STRONGHOLD OF TRUTH
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IV. Revelation is available.-Let us notice how far we have traveled.-Revelation is possible, and necessary. And now we must see that it is available. Heb. 1 :1-2: "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son." We believe that revelation is available in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. A person communicates himself either by acts or by words, or by both. For the first disciples, for the earliest Christian Church before our Lord's resurrec tion-that is to say, for the community of His immediate followers-His Presence was a revelation, His Person was sufficient; but we today have His words, since. we have not His Presence in the sense in which they had. So we find in St. John 20 :30-31 this: "Many other signs truly did Jesus . . . . which are not written in this book, but these are written, that ye might believe . and that believing ye might have life." For us today, the words of the Lord Jesus Christ take the place of His personal presence, and are the media of His reve lation. St. Paul has the same idea in 2 Tim. 3 :16-17. And so our position is just this-God has revealed Him self in nature ; He has revealed Himself in providence and history ; but pre-eminently He has revealed Himself in Christ for spiritual realities. A Bad Mirror Natural religion has never been found sufficient for human life, because of sin. Man's nature has never been an adequate mirror of Divine revelation. If we would know the highest and best, as well as the deepest and worst, of which human nature is capable, we should read Romans, Chap. 1, where we shall find, as Sir William Ramsay says, "St. Paul's philosophy of history." When we look there, and see what men had, and yet did not retain God in their knowledge, we see the futility and the fatality of a merely natural religion. Of this revelation in Christ, we believe that the New Testament is the purest, fullest, and clearest expression.
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