Page:God Manifest.djvu/202

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
192
GOD APPEARING.

Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?"[1] So, on another occasion, when His own disciples were astonished at something which he had said, we find this language used: "When Jesus knew in Himself that his disciples murmured at it, he said to them," &c.[2] Now observe this expression "knew in Himself," for it is very significant: it not only declares the fact of His knowledge of men's secret thoughts, but states the manner in which He knew them, and that it was a peculiar and a Divine manner, implying in fact, omnipresence as well as omniscience. He knew in Himself their thoughts, showing that His self. His mind and nature, was not a small circle, as it were, peculiar to Himself—not, like every other man's, merely one of the finite mental existences that make up the intellectual world, but rather that His self, His mental existence, dwelt in, and extended through, other men's selves and minds, pervading all and perceiving the states of all, as the Divine does. Thus it was, then, that Jesus perceived men's thoughts, by being present in their minds through His Divine nature: He had Omniscience by means of Omnipresence. Such a power belongs to God alone, and He who possessed it could have been no other than God.—That He possessed Divine foreknowledge, moreover, is plain from the words, "Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who would betray Him."[3]

But—in the second place—that Jesus possessed the Divine characteristic of Omnipresence, is not left to inference merely, but was expressly declared by Himself, "Wherever," he said, "two or three are gathered

  1. Matthew ix. 3, 4.
  2. John vi. 61.
  3. John vi. 64.