The Apologetic Value of Paul’s Epistles 93 A. In Relation to Time. He is God’s Son who was “bora of the seed of David according to the flesh”. On the side of His humanity our Lord “was born.” (Rom. 1:2.) That nature begins only then. He is possessed of another nature that dates back long before the incarnation. He is in a peculiar sense God’s “own Son” (Rom. 8 :32 ), belonging to Him above all others, or as Alford well says, “His vios povoytvrjs, the only one of God’s Sons who is one with Him in nature and essence, begotten of Him before all worlds. This Son was delivered up for us all. This idea is hinted at in 2 Cor. 8 :9 : “Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor,” and finds full expression in the Epistle to the Philippians (2:5-9), concerning which there is very little controversy. The straggling hints we have in the four great epistles confirm the teaching of the Letter to the Philippians, and above all the classic statement of the Fourth Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word.” B. In Relation to Man.. Paul-says Christ Was “made of a woman” (Gal. 4 :4 ) , and that He was sent into the world “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8 : 3 ) ; that is, He came into the world by birth and bore to the eye the aspect of any ordinary man. But though Christ came in the like ness of sinful flesh, He was not a sinner. He “knew no sin” (2 Cor. 5:21). The mind that was in Him before He came ruled His life after He came. However, Paul regards the resurrection as constituting an important crisis in the experi ence of Christ. Thereby He was declared to be the Son of God with power (Rom. 1 :4 ) , “the man from heaven” (1 Cor. 15 :47); and yet to Paul, Jesus is a real man, a Jew with Hebrew blood in His veins, a descendant bf David. The portrait thus painted agrees perfectly with that of the Evan gelists who depict Him as a real man, but, in some strange fashion, different from other men. “His soul was like a star and dwelt apart.”
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