Here is our Bible, then. Now let me speak about Jesus, and see if our
thought is less precious than the old. In my old days, when I preached
in the orthodox church, Jesus was never half so dear, so helpful to me,
as he is now. If I thought of him at all, I was obliged to think of him
as somehow a second God, who stood between me and the first one, and
through whom I hoped deliverance from the law and the justice of the
first. I had to think of him as a part of a scheme that seemed to me
unjust and cruel, involving the torture of some and the loss of most of
the race. You cannot pick the old-time Jesus out of that scheme of
which he is a part. I could not love him then as I love him now. I
could not think of him as an example to follow; for how can one take
the Infinite for an example? How can one follow the absolutely Perfect
except afar off?
But now I think of Jesus and his cross as the most natural and at the
same time the divinest thing in the history of man. Nothing outside of
the regular divine order in it. Jesus reveals to me to-day the
humanness of God and the divineness of man. And he takes his place in
the long line of the world's redeemers, those who have wrought
atonement, how? Through faithfulness even unto death.
The way we work out the atonement of the world, that is, the
reconciliation of the world to God, is by being true to the vision of
the truth as it comes to us, no matter by the pathway of what
suffering, true as Jesus was true, true even when he thought his Father
had forsaken him.
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