032. REVOLT OF HUMAN WILL FROM GOD

REVOLT OF HUMAN WILL FROM GOD The fall, then, was the revolt of the human will from God. Evolution not only cannot throw doubt upon the fact, but it requires the fact to explain man’s subsequent history. The later modifications of Darwinism only confirm the scriptural account. Though Weismann denies the transmission of acquired characters, Wallace is probably far nearer the truth when he maintains that there is "always a tendency to transmit acquired characters, but that only those which affect the blood and nervous system, like drunkenness and syphilis, overcome the fixed habit of the organism and make themselves permanent." But why confine this transmission merely to physical acquisitions? Moral changes are more fundamental. The act of will by which man turned his back upon the life and love of God and set up an independent sovereignty in this universe was an act which not only changed his moral environment but deprived him of all moral sustenance. Here is cause for atrophy, corruption, death. Here is a change which affects the very roots of being. As regeneration is the new creation of man’s moral nature by God, so the fall was man’s own creation of an evil nature by self-will and disobedience. It was the most tremendous act of independent volition ever put forth by man. It revolutionized his being. It changed the direction of the deepest springs of life. The changed nature was transmitted, for there was no other nature to transmit. Evolution became the evolution of a dwarfed and degraded humanity, or in other words evolution became degradation. So much with regard to evolution and man’s fall. Let me now speak of evolution and man’s redemption. And here I must remind you once more of the original and natural relation of the race to Christ. It is in him that the race was created, and he was from the very beginning the constant source of its physical and moral life. When man broke away from moral control and in his moral life became self-centered and independent, he did not, simply because he could not, break away from his natural connection with the indwelling Christ, in whom he lived and moved and had his being. Man can scoff at his Saviour, but he cannot do without him, simply because that Saviour is the source of his life, and doing without him is annihilation. If you could imagine a finger endowed with free-will and trying to sunder its connection with the body by tying a string around itself, you would have a picture of man trying to sunder his connection with Christ. What is the result of such an attempt? Why, pain, decay; possible, nay, incipient death, to the finger. By what law? By the law of the organism, which is so constituted as to maintain itself against its own disruption by the revolt of the members. The pain and death of the finger is the reaction of the whole against the treason of the part. The finger suffers pain. But are there no results Christ’s Suffering Is Atoning of pain to the body? Does not the body feel pain also? How plain it is that no such pain can be confined to the single part! The heart feels, aye, the whole organism feels, because all the parts are members one of another. It not only suffers, but that suffering tends to remedy the evil and to remove its cause. The whole body summons its forces, pours new tides of life into the dying member, strives to rid the finger of the ligature that binds it. So, through all the course of history, from the moment of the first sin, Christ, the natural life of the race, has been afflicted in the affliction of humanity and has suffered for human sin. The whole creation that groaneth and travaileth in pain together expresses the struggling of Christ with moral evil, for matter cannot groan, nor can the irrational universe feel. And the groanings of the believer in his prayers for the lost are the expression in man’s finite nature of the infinite sorrow of the Holy Spirit, who is himself the Spirit of Christ. This suffering has been an atoning suffering, since it has been due to righteousness. If God had not been holy, if God had not made all nature express the holiness of his being, if God had not made pain and loss the necessary consequences of sin, then Christ would not have suffered. But since these things are sin’s penalty and Christ is the life of the sinful race, it must needs be that Christ should suffer. There is nothing arbitrary in the laying upon him of the iniquities of us all. There is an original grace as well as an original sin. The fact that Christ is our life makes it inevitable that we should derive from him many an impulse and influence that does not belong to our sinful nature. The heart sends its blood into the decaying member, if perchance it may yet be restored. So there are a thousand currents of moral life, flowing into the lives of men, which come from Christ the life of humanity. The virtues of the unregenerate upon which they pride themselves are due not to themselves but to his grace. The light of conscience, of tradition, of parental training, of social ethics, of civilization in general, all proceeds from Christ. No man ever thinks truly, feels rightly, acts nobly, except as Christ works in him. There is no such thing as independent human action, except in the case of sin. It is Christ who works all our good works in us. While it takes only one to do evil, it takes two to do good. This is true everywhere. Christ, the Light of the World, is shining in all lands, among the heathen as well as in Christendom, leading individuals here and there to see their sins and to cast themselves upon God for pardon, and preparing communities and nations to receive the published message of salvation. Yet everywhere and always it is his power and grace, and no works or worthiness of man, that regenerate, justify, and save. That this spiritual life of the race should be summed up in the historical Christ and should find in him its channel of manifestation and communication to the world is not only in perfect accordance with the method of evolution, but is absolutely required by it. The tendency of all biological inquiry is to trace life in each of its departments back to a single germ. All the human inhabitants of the globe derive their life from a single human ancestor—a fact a priori difficult to predict, and, considering the immense number of so-called chance variations which had at favorable times to be taken advantage of, a priori almost incredible. Yet the sudden appearance of man, with powers immensely transcending those of the brute, and with a progeny reproducing those same powers, is a fact of biological history. Now if it is consistent with evolution that the physical and natural life of the race should be derived from a single source, then it is equally consistent with evolution that the moral and spiritual life of the race should also be derived from a single source. Scripture is stating only scientific fact when it sets the second Adam, the head of redeemed humanity, over against the first Adam, the head of fallen humanity. We are told that evolution should give us many Christs. We reply that evolution has not given us many Adams. Evolution, as it assigns to the natural head of the race a supreme and unique position, must be consistent with itself, and must assign a supreme and unique position to Jesus Christ, the spiritual head of the race. As there was but one Adam from whom all the natural life of the race was derived, so there can be but one Christ from whom all the spiritual life of the race is derived.

I would pursue this analogy yet further, and would find in the relation of the first Adam to the previous physical life of the world, a type of the relation of the second Adam to the previous spiritual life of the world. The whole process of evolution which preceded man’s appearance upon this planet was the manifestation of an intelligence and a will struggling upward through lower forms toward rationality and freedom. To put it in more theological phrase, the preincarnate Logos was exhibiting the divine wisdom and power in successive approximations toward humanity. Psychical man was the result,—a being with spiritual powers, but with these powers as yet unexercised and untried. "That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual." The spiritual was only potential, and it was lost by the exercise of man’s power of contrary choice. What might have been an upward evolution and a continual progress in likeness to God became a downward evolution and a continual progress in evil. But now began a new manifestation of the life of Christ. The same immanent Logos whose operation had thus far culminated in rational man now instituted a long process for the evolution of spiritual man. The history of the race became a preparation for the coming of the second Adam, as the history of life before man’s appearance had been a preparation for the coming of the first Adam. Out of a prepared nation Christ emerged, as out of the highest forms of pre-existing^-life Adam had emerged. Do you say that the virgin birth of Christ makes his origin unique? I reply that the first advent of man is no less unique. The miraculous conception to which we must hold if we would maintain either the purity of Mary his mother or his own freedom from hereditary taint, was the work of the Spirit of God, no more and no less than the bringing of a free human intelligence out of a race of apelike progenitors was a work of the Spirit of God. In both cases the result was one to which the life of the planet had been tending. In both it was the culmination of an age-long process of development. In both it was the goal to which the immanent Christ had been conducting the evolution of the world The new science recognizes more than one method of propagation even in one and the same species, and it is no wonder that in the introduction of him who was the crown and summit of the whole system we should see a return to the original method of parthenogenesis.