1 TIM. i. 11. “The glorious gospel of the blessed God.”
IT should be the gospel of the glory. The word “blessed”
expresses the blessedness of the Divine nature in itself, and
might be rendered happy, were it not that happiness has in
it elements of levity, turbulence, and change, drawn from
our troubled and transient joys.
I. The great thing that the Gospel has to tell men is the
glory of God. In the Old Testament the glory of God
meant the bright light that lay between the cherubim. So
in the Gospel we have the presence of the whole brightness
of the self-revelation of God blazing with a more lambent
lustre and a truer radiance than even that light. If so,
what a strange contrast between the appearance and the
reality! The Gospel is all about a human life, and in the
very heart of it there is a piece of abject humiliation and
shame. The explanation is that in Christ you have the
self-revelation of God, not the mere history of a man, and
that His tears, His tenderness, His gentleness and pity, all
that is God pouring Himself on the blind eyes of the world
through the flesh of a man.
This revelation is the brightest that man can receive.
It will always be the case that the glorified manhood of
Jesus Christ is one way of knowing the Father. Besides,
the attributes of God are all in this revelation melted into
one.
The living thing in the glory of God is His grace.
Other attributes are the fringes, but this the central blaze.
II. This Gospel is an element in God’s blessedness.
Is it not something to feel that the heart of all things is
blessed? But more to feel that God is blessed because
He loves so much, and gives so perfectly in Christ.
III. What firmness and confidence this ought to give us,
that God does this for His own name’s sake. God’s glory
is His end, means just that God’s love is His motive and
His impulse in it all. Just below the surface of our feel-
ings we have to go down to the rock of the immutable
heart, the unchangeable love, the unchanging mercy.
Alexander Maclaren, D.D.