember back in Genesis, when man had
sinned, it's written, Therefore the Lord God sent
him forth from the garden of Eden.
And that man who was sent forth never
forgot the God that had sent him forth.
He never forgot that he had been in
there, and it's somewhere, if there is such
a thing as racial memory, I don't know
whether there is or not, and I'm cautious
about that expression, I know where it originated.
But if there is such a thing as
racial memory, then the memory of that garden
is still in the hearts of men, but
they can't find God.
They've never forgotten that God was, but they've
only forgot what God is like.
And there are many answers, three that I
shall mention.
What is God like, says the beating heart
of the human race, and philosophy comes along
with an answer.
I just happened at the moment, more or
less accidentally, to be reading Emerson's Plato.
Oh, Plato had something all right.
If you want to keep humble, read biography.
That's all you have to do.
If you get to thinking you amount to
anything, read biography.
Any of you missionaries think you amount to
anything?
Read the life of Carey or Livingston or
somebody, and you'll be humble for the rest
of your life.
I'm also nibbling at that journal of Whitefield,
and that's a humbling thing, too.
Very humbling.
When I read Plato, I am so humble
that I scarcely feel like raising my head.
Philosophy, however, has tried to answer the question,
What is God like?
Their concepts have been so many and so
contradictory and so self-contradictory, that yet it's
about what you could expect a blind man
to do.
A blind man trying to paint a portrait
of somebody, he is blind and he can't
see, so he feels the face of the
man and then tries to paint him.
So philosophy feels the face of the universe
and tries to paint God, and it can't
do it.
Of course, there is a presence in the
philosopher, and most of them admit there is
a presence in the universe somewhere.
They try to explain what it is, and
they say it's law, they say it's energy,
they say it's mind, they say it's essential
virtue.
Thomas Edison said before he died a while,
he didn't live long enough to try it,
but he said that he hoped to live
long enough, or hoped if he did live
long enough, he could invent an instrument so
sensitive that it could find God.
Well, that's about what you could expect of
Thomas A.
Edison.
He made the electric light and other gadgets,
but he didn't know any more about God
than the little boy who delivers your paper,
because he was just another man, that's all.
So philosophy has its answer, and then of
course religion has its answer.
The Pharisees say God is light, and so
they worship the sun and they worship light
and fire, and others say that it's conscience
and so much virtue, and some say it's
the principle that upholds the universe, and they
are getting very near.
And others say he is all justice, and
so they are terrified, and others say he
is all love, and so they are arrogant.
Then paganism comes on with its answer, and
oh, how tragically they have gone astray, the
pagans.
They have said it's the sun, they looked
around for God and they saw the sun
rising in the east and moving in a
blaze of fire across the sky to the
west and going down in brightness.
And they said, Apollo, they said, Zeus, they
named this God.
They heard the wind roaring up the sea
coast and they said, the Olus.
They saw the waters of the ocean churning
itself into foam, and they said, Neptune.
Or they saw the waving fields of yellow
grain and thought of the fruitfulness and everlasting
recreating of itself year after year, and they
said, Sirius.
Incidentally, don't look down your nose with such
Christian pride, because every time you open a
box of K rations, or I mean K
cereal, or K cereal or puffed wheat, you
are eating cereal.
And cereal was named after the goddess of
the grain, Sirius.
I don't believe in the old lady, but
I know where the name came from, Sirius.
She was the goddess of the wheat field,
and so Kellogg Company took her and called
that pill of stuffing that they feed us
every morning, cereal.
In the 1st chapter of Romans, the man
of God tells us how the pagans did.
They loved sin, and they wouldn't have the
thought of God in their minds.
They crowded the thought of God out, and
so God turned them over to the vile
affections.
But they still would be religious, though turned
over and deserted by God.
So they invented gods for themselves.
Clear down from man to the bird, to
the beast, to the creeping thing, and the
very insect that hawks and whistles, was worshiped
by somebody somewhere.
That's religion, paganism.
Always remember that the morality of a nation
follows its belief about God.
The moral decline of any church begins when
they begin to think purely of God, or
inadequately.
The moral decline of any denomination sets in
when that denomination starts thinking ignobly of God.
As soon as I allow myself, by a
Western guitar-thumping, rockabilly, cowboy, half-converted singer,
to believe that Jesus Christ is simply a
pal up there in the saddle, looking down,
watching me, right there I've started to backslide
where I can afford at least in my
spirit.
I must think nobly of God.
I must think worthily of God, or at
least in a worthy manner.
I must put God where he belongs.
I haven't been around here long enough to
find out whether you are Calvinists or Arminians,
and I don't want to know.
But I will say this, that we could
well afford to listen for old Presbyterian forebears
and old Reformed forebears that told us how
awful God is and how wonderful God is,
that God is sovereign and awe-inspiring.
I wouldn't go along with them all the
way, but I'll go along with them while
they kneel in breathless adoration before the presence
of the One who dwells in light that
no man can approach unto.
What is God like?
I'm about finished.
The answer of God is, He that hath
seen my Son hath seen me.
Jesus answered it when he said, He that
hath seen me hath seen the Father.
The Father answered it when he said, He
that hath seen my Son has seen me.
The brightness of his glory and the express
image of his person.
And so the quest of the ages is
over.
The quest of the Greeks was a noble
quest, the quest of the Romans after God
less noble but still worthy.
The quest of the heathen feeling after God
brought tenderness and sympathy to the heart of
the greatest apostle of them all.
I can imagine missionaries when they go and
find the little shrines with meat and bread
in front of it, see someone kneeling down
before a wooden or a stone image, I
can imagine the sympathy that's in their hearts.
But the quest is over.
Whoever has seen Jesus Christ has seen the
Father, for what Jesus is, the Father is.
God now has uttered himself to mankind.
He has drawn aside the veil forever, and
whoever looks upon the Lord, Jesus looks upon
all of God.
Jesus is God.
Jesus is God being what God is.
Jesus is God thinking God's thoughts.
Jesus is God feeling the way God feels.
He is God doing what God did, he
is God now doing what God does.
I've been reading again the gospel of John,
and I've just finished reading that part again
where Jesus tells the people, I can't do
a thing of myself, I do whatever the
Father does.
The Father does in me all that I
do.
So they reached down for rocks and said,
listen to that blasphemy.
Strange, isn't it, that some of the modern
cults say Jesus never claimed to be God?
1900 years removed from him, they say he
never claimed to be God.
But those who heard him talk wanted to
kill him because he did claim to be
God.
Jesus is God, and we know now what
God is like.
We know how God feels toward a fallen
woman.
Woman, neither do I condemn thee, go, but
don't sin any more.
We know how God feels toward fishermen.
Come unto me, boys, he said, you workmen,
come to me, and I'll make you fishers
of men.
We know what God thinks of babies.
He took them up in his arms and
blessed them.
I suppose the frustrated theologians have wondered what
was hidden back of all that.
Wasn't anything hidden back of that at all,
nothing, not a thing.
When you pick up a baby, I was
up at Fair Havens on Lake Smithco, or
whatever you are up there somewhere.
There was a conference of preachers last week.
I was up there preaching to them, and
the women were there and they just had
one baby, just one, a 13-month-old
girl named Valerie Patterson.
In her hair I have never seen anything
redder in any place in my life.
I was just looking for anything that was
red.
There was nothing that was red.
Of course, as soon as Valerie had her
rumping over the lawn and she and I
had a nice time together, why do I
pick Valerie up and pat her red head?
Any deep profundities there, any theological types?
No, I just like babies.
And why did Jesus pick babies up and
bless them?
He was a human being.
He was God.
What is there in the universe more lovable
than a baby?
All sorts of them.
I'm glad they don't come all one color.
I think that little Chinese-Japanese baby that
runs around here is absolutely delightful, I could
swallow her.
I'm glad for that.
I'm glad for the different colors and the
different way their eyes go.
I wouldn't want them all to go straight
across like mine.
God made babies and loved them.
And Jesus Christ showed that he did by
holding them up in his arms, patting them
and blessing them and turning them loose.
Of course, he turned them loose quick because
they want to run.
He didn't want you to hold them just
a brief minute, and away they go again.
We know what God thinks about birds, because
Jesus talked about birds all the time, and
if you are such a businessman that you
won't see a bird, you are missing an
awful lot, brother.
We know what God thinks of flowers, where
he pointed to the flowers.
We know what he thinks about food and
marriage and life and suffering and death and
the world to come.
We know what God thinks of everything, because
Jesus Christ talked about almost everything.
So when you read your New Testament and
see the attitude of Jesus Christ the Lord
toward all things, you'll know exactly how God
feels toward all things.
This man, though he had made the world,
still a woman took him up in her
arms and crewed him to sleep, when he
whimpered in her arms.
I don't know where to look in all
the vast new world for anything as beautiful,
as utterly, awfully, deeply beautiful as the story
of the Incarnation.
God made flesh to dwell among us.
We sang a while ago, O could I
speak the matchless word!
O could I tell the glorious forth which
round my Savior shined!
I'd soar and touch the heavenly strings and
vie with Gabriel, while he sings in notes
all most divine.
I'd sing the characters he wears, and all
the forms of love he bears, exalted on
his throne.
In loftiest songs of sweetest praise, I would
through everlasting days make all his glories known.
For you older people, there is a stanza,
I don't know whether we will sing it
this morning or not, it runs like this,
Well, the delightful day will come, when my
dear Lord shall take me home, and I
shall see his face.
Then with my Savior, brother, friend, a blessed
eternity I'll spend, triumphant through his grace.
Jesus is God, says the writer, and the
world above and the world below and the
poor world beneath, join to say amen and
amen, Jesus is God.