21 THE MYSTERY OF GODLINESS
THE MYSTERY OF GODLINESS “And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness:”1 Timothy 3:16 THAT is, in Christianity, which is the divine method for the production of godliness, or godlikeness, the transformation of man into the image of God, there are mysteries — supernatural things — miraculous things. And not only mysteries, but great mysteries, and so evidently is that true that it is without controversy — it is not open to question: “without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness:”1 Timothy 3:16 The apostle immediately enumerates six of these mysteries, not as exhausting the number by any means, but as illustrating his proposition that in Christianity there are mysteries.
First of all, he instances the incarnation:
“God was manifest in the flesh,” — 1 Timothy 3:16
Truly here is a mystery — nay, two of them, for God is a mystery and man is a mystery and the incarnation combines them both.
‘‘justified in the Spirit,” — 1 Timothy 3:16 first in His baptism, and again when, by the Spirit, He was raised from the dead, after bearing the sin of His people.
“seen of angels,” — 1 Timothy 3:16
Outside of the ordinary sight of man are intelligences, spiritual beings, angels. These are linked to this God man, this divine One.
“preached unto the Gentiles,” — 1 Timothy 3:16
It seems a strange thing that this should be counted among the mysteries, and yet to one instructed in Old Testament truth, it is a great mystery.
“believed on in the world,” — 1 Timothy 3:16 Another one of the mysteries of godliness, “received up into glory,” — 1 Timothy 3:16
— the crowning miracle of His resurrection and ascension into heaven. So that just illustratively, and as bringing out his thought, the apostle mentions six of these great mysteries which stand connected with godliness.
There is a tendency in our day to rest the defence of Christianity upon the superiority of its ethics, upon the moral beauty of it as a preceptive system. It was this fear of the miraculous, this lack of faith boldly to proclaim the mysteries and supernatural in the religion of Jesus Christ, which was the root-idea of a Parliament of Religions at the Chicago World’s Fair. The thought was not that we should demonstrate to the adherents of the false faiths the divine origin of ours by means of its supernaturalism, but that we should demonstrate that our ethical system was, on the whole, superior to theirs. Beyond all question there is in that superiority an unanswerable argument. But, after all, there is nothing more supernatural in Christianity than its ethics. We do not escape the miraculous, or marvelous, or mysterious in Christianity by exalting the preceptive teachings of the Word of God, for the absolutely unique character of those teachings immediately raises the question of origin.
Compared with this body of precept all the codes of all the philosophies are imperfect — not to say defiled by obvious imperfections. Take, for instance, the Ten Commandments. You may rest their vindication upon their rightness. Every one admits that it is right to do those things which are commanded and wrong to do those things which are forbidden. But that very perfection suggests the inquiry: “Whence came that law?” So, by whatever road we approach the subject, we get back, after all, to the supernatural, to the mysterious. . It is an inescapable element of the Christian faith.
Turn to the Acts of the Apostles. Trace the history of the first putting forth of this gospel of Jesus Christ. You find the constant insistence upon the marvelous and mysterious in it as the unanswerable proof that it came from God. The great burden of the apostolic preaching was the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was a recent event. The witnesses of His resurrection to the number of about five hundred were still living. The whole matter was one open to inquiry and susceptible of ordinary investigation. And the first preachers went everywhere, resting the authority of the gospel which they preached upon that stupendous miracle — the resurrection. But all the mysteries were preached. There was no apology for these things; nay, they were insisted upon; the weight of the argument is upon them. The advance and maintenance of the gospel was made to depend upon the supernatural in the faith, upon the great body of mystery which it holds. Everywhere the incarnation, resurrection, the second advent of Jesus Christ, the existence and presence of angels, were the every-day testimony of the apostolic church. They gloried in these truths, they were not afraid of them, and they did not apologize for them.
Since, then, these great mysteries inhere in the Christian faith, we shall do well to consider what they are and why they are there.
First of all, we ought to expect it to be so. If God is at work for the saving of men; if the gospel is what the apostle Paul said it was — and he gave that as his reason for not being ashamed of it —
“the power of God unto salvation to everyone thatbelieveth”;—Romans 1:16 if the very essence of Christianity is that men are saved, not by conformity to ethical precepts, but by a great God-wrought work; then, just because God is doing it, there must be a measure of mystery in it. It would not be God’s work if there were not mystery in its processes.
God’s work in creation is full of mystery. We do not refuse to believe the great patent and obtrusive facts of creation because we are unable to explain them. The very commonest phenomenon, that of life — so common that we cannot live (with our senses at all exercised) through one day without observing it again and again — whether in the tiny blade of grass or in the men and women about us, is a mystery which has never been solved. Today it is as great a mystery as it was in the very dawn of creation; no one knows anything about it except the fact of it. But we do not refuse to credit the fact, because unable to explain the process. We do not recoil from the material universe of God and refuse to believe in it because we cannot explain its mystery. Wherever we find God’s work, we find the miraculous and mysterious. If God is at work, this is inevitable.
Now, if this is true of God’s work in creation, it must be true of God’s work in redemption, and that simply because it is the Incomprehensible who is at work. Therefore when we come upon a miracle, we do not apologize for it, we do not retire it into the background of our testimony and make as little of it as possible, but we exult in it and proclaim it. We glory in the fact that this Christianity of ours presents mysteries which are, at present, insoluble — into the processes of which the mind cannot penetrate. We point to that as God’s very sign manual and authentication of the system. If that were wanting we should reject the system as evidently man-made. A God whose being and processes I could understand, would be of precisely my girth and stature — no more. So this fact that there are mysteries in Christianity is our boast. It is the unanswerable proof to our minds that God, indeed, is the Author of this religion.
If we examine the natural religions — the manmade religions — we do not find this mystery. We find a vast number of fables, it is true, but we are easily led to see (even the enlightened votaries of these religions acknowledge this) that they are old wives’ tales and mere childish traditions. Not so if we turn to the mysteries of the Christian faith, for we ourselves are the subjects of them in large part and are seeing the effects and results of them every day in our own experiences. For some of the very profoundest of these mysteries are perpetually renewed, continually reenacted. Regeneration, answered prayer, the hand of God in human affairs — these are the mysteries in which we live and move and have our being. It is not a question of historical signs and wonders merely; it is a question of a living experience with a living God whose dealings perpetually transcend the reach of our comprehension. In the second place, in every one of these mysteries there are two elements. There is the fact, which is always simple, historical, obvious, reasonable; and there is the explanation of that fact, which eludes our discernment. There lies the baffling, the mystery. What is done is evident. How it came to be done is the thing we do not understand. The process is not explained. Therein lies the element of mystery in this faith of ours.
Take for an illustration the first of the mysteries enumerated by Paul in our text — the incarnation. The Scriptures state the fact of the incarnation in the simplest terms:
“God was manifest in the flesh” —1 Timothy 3:16 “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,” — John 1:14 As a fact, therefore, it offers itself to human observation and verification. So we look at Jesus —
“manifest in the flesh” —1 Timothy 3:16 therefore human, and immediately observation confirms the fact. How perfectly human, how entirely human He is! There is a birth; there is a cradle; there are swaddling clothes; there is a nursing mother; there is growth; .there is the obedience of a child; and there is, finally, the taking up of a great mission — a man goes out among his fellow men, weeps when they weep, rejoices when they rejoice, is weary like other men, and at last dies.
Yet this man is just as evidently doing things which only God can do. He makes it evident that He is omniscient and omnipotent. He knows what is going on at a distance. He creates. He commands nature and she obeys. He heals incurable diseases and He raises the dead. The fact of the incarnation is confirmed — we see the man, and we see God. But — and here is the mystery — when we would go behind the fact and ask: “How can that be? How is it that God can be incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth?” we get no answer. A fact, then, is given, which is verifiable, simple, obvious, and it is the fact which is presented for our faith, and not the process, not the method. This is true of all these mysteries. Take for another illustration, regeneration:
“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again” — John 3:3 Instantly we are ready with the question of Nicodemus:
“How can a man be born when he is old?” — John 3:4
What is the answer? Is there an unveiling of that mysterious process by which the Spirit of God, acting upon the Word, imparts the divine life, — creates a new man within a living man? Not at all; not the smallest syllable of explanation of the process. What then are we told?
“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” — John 3:14-15 And then we look away to Christ crucified; we see Him bearing “our sins in his own body on the tree” — 1 Peter 2:24 and we say with Paul:
“who loved me, and gave himself for me.” — Galatians 2:20
Lo! the mystery is enacted and we are born again — but our senses are not quick enough to surprise God in the process. Here for our faith is a fact, Jesus hanging upon the Cross. The cross has an historical place: it is a fact in the world’s history, — just as real a fact as the battle of Waterloo, — and that fact is presented for our belief, not the explanation of the fact. But the result of faith in the fact of the cross is another fact — and this too is verifiable. We see men full of all kinds of evil, transformed in life, and we see, too, that the change is first of all within. The changed outward life is the spontaneous, joyous outworking of a wholly new inner life, so that it is natural, so to speak, for these things to come forth. We see, then, the result. We are not taken into the mystery of the process.
Take prayer, — the most familiar of the experiences of a Christian. There, also, you have a very simple fact, and a mystery very profound. A child of God lifts up his voice and heart to God. Does he see God? Not at all. So far as outward observation goes, he is talking into the air. He may not be talking audibly at all; perhaps the anguish is too great to put into words and his groans ascend to the throne of God. Does he see God? No. But presently something happens and it is the very thing he asked for.
Only yesterday I called upon a friend who for weary months has been suffering and is now facing a surgical operation that may be fatal, as she well knows. She was telling me of her experience. She has already undergone one exceedingly perilous and painful operation. Her testimony was that two weeks before it was to be performed she was filled with the torment of fear. She said with a sweet humility, “I didn’t know how to pray, but I asked God to take that fear away, and — would you believe it, He did.” So it is with the providences of life. Prosperity comes to one, losses to another. One pathway seems to be strewn with roses, another is paved with thorns. Why? I do not know: it is a mystery. But as I stand before it, baffled and perplexed, I hear the words of the Lord Jesus:
“What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.” — John 13:7
How strange, how inexplicable is the providence of death! How strange some deaths! How sorely puzzled I was when that young missionary, dear Clarence Wilbur, was taken in the morning of his beautiful manhood from the very forefront of the fight down there in dark Central America, a noble soldier of Jesus Christ stricken down dead! Why was I not taken? Why not some of us who seem to be doing so little for the Lord? Why should he be taken? I do not know. I have no solution to offer.
I think of dear Mrs. Dillon, another missionary, heroine in Jesus Christ, taken from her husband, from her children, and from her work in that same dark land. In the mysteries of godliness, the human side is always simple, reasonable and right. It commends itself to the judgment and to the conscience and to the heart of man, invariably. Judgment says, it is wise to trust Christ; conscience affirms that it is right to trust Christ; the unquiet heart knows it can never rest until it trusts Christ. But connected with this simple, reasonable and right thing which man is to do, there is a great category of strange and marvelous and unexplained things, which God will do, but that is God’s part of it. We go stumbling over that which God reserves to Himself, and we are unable to find one single, unreasonable requirement — staggering, puzzling requirement — laid upon us.
This, then, is what it comes to: God offers facts to human faith — verifiable facts, and facts for the truth of which, before He demands faith, He invariably offers proof. Jesus Christ said:
“believe me for the very works’ sake” — John 14:11 abundant proof concerning that which is asked of you and of me—faith for that which God reserves to Himself. It is beautiful to see how Paul, for instance, and all men of faith of the Bible, humbly took this place. They confessed themselves to be beginners in the school of God.
“For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.”1 Corinthians 13:9 says the great apostle.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly;”1 Corinthians 13:12 Does Paul stumble therefore? Not at all. With quiet assurance, he stands before this partial knowledge, this clouded mirror, and answers:
“But when that which is perfect is come,
then that which is in part shall be done away.” — 1 Corinthians 13:10 “but then shall I know even as also I am known.”1 Corinthians 13:12
Meantime he trusted that the Almighty was taking care of the mysteries. Is this difficult, dear friends? Can we not trust and patiently wait? We are in the kindergarten now; perhaps we could not understand the method of the mysteries, even if it were told us ever so plainly.