new church life: march/april 2017
This naturally leads to another question: given His Divine soul and Infinite
love from conception, was there ever really any doubt that the Lord would
overcome the temptations of the world? I don’t think there was – although in
His natural mind it certainly did seem to Him at times as if there was. Rather
I think the Lord’s greatest temptation – still within His natural consciousness
– was to think that all His work might have been for nothing if the people He
came to redeem and save were to reject Him. But this is another article for
another day.
The idea that the Lord “descended as the Divine Truth which is the Word”
is what we need to understand – because it’s not intuitive. Yes, John’s gospel
tells us that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” but I think we need
to see this as a gradual process, not an event of birth. After all, we know that
the limitations He took on made it impossible for Him fully to comprehend
the depths of Divine Wisdom in the beginning.
In other words, He was “an infant like any other infant, a boy like any
other boy, and so on; but with this sole difference, that He passed through
those progressive states sooner, more fully and more perfectly than others.”
(True Christian Religion 89) Yet during that process, as He learned the truths of
the Word which was and is Divine, one by one, “line upon line, precept upon
precept,” He understood immediately how they applied to Himself, and His
mind was formed by them and His speech and actions expressed them.
That is how He came to embody the Divine Truth – without separating it
from the Divine Good. And that is why it is said in John that “we beheld His
glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
(John 1:14)
There is no way the shepherds or the wise men saw that glory in the
physical features of a baby – except as the hope and promise of fulfillment of
messianic prophecy “as it was told to them.” Remember Isaiah 53 where we
read: “Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of Jehovah
been revealed? For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root
out of dry ground; He has no form nor comeliness; and when we see Him there
is no beauty that we should desire Him.”
Rather it was “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel
and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of Jehovah” (Ibid. 11:2) that
made His glory visible as He taught and was glorified.
The whole process, of course, was not finished until His resurrection
when at last the disciples did see Him in glory such that “their hearts burned
within them while He talked with them on the road, and while He opened the
Scriptures to them.” (Luke 24:32)
Again, a tangent, but it may be useful to note that the bread of the holy
supper is unleavened because it corresponds to the Lord’s Divine love, which
was never “leavened” by any corruption (represented by yeast), but the wine is
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