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Christ Offers The Riches Of The Universe, April 2
For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in
our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face
of Jesus Christ.
2 Corinthians 4:6
.
By sin man was shut out from God. Except for the plan of redemption,
eternal separation from God, the darkness of unending night, would have been his.
Through the Saviour’s sacrifice, communion with God is again made possible. We
may not in person approach into His presence; in our sin we may not look upon
His face; but we can behold Him and commune with Him in Jesus, the Saviour.
“The light of the knowledge of the glory of God” is revealed “in the face of Jesus
Christ.” God is “in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself” (
2 Corinthians 4:6
;
5:19
)....
“In him was life; and the life was the light of men” (
John 1:4
). The life and
the death of Christ, the price of our redemption, are not only to us the promise and
pledge of life, not only the means of opening again to us the treasures of wisdom:
they are a broader, higher revelation of His character than even the holy ones of
Eden knew.
And while Christ opens heaven to man, the life which He imparts opens the
heart of man to heaven. Sin not only shuts us away from God, but destroys in the
human soul both the desire and the capacity for knowing Him. All this work of
evil it is Christ’s mission to undo. The faculties of the soul, paralyzed by sin, the
darkened mind, the perverted will, He has power to invigorate and to restore. He
opens to us the riches of the universe, and by Him the power to discern and to
appropriate these treasures is imparted.
Christ is the “Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world”
(
verse 9
). As through Christ every human being has life, so also through Him
every soul receives some ray of divine light. Not only intellectual but spiritual
power, a perception of right, a desire for goodness, exists in every heart. But
against these principles there is struggling an antagonistic power. The result of
the eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is manifest in every man’s
experience. There is in his nature a bent to evil, a force which, unaided, he cannot
resist. To withstand this force, to attain that ideal which in his inmost soul he
accepts as alone worthy, he can find help in but one power. That power is Christ.
Cooperation with that power is man’s greatest need.—
Education, 28, 29
.
Christ stands as the representative of the Father, the connecting link between
God and man; He is the great teacher of mankind. And He ordained that men and
women should be His representatives.—
Education, 33
.
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