And so Jesus Christ was God, manifested in the
flesh.
Now we do know what God is like. We know that He is so like man,
that He can take upon Him man's flesh and blood without changing, or
lowering, or defiling Himself. That proves that man must have been
originally made in God's likeness; that man's being fallen, means
man's falling from the likeness of God, and taking up instead with
the likeness of the brutes which perish; that the fault cannot be in
our bodies, but in our spirits which have yielded to our bodies, and
become their slaves instead of their masters, as Christ's Spirit was
master of His body. But the Son of God, by being born and living as
a man, showed us that we are not fallen past hope, not fallen so low
that we cannot rise again. He showed that though mankind are sinful,
yet they need not be sinful; for He was a man as exactly, and
perfectly, and entirely as we are, and yet in Him was no sin. So He
showed that brutishness and sinfulness is not our proper state, but
our disease and our fall; and a disease of which we can be cured, a
fall out of which we can rise and be renewed into the true and real
pattern of mankind, the new Adam, Jesus the sinless Son of Man and
Son of God.
The next question, I said, that rose in men's mind was: "How do I
know that God is good, as I fancy sometimes that He must be? I see
the world full of sin, and injustice, and misery, and death.
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