ere is
nothing about Jesus Christ, as it seems to me, more manifest, unless our
eyes are blinded by prejudice, than that the Carpenter of Nazareth, who
grew up amidst the ordinary conditions of infant manhood, was trained as
other Jewish children, increased in wisdom, spoke a language that had
been moulded by man, and inherited His nation's mental and spiritual
equipment, yet stands forth on the pages of these four Gospels as a
perfectly original man, to put it on the lowest ground, and as owing
nothing to any predecessor, and not as merely one in a series, or
naturally accounted for by reference to His epoch or conditions. He
makes a new beginning; He presents a perfectly fresh thing in the
history of human nature. Just as His coming was the introduction into
the heart of humanity of a new type, the second Adam, the Lord from
heaven, so the work that He does is all His own. He does it all Himself,
for all that His servants do in carrying out the purposes dear to His
heart is done by His working in and through them, and though we are
fellow-labourers with Him, His hands alone lay every stone of the
Temple.

Not only does my text, in its highest application, point to Jesus Christ
as the Author of redemption from its very beginning, but it also
declares that all through the ages His hand is at work. 'Shall also
finish it'--then He is labouring at it now; and we have not to think of
a Christ who once worked, and has left to us the task of developing the
consequences of His completed activity, but of a Christ who is working
on and on, steadily and persistently. The builders of some great
edifice, whilst they are laying its lower courses, are down upon our
level, and as the building rises the scaffolding rises, and sometimes
the platform where they stand is screened off by some frail canvas
stretched round it, so that we cannot see them as they ply their work
with trowel and mortar. So Christ came down to earth to lay the courses
of His Temple that had to rest upon earth, but now the scaffolding is
raised and He is working at the top stories. Though out of our sight, He
is at work as truly and energetically as He was when He was down here.
You remember how strikingly one of the Evangelists puts that thought in
the last words of his Gospel--if, indeed, they are his words. 'He was
received up into heaven, and sat at the right hand of God, and they went
everywhere, preaching the word.' Well, that looks as if there were a sad
s