- THE REDEMPTIVE PLAN

He came to that which was his own … (John 1:11)
In earlier verses in John’s Gospel record, we have read in remarkably brief and simple words of the eternal past and of the eternal Son. We are told that from the beginning He was God; that He made all things, and that in Him was Light and that in Him was life.
Surely, these powerfully simple words and phrases are at the root of all theology. They are at the root of all truth.
How thrilling it is for us, then, to receive in these two words, He came, the confirmation of the Incarnation, God come in the flesh!
I confess that I am struck with the wonder and the significance of the limitless meaning of these two words, He came. Within them the whole scope of divine mercy and redeeming love is outlined. All of the mercy God is capable of showing, all of the redeeming grace that He could pour from His heart, all of the love and pity that God is capable of feeling—all of these are at least suggested here in the message that He came!
Beyond that, all of the hopes and longings and aspirations, all of the dreams of immortality that lie in the human breast, all had their fulfillment in the coming to earth of Jesus, the Christ and Redeemer.
Man has always been a hopeful creature, causing Milton to write that “hope springs eternal in the human breast.” Even fallen man continues to be an aspiring creature. We are reminded that while mired in the pigsty, the prodigal remembered his father’s house, and within himself pondered the question of “What am I doing here?”
All of our hopes and dreams of immortality, our fond visions of a life to come, are summed up in these simple words in the Bible record: He came! I suppose it is the editor nature within me to note that I am impressed with the fact that these two one-syllable words occupy only seven spaces in a printed line. But what these two words tell us is more profound than all of philosophy, and I am not using the superlative carelessly in this context.
There are times when the use of the superlative is absolutely necessary and you cannot escape it. The coming of Jesus Christ into this world represents a truth more profound than all of philosophy, for all of the great thinkers of the world together could never produce anything that could even remotely approach the wonder and the profundity disclosed in the message of these words, He came!
These words are wiser than all learning. Understood in their high spiritual context, they are more beautiful than all art, more eloquent than all oratory, more lyric and moving than all music—because they tell us that all of mankind, sitting in darkness, has been visited by the Light of the world!
Oh, I am sure that we are all too passive about what this really means! When we sing “The Light of the world is Jesus,” there should be a glow on our faces that would make the world believe that we mean it.
It meant something vast and beautiful to Milton—and he celebrated the coming of Jesus into the world with one of the most beautiful and moving expressions ever written by a man.
Milton’s heart was surely bowing in the Presence as he wrote:
This is the Month, and this the happy morn
Wherein the Son of Heav’n’s eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.
That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
Wherewith he wont at Heav’n’s high Council Table
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside; and here with us to be,
Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day,
And chose with us a darksome House of mortal Clay.
See how from far upon the Eastern road
The star-led Wizards haste with odors sweet:
Oh run! prevent them with thy humble ode,
And lay it lowly at his blessed feet;
Have thou the honor first thy Lord to greet,
And join thy voice with the Angel Choir,
From out his secret Altar toucht with hallow’d fire.
Such was Milton’s poetic description of his feelings and his understanding of the Incarnation.
For myself, I am one who is just plain childishly glad that He came!
It is the grandest story of all the ages—yet many of us sit and listen and then we yawn and inwardly confess, “I am bored!”
The reason?
I think we have heard it and heard it again so many times that it no longer means to us all that it should.
Oh, brethren—these wonderful and beautiful and mysterious words—He came!
His own
Then we read that “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him” (John 1:11).
There is a significant fact in the use of these words, his own. In their double use in this passage in the English language, the words seem to be the same.
But, as used by John, the translation of the first is that He came unto His own things, His own world, His own home.
One translation says, “He came unto His own home.”
The second use then is different—as though “the people in His own world did not receive Him.”
Let us think about His world to which He came—for it is Christ’s world. The world we buy and sell and kick around and take by force of arms—this world is Christ’s world. He made it and He owns it all.
Jesus Christ, the eternal Word, made this world. He made the very atoms of which Mary was made; the atoms of which His own body was made. He made the straw in that manger upon which He was laid as a newborn baby.
I have given much thought to this sweetest and tenderest of all the mysteries in God’s revelation to man.
I confess that I would have liked to have seen the baby Jesus. That is not a possibility—for death has no more dominion over Him, and He is glorified yonder at the right hand of the Majesty on high. But that same Jesus, now ascended and glorified, was that baby Jesus once cradled in the manger straw. Taking a body of humiliation, He was still the Creator who made the wood of the manger, made the straw and was Creator of all the beasts that were there. In truth, He had made the little town and all that it was. He had also made the star that lingered over the scene that night.
This was the eternal One. He had come into His own world. While we often talk about Him being our guest here, it is not Jesus Christ who is the guest.
We talk about making God partner in our affairs but I dare to tell people that they should stop patronizing Jesus Christ. He is not the guest here—He is the host!
We are the guests and we are here by sufferance. It is time for us to stop apologizing for the Lord Jesus Christ and start apologizing for ourselves!
We have a lot of apologists who write books and give lectures apologizing for the person of Christ and trying to “explain” to our generation that the Bible does not mean “exactly” what it says.
God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ and thus we know where we stand, believing that “through him all things were made; and without him nothing was made that has been made.”
Jesus Christ made the world in which we live and He placed all of the stars and planets in their courses throughout the universe.
Can any man believe that God really needs him and commissions him to run around apologizing and explaining, rushing in to take God’s part and setting up a logical defense for the eternal, omniscient and omnipotent God?
The earthly relationship
I am going to digress here to make a further point concerning the earthly relationship of this eternal One who came unto His own world.
I hear an occasional devotional exercise on the radio in which the participants ask: “Mary, mother of God, pray for us.”
Mary is dead and she is not the mother of God. It is only right that we should express our position based on the Word of God.
If Mary is the mother of God, then Elizabeth is God’s cousin. You can check back and if that is true, then God has a wide assortment of cousins and uncles and grandchildren—all to the point of absurdity.
Mary is not the mother of God, for the Holy Ghost said in the Scriptures, “A body you prepared for me” (see Hebrews 10:5; Psalms 22:9-10; Philippians 2:7-8).
Mary was the mother of that tiny babe. God in His loving and wise plan of redemption used the body of the virgin Mary as the matrix to form a body for His eternal Son, who was with the Father and was Himself God.
For love and faith and humility we honor Mary. She was chosen of God to be the recipient of the eternal Son and to give that Son a human body.
That is why we do not join in saying, “Mary, mother of God.” We should always refer to her as “Mary, mother of Christ.” Then we have it right and we have given Mary her proper honor, for it is an honor higher than given to any other woman since time began.
I have expressed this here because Jesus Christ, the eternal Word, made this world. He knew what He was doing when He made us in the image of God and He does not want us to compromise or rationalize on His behalf.
What does He want from us? The way in which we can most perfectly please Him is to render to Him the total commitment of our beings! Every one of us needs to bow and kneel before Him, confessing that we are sinners, with the earnest prayer: “Oh, Lord, touch me and make me whole!”
Then we are able to stand on our feet, cleansed and forgiven, no longer crawling in the mire and degradation of the darkness. It is then that we can stand up and looking to the heavens, sing with feeling and assurance:
I was once a sinner, but I came
Pardon to receive from my Lord,
This was freely given, and I found
That He always keeps His word.
In the Book ‘tis written, Saved by grace;
Oh, the joy that came to my soul!
Now I am forgiven and I know
By the blood I am made whole!
We belong to God. We belong to His Christ. This is our Father’s world. Everything we touch and handle belongs to Him. The breezes that blow, the clouds above, the fields of corn and waving wheat, the tall, noble forests and the flowing rivers—they are all His!
We have come to love Him and adore Him and honor Him—but we do not patronize and we do not apologize.
Yes, He came in the fullness of time, and His own world, the world of nature, received Him. But His own people received Him not!
It is my own feeling that when Jesus came, all of nature went out to greet Him. The star led the wise men from the East. The cattle in the stable stall in Bethlehem did not bother Him.
His own things in created nature received Him.
Dr. G. Campbell Morgan in his volume called The Crisis of the Christ, points out that when Jesus went into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil, He was there with the wild beasts for forty days and nights.
Dr. Morgan believed that there had been a wrong conception about Jesus being with the animals, as though they had been wanting to attack Him and that He had to have angelic protection.
Dr. Morgan said, properly, “That is not true. The wild beasts recognized their King, and no doubt they crept to His feet and licked them.”
In harmony with the natural world
Jesus was perfectly safe there—He was nature’s Creator and Lord. He was in harmony with nature. As He grew in stature and wisdom, I think the wind blew for His pleasure and the very earth on which He trod smiled. The stars at night looked down on the cottage of that Man known as the humble carpenter.
Let me venture an opinion here. Jesus was in harmony with in this world and I am of the opinion that the deeper our own Christian commitment becomes the more likely we will find ourselves in tune and in harmony with the natural world around us.
Some people have always scoffed at the habits of St. Francis as though he probably was not in his right mind. I have come to believe that he was so completely yielded to God, so completely and fully taken up with the Presence of the Holy Ghost that all of nature was friendly to him.
He preached to the birds, he called the rain and the wind his friends and the moon his sister. His life contained many and unusual delights because God’s blessed world received him so fully and so warmly.
Brethren, I am not ashamed of his world—I am only ashamed of man’s sin. If you could take all of the sin out of this world, suddenly extract it, there would be nothing in all the world to be ashamed of and nothing to be afraid of.
Take away the sin and there would be no more sickness and disease. There would be no patients in the mental asylums. Crime would be a thing of the past and you could go to bed at night and leave all the doors unlocked.
That is why I have repeated we have no business making excuses for God. Our apologies must be for humanity—and for our sins.
I believe that Jesus carried a perfect body to Calvary but there, dying on the cross, all of our human filth, our sins and sicknesses and diseases, were all laid on Him.
He had come into His own world, where even the winds and waves obeyed His least command. We call those events miracles, but really it was just God Almighty acting like God in the world that received Him.
But when we come to consider the people, proud humanity with all of its sin and sicknesses and death—that is another story!
In the fullness of time, it was the nation of Israel, the Jews, to whom Jesus came. Of all the people on the earth, the nation of Israel surely was the best prepared to receive Him because they were the children of Abraham, called to be a chosen people in an everlasting covenant with God the Father.
Israel had the revelation of God. The Israelites knew all the traditions of worship and faith. They had the prophets. They had the temple worship and the observances of the holy days.
Yet having all of these, they failed to recognize Jesus as Messiah and Lord. There is no doubt that theirs was the greatest moral blunder in the history of mankind, for He came to His own people and His own people rejected Him! Oh, the blindness of it all when the Jews turned Him away.
The Bible is very plain in warning us and telling us of that kind of spiritual blindness.
In earlier and troubled times in the nation, God had commissioned Isaiah as His prophet, telling him: “Go, and tell this people: `Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’ Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed” (Isaiah 6:9-10).
This was the kind of blindness that lay upon them when He came and they did not recognize Him. It was a stroke of God Almighty upon them for sin. They rejected Him.
His own people received Him not—and the question follows, “Why?”
First of all, I think it would have meant probable financial loss for many to step out of their situations in life and follow Jesus. The rich young ruler who came to Jesus to ask questions is a good example of that position. He was interested in the teachings of Jesus and asked what he should do. Jesus gave him a test of discipleship, urging him to dispose of his properties and join the disciples in following Him. But the young man made his choice and went away sorrowing, for he had great possessions.
I am afraid that humanity’s choice would still be the same today—people are more in love with their money and their possessions than they are with God.
Second, for many of those men and women who considered the claims of Christ in His day, following Jesus would have called for abrupt and drastic changes in their pattern of living. They could not tolerate the thought of allowing the selfish and proud aspects of their lives to be disturbed.
I think a third factor was their almost complete disdain for inward spiritual life which Jesus taught as a necessity for mankind. When Jesus insisted that it is the pure in heart who will see God, that it is the humble mourner who will be comforted and that the meek will inherit the earth—all of this meant a great housecleaning inwardly.
In our day history repeats itself—many who want to follow the Christian traditions still balk and reject a thoroughgoing spiritual housecleaning within their beings.
Fourth, Jesus brought forth a whole new concept among humans that the first shall be last in the kingdom—and that the person who will be a committed Christian must know the meaning of complete abdication of self.
The centuries have not changed this. Jesus still calls with a definite challenge that “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).
Fifth, Jesus talked about the necessity of the genuineness of faith—faith in the unseen; faith that has no dependence upon the works of the Law; faith that does not stake its trust on the temple or the traditions.
Jesus taught frankly that He was asking His followers to throw themselves out on God. For the multitudes, He was asking too much. He had come from God—but they received Him not!
Now, coming back to the responsibilities of men and women in our own day—it seems to be a very satisfying thing for some to just sit back and belabor the Jews. It is very comforting for us, two thousand years removed, to preach about the Jews who did not receive Him. It is a kind of safety valve for us, a red herring that we draw across the trail, as though it will take God’s eyes away from our own sins and our own rejections.
Jesus taught very plainly that we should take the beam from our own eyes in order to see clearly to remove the mote from our brother’s eye.
Every one of us should be warned about this kind of self-deception in matters of spiritual responsibility. We have two thousand years of Christian teaching and preaching that the Jews did not have. We have a revelation that the Jews did not have, for we have both the Old and the New Testaments. We have information and spiritual light that the Jews did not have in their time.
Then, too, we have an urgency by the presence of the Holy Spirit which the Jews did not have.
In short, I do not think for one minute that we ought to spend our time belaboring the Jews and comforting our own carnal hearts by any emphasis that Israel rejected Him. If we do, we only rebuild the sepulchers of our fathers, as Jesus said.
Brethren, history tells us that they did what they wanted to do. They knew their spiritual responsibilities but they still rejected Jesus when He came into their midst.
The same situation is all around us today. Millions of men and women with an understanding of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, with many years of spiritual light and Bible teaching in their backgrounds, still are not willing to receive and commit themselves to Him whom the very angels and stars and rivers receive. They hesitate and they delay because they know God is asking the abdication of their own selfish little kingdom and interest.
Some go “underground”
I know that some of you are not going to change your way of living. You will go “underground” before you will do that. As far as some people are concerned, I am sure that all of my preaching has only the result of driving them underground. They will not consent to the thorough inward housecleaning that is involved in full commitment to Christ.
Forgiveness and cleansing and purity! I will tell you this about the manger stall in which they laid the baby Jesus—it was clean. It was simple, it was plain—even rude by our standards, but I know it was clean. Joseph and Mary would never have let the baby Jesus lie there in a dirty crib—and it is just as true today that our Lord will not inhabit any place that is not clean.
Some people would rather have the dirt than to have the presence of the Son of God. They prefer to stay in the darkness than to come to the Light of the world. They have every opportunity to come. They have every kind of spiritual light. But they will not receive Him—they do not want their spiritual houses to be clean.
This is the tragedy of mankind, my brethren. We have rejected Him from our hearts because we must have our own way. The true meaning of Christianity is a mystery until we have been converted and brought in by the miracle-working, transforming power of the new birth. Until Jesus Christ is sincerely received, there can be no knowledge of salvation, nor any understanding of the things of God.
The little, selfish, sinful man rejects the Son of God. While he is still enumerating the things he desires and the things he wants, the Son of God stands outside.
“He came . . . and his own did not receive him” (John 1:11).
My brethren, I repeat: that is the great tragedy of mankind!