the temple of the Holy Spirit. (V) But by far the most serious and terrible thing is that to deny the incarnation is to deny that there can ever be any real union between the human and the divine, between God and man. If spirit is altogether good, and if the body is altogether evil, then God and man can never meet, so long as man is man. God and man might meet, when man had sloughed oif the body, and had become, liter ally, a disembodied spirit. But the great truth of the incarnation is that here and now, in this world of sense and time, there can be real commun ion between God and man. To deny the incarnation and the possibility of that incarnation is to deny that great and precious truth. Nothing in Christianity is more central than the reality of the in carnation, the manhood of Jesus Christ. I John 4 :4-6: You have your source and origin in God, dear chil dren, and you have won the victory over.them, because that power which is in you is greater than the power which is in the world. This is why the source of their speaking is the world, and is the reason why the world listens to them. Our source and origin is God. He who knows God listens to us. He who has not his source in God does not listen to us. This is how we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. Here John lays down one great truth, and faces one great problem. (1) The Christian need not fear the heretic. In Christ the victory over all the powers of evil was won. The powers of evil did their worst to Him, even to killing Him on a Cross, and in the end He emerged victorious. That victory belongs to the Chris tian. Whatever things look like, the powers of evil and of falsehood are fighting a losing battle. As the Latin proverb has i t : “Great is the truth, and in the end it will prevail.” All that the Christian has to do is to 32
remember the truth which he al ready knows, and to cling to it. The truth is that by which men live; error is ultimately that by which men die. (2) That is so; but the problem remains that the false teachers will neither listen to, nor accept, the truth which the true Christian offers. How is that to be explained? Here John returns to his favorite anti thesis, the opposition between the world, the ¡cosmos and God. The world, as we have been before, is human nature apart from, and in opposition to, God. The man, whose source is God, will welcome the truth; the man, whose origin is the world, will reject the truth. When we come to think of it, that is an obvious truth. How can a man whose watchword is competition even begin to understand an ethic whose keynote is service? How can a man whose aim is the exaltation of the self, who believes in the survival of the fittest, and Who holds that the weakest must go to the wall, even begin to understand a teaching whose principle for living is love? How can a man who believes that this is the only world, and that, therefore, ma terial things are the only things which matter, even begin to under stand a life which is lived in the light of eternity, and where it is the unseen things which are the greatest values in life? A man can hear only what he has fitted himself to hear, and, therefore, he can unfit himself to hear the Christian mes sage at all. That is what John is saying. We have seen again and again that it is characteristic of John to see things in terms of black and white. His thinking does not deal in shades. On the one side there is the man whose source and origin is God, the man who can hear the tru th ; on the other side there is the man whose source and origin is the world, and who is incapable of hearing the truth. There
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