Back To Chicago

Today I’m trying to fly back to Chicago. It is an iffy proposition due to the weather. So I’ll sit at the airports in Mobile and Dallas/Fort Worth and finish my reading project for this trip.

Going to Mobile I took William Kelly’s Exposition of the Book of John to read along the way. By the time we arrived I covered the first five chapters of this marvelous work by a gifted expositor from the past. Anything you see by Kelly is worth its price and a careful read. I purchased this particular work at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland last fall when we where there after the Northwest Grace Conference. Powell’s is billed, by the way, as the world’s largest bookstore. It covers a whole downtown city block with three stories of used and new books. I could spend a week there—and a fortune.

Kelly writes in beautiful nineteenth century English that requires you to read with special attention. I find this helpful, frankly, because it forces me to think carefully about what he is saying. And what could be more wonderful than the Book of John and its presentation of the Lord Jesus Christ as “the Word, the Only-Begotten Son, God Himself on earth in human flesh.”

It is our common understanding that Jesus Christ is “very God and very man,” that He is “true God and true man”—the God-Man. In other words, in His Incarnation Jesus Christ is both undiminished deity and full, authentic humanity. He is truly the unique person of all time. No wonder He is rightly called the Celebrity of the Universe!

One quote from Kelly puts it thusly:

“The Incarnation was no mere emanation of divinity; neither was it a Person once divine Who ceased to be so by becoming man (in itself an impossible absurdity), but One Who, to glorify the Father, and in accomplishment of the purposes of grace to the glory of God, took humanity into union with Godhead in his Person” (p. 60).

That He can thus actually, really and fully be “touched by the feelings of our infirmities” makes the heart cry, Oh, what a Savior!

Maranatha!