Now, the character of Jesus is human nature as God first formed it. It existed in His thoughts from eternity. If it be asked whether St Paul refers, in verse 24, to the creation of Adam in God’s likeness, or to the image of God appearing in Jesus Christ, or to the Christian nature formed in the regenerate, we should say that, to the apostle’s mind, the first and last of these creations are merged in the second. The Son of God’s love is His primeval image. The race of Adam was created in Christ (Col. i. 15, 16). The first model of that image, in the natural father of mankind, was marred by sin and has become “the old man” corrupt and perishing. The new pattern replacing this broken type is the original ideal, displayed “in the likeness of sinful flesh”—wearing no longer the charm of childish innocence, but the glory of sin vanquished and sacrifice endured—in the Son of God made perfect through suffering. Through all there has been only one image of God, one ideal humanity. The Adam of Paradise was, within his limits, what the Image of God had been in perfectness from eternity. And Jesus in His human personality represented, under the changed circumstances brought about by sin, what Adam might have grown to be as a complete and disciplined man.
The qualities which the apostle insists upon in the new man are two: “righteousness and holiness [or piety] of the truth.” This is the Old Testament conception of a perfect life, whose realization the devout Zacharias anticipates when he sings how God has “shown mercy to our fathers, in remembrance of His holy covenant, ... that we being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life.” Enchanting vision, still to be fulfilled! “Righteousness” is the sum of all that should be in a man’s relations towards God’s law; “holiness” is a right disposition and bearing towards God Himself. This is not St Paul’s ordinary word for holiness (sanctification, sanctity), which he puts so often at the head of his letters, addressing his readers as “saints” in Christ Jesus. That other term designates Christian believers as devoted persons, claimed by God for His own;[125] it signifies holiness as a calling. The word of our text denotes specifically the holiness of temper and behaviour—“that becometh saints.” The two words differ very much as devotedness from devoutness.[126]
A religious temper, a reverent mind marks the true child of grace. His soul is full of the loving fear of God. In the new humanity, in the type of man that will prevail in the latter days when the truth as in Jesus has been learnt by mankind, justice and piety will hold a balanced sway. The man of the coming times will not be atheistic or agnostic: he will be devout. He will not be narrow and self-seeking; he will not be pharisaic and pretentious, practising the world’s ethics with the Christian’s creed: he will be upright and generous, manly and godlike.
FOOTNOTES:
[ [118] Quid si post οὕτως distinctionem ascribas? Vos autem non ita (subaudi facere convenit), qui didicistis, etc.
[ [119] Comp. Numb. xii. 7; Ps. i. 4; Luke xxii. 26, for this Hebraistic turn of expression.
[ [120] Comp. Phil. iii. 2, 18; Titus i. 16.
[ [121] See pp. 47, 83, 169, 189.
[ [122] Ἐστὶν ἀληθεία ἐν τῷ Ἰησοῦ. The article with the proper name is most significant. It points to the definite image of Jesus, in His actual person, that was made familiar by the preaching of Paul and the other apostles.
[123] L’Antéchrist, pp. i. ii. 1, 2. This is a powerful and impressive work, of whose value those who know only the Vie de Jésus can have little conception. Renan’s faults are many and deplorable; but he is a writer of genius and of candour. His rationalism teems with precious inconsistencies. One hears in him always the Church bells ringing under the sea, the witness of a faith buried in the heart and never silenced, to which he confesses touchingly in the Preface to his Souvenirs.