God is revealing himself (1) as Nature and natural law; (2) as Spirit and as moral law; and (3) as Jesus Christ of the Cross and of the Resurrection. There is the light of the sun in natural laws, the light of the soul in the moral law, but whoever wants the highest light of all will seek it in the risen and glorified Jesus, whose Light can illumine our path and guide our steps and ultimately change us into His likeness and His spirit.
And how can we experience the fullness of that light? We can achieve it best by co-working with Him for the attainment of His will and purpose for us, for the social order, and for the entire creation. There are five ways that I have found effective for co-working with Him:
(1) By choosing to walk in the Light, “the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” (John 1: 9)
(2) By receiving Jesus Christ and choosing to follow Him. To quote from Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam’s sermon which I heard out at sea recently, “Commit ourselves to Him, His Way, His Truth, and His Life.”
(3) By entering into ineffable union with Him through the baptism of the Holy Spirit and through living His life of limitless love going out to all, and thus overcoming all hate with love and all evil with good.
(4) By growing up and entering into continuous fruit-bearing and abiding in Him.
(5) By becoming happily and wholly His. Then He can make real to us that all He is and has are wholly ours. This is marriage with Him and in fullness will bring not only rejuvenation to our whole being, including our body, but also prepare us for the ultimate Triumph.
(6) By putting on, either by Translation and Resurrection, the immortal body like the resurrected body of Jesus Christ.
(7) By becoming active parties of His in bringing all things to His likeness, so that the cosmos as well as the social order and the individual may be brought to perfection in and with Jesus.
The first and continuous requirement to become like the Glorified Jesus is to walk in His Light. St. Paul calls this Light, “The law written in the heart” (Romans 2:15). George Fox calls this Light “the That of God in every man.” Thomas Kelly calls it “the Holy in every man.”
This Light so perfectly manifested in Jesus was revealed in occasional shafts of light in places where Jesus was not, but always in a way that directed men’s attention to Jesus Himself in whom this Light of Heaven shone in all its fullness and glory.
Socrates, seemingly the most Christian of all the pagans, obeyed the Divine Light and Voice with such faithfulness that a second generation of Christians referred to him as a “disciple born out of due time.” He looked forward to a higher revelation which he said “would be by the Grace of God.” Plato, his favorite pupil, seeing what Athens did to Socrates, “the best man he ever knew,” prophesied that when the perfectly Just Man appeared he would be “taken to the Cross.” A recent brilliant Platonist, George Moore, says that if Plato had met Jesus in the flesh he would have cried out, “My Lord and My God!”
Before the Word was made flesh and the Ideal made actual in the Incarnation there was “the dawn of conscience” in Egypt and in India and China as well as in Greece. The wisest men were seeing that evil can only be overcome with good. Not only did Moses and the Prophets write of Jesus, but all men who listened well to the Light within and without, prepared the way for His coming in the flesh as God-with-us on the plane of our humanity.
The missionary Episcopal bishop to Alaska reports that when he told a certain Indian tribe about Jesus and His ministry of love and vicarious death, they said, “This is not entirely new to us.” In the history of their tribe there was a very good man who said to a neighboring tribe with whom they were at war, “Let’s stop this and be friends.” They replied, “But you have killed thirteen more of our leading men than we have of yours. Give us thirteen of yours.” The very good man said, “Don’t you think I’m worth as much as the thirteen?” When they said yes, he said, “Then take me and spare them.”
I also caught the gleam of that glorious Light before I knew where it came from.
As far back as I can remember, I knew God but did not know that the one I knew was God. The reading of the gospel report of the way Jesus was misunderstood and hated and crucified melted me to tenderness and sometimes to tears. I knew Him both when resisting His Love and when yielding to its drawing power. He was with me in all of my resistance as well as in the whole of my quest for Him. I even obeyed some of the New Testament teachings of Jesus before I knew that these teachings were in any book. If I had known that in Him was joy and abundant life and even humor it would have been far easier. The real God had to win out against my prejudiced misconceptions concerning Him.
But when one comes to the full realization that the Perfect Light can be found only in Jesus and is content to abide in Him and do His will, then the long quest is ended.
Willing to do His will, and then doing it in so far as you know it to be His will, is the Way to an increasing knowledge of Him. We do not know by study alone. We know by obedience. Obedience is the organ of Knowledge and the condition of revelation. Jesus revealed Himself to Saul, the persecutor, at the very hour he was ready to say, “Lord, what will you have me to do?” He does this for us all.
There is no need of His revealing His will until we are ready to do His will. At that hour He tells us what to do. There is no need to conjecture concerning what Jesus is. “Come and see.” All we need to agree upon concerning Him for the beginning of discipleship is that we walk in the Light now given us, and continuously being given us on the Way, by walking together in Love, and by being led by the Spirit.
When Thomas refused to believe the Resurrection without proof of the wounds, Jesus did not excommunicate him. He gave him even more proof than he asked for—so much proof that Thomas was the first of all the disciples to cry out, “My Lord and My God!”
Years ago while attending a lecture at the chapel of Vanderbilt University School of Religion at the request of the Dean, I sensed from what the speaker was saying that he did not believe in the heavenly begetting of Jesus. He seemed to be very subtle and adroit in the way he was raising doubts and weakening faith. This caused my spirit to suffer. I sought escape by looking out upon the beautiful campus but did not find peace. Then I asked Jesus what was the truth as to His birth and the answer came “I was born of a virgin but welcome those who do not see it.” No matter who gave the answer this answer seems true to the spirit of Jesus, so true that even the Dean of the School of Religion passed it on to his class. Just this afternoon, September 19, 1948, at a meeting of members of the World Council of Churches on the way back to America on the SS Nieu Amsterdam, it was revealed that, as heartening as was the will for Christian Unity at Amsterdam, it would have been broken had not the delegates agreed not to press their doctrinal differences. As I sought to say to them, “The way to unity of doctrine is not by definitions, but by practicing the Unity of the Spirit in the bonds of love on the way to knowing the full truth concerning Jesus. This can only come by obeying Him, by coming to Him and walking with Him and finding out on the Way as He reveals Himself.”
Personally I am happily certain Jesus is Lord, is Christ, is God-with-us, and all and more than the New Testament says He is. But I am quite certain that the way to knowing Him is not by argument and speculation, but by obeying Him and walking with Him. He invites everyone who will to “Come and See” —”Come–Go with Me and Find Out.”
As John Watson (Ian Maclaren) developed in his Beecher Lectures at the Yale Divinity School about forty years ago, the religious cycle is: First, mysticism (I like better first-hand experience) which is such high reality that the whole concern is to proclaim it and communicate it. Second, the taking time off to explain what those who had such high Reality really had. This is the cycle of doctrine and of creedmaking. But, alas, the third step is too often a hairsplitting about the doctrines which lead to such barrenness that the hungry sail south to find Reality, and those who are not hungry become skeptical.
There is no way of knowing the Truth concerning Jesus nor the deeper Truth of life, apart from choosing to be true to our best selves and bravely walking in the Light that lights up our lives, and this Light always leads us to be loving, merciful, kind, and as helpful as possible to all and to inflict no injury. We dry up and become essentially dead and stupid apart from this continuous and happy choosing. The difference in men as Emerson puts it “is not in their talents but in their dedications,” in their continuous dedication to the highest Within, Without, and Above. As Charles Finney saw, it is the condition for being changed from character to Character, from glory to Glory in His likeness. In this beholding and dedication, Drummond also found his scientific formula for sanctification. Yes, the Light of the World, the light that lights up every man, is Love.
Even in nature and in the whole process of growth, Love is the most important factor for survival and for lifting the creation towards its predestined goal. Goethe, observing God’s wisdom as revealed in some fact of plant or animal life, remarked that if anyone seeing this did not believe in God he “would not be helped by Moses and the Prophets.” The more innocent anything is the better is its chance for survival and triumph. The meek and not the fierce inherit the earth. The more power you have to inflict danger the more you are in danger. The more secure you try to make yourself on any other basis than that of love and innocence, the more insecure you become. Germany and Japan are striking illustrations. The more dangerous an animal is the more difficult it is for it to survive. The innocent lamb has survived and increased while the cave-bear and sabre-toothed tiger have disappeared.
The universe was made by Love to become loving. Only Love has the power to triumph. Only Love really succeeds.
As Luther saw, God’s mark is upon everything that obeys Him. “There is no tree that bears fruit for its own use.” No tree eats its own fruit. The sun does not shine to light up and warm itself. Everything in God’s will gives itself. To quote Luther again, “Only Satan and men under his influence seek their own.” Everything that seeks its own closes itself to the inflow and outflow of His Love. All self-love takes merit to itself and closes one to the fullness of the grace and love of God. The only way to save self is to give self to the inflow and outflow of heavenly Love, which seeks not its own personal ends but the highest will and good of all. To go on with Jesus and to become like Him we have to die daily to every form of selfishness, to every assertion of the selfish and egotistic self. The Kingdom of God comes only as pure Love, a Love for one’s enemies as well as for one’s friends. Love, like the sunshine and rain, is freely given to all.
Love and Life are one and the Golden Rule is written at the heart of the universe. When man dares to practice this Love, which is kind, tender and fearless, animals as well as normal humans respond to it. Even a dog resents being feared and distrusted. I have never found a dog that would not respond to faith and love, with the exception of a mad dog. If I had had enough love and faith to have cast out the demon of madness he should have loved me far more because of his release. As it was, I had enough of the spirit of life to enable me to jump so high he did not succeed in biting me.
Allan Boone, the author of Letters to Strongheart, says he has gone into the jungles of the world unarmed and no wild animal has ever attacked him. In a lecture given before the Southern California Camp Farthest Out, he said that rattlers do not usually bite Indians, as Indians and rattlers have a way of understanding and respecting each other. Francis of Assisi, Sundar Singh, and Helen Keller have had experiences with dangerous animals that should be classed along with the experiences of Daniel in the lion’s den. When we become innocent and loving and fearless the creation will become loving and innocent and cooperative.
When Jesus, the Perfect Light, Life and Love, wins in us, it will be easy to Christianize the lions and the bears and the wolves and the rest. The prophets saw that the innocent child would play upon the cockatrice’s den and that the whole creation would be loved into loving. But the divine order is for the Perfect Light and Perfect Lover to bring many sons to Perfect Love and Light and with these to bring the creation. And as we have seen, the first and forever requirement is for us to come to His Light and walk in it, to receive His Love and live it. We have to come to our best selves and then we are ready to turn Homeward.
The Word had to be made flesh and the idea made actual. We must be born of Him, grow up in Him, be co-partners with Him and become extensions and contagions of Him, and the Kingdom of God in order to become like Him ourselves and to make all things like him. Our age is finding far more in the atom, in the peanut, in the guinea pig, in psychology, in psychoanalysis, and in man as God’s image and likeness than any previous age. Many are tempted to believe that everything that man needs is within himself, that all he needs to know are the laws of mind and spirit and with these he has no need for a personal God or Saviour. But as we have seen in a crisis, we need more than Law. We must have a Person. When we are sinking we need Him who walks upon the water and can still the waves. If we are wise enough to be taught and led by the Holy Spirit, the only consciousness that can reveal Jesus to us, we may live to see and help to bring into being a friendly and a cooperative world, the end of war, and atomic energy brought under the control and best uses of Love.