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If he were not God, then we are in a world where the very day is no better or brighter than a starless midnight.
If Jesus Christ were a good man, a supremely good man and a supremely intellectual man, then he was and is (as he claimed) Almighty God.
The New Testament says he was a supremely good, and a supremely intellectual man.
For two thousand years the most brilliant men in the world have corroborated this record by freely testifying that Jesus Christ was a supremely good and a supremely intellectual man; all this being so, I change the conditional form of the proposition to the indicative and declarative and now say:
Since Jesus Christ was a supremely good and a supremely intellectual man, he was, therefore (as he claimed), Almighty God.
He could not be a supremely good and a supremely intellectual man and claim to be God unless he were God.
Since he claimed to be God, therefore, he was God.
Yes; he was God.
The evidences are manifold.
He was sinless.
He said:
Which of you convinceth me of sin?
For two thousand years he has been in the concentrated light of a hostile worlds merciless investigation. The light has been turned on the land in which he lived. Every rod of ground over which he travelled has been dug up, or surveyed, or trodden. His words have been weighed, balanced to a nicety against any probability of error, mistake, imagination, fancy or misquotation. His words have been split open as men break open rocks. All the contents of his words have been put in the crucible of criticism. Every thought has been insistently and unsentimentally assayed for, even, the suspicion or the slightest hint of an alloy. His teachings have been chemically dissolved and turned into their component parts. The saline base of truth has been sought for at any risk to the compounded speech he made.
And after all! not one self-respecting, authoritative lip has uttered a charge against him.
In the hush of a world that cannot even murmur, he steps forward and once more rings down his challenge:
Which of you convinceth me of sin?
He stands out among his fellows as a white shaft under a starless midnight. He rises above the passions of men as an unshaken rock in the midst of a wild, lashed sea. He is to mans best character as harmony is to discord, as a smile is to a frown, as love is to hate, as blessing is to cursing, as a garden of lilies to a desert of sand, as heaven is to earth, as holiness is to sin and as life to death.
If he were sinless, he was absolutely holy; he was so holy that his very presence brought out the sin in others. Sinful men and women fell at his feet and confessed their sins. At sight of him demons tore their way out of the bodies they possessed and fled as clouds of darkness before the sun, crying as they fled, Thou art the holy one of God hast thou come to torment us before the time? Tormented as they were even then, as sin always is when confronted by holiness; as vice is before virtue; as a lie is before the truth.
He was sinless.
He was holy.
His sinlessness and holiness cannot be accounted for on natural grounds.
All his natural ancestry were sinful.
His sinlessness cannot be accounted for unless he were God; for, sinlessness and holiness come alone from God and, as essential qualities, take their rise alone in God.
His power over nature proved him God.
His look changed water into wine, his word gave sight to the blind, healing to the deaf, speech to the dumb. At his word the lame man leaped as a hart, the leper was cleansed. He said, Peace, be still, and the wild tempest of the sea was hushed, and there was a great calm, a calm like unto the stillness of the unruffled rest of God.
For two thousand years his regenerative power in a world of sin has been the proof that he was God.
For two thousand years, in every age, in every clime, among all classes of men, from the refined infidel to the vilest sinner, from the cold atheist to the brutal idolater, men have been changed transformed. Men who have been the bond slaves of passion, whose daily lives have been the output of iniquity, whose deeds have been for destruction, whose words have been poison, and whose inmost thoughts have been as the vapors of miasma these all have been transformed into fountains of purity, into angels of mercy, or as illuminated missals have been written full of the name and the glory of God; men whose every fibre was as the coarse and tangled threads of a brutal unrefinement have become men whose every line of character was as the woven gold of Ophir and the speech that once smote with discord the ears that heard it has become as the sound of singing across silent waters and under listening stars. And you ask these transfigured human beings, as you find them travelling along the highway of twenty noteful centuries, what it was that so changed them, put such new force and impetus in them, making them to be as men new created, and they will tell you that Jesus Christ came along that way, they saw in his face the stain of blood, the marks of nails were in his hands and feet, he had the appearance of one who had been cruelly slain. He stopped, looked at them and said: Come unto me. They obeyed, they fell at his feet. He touched them, a strange, keen sense thrilled through them. He said to them, Arise. They arose and found themselves new men men twice begotten.
Ask the drunkard who tried to be sober, broke every pledge and drank in his cup the very life blood of those he loved and who loved him how at last he found strength to say a final no, turn from the accursed thing, and enter a world all new in which to live, a freeman and no more a slave he will tell you, Jesus Christ did it all.
Ask any of the bond slaves of passion, men who have been gripped by every form of human desire, and whiplashed, and stung, and tortured by their gratification, and driven to fresh and maddening excess by the never satisfied and always burning lust within (ever crying like the horseleachs daughter, Give, give); ask them how it is that to-day they are freemen and walk as kings, and they will tell you that Jesus Christ laid hold of them, and by the might of his power, the tenderness of his love, and the wealth of his grace, made them free.
And this has been going on for two thousand years.
The story has recently been told of a great thinker lecturing one day before a large audience of medical students some eighteen hundred men who pressed in to hear him. He took from his desk a letter, and holding it up before him, said something to this effect:
Gentlemen! I have here a letter from one of your number, in which he tells the story of his life a record of shame, of sinful indulgence, that makes me shudder even to look at the letter. At the close of this fearful confession he asks, Can your God save such an one as I am?
Stopping for a moment and surveying his audience, the speaker said: When I came to the city this afternoon (it was the city of Edinburgh) there was a beautiful, fleecy cloud spreading itself like a thing of glory in the upper sky, and I said, 0 cloud, where do you come from? and the cloud answered me and said, come from the slums and the low, vile places of the city. The sun of heaven reached down and lifted me up and transfigured me with his shining.
Looking about upon the now deeply impressed throng, the speaker, after a solemn pause, said:
I do not know whether this young man is here or not, but if he is, I can say to him that my Saviour and my Master, Jesus Christ, he who is our great God and Saviour, he can reach down from the highest heaven to the lowest depths into which a human soul can sink, and can lift you, and lift you up and up, till he shines in you and through you, and transfigures you with the light of his love and glory.