Daily Devotionals

Devotional: September 1st

GOD MANIFEST IN THE FLESH

Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature. -- Colossians 1:15

Why does our Lord on one occasion (John 14:9) charge Philip with not knowing Him? Because Philip had said, "Lord! show us the Father and it sufficeth us." And why was that question a betrayal of Philip’s ignorance of Christ? Because it showed that he had not discerned Him as being " the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth," and had not understood that " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." You do not know, and not knowing that, all your knowledge of Me, howsoever tender and sweet it may have been, howsoever full of love and reverence and blind admiration - all your knowledge of Me is but twilight knowledge, which may well be called ignorance. Not to know Christ as the manifest God is practically to be ignorant of Him altogether. Philip asked for some visible manifestation, such as their old books told them had been granted to Moses on the mountain, to Isaiah in the temple, and to many another one besides.

But if such a revelation had been given - and Christ could have given it if He would - what a poor thing it would have been, put side by side with that mild and lambent light that was ever streaming from Him, making God visible to every sensitive and responsive nature! For these external manifestations for which Philip is here hungering, what could they show? They could show certain majestic, splendid, pompous, outside characteristics of God, but they could never show God, much less could they show " the Father." Righteousness and love, the revelation of these two, could be entrusted to no flashing brightnesses, and to no thunders and lightnings. There can be no revelation of these things to the outward eye, but only to the inward heart through the medium of a human life. For not the power which knows no weariness, not the eye which never closes, not the omniscience which holds all things, great and small, in its grasp, make God. These are but the fringe, the outermost parts, of the circumference; the living Centre is a Righteous Love. And you cannot reveal that by any means but by showing it in action; nor show it in action by any means so sure as in a human life. Therefore, above all other forms of manifestation of God, stands the Person of Jesus Christ - God manifest in the flesh.

Jesus is Lord. My brother, a Man, is King of the universe. The new thing in Christ’s return to " the glory which He had with the Father before the world was" is that He took the Manhood with Him in indissoluble union with the Divinity, and that a Man is Lord. So you and I can cherish that wonderful hope. " I will give to him that overcometh to sit with Me on My throne." Nor need we ever fear but that all things concerning ourselves and our dear ones, and the Church and the world, will be ordered aright, for the hand that sways the universe is the hand that was many a time laid in blessing upon the sick and the maimed, and that gathered little children to His bosom.

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