VI. EVERY MAN THE SON OF HIS OWN FATHER
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IT IS entirely obvious that every man is the son of his own father; that is, he is like his father—a reproduction of him, of a similar essence, type, and character. This is more than a truism in the discussion of our subject; it has a most important bearing as a self-evident fact upon the discussion. For it follows that if Jesus is the Son of God in any special sense, he is entirely distinct from us.
In what sense can we justly and properly be called the children or sons of God? Is it not only when we are recreated through regeneration into His image and likeness? Of course, in the most general sense every one is the offspring of God, but he is not so in the Biblical sense until he is recreated into the image and likeness of God, for it is this sonship to which reference is so often made. But when a man is so changed from his carnal mind as to become spiritually minded, is he more than an angel? Obviously not.
Yet we know that he does become an angel in the hereafter from the Book of Revelation, where John falls down at the feet of the angel who had been showing him the glories of the New Jerusalem, and we hear these words: "See thou do it not; for I am thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book." From this we deduce that angels are regenerated men. But he never becomes more than an angel, and thus always remains a finite being.
But we find that Jesus is called the Son of God from the beginning, and finally has all power lodged in his hands, as we read in Matthew 28:18. He is thus the Son of God in a special sense from his birth, and in the end announces himself as one with the Father, and finally as the Father. (John 10:30 and John 14:17—10.) His case is unique and wholly different in many respects from our own. He not only becomes like the Father, but eventually proclaims his identity with the Father.
The human being, with a purely human soul, becomes only a replica of its own father morally as well as physically, within limitations. His degree of perfection or imperfection in living the father's life may be and is modified by his own acquiescence or active interference. But he is never more than a human being, and he is always a being distinct from his father. Jesus as the Son of God became a replica of his Father, and eventually insists that he and the Father are one—identical. "He that hath seen me hath seen the father." (14:9.) No other man could make this claim concerning himself and his father. Jesus could do so because the Divine Essence is indivisible. If he were a son of God, as we are the sons of our human fathers and so became a distinct being, he would be another God, and there would be two Gods, which is impossible.
While Jesus is called the Son of David many times, we realize that it is only through his mother that he is so called. He insists that he is the Son of God. His repudiation of the claim that the Messiah was to inherit his soul from David as a man inherits his soul from his human father is indicated in the following passage:
"While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, saying, What think ye of Christ? Whose son is he? They say unto him, The Son of David. He saith unto them, How then doth David in spirit call him Lord, saying, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool? If David then call him Lord, how is he his son?"
This was the insistence upon the fact that his soul was from the Divine Father, and not from any human father. He admitted only the modifying influence of his mother as an external thing, for he always repudiated the claims of Mary when she attempted to press or emphasize an enduring relationship.
The announcement of the angel Gabriel to Mary is a proof of his conception in a wholly different way from other men, in order to become a being, while resembling as to his external life other men, yet distinctly different. "Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest, and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David." He was David's son only in the matter of his material form from Mary, not as to his soul, for he is distinctly called the Son of God in a special sense, thus receiving his soul-form directly from the Divine Father.
Continuing the quotation we read: "And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end," thus showing his unique immortality as differentiated from every mere earthly king. "Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" asking the eternal question as to the possibility of generation without a human father. And the reply comes with authority: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God."
From this we are to understand that a human child was to be born to Mary, but that its soul-form should be provided by the Highest Himself. In other words, that a receptacle of life was to be supplied from the Divine Father, which should be a projection of the very Divine itself into the realms of the spiritual and material.
Now we must realize that if this Son of the Highest was to be a human being, it would needs have a soul-form similar to the souls of other human beings. It would need to have a receptacle of life from the spiritual plane, from the mental plane, and it would also need an actual material body from the material plane. This latter we know that Mary provided. Through this body was also provided a consciousness upon the plane of the natural which remained with Jesus until his crucifixion, that is, from her was provided a plane upon which that consciousness manifested itself. Into this plane of consciousness temptations entered, for Jesus was "tempted in all points like as we are."
In our study of the constitution of the human soul-form we saw that the first plane of all is the Inmost or Unconscious Spiritual. It is there, as in a Holy of Holies, that the Divine life is received by the created soul-form. It is there that God dwells directly with man. Now we must believe that in the soul-form which the Divine provided for His own manifestation in time and space, which was to be an extension of Himself, and not a separation from Himself as in the case of man the creature, that inmost plane is represented, not by a separated receptacle as in the case of man, but by the very Divine itself. The Inmost in the case of Jesus was Jehovah. Jehovah flows into men as into something which He has separated from Himself and yet to which He is adjoined, i. e., is in juxtaposition, but into the soul-form which He provided for Himself He dwelt directly without separation; for it was God manifesting Himself, extending, projecting Himself. And on this highest plane God always dwells as complete within Himself, "in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see," "the King eternal, immortal, invisible."
Let us now see an illustration of the projection of God in Jesus Christ:
| GOD | INFINITE | |||
| HIS SOUL FORM OR PROJECTION |
SPIRIT MIND |
AT FIRST LIMITED | ||
| OUTWARD BODY | MATTER | LIMITED | ||
| Diagram 5 | ||||
Comparing this with diagram 4. we perceive that in the case of Jesus the plane of the Inmost does not appear. Yet in a later chapter, where the Divine is divided into its own elements of Good and Truth, this Inmost is represented by the Divine Truth, the form of the Divine Good.
The first plane of the soul-form provided by Jehovah for His extension into nature would be the plane of "Spirit," or that of the heavens where angels dwell, and we can understand that He assumed this plane from the spiritual atmospheres of the heavens, for it was, even in Christ at the very first, limited as angels are limited. It was imperfect as angels are imperfect, and yet more perfect than angels because it had God more directly resident in it than even the angels have. It was necessary that Christ should have this plane of created life in order to be perfect man with man's planes of life, in order to be a complete man.
The next plane which Jehovah provided in His assumption of an outward form would be that of the mental, or the natural above the body, the plane of the natural human mind; and we can assume that He provided this from the substances of its atmospheres.
We must bear in mind that it was proper and orderly and in harmony with all methods for the extension of life from the highest into lower forms for the Lord so to provide a form for His own extension into nature, providing it from the different planes through which it was to pass and in which it would later manifest itself.
God as He is in Himself could not directly come from the highest into the lowest. He had to come down through intermediate planes of creation. Yet we must believe, and we have abundant warrant for so believing, both from reason and the Word of God, that God was always potentially a man in the last things of nature. Nature is but the shadowing-forth, the projection of God, into ultimate forms, and all nature reflects the man-form. Trees with their branches and tops appear to strive to realize the human figure with its arms and head. Animal life in its progress upward grows more and more distinctly into the human form. Human society arranges itself into an approximation to the human form. All nature is thus the adumbration of the Divine, and suggests that the inmost soul of all is essentially Man.
Yet we can perceive that God in the creation of the natural universe separated it from Himself as it proceeded downward and outward, so that we can never correctly think of nature itself, or created forms, as being God. They are from God, but separated distinctly from Him. Yet it is obvious that God might proceed downward into the realms of lower created things by the projection of Himself. But in order to do this it would be inherently necessary for Him to provide a way for doing it, and the way He provided we may believe was by this assumption of the human soul-form and being born as to this outward form a man on the plane of matter. This would be but a step or a means by which He was later on coming directly and fully into all realms of creation. So that the soul-form provided, the life manifesting itself as an ordinary man would be only a process of extension of Himself, and an orderly one.
It is necessary to pause here for a moment to reply to difiiculties that naturally arise in the human mind.
For example, we are asked, Was not God always present on the different planes of creation? Yes, for God is omnipresent. But we can comprehend that before the Incarnation He was present mediately, not immediately. Thus, in the creation of the universe, both spiritual and material, we can perceive God creating all things through atmospheres thrown off from Him. He obviously created a spiritual universe as well as a natural, for we are to live hereafter in a spiritual universe, and man lives now more or less consciously in its atmospheres, and more distinctly and perceptibly after leaving the world of nature or the natural universe.
We can perceive how this creation was probably effected in the spiritual universe by its reproduction on the plane of the natural. We can see it imaged most perfectly in a single solar system. The sun, as a distinct initial manifestation of creative life on the natural plane, has its three atmospheres or aura, ether, and air, and in these atmospheres creative energy proceeding from the Lord through the sun operates to create a visible material world.
We see that creation proceeding downward by atmospheres to the lowest comes to rest in gross matter—the mineral kingdom; and then we witness its ascent upward in created forms of mineral, vegetable, and animal to man. God, before the assumption of the human, was in this lowest activity of the sun's in nature, for all life must inevitably proceed from its original Creator, God. But He was not there directly, or immediately, but indirectly and mediately.
By this inward projection of Himself through the soul-form taken from interior spiritual atmospheres downward into nature He provided the way, as we have already pointed out, to come eventually directly and immediately into the lowest plane of being, the natural universe, just as man, His image and likeness, is in it.
We have said that He was always potentially on this natural plane; for if He were not, He could not have descended into it; but He could not descend actually into it until He had provided in nature a form receptive, and directly and immediately receptive, of the very Divine itself.
This was a necessary mode of manifestation also because of man's fall from his original state of orderly life. We can understand that the pre—Adamite man was merely an animal man, but yet a distinct creation from the higher forms of animals below him, because he had the spiritual plane of life capable of receiving and manifesting the life of God as an image and likeness of God. He had not only the animal mind, but the spiritual mind, or plane of being, with the inmost within that. Because of this he grew upward until he became heavenly, or truly spiritual, in the Garden of Eden state. Yet he fell from that lofty estate and became wholly evil; and in order to save him and lift him up again into the true order of his being it became necessary for the very Divine to descend into human life and rescue man from himself, to reveal God to man and help him upward. This is a condescension that is predicable only of infinite Love and Wisdom, and yet is in harmony with His benevolent purposes obvious in creatlon.
We have shown previously from the Word of God that Jehovah said that He was so coming into nature, into the natural world, to rescue man. We have shown repeatedly, and we think conclusively, that He was to come in the form of a servant, despised and rejected of men, and yet that He Was to be "the mighty God, the everlasting Father." And we have seen that Jesus could have been no other than God in the flesh. "In the beginning was the Word," or Logos, or Expression of God—existing from the beginning of all things—"and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . And the Word (or God) was made flesh." This Word is the Divine Truth, the form of the Divine Good, always existent, corresponding, in the projection of God—the Divine Good—into nature to the plane of the Inmost in man. This Divine Truth, having as its inmost or soul the Divine Good, and in actual fact identical with it as form and substance are always one, clothed itself with a temporarily limited soul-form and fleshly body.