Now we do know what God is like. We know that He is so like man, that He
can take upon Him man’s flesh and blood without changing, or lowering, or
defiling Himself. That proves that man must have been originally made in
God’s likeness; that man’s being fallen, means man’s falling from the
likeness of God, and taking up instead with the likeness of the brutes
which perish; that the fault cannot be in our bodies, but in our spirits
which have yielded to our bodies, and become their slaves instead of
their masters, as Christ’s Spirit was master of His body. But the Son of
God, by being born and living as a man, showed us that we are not fallen
past hope, not fallen so low that we cannot rise again. He showed that
though mankind are sinful, yet they need not be sinful; for He was a man
as exactly, and perfectly, and entirely as we are, and yet in Him was no
sin. So He showed that brutishness and sinfulness is not our proper
state, but our disease and our fall; and a disease of which we can be
cured, a fall out of which we can rise and be renewed into the true and
real pattern of mankind, the new Adam, Jesus the sinless Son of Man and
Son of God.
The next question, I said, that rose in men’s mind was: “How do I know
that God is good, as I fancy sometimes that He must be? I see the world
full of sin, and injustice, and misery, and death. Perhaps that is God’s
doing, God’s fault.” That is a common puzzle enough, and a sad and
fearful one. The sin and the misery and the death are here. If God did
not bring it here, yet why did He let it come here? He could have
stopped if He would, and kept out all this wretchedness: why did He not?
Was He just or loving in letting sin into the world?
To all which St. Paul answers: “God was justified in the Spirit.”
You do not see what that has to do with it? Then let me show you.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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