What Is The True Christian Religion?/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
THE TRUE EXPLANATION OF THE REDEMPTION
There were three great objectives in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ in coning to earth, or in what we call the Incarnation, or assumption of the flesh and of out human nature.
The first great objective was to release mankind from his captivity to the hells; for mankind had become an almost complete slave to the hells, or to the collective power of evil beings associated in the underworld, depraved men and women who had gone from this earth in their insane and malignant evil.
The means He used was to assume a human nature and a fleshly body from Mary in order to be able to approach the denizens of the underworld. As God is in Himself He is a consuming fire, and, using a material analogy, had He come unveiled before men and devils they would have been consumed more surely than mortals would be consumed by the near approach of the sun of our solar system.
It was indispensable therefore that He should veil over His glory.
It would have been possible for the Lord to have destroyed the enemies of the human race by His Divine Word, the Divine Truth. If "by the word of the Lord were the heavens made," certainly the earth and the hells could have been as easily destroyed.
The illusions of hell are mere phantasies; the power of evil is a phantasy; but men were entangled in those phantasies, believing good to be evil and evil to be good. They were hypnotized by evil beings, and were almost completely in the power of these evil beings. The wickedness of the earth would have quickly destroyed the race under the influence of insane and malignant beings.
It became necessary for the Lord in His assumed humanity to become champion of the human race and fight against the hells as a man, thus to assume the limitations of humanity, but with the power of Almighty God. There was no other way to meet devils without destroying them. In this way only could He become their rescuer or Redeemer.
The enemy of the human race was the underworld. In this way of human birth, "the seed of the woman would bruise the serpent's head." and the "serpent," or the collective power of evil in its malignity, "would bruise his heel." The seed of the woman was the Divine Truth embodied in a human being, the son of Mary. The Seed of the serpent was self-love. Beguiled by the senses, the celestial being of Eden, set up self-love and the pride of self-intelligence in the center of the Garden instead of the acknowledgment of God, which was the tree of life, as the source of life and happiness.
The promise to the man in Eden of a final rescue became the guiding principle of history. It was the promise of at-one-ment with God which was to be worked out in the history of the world. The story of the Bible is therefore the story of the fall of man by listening to the self-life, in time being brought back to oneness with the Divine through the work of a Human-Divine Redeemer, the seed of the woman.
Into a world almost lost came Jesus "God-in-Crist," "the Only-Begotten Son of God," bringing the otherwise unseeable and unknowable God into manifestation, so that God could fight against man's enemies of the underworld in this assumed and limited humanity on the plane of man's life.
This was the situation which brought Jesus into the world as the promised Messiah of the Jews, but really as the Deliverer of all mankind from the hells. All the promises of the Old Testament point to this deliverance. And there was to be but one Redeemer and Saviour, the son horn of the Virgin, God-with-us, "The Mighty God. the Everlasting Father." God in human form, "in whom dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead." As Jesus said, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father . . . The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works." "I and the Father are one."