1 John 4:2

THE INCARNATION AND THE INNER LIFE

‘Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.’

1 John 4:2

Only too commonly the Incarnation is regarded as a doctrine which faith must accept, but which, except in its issues and results, has no immediate connection with the tenor of daily life. Yet it is plain enough from the text that to confess the Incarnation, in all its blessed fulness and reality of meaning, is to afford a proof of being a very son of God, and a recipient in the fullest measure of the inworking power of the Spirit.

I. Who is He of Whose Incarnation we are speaking?—The immediate and instinctively given answer that each one of us would return would probably be the one word—God. True, most true, most blessedly true, but yet not the suggestive and instructive answer which the Apostle who wrote the words on which we are meditating has enabled us to make. What St. John, under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, plainly reveals to us is this, that He Who was incarnate was He Who was in the beginning, ever with God, and Himself God. And the name that he gives to Him is the Word.

II. Why was this love manifested in a form so startling in its lowliness as that which is revealed to us in the gospel narrative?—Could not the Word have become flesh—could not the Incarnation have been a true and real entry into our humanity and a veritable assumption of our nature, without the humble birth, the slow, silent years of growth, and the gradual increase of wisdom and experience? Though such questions will arise in the soul, there is a kind of presumption in entertaining them, and, to some extent, in endeavouring to answer them. This, however, may with all reverence be said, that, had it been otherwise, the conviction that the Son of God had verily and truly taken our nature upon Him would never have been felt with completeness and fulness in the human heart.

III. Does not the Incarnation with all its attendant circumstances bring home to us the vital truth that if such was the form and manner of the Lord’s assumption of our humanity, communion with Him here and hereafter must be a blessed reality on which the loving and believing soul may rely with the most unchanging confidence. If the dear Lord while here on earth verily did live in blessed union and communion with His chosen ones, as some of that holy number tell us plainly that He did live—if the Incarnation bore with it that boundless blessing to disciples and Apostles, what is there to lead us to doubt that to those that love Him and pray for His abiding presence with them, the Incarnation bears the selfsame privilege and blessing now?

IV. Our dear Lord’s Incarnation was not merely a holy mystery which faith must apprehend, but it carries to the soul convictions of the personal love of Christ toward each fellow-man which make it, what it seems now becoming more and more to us all, the, so to speak, practical doctrine of our own mysteriously moving and eventful times. The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man are the two great truths which, year by year, modern religious thought seems more distinctly apprehending and realising; and that each of these great principles rests upon, as its basis, the Incarnation may be regarded as an almost self-evident truth. The revelation of God as our Father was made to us through the Son of His love. Our revelation of the Brotherhood of man can only come through the beloved One, Who made Himself our Elder Brother that He might die for us, and make us His brethren and His own for evermore.

—Bishop Ellicott.