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STRONGHOLD OF TRlITH
Does not this mean twisting the Bible to see Christ in every part? No, it does not. As some one has said, the real danger is the twisting away from Christ in the Bible. We' must, of course, be careful about that, for we know it is possible to go to extremes. There was a time when some devout men saw Joseph of Arimathea in the first psalm, that he was the man of God depicted there, but we have now gone to the other extreme, and do not see anybody in it. We believe in neither of these extremes, but we nevertheless believe that Christ is the substance of all Scripture. How, then, are we to look at it? My subject is large and comprehensive. L Christ in the glory of the eternal pa.st. This is where His life commenced. John 1, 1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." This is the commence· ment of all we know of the Lord Jesus Christ: when He was at home in heaven, when He was with the Father. The Eternal Father has an Eternal Son, and the Lord Jesus Christ is revealed to us in Scripture as the Unique Son of God, in a sense in which no other person can pos sibly be a son. The passage in Proverbs viii, which records the personification of Wisdom and other similar passages, should be associated with John 1:1 in the study of Christ in the glory of the eternal past. II. Christ in the glory of the a.ct of Creation. John 1 :3 : "All things were made by Him, and with out Him was not anything made that was made." Col. 1 :15-16. "He is the first-born of every creature, for by Him were all things created." Heb. 1:2: "By whom also God made the worlds." This is what Lightfoot long ago called the cosmic relation of Christ, and it adds immensely to the glory of our Lord when we think of Him, not only as our Redeemer but as the One through whom God made the world. As we look up into the sky, we can say, Christ made those stars; when we look over the landscape, we can say, Christ was responsible for that.
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