"Who is the image of the invisible God," and another passage says: "The very image of his sub

stance," it cannot mean less than he is the visible of the invisible God.

To illustrate: Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and it sufficeth us." He replied, "When thou hast seen me thou hast seen the Father." And when it is said: "Who being the effulgence of God's glory," is not that at least the raying forth, the outshining of the divine glory which must be another way of saying, "He is the visible of the invisible."

Of kindred meaning is the expression "Existing in the form of God." Form is the apparent—the phenomenal. So Logos, or the Word, is the revelation of the Father's mind, heart and will-unveiling of the hidden. Of like purport is the declaration: "In him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily."

But we must hark continually back to his nature -"the Word was God," lest by the weakness of the terms image, effulgence, form and Logos, we account him only a manifestation. Therefore has been reserved to the last the relations to the Father expressed by Sonship.

1. He was, and is and shall be the Son of God by eternal subsistence. I stop not to defend the paradox of the old theologians "the Son of God by eternal generation." Eternal subsistence will serve if any man scruple at "eternal generation." He was the Son before the world was, and of course before

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he was sent into the world. How else could it be said: "He sent his Son into the world-he gave his Son," and how else could he say, Father, glorify thou me with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." Here his Sonship is antecedent to time.

2. The next idea of Sonship is expressed in the first phrase of the text, "The Son of God's love." This is by no means the same as His Beloved Son. The phrase attempts no expression of God's love for his Son. It does express God's love for the lost world. Our Lord himself explains: “God so loved the world as to give his only begotten Son." In other words, the Son is both the depository and full expression of the Father's love for the world. The full expression," So loved," measures and limits the love of God to man. In him all love-out of him no love, but a consuming fire.

3. Son of God by generation, or procreation of his humanity. Said the angel to the Virgin Mary: "The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee; wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God." By the overshadowing of the Most High this child is begotten, by the omnific energy of the Spirit the Virgin conceived. "Wherefore, when he cometh into the world he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body didst thou prepare me." This is a time Sonship and in order to our redemption.

4. Son of God by the resurrection.

"Who was declared to be (or constituted) the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of Holiness, by the resurrection from the dead, even Jesus Christ, Our Lord." (Rom. 1:4.)

So speaks David in the second Psalm: "Thou art my Son, this day I have begotten thee." This was not the Sonship by eternal subsistence, nor the Sonship by procreation in the Virgin Mary, but Sonship by resurrection. So Paul interpreted the Psalm in Pisidian Antioch: "God raised up Jesus; as also it is written in the second Psalm, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee." (Acts 13:33.)

Hence our text declares: "The firstborn from the dead."

It is worthy of emphatic notice that the purpose of all three advents of the Son into the world is to assume a body. At the first advent he assumed the body of his humiliation, at the second advent, by his resurrection he assumed the body of his glory. At his third and final advent, he will assume, by resurrection, his mystical body-the glorified church. And all the heights and depths of theology are in these advents and these assumptions of bodies. In the first are the doctrines of atonement, in the second all the exaltation and kingly reign, in the last all eschatology.

Mark just now the second only. When Jesus died, expiation was finished, but not atonement.

The blood shed on the cross must immediately, while hot, before coagulation, be carried beyond the veil into the most holy place and sprinkled on the mercy seat to make atonement. See the great day atonement in Leviticus, sixteenth chapter. The shedding of the expiatory blood and its offering before God on the mercy seat was one continuous act, so, as Jesus died, he prayed: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." His disembodied soul neither loitered by the way nor lodged in any half-way house, nor strayed aside to preach to lost spirits in hell (a most blasphemous assumption of Dante's "Inferno"), but having passed through the veil— that is to say, by the dissolution of his flesh-Christ entered not into a holy place made with hands, like in pattern to the true, but into heaven itself to sprinkle the expiating blood on the mercy seat. Therefore, that very day the veil in the earthly temple was rent in twain from top to bottom. There could be no resurrection before Atonement. Atonement is the predicate of resurrection. "The God of peace brought again from the dead the great shepherd of the sheep with the blood of an eternal covenant." (Heb. 13:20.) Atonement was made in heaven. Christ's soul was in heaven, not in hell, between his death and resurrection. He was in heaven, and therefore to get back to earth there must be an advent. Hence in the Hebrews it is said, referring to his resurrection, "This day have I begotten thee," and then is added, " And when he

again bringeth in the firstborn into the world, he saith, Let all the angels of God worship him." (Heb. 1:5, 6.) Angels had worshiped him as the Son of God eternally subsisting. Also they worshiped the firstborn in procreation, but now again he bringeth his Son into the world as the firstborn from the dead, and the angels must worship risen and glorified humanity. Take not your theology on this passage from “Paradise Lost," any more than you take your theology of Redemption from "Paradise Regained," which stops at the temptation and never reaches the cross.

HIS RELATION TO THE UNIVERSE

When Paul uses prepositions he casts Gnosticism into a fiery furnace seven times heated, incinerates it and with a breath of inspired logic-puff! Its ashes are scattered unto the four winds of heaven. Mark the emphasized prepositions:

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"He was before all things."

"In him was all creation "-potentially.

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Through him was all creation"—the activity of the potential.

"Unto him was all creation." He the end, purpose, destiny.

"For him was all creation." His the absolute ownership.

"By him all things consist."

Note that verb-consist. Having created them,