“I AM THE ALMIGHTY.”
And Paul, the special apostle of the Church, unites with Thomas (the believing, but material evidence demanding representative of the elect remnant in Israel) in proclaiming the deity of God’s Christ.
Thomas falls at his feet and cries:
“My Lord and My God.”
Paul bows his head in adoration before him and writes:
“Our great God and Saviour—Jesus Christ.”
Upon the august throne of the universe he is seated.
He who lay a babe upon a woman’s breast; who, although he was infinite, became an infant; who being in the form of God, did not hesitate to put off the divine glory and put on mortal humanity that (as an infinite person) he might, through the “prepared” body of his mortality, offer an infinite sacrifice for men; who died under a malefactor’s doom, but with his nailed hands, in the hour of his agony, saved a thief from hell—opening to him the gates of Paradise; he who refused the deliverance of angels when they bent above his cross, that by his cross he might give to men the deliverance angels could not give; lie who was buried in a borrowed grave; who rose as an immortal man, ascended as the Second Adam—the New Head of Humanity—the Life Giver to a world, and took his seat on the Father’s throne, as witness of redemption achieved and salvation secured—he sits there now, and having taken to himself the glory which he had with the Father before all worlds were, having clothed his immortal humanity with that “form of God” which ever was his, now sits the centre of a world’s adoration and heaven’s amaze, as the GOD MAN—the highest form of God and the ultimate form of man; the proclamation that man in Christ is the archetype of God and God in Christ the archetype of man.
As we thus gaze upon him in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily; as we meditate upon him, seek to reason about him, are touched by his love, held by his power, and filled with his life, we say with the inspired apostle: “Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh.”
“Our great God,” repeats Paul, and he adds, to balance the wonder of it, “and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” he who, in some glad day nearer than we think, is coming back to this old, sin-stained, grave-digged world—to be owned and saluted by all nations, peoples, kindred and tongues as—