The Purposes of the Incarnation. 339 The last hours of Jesus with His disciples were passing away. He was talking to them, and four times over they interrupted him. Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us”. Philip’s interruption was due, in the first place, to a conviction of Christ’s relation in some way to the Father. He had been so long with Jesus as to become familiar in some senses with His line of thought. In all probability Philip was asking that there should be repeated to him and the little group of disciples some such wonderful thing as they had read of in the past of their people’s history; as when the elders once ascended the mountain and saw God; or when the prophet saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple; or when Ezekiel saw God in fire, and wheels; in majesty and glory. I cannot read the answer of Jesus to that request without feeling that He divested Himself, of set purpose, of anything that approached stateliness of diction, and dropped into the common speech of friend to friend, as,—looking back into the face of Philip, who was voicing, though he little knew it, the great anguish of the human heart, the great hunger of the human soul,—He said, “Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father”. That claim has been vindicated in the passing of the centuries. REVELATION TO THE RACE. We will, therefore, consider first, what this revelation of God has meant to the race; and secondly, what it has meant to the individual. First, then, what conception of God had the race before Christ came ? Taking the Hebrew thought of God, let me put the whole truth as I see it into one comprehensive statement. Prior to the Incarnation there had been a growing intellectual apprehension of truth concerning God, accompanied by a diminishing moral result. It is impossible to study the Old
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