For if the Son of God be man, then he understands me and will have a fellow feeling for me. He knows my unfitness to worship sometimes—he knows my tendencies to grow weary and dull my pains, my trials, and my griefs: He knows what fierce temptations mean, For he has felt the same. Man, truly man, yet sitting at the right hand of the Father, you, O Savior, are the delight of my soul. Is there not the richest comfort in this for you, the people of God?

Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh. 1 Timothy 3:16

“God was manifest in the flesh” (1 Timothy 3:16 KJV). I believe that our version is the correct one, but the fiercest battles have been held over this sentence. It is asserted that the word Theos is a corruption for Os, so that, instead of reading “God was manifest in the flesh,” we should read, “who was manifest in the flesh.”

There is very little occasion for fighting about this matter, for if the text does not say “God was manifest in the flesh,” who does it say was manifest in the flesh? Either a man, or an angel, or a devil. Does it tell us that a man was manifest in the flesh? Assuredly that cannot be its teaching, for every man is manifest in the flesh, and there is no sense whatever in making such a statement concerning any mere man, and then calling it a mystery. Was it an angel, then? But what angel was ever manifest in the flesh? And if he were, would it be at all a mystery that he should be “seen by angels” (1 Timothy 3:16)? Is it a wonder for an angel to see an angel? Can it be that the devil was manifest in the flesh? If so, he has been “taken up in glory” (1 Timothy 3:16) which, let us hope, is not the case.

Well, if it was neither a man, nor an angel, nor a devil, who was manifest in the flesh, then surely, he must have been God; and so, if the word be not there, the sense must be there, or else nonsense. We believe that, if criticism should grind the text in a mill, it would get out of it no more and no less than the sense expressed by our grand old version. God himself was manifest in the flesh. What a mystery is this! A mystery of mysteries! God the invisible was manifest; God the spiritual dwelt in flesh; God the infinite, uncontained, boundless, was manifest in the flesh. What infinite leagues our thought must traverse between Godhead self-existent, and, therefore, full of power and self-sufficiency, before we have descended to the far-down level of poor flesh, which is as grass at its best, and dust in its essence! Where find we a greater contrast than between God and flesh, and yet the two are blended in the incarnation of the Savior.

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