• What's a Nazirite vow?
  See Numbers 6:1-21.  In a nutshell, it is a voluntary vow that a man or woman can take to be consecrated to God for a period of time.  The consecration consists of not drinking wine or any food or drink made from grapes, not cutting your hair (note: actually the beard is not included; compare Numbers 6:18 with Leviticus 14:9), and not becoming ceremonially unclean by touching a dead body.
• Isn't it an Old Testament thing?
  No.  It's a Jewish thing.  Paul took a Nazirite vow (Acts 18:18), and Paul also paid for the sacrifices so that three Jewish believers in Jesus could complete their Nazirite vows in Jerusalem (Acts 21:23-24).  (Sidenote: if you think that Paul was compromising his belief in justification by faith by doing this, go back and read Acts 15.  For Jewish believers in Jesus, keeping the law is about voluntary obedience and love for God.  According to Hebrews 7:11-19, no one was ever saved by keeping the Law.)
• But you're not Jewish...
  No.  That's true.  However, I do love Jesus and I have a desire to be consecrated to Him.  In a sense, I borrowed a Jewish act of consecration because contemporary American evangelical culture does not have any comparable means of sacrificially expressing devotion to Jesus.  And it is in the Bible after all...
  
• Did Lou Engle dig this up on his own?
  Lou Engle apparently had a dream in the late '90s about calling out contemporary Nazirites as a challenge for 21st century America.  But he's not the first one to go back to the Old Testament and find this vow.  As at least one example, Rees Howells performed a Nazirite vow in the early 20th century (see Rees Howells: Intercessor, by Norman Grubb, pages 113-120).
• What's the point?
  The Bible actually says basically nothing about what the vow is for.  I'll post some more thoughts below, but one thing that I do want to say very clearly is that a Nazirite vow does not earn favor with God.  We are accepted by God only and entirely because of what Jesus did at the Cross.  If we are in Christ, God enjoys us as His children and delights in us because of our sincerity of heart - that is, our pursuit of complete obedience (pursuit, not the attainment of it).  No act of devotion can make Him love us more, just as no sin can make Him love us less.  On the flip side, if we are living in unrepentant sin, no act of devotion can make up for the lack of obedience either ("To obey is better than sacrifice", 1 Samuel 15:22).

What I Learned

My Nazirite vow began on January 21, and lasted for 208 days, ending yesterday.  Reflecting back on the past 200 days (as I rub my shaved head), the following thoughts come to mind:

• I am weak but He is strong.
  The deepest insight that I have gained out of this experience is my weakness.  If I thought I was out to demonstrate my holiness by a act of radical devotion, I failed completely.  For much of this time, I have been half-hearted in prayer and pursuing intimacy with the Lord.  I fell into all the same sins I struggled with before.  And therefore I felt like a hypocrite - I had the symbol of my consecration on my head, but I wasn't living a consecrated life. 
  
  In the end, I have come back again at a deeper level to the place where I started.  If my hope of living the Christian life depends on  me, I'm screwed.  I am weak.  Though I still hope and pray for breakthroughs and increasing victory over specific areas of sin, I will always be weak.
  
  But He is strong.  My hope is not in my faithfulness, my ability to obey His commandments consistently, my ability to fast, or my perseverance in prayer.  My hope is in Him - Him alone!
  
  Lamentations 3:22-24
  ²² Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed,
  Because His compassions fail not.
  ²³ They are new every morning;
  Great is Your faithfulness.
  ²⁴ “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
  “Therefore I hope in Him!”
  
  
• Being a Walking Declaration of the Worthy God
  Something I've thought about a lot is why God set up the Nazirite vow the way that He did.  The Nazirite vow might seem to be similar to fasting as an expression of "radical" devotion to God in the contemporary Church, but there are major differences. 
  • Fasting has a very practical dimension - it weakens your body, not just as a symbol of dependence on God, but as a means of actually increasing conscious dependence on God.  The Nazirite vow is basically symbolic. 
  • Fasting is to be primarily a private practice (Matthew 6:16-18), but the Nazirite vow is impossible to hide.
  • Fasting was mandatory for the people of God in the Old Testament (Leviticus 23:26-29), and is expected in the New Testament (Matthew 6:16, 9:15). The Nazirite vow, with the exception of a few special cases (e.g. Samson, Judges 13:5), is voluntary.
  • Fasting includes a dimension of seeking (seeking an answer to prayer, e.g. David, 2 Samuel 12:16; or seeking revelation, e.g. Daniel, Daniel 10:2-3, 10:12).  The Nazirite vow is more often an expression of gratitude and overflow towards God (e.g. Samuel, 1 Samuel 1:11).
  So what is the Nazirite vow really about?  I have two Biblical observations:  First, the Nazirite vow in the beginning of Numbers 6 immediately precedes the Aaronic blessing (Numbers 6:22-27).  Second, Nazirites are mentioned in the same breath with prophets in Amos 2:11-12.
  I think that the fundamental purpose of a Nazirite vow - a very public, strange, symbolic, and voluntary expression of devotion to God - is to serve as a walking declaration of the existence and beauty of God.  The Nazirite becomes a public reminder of God as he or she lives out life.  If the culture is walking in awareness of and obedience to God, then the public reminder is a blessing and the Nazirites contribute to the blessing of the society.  But if the culture is in rebellion against God, then the Nazirites are an ever-present rebuke to the godless self-seeking that surrounds them.  That is why the people of Israel in Amos' day suppressed the Nazirites.
  I am reminded of something I experienced when I spent a weekend at a Benedictine monastery a few years ago.  The monks' way of life - their silence, their Latin prayers, their old-fashioned cloaks and sandals, and above all the awareness that they would do this for the rest of their lives - were all very foreign to a 21st century American.  The overwhelming feeling I had, however,  was that Jesus is worth it.  He is worthy of that kind of odd, irrelevant, radical devotion - and so much more!
• Grapes are in everything!
  I expected the hair part of the Nazirite vow to be challenging, but I didn't expect the grapes part to be so bad.  It turned out that not eating grapes was far more troublesome than having of long hair and a beard.
  
  One issue that every Christian Nazirite needs to face immediately is the question of communion.  I decided that I would take communion, since I normally commune even when I'm fasting, and I thought of it as roughly parallel.  So I drank grape juice whenever I had communion.
  
  Much trickier is the issue of vinegar.  Vinegar - often, but not always, made from grapes - is in all kinds of things, from hot sauce to salad dressing to Wonderbread (Wonderbread??).  I decided early on that I wasn't going to bother with avoiding vinegar (actually, I decided retroactively after about three weeks of having eaten hot sauce practically daily...).
  
  Even without the vinegar, though, it is still hard to avoid grapes completely.  It turns out that grape juice (usually white grape juice) is the favorite mixer juice for most of what you buy in the store.  So if you buy any kind of juice product that isn't 100% some other kind of juice, it's very likely that it has grapes in it.  Crazier yet, I found a few different kinds of bread that had raisin juice extract in them.  It wasn't raisin bread.  It was just plain whole wheat bread.  But for some reason, they felt that it needed raisin juice.  So I ended up checking ingredients on almost everything I bought.
  
  
• Hair doesn't burn very well.
  At the end of the Nazirite vow, you're supposed to shave your head and take the hair to the Temple and burn it on the altar.  Obviously, there's no Temple now, but I did decide to burn the hair that I shaved off.  It was an interesting experience.  It turns out that in order to burn hair, you really need a pretty good fire that is already burning something else.  Hair itself doesn't so much burn as melt.  Not having any lighter fluid, I ended up spraying it with WD40 to get it to burn, and even then, it took a while.
  
  It was actually a neat insight with which to end the vow.  I don't know if you would see the same thing if you actually threw your hair onto an altar fire and watched it burn up, but I found that in trying to burn my hair I gained an appreciation for how God designed it.  Once hair catches fire, it melts and chars into a plastic-looking ash, and then it goes out.  If the hair is packed together, that only happens to the outer layer.  The inside isn't burnt.  So if your hair actually caught on fire, the likelihood of your head getting burnt would actually be pretty low.  God gave us a semi-flame retardant covering for our heads!

There is an activity of God displayed throughout creation, a wholesale activity let us say, which men refuse to recognize. The miracles done by God incarnate, living as a man in Palestine, perform the very same things as this wholesale activity, but at a different speed and on smaller scale. One of their chief purposes is that men, having seen a thing done by personal power on the small scale, may recognize, when they see the same thing done on the large scale, that the power behind it is also personal — is indeed the very same person who lived among us two thousand years ago. The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. Of that larger script part is already visible, part is still unsolved. In other words, some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do. In that sense, and from our human point of view, some are reminders and others prophecies.

God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn that water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities. Thus every year, from Noah’s time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see. Either like the Pagans they refer the process to some finite spirit, Bacchus or Dionysus: or else, like the moderns, they attribute real and ultimate causality to the chemical and other material phenomena which are all that our senses can discover in it. But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off. The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at the wedding party in Cana. Every year God makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and there is an increase, and men, according to the fashion of their age, say, ‘It is Ceres, Adonis, it is the Corn-King.’ or else, ‘It is the laws of Nature.’ The close-up, the translation, of this annual wonder is the feeding of the five thousand. Bread as not made there of nothing. Bread is not made of stones, as the Devil once suggested to Our Lord in vain. A little bread is made into much bread. The Son will do nothing but what He sees the Father do. There is, so to speak, a family style. The miracles of healing fall into the same pattern. This is sometimes obscured for us by the somewhat magical view we tend to take of ordinary medicine. The doctors themselves do not take this view. The magic is not in the medicine but in the patient's body. What the doctor does is to stimulate Nature's functions in the body, or to remove hindrances. In a sense, though we speak for convenience of healing a cut, every cut heals itself; no dressing will make skin grow over a cut on a corpse. That same mysterious energy which we call gravitational when it steers the planets and biochemical when it heals a body is the efficient cause of all recoveries, and if God exists, that energy, directly or indirectly, is His. All who are cured are cured by Him, the healer within. But once He did it visibly, a Man meeting a man. Where He does not work within in this mode, the organism dies. Hence Christ’s one miracle of destruction is also in harmony with God’s wholesale activity. His bodily hand held out in symbolic wrath blasted a single fig tree; but no tree died that year in Palestine, or any year, or in any land, or even ever will, save because He has done something, or (more likely) ceased to do something, to it.

When He fed the thousands he multiplied fish as well as bread. Look in every bay and almost every river. This swarming pulsating fecundity shows He is still at work. The ancients had a god called Genius — the god of animal and human fertility, the presiding spirit of gynaecology, embryology, or the marriage bed — the ‘genial bed’ as they called it after its god Genius. As the miracles of wine and bread and healing showed who Bacchus really was, who Ceres, who Apollo, and that all were one, so this miraculous multiplication of fish reveals the real Genius. And with that we stand at the threshold of the miracle that for some reason most offends modern ears. I can understand the man who denies the miraculous altogether; but what is one to make of the people who admit some miracles but deny the Virgin Birth? Is it that for all their lip service to the laws of Nature there is only one law of Nature that they really believe? Or is it that they see in this miracle a slur on sexual intercourse which is rapidly becoming the one thing venerated in a world without veneration? No miracle is in fact more significant. What happens in ordinary generation? What is a father’s function in the act of begetting? A microscopic particle of matter from his body fertilizes the female: and with that microscopic particle passes, it may be, the colour of his hair and his great grandfathers hanging lip, and the human form in all its complexity of bones, liver, sinews, heart, and limbs, and pre-human form which the embryo will recapitulate in the womb. Behind every spermatozoon lies the whole history of the universe: locked within it is no small part of the world's future. That is God's normal way of making a man—a process that takes centuries, beginning with the creation of matter itself, and narrowing to one second and one particle at the moment of begetting. And once again men will mistake the sense impressions which this creative act throws off for the act itself or else refer it to some infinite being such as Genius. Once, therefore, God does it directly, instantaneously; without a spermatozoon, without the millenniums of organic history behind the spermatozoon. There was of course another reason. This time He was creating not simply a man, but the man who was to be Himself: the only true Man. The process which leads to the spermatozoon has carried down with it through the centuries much undesirable silt; the life which reaches us by that normal route is tainted. To avoid that taint, to give humanity a fresh start, He once short-circuited the process. There is a vulgar anti-God paper which some anonymous donor sends me every week. In it recently I saw the taunt that we Christians believe in a God who committed adultery with the wife of a Jewish carpenter. The answer to that is that if you describe the action of God in fertilizing Mary as 'adultery’ then, in that sense, God would have committed adultery with every woman who ever had a baby. For what He did once without a human father, He does always even when He uses a human father as His instrument. For the human father in ordinary generation is only a carrier, sometimes an unwilling carrier, always the last in a long line of carriers of life that comes from the supreme life. Thus the filth that our poor, muddled, sincere, resentful enemies fling at the Holy One, either does not stick, or, sticking, turns into glory.

So much for the miracles which do small and quick what we have already seen in the large letters of God's universal activity. But before I go on to the second class — those which foreshadow parts of the universal activity we have not yet seen — I must guard against a misunderstanding. Do not imagine I am trying to make the miracle less miraculous. I am not arguing that they are more probable because they are less unlike natural events. I am trying to answer those who think them arbitrary, theatrical, unworthy of God, meaningless interruptions of universal order. They remain in my view wholly miraculous. To do instantly with dead and baked corn what ordinarily happens slowly with live seed is just as great a miracle as to make bread of stones. Just as great, but a different kind of miracle. That is the point. When I open Ovid, or Grimm, I find the sort of miracles which really would be arbitrary. Trees talk, houses turn into trees, magic rings raise tables richly spread with food in lonely places, ships become goddesses and men are changed into snakes or birds or bears. It is fun to read about: the least suspicion that it had really happened would turn that fun into nightmare. You find no miracles of that kind in the Gospels. Such things, if they could be, would prove that some alien power was invading Nature; they would not in the least prove that it was the same power which had made Nature and rules her every day. But the true miracles express not simply a god, but God: that which is outside Nature, not as a foreigner, but as her sovereign. They announce not merely that a King has visited our town, but that it is the King, our King.

The second class of miracles, on this view, foretell what God has not yet done, but will do, universally. He raised one man (the man who was Himself) from the dead because He will one day raise all men from the dead. Perhaps not only men, for there are hints in the New Testament that all creation will eventually be rescued from decay, restored to shape and subserve the splendour of re-made humanity. The Transfiguration and the walking on the water are glimpses of the beauty and the effortless power over all matter which will belong to men when men are really waked by God.

Incomparably the most important watershed in the long history of humanity has been the Incarnation of Christ. At this point, the streams divide. After this, the human course and direction are changed. One Figure has split history in two—so that every event is now dated with reference to His coming, either before or after. In the clash and turmoil of this bitter age in which we live, His influence is still a more dominating thing, His power more to be reckoned with, than the power and influence of any Caesar. For this one Figure multitudes to-day would be glad to die; and no man who has once seen Him can ever quite thrust Him out of sight again or evade His urgent challenge. “Who is this ? “ they asked at the street-corners in Jerusalem long ago : and it is no academic speculation or theological theorizing that renews the question now. It is life, it is history, it is all that is deepest in your experience and mine, that force it inescapably upon us. Who is this Jesus?

Let us begin our inquiry by setting right in the centre of our minds one fundamental fact: the Christian religion is first and foremost and essentially a message about God. It is not primarily a new ethic. It is not just a gospel of brotherliness and loving our neighbour and accepting the Golden Rule. It is not in the main a philosophy of life or a social programme. Doubtless it includes all that : it involves an ethic, supplies a philosophy, enunciates a programme for society. But basically, it is none of these things. It is not a message about human virtues and ideals at all. It is a message about God.

That message is this—that the living God, eternal, immortal, invisible, has at one quite definite point broken through into history in an unprecedented way. Once and for all, in an actual life lived out upon this earth, God has spoken, and has given the full and final revelation of Himself. In Jesus, God has come.

Such is the dramatic and astounding statement on which the Christian religion is built. Possibly familiarity has dulled its wonder for us: but will you try to realize afresh just how electrifying, how startling, that statement is ? In order to realize it, we must go back to our Gospels and contemplate the picture that confronts us there. Who is He, of whom such amazing things are spoken?

They tell us that for the greater part of His life He was a working carpenter. His home was in an obscure provincial village. He was born in a stable, adjoining a roadside inn. Wealth and official position He had none. He wrote no books, He fought no battles, the applause of listening senates was never His to command. His friends were mostly as poor as Himself, fishermen and peasants. When He left home and started preaching His own family tried to dissuade Him, thinking and actually saying that He was mad. The theologians and clever people scoffed at what they thought was His illiteracy. The crowds which at first gathered inquisitively to listen to His teaching soon dwindled and vanished away. His own best friends showed signs of doing the same. “Will ye also go ? “ He had to ask them; and at the end, they did desert Him to His fate. He died a felon’s death, reviled and execrated, hanging between two thieves. He was buried in a borrowed grave.

But then a strange thing happened. It was rumoured that death had not finished Him. It was reported that He had been seen alive. And then, quite suddenly, His disciples appeared in the streets proclaiming that He had risen. They said He had come back to them. They said the carpenter’s apprentice of Nazareth was at the right hand of God in heaven. They said they now saw, what formerly had been hidden from them, that from the first God had been uniquely present in Jesus ; that in that life and death, the unseen had become visible, and the eternal had become historic, and God had become man.

Was it surprising that the world, hearing all that, laughed it to scorn ? The Book of Acts, in its second chapter, records that the first contemporary theory about the apostolic preaching was that these men had been drinking—” full of new wine “ : the tale was so incredible. And when from its home of origin in Jerusalem, it began to circulate more widely, acquiring currency in the great cities of Asia and the west, the whole Roman Empire rang with contemptuous laughter, shouts of amused derision.

But the extraordinary thing was this, that neither with laughter nor with force, not with the massive arguments of her philosophers nor by the might of her thundering legions, could Rome stop Jesus. What actually happened was that Jesus stopped Rome, and on the dust and ashes of her broken splendour set the foundations of the empire of God which was to be.

So the question is thrust back upon us with redoubled force : Who is this Jesus ? When the first Christians appropriated the word Lord, Kyrios (the same hallowed name which the Old Testament had reserved for the Hebrew Jehovah), and dared to use it of this Galilean Carpenter; when those men, strict monotheists as they were, took that astounding and unprecedented step, were they just dreaming, romancing, yielding to the intoxication of a foolish fancy? Were love and imagination running away with them? Or was the thing true?

Some of you will remember the passage in Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s Recollections, in which she tells how once she met Walter Pater at Oxford. She had thrown off the Christian faith; and reckoning on his sympathy, she expressed the belief that Christ’s day was done. He shook his head, and looked troubled. “I don’t think so,” he said. “And we don’t altogether agree. You think it’s all plain. But I can’t. There are such mysterious things. Take that saying, ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden.’ How can you explain that? There is a mystery in it— something supernatural.”

Even the sceptic has stood troubled and ill at ease before this strange fact of Christ. Here none of his categories seem to fit. His confidence deserts him. There is mystery in it.

Now if we try to analyse the mystery, we shall find, I think, that it is threefold—the mystery of a personality, the mystery of a power, and the mystery of a presence.

When I speak of the mystery of a personality, I am thinking of the startling coalescence of contrarieties that you find in Jesus. He was the meekest and lowliest of all the sons of men: yet He said that He would come on the clouds of heaven in the glory of God. He was so austere that evil spirits and demons cried out in terror at His coming: yet He was so genial and winsome and approachable that the children loved to play with Him, and the little ones nestled in His arms; and His company in the innocent gaiety of a village wedding was like the sunshine. No one was ever half so kind or compassionate to sinners: yet no one ever spoke such red-hot, scorching words about sin. He would not break the bruised reed, and His whole life was love: yet on one occasion He demanded of the Pharisees how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. He was a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions: yet for sheer stark naked realism He has all our self-styled “realists” beaten. He was the servant of all, washing the disciples’ feet : yet masterfully He strode into the Temple, and the hucksters and traders fell over one another in their mad rush to get away from the fire they saw blazing in His eyes. He saved others: yet at the last, Himself He would not save. There is nothing in history like the union of contrasts that confronts you in the Gospels. The mystery of Jesus is the mystery of a personality.

But it is more. It is the mystery of a power. From that far day when He took a deadly cross, and converted it into a glorious throne, that power—like a streak of gold—has marked the centuries. Empires have gone down before Him. Through His influence, great movements of reform have swept the earth. In His name, men and women of every age and race have “wrought righteousness, stopped the mouths of lions, and out of weakness have been made strong.” He has been the master-force behind the onward march of men. What Emerson said of Jesus was indeed magnificently true: “His name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this world.” Thomas Hardy, near the close of The Dynasts, makes Napoleon say—

“To shoulder Christ from out the topmost niche
Of human fame, as once I fondly felt,
Was not for me.”

The one name before which the Anti-God movement of to-day trembles is the name of Jesus of Nazareth. There is no modern Caesarism which can shoulder Christ off the page of history, or break His grip on the souls of men. After nineteen centuries, we still baptize our children in His name; when love and marriage come, His is the blessing we invoke, and His the altar at which we plight our troth; when all is over, it is beneath His cross we lay our dead, and it is in His message of eternal hope that we find comfort. Ten thousand times He has broken the chains of evil habit, and set the prisoners free. He has put energy and victory into wasted lives and souls rotting with sin. And there are those in this Church now who would unhesitatingly ascribe “every virtue they possess, and every victory won, and every thought of holiness,” not to their own resolution or resources, but to the saving might of Christ alone. The mystery of Jesus is the mystery of a power.

But it is still more. It is the mystery of a presence. In every age, His own words have been verified anew—” Lo, I am with you always.” Now notice what this means. It is frequently said that it is quite impossible that Jesus should have any final relevance for the modern mind or for the social order of to-day. He was born in the first century. His environment was totally different from ours. The quiet life of a peasant in agricultural Palestine was worlds apart from the hectic life of a city-dweller in this mechanized, industrialized age. We have problems on our hands which the first century never envisaged. How should Jesus, born a Jew, using the categories and thought-forms of His own age, facing the problems of His own society, still remain authoritative for us?

“The Man upraised on the Judean crag,
Captains for us the war with death no more,
His Kingdom hangs as hangs the tattered flag
On the tomb of a great knight of yore.”

But the argument which imprisons Jesus in the fetters of a particular age and environment and denies His validity for to-day involves a double fallacy. It ignores two decisive facts: the one, that the human heart which Christ addressed is still the same, the same in its loves and sorrows, its temptations and hopes and passions and defeats—that has not changed; the other, that in any case we are not harking back to a dead memory, but encountering the challenge of a living spirit. This Christ is a present fact, and men know it. For when we read our Gospels, intending to judge and assess and pass our verdict on what meets us there, gradually an extraordinary thing begins to happen: the central Figure steps out from the page, and stands before our conscience, and judges us. This is not talking metaphorically or at random. It is not using language dishonestly. In fact, the more honest we are in this matter the more vividly do we grow aware that Someone—not a mere fact of history, not the moving memory of a mighty life long since passed away, but Someone alive and present—is meeting us, is refusing to be held at arm’s length or thrust aside, is dealing with us as only God could deal. This is not romancing. It is a strictly accurate, unrhetorical account of what actually happens. It is the assured, irrefragable experience of men and women in this Church to-day. The mystery of Jesus is the mystery of a personality, and of a power, and of a presence.

What, then, are we to say of Him? What explanation shall we offer ? Reason and conscience alike demand that we should attempt some answer. We cannot be content to leave an unprecedented fact like this unexamined. For the sake of our own peace of mind, if for nothing else, we must try to reach a verdict. Who is this Jesus ?

The deeper answer to that question we must hold over for our next study. We shall consider then whether we cannot recapture for ourselves the sublime and breathtaking conviction of the men of the New Testament, that this Jesus was God manifest in the flesh. But for the present let us concentrate on getting this one thing quite clear— that whoever or whatever else He may have been, whatever other name or predicate we may feel impelled to give Him, He was at least truly and fully man.

I beg you never to let that go. It is crucial for salvation. If Jesus was not truly a man, if His humanity was in some sense unreal, an appearance or a disguise, if the Figure in the Gospels was an unearthly angelic visitant, a demigod in human shape, the whole doctrine of redemption falls to the ground. Hold on to the full humanity of Jesus!

Many good people are in danger, perhaps quite unconsciously, of losing sight of this essential aspect of the person of our Lord. It is a strange and very significant fact that the first heresy which ever vexed the Christian Church—the so-called “docetic” heresy of the first and second centuries—was not a denial of the Godhead of Jesus: it was a denial of His true manhood. It was an assertion of His Godhead which virtually emptied His manhood of all reality. That attitude is still rife. Even now there are good Christian people who have an uneasy feeling that you cannot emphasize the humanity of Jesus without subtracting from His divinity—which is an utterly erroneous idea. They have been so concerned (and indeed quite rightly concerned) to uphold at all costs the Godhead of Jesus that He is no longer, for them, truly and genuinely human. But I repeat —unless Christ was real man, there is no salvation.

Can there be any doubt as to the witness of the New Testament on this matter ? The Jesus of whom the evangelists tell is veritable man if ever there was one—not some heavenly Titan masquerading as man, but man in very truth. He knew as we do, what weariness means, and the burden of sheer physical exhaustion: “Jesus, being wearied with His journey, sat thus on the well.” His tears at Lazarus’ grave were not forced tears, but the real grief of a sensitive spirit. He felt, as we do, the need for friends what volumes that poignant question in Gethsemane speaks —“ Could ye not watch with Me one hour?” He had to fight temptation, not only in the desert at the beginning, but right on to the end of the journey: and it was no sham fight, no easy, automatic victory, but a real and desperate encounter, a struggle that made His soul sweat blood. What He suffered in His body on the cross, and in His mind and spirit through all the despising and rejecting which culminated there, was not make-believe or solemn play- acting, but something so terrible that thought recoils before it and language fails. “He descended into hell.”

No, there is not one shadow of doubt as to the New Testament’s witness. From every page of the Gospels there emerges a Figure whose humanity is unmistakable and authentic, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. I say nothing about the other side of the picture now. Let it suffice for the moment to get this one truth piercingly clear to our own minds and hearts; and to be able—with the Roman governor who tried His case at the end—to say, “Behold the Man!”

There is a most moving passage in which the great Russian novelist Turgenev has described how once there came to him, in a kind of vision, a swift and wonderful insight into the meaning of the humanity of Jesus. “I saw myself, a youth, almost a boy, in a low-pitched wooden church. The slim wax candles gleamed, spots of red, before the old pictures of the saints. There stood before me many people, all fair-haired peasant heads. From time to time, they began swaying, falling, rising again, like the ripe ears of wheat when the wind in summer passes over them. All at once a man came up from behind and stood beside me. I did not turn towards him, but I felt that the man was Christ. Emotion, curiosity, awe overmastered me. I made an effort and looked at my neighbour. A face like everyone’s, a face like all men’s faces. ‘What sort of Christ is this? ‘I thought. ‘Such an ordinary, ordinary man. It cannot be.’ I turned away, but I had hardly turned my eyes from this ordinary man when I felt again that it was really none other than Christ standing beside me. Only then I realized that just such a face is the face of Christ——a face like all men’s faces.”

He is true man, this Jesus. Never for a moment must that truth be suffered to grow dim. We dare not—if we have set our hopes upon Him—let this fact go. It is crucial for the world’s salvation. Do you see why? Do you understand why it is so overwhelmingly vital and important to reassert the full humanity of Jesus ? Suppose we were led to conclude that He was not quite human, that He never met us just on our level, that there is no true identity between Christ and our sinning, suffering race, then not only are we robbed of our most precious pattern and example, but what is far worse, we have to say that God has not come the whole way after all, that God has not quite stooped down to the depth of our urgent need nor borne all our human burden: and that means—no atonement, no healing of our mortal wound, no breaking of our bitter bonds. I beg you to realize that that—nothing less—is the issue; and realizing that to cling, as the New Testament clings, to the certainty of Christ’s full humanity, to the glorious, heart-stirring and subduing fact that God, in love for you and me, has indeed come all the way, has started on the level where we are and met us where we live, and borne our earthly frame of dust and clay, that we may wear His immortality.

“With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.”

We cannot tell, says Alice Meynell, what other forms of revelation God might choose for other worlds. We cannot guess His secret dealings with other dwellers in His wide universe, beyond this wayside planet we inhabit.

“O, be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The myriad forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.”

“There is one mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus.”

But is that all? Is that the final word? In our next study we shall endeavour to press more deeply into the mystery; until we reach a point where, looking upon this Man, our souls are able to say, “My Lord and my God!”