Some learned folk have been much taken up with the make-up of the Book, its paper and type, and punctuation, and binding.  And they have done good service in clearing away a lot of dust and cobwebs that had been gathering on it for a long time.  But we plain folk, absorbed in getting things done, do not need to wait on their conclusions.  If in those pages we have found Jesus, and God in Jesus, the Book has fulfilled its mission to us.

To all directly, in nature’s voice, and in our common daily life; to a nation chosen for the special purpose, and through that nation and its books; through Jesus to those who knew Him, and, by a Book telling of Him, to all following, God came, comes in His wooing, and looked, looks tenderly into man’s face.  Each of these paths leads straight to God, and each comes to include the others.

But chiefly in Jesus God came.  Jesus is God going out in the cold black night, over the mountains, down the ravines and gullies, eagerly hunting for His lost man, getting hands, and face, and more, torn on the brambly thorn bushes, and losing His life, in the darkness, on a tree thrust in His path, but saving the man.

The Plan for Jesus’ Coming

The Image of God.

Man is God’s darling—­the king and crown of creation.  The whole creation was made for him to develop and rule over and enjoy.  He is in a class by himself.  When he made his bad break there was just one thing left to do.  God must get a new leader for His man to lead him back into all the original plan for himself.  Of the whole earth man stood next to God Himself.  God could not find that leader lower down.  So He went higher.  Jesus is God giving the race a new Leader who would withstand the lure of temptation and realize the ambition of God’s heart for His darling.

The man was made in the image of God, for self-mastery, and through self-mastery for dominion over all of God’s creation.  That was the plan for the man.  That, too, is the plan for the new Man.  There is only one place to go to find God’s plan for the coming One.  That is in the Hebrew half of the Bible.  One can hardly believe, unless he has been through the thing, how hard it is to get out of the Old Testament its vision of the coming One without any coloring from the New getting into his eyes.

We have been reading the Old Testament through the events of the New for so long that it gives a severe mental wrench to try to do anything else.  Yet only so, be it sharply marked, can the plan for the coming of Jesus be gotten, and, further, only so can Jesus be understood.  One must attempt to do just that to understand at all fairly what a reverent Hebrew in prophetic times expected; what such earnest Hebrews as Simeon and Anna were looking for.

I have tried to make a faithful effort to shut severely out of view the familiar facts of the gospel story for my own sake, to try to understand God’s plan as it stood before there was a gospel story.