IN our last paper we spoke of the Creator’s purpose in the creation of man, and briefly contrasted the glory of this purpose with the degrading thoughts of the scheme of evolution which traces the origin of man, and of the beasts that perish, to one common ancestry. Let us today speak of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ in relation to the evolutionary idea of human origin. Since the philosophy of evolution denies God the Creator, it necessarily also denies the Incarnation of the Son of God. Though our readers may have no personal concern with this philosophy in its most pronounced infidelity, many of them must be concerned with its baneful influence over Christian truth. The out-and-out evolutionist has given up Christianity, but numbers of Christians are influenced against Christian truth by that amount of evolutionism which has penetrated their minds. It is a leaven which is corrupting holy and exalted Christian truth.
The Incarnation of the Son of God was no afterthought in the divine mind. From everlasting the delights of Wisdom were with the sons of men. The announcement of the Incarnation was first made in the Garden of Eden, and in words addressed to the serpent after man had fallen from God: “Her Seed . . . shall bruise thy head” The story of the fallen spirit is but briefly touched on in the Scriptures. We are given to understand that pride was his condemnation; that he was once full of wisdom and perfect in beauty, and was perfect in his ways until iniquity was found in him, and that his very excellence lifted up his heart. How it was that this spirit could enter a body and use that body, as was the case in the temptation, we are not told, though we have mention made in the Scriptures of various examples of such action on the part of spirits. The fallen spirit beheld the creature man as created by God, and by leading man to question God’s word he accomplished his ruin. Then it was that the Seed was promised, who should not only be man’s Saviour, but Satan’s Conqueror. How long the spirit who had fallen had been created we are not told, but we see him strangely interested in the being, man, whom God had made. God made man in His own image and likeness, and Satan’s effort was to corrupt God’s work, and to stamp his own image and likeness upon man. He succeeded, but only to hear from God’s own voice that His Son should become man, and Satan’s destruction. The knowledge of this revelation in God’s universe must have had far-reaching results. Of the prophetic utterances of God upon this earth, we read “which things the angels desire to look into.”
The doctrine of incarnation was abundantly taught in the religious system of the pagan Egyptians. Their deities became incarnate―as they believed―in various types of the animal world. Their gods were frequently shaped as part beast and part man—the beast in various cases having the prominent position assigned to it. Thus was the truth of the promised Seed degraded in ancient days. In our own times, in Christendom, the evolutionary idea would change the truth of God into a lie.
We endeavored on the last occasion to conceive the infinite wisdom and majesty of the Creator by glancing at His universe; but what thoughts shall be found to enter into His condescension and wisdom in view of the Incarnation of His Son. The Incarnation was no afterthought of God, we repeat; it was planned by Him before the world was, and before His creature, the fallen angel, had accomplished the fall of His creature, man. When our Lord was born into this world, holy angels from heaven filled the sky above the fields of Bethlehem, and with gladness ascribed glory to God in the Highest, and praised His good pleasure in men. His goodwill was not expressed towards angels by the Incarnation of His Son, but towards men. “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood” ―which spirits are not ― “He also Himself likewise took part of the same. . . . He taketh not hold of angels, but of the seed of Abraham He taketh hold.” He “took upon Him the form of a servant,” but not that of the angel-servant; He “was made in the likeness of men.” In the Scriptures quoted we are given to see the angelic beings adoring their Creator in view of His glory in the Incarnation of His Son. But not only was the good pleasure of God in men manifested, the Son of Man was to have the highest place in heaven awarded to Him. To no angel has God given the seat of heaven’s throne. “To which of the angels said He at any time, Sit on My right hand, until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool?” It is not given to them thus to rule. “Are they not all ministering spirits” “But unto the on He saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.” The exalted Son of Man is to fill the throne of God; He is to reign over the kingdom of the universe, and the redeemed shall be associated with Him in that glory.
Very briefly we have indicated that the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ is a far-reaching purpose of God, affecting the creatures of His universe, and the rule and glory He will yet establish in it. Let us now return to our planet, which seems so very small when our thoughts expand to contemplate the worlds around it. And in fixing our minds upon this earth, we must think upon man in relation to the purpose of God in the Incarnation of His Son—man made a little lower than the angels, yet to be crowned with glory and power above them. “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that Thou visitest him?”
Men say, If you speak thus of the Creator, why did God allow sin to spoil His work?
Our reply is, God has not chosen to tell us. We might ask, Why did God allow certain planets to be broken up in pieces? Why did He allow the earth He made to become a chaos? This world is but as a grain of sand in His universe. Men are but a handful amongst His creatures. And when we take a mental glance at the universe of God, and consider that the whole of man’s history on the earth is but of a few thousand years’ duration, we can afford to wait God’s time to obtain the reply.
God made man out of the dust of this earth, and formed him so that he should be capable of the highest intercourse with himself. God endowed him with powers and capacity of reason and affection, which He alone could satisfy, and bestowed on him the relationship of child to Himself. In the creatures God has made, whether of this or other worlds, there are orders and stages of excellence, but to man has been assigned the place of union and communion with God. We say again, were man but the chance outcome of a succession of growths and developments, were he but the birth of the law of the survival of the fittest, the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ would be impossible. When our Creator made man He had the Incarnation of His Son in view. True, man has fallen from his first estate―perhaps even lower than the evil angels have fallen from theirs. In many instances man has become degraded in his mode of existence almost to the level of the brute creation; even in the civilized world, he has often sunk lower than brute beasts by degrading himself beneath himself―which no mere brute does. And now, in Christendom, our latter-day philosophers use their high mental powers to teach that man and beast are of one common ancestry, thus scientifically lowering man in theory to the level to which the savage lowers himself in practice. But, notwithstanding all human degradation and sin, “God was manifest in the flesh,” and man shall yet be lifted up to the high estate designed by God.
When we speak of the union of Christ with men, let us be reverently careful of our words and thoughts. We must keep steadily before the mind the lowest depths into which man had fallen, and also the high glory man filled before his fall. But whether before or after the fall, man was alike a human being; in the one case he was a human being as originally formed by God, in the other a human being fallen from that original. Our Lord was very man. His human nature was holy; as the angel said to Mary, “that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God,” and as we also read in the epistle to the Hebrews, “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners.” Thus when He was here amongst men His human nature was a holy one. Though He “was in all points tempted like as we are,” yet it was ever “without sin.” He did not unite Himself to fallen and unholy men, He unites fallen men, whom He by His death has made holy, to Himself. He was the corn of wheat which except it “fall into the ground and die it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” Thus the purpose of God respecting the Incarnation of the Lord and man’s exaltation in Him was accomplished through His suffering and death. The heel of the Seed of the woman was bruised, as God said at the beginning to Satan.
The Incarnation of Christ was the means whereby the atonement made by Christ could take place. He came into the world to do the Will of God, and that Will was fulfilled by His being the sacrifice for sin in the body God prepared Him, and by that “Will we are sanctified through the offering of the Body of Jesus Christ once for all.” The Scripture does not contemplate the Incarnation apart from the atonement in relation to man’s salvation. The atonement of our Lord does not elevate fallen human nature, it witnesses to the depth of that fall, while affording propitiation for all who come to God by Him. He suffered death, and bore the judgment due to fallen human beings, and now such as receive Him are united to Him by the Holy Ghost.
One of the evils attendant on the system of evolution is the belittling of sin. The fact of man’s fallen state is rejected, and instead, he is said to be in an exalted state. His passions are regarded as merely the remnants of old wolfish or hawkish ancestry. A responsible sinner according to this system he certainly is not; on the contrary, he is gradually reaching the supreme excellence of this nineteenth century. In such a doctrine God’s righteous indignation against sin and man’s need of atonement have no part. It is true that no real Christian can reject the facts of human sin and the atonement of Christ, but real Christians may be influenced through these current ideas against the fulness of the facts. It is undeniable that where the evolutionary idea is allowed, even in a minute form, there the atonement of Christ is made light of. The doctrine is consistent in its operation. It leaves out the Creator, and, having done so, it exalts man in his own eyes as the most marvelous survival of former ages, allows no sin against God, and rejects both the Incarnation and the atonement of God’s Son.