Who, then, is Jesus Christ?  Let John tell us.  The Oriental world was puzzled about the question of the origin of evil.  They said, in brief, a good God cannot make a bad world.  Out of a good God, therefore, there have emanated other gods, and out of these gods other gods, until at last there came to be imperfect gods or bad gods.  And the world was made, some of them said, partly by a good god and partly by a bad one; and others by an imperfect god who was an emanation of the perfect one.  Of these emanations one was Life, another was Light, another was the Word.  And John, writing in the age of Oriental philosophy, uses the phraseology of Oriental philosophy in order that he might tell mankind who and what Jesus Christ is.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.”  God never was an abstraction; from the very beginning He was a speaking God, a living God, a manifesting God, a forth-putting God.  “The same was in the beginning with God.  All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.  And this Word became flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.”  Let me put this into modern language.  What is it but this?  From eternity God has been a manifesting God.  When the fulness of time came, God, that He might manifest Himself to His children, came into a human life and dwelt in a human life.  He that had spoken here through one prophet, there through another prophet; He that had sent one message in this direction and another in that; He that had spoken through signs and tokens, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says, in divers manners and in fragmentary utterances—­when the fulness of time had come, He spoke in one perfect human life, taking entire possession of it and making it His own, that He might manifest Himself in terms of human experience to humanity.  Or turn to Paul and let me read you this declaration; “Let this mind be in you which was also in Jesus Christ; who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of man, and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”  What is this, again, but the same declaration?  God desiring to show Himself to humanity, entered into one human life, became subject to human conditions, shared the weakness, the wants, the ignorance of humanity, entered into and was identified with one human life.

Do I say, then, that Jesus Christ was a man like other men?  No.  But I do say that in their essential qualities God and man are identical, and God entered into humanity that He might show to humanity what He is.  I do say, not that Jesus Christ was a man like other men, but that other men may become like Jesus Christ.  I hold a bulb in my one hand and a tulip in my other.  Will any man say to me, this