To be near unto God - pagina 312

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imparts unto us the riches of his reconciliation, seeks us out as sinners, and makes us children of God. Only when Christ has made us children of God, does the knowledge of the Father become our blessed and glorious possession. But again, Christ does not come to us for the first time in the work of redemption. He is the Eternal Word, which was before all things with God and was God. All nature, with the

when he

revelation

by him.

of

He

God which is

the Word,

it

contains

is

created

No

speech goes forth Without the Eternal

from nature without him. Word nature would be dead and dumb, and would have nothing to say to us. And not only has nature been created by the Eternal Word, and endowed with a language of its own, but we ourselves, in the midst of nature, would not have come into this world, but for Christ. The whole scope of our human nature is from him. We too have been created by him. Our whole spiritual disposition, and our capacity to overhear and understand nature, have been implanted in us by him. The same is true of our moral being. Christ has given us our conscience. He is himself the conscience of mankind. The fellowship of our hearts with the moral world order, our perceptions of good and evil, of right and wrong, of what fills one with horror and inspires one through beauty, of selfishness and love, of light and darkness these have all come to us from the Eternal

Word. Hence

it can not be said either that we know apart from Christ, or that only in and by Christ this known God is revealed to us as our Father. For the broad foundation of the

God

304

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