The God-Men

The God-Men

By John G. Lake, Spiritual Hunger and Other Sermons

“Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?
Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip.
For if the word spoken by angels was stedfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompence of reward;
How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation;
which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him”
(Heb. 1:14, 2:1-3).

Let us look at the word “salvation.”
It is the great inclusive word of the gospel. It encompasses all that God does for the soul.

We have broken it down to a great extent and made it mean salvation from sin, sometimes from a single transgression.

But it means much more than this.
It is an all-inclusive word, including all that God does for the spirit, soul, and body of man and is applicable to each department of his nature, not only in destroying the consciousness of sin, which is purely negative, but in creating a consciousness of righteousness, which is positive.

Salvation is at once destructive and creative.

Mankind has lost much in limiting this work of God to a single act, or a series of acts, instead of realizing all that God does for man.

To know God's purpose for your life it is necessary to know who you are, what you are, and why you are here,
the whole spirit, soul, and body being brought into complete “at-one-ment” with God.

There are some overlooked declarations in the Word of God that would enlarge man’s conception of the Word and purpose of God if we would only pay attention to them.
Here is one:
“But one in a certain place testified, saying,
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? or the son of man, that thou visitest him? Thou madest him a little lower than the angels ”
(Heb. 2:6-7).

The margin of my Bible says that it means,
"Thou hast made him for a while a little lower than the angels.”
Some translations read,
“Thou hast made him a little lower than God.”
I believe it means of the same quality and substance, but limited in degree of understanding.
That is my conception of this verse, and I believe it harmonizes with God’s picture of man all the way through the Book.

My conviction is that the greatest transformation possible to the race is that men shall realize that instead of being enemies of God and of each other, God intends us to be gods (John 10.34).

The great awakening that needs to come to all our hearts, and that has come so gradually to the world, is that there is a God-power and a soul-force in the nature of man that God is endeavoring to bring forth.

He is calling forth a soul-awakening to the realization that the man within is the real man.

The inner man is the real governor, the true man that Jesus said was a god.

I have been questioned on that one thing as much as any other. I want to emphasize it.

One day the Pharisees challenged Jesus because He said He was the Son of God.
They called Him a blasphemer.
They kept the letter of the law but not the spirit of it.
They had become enslaved to the mere letter and were, therefore, opposed to the broader vision of Christ.
They were so angry they picked up stones and began to stone Him.
Jesus turned to them and said, quoting the words God had spoken through David,
“Is it not written in your law,
I said, Ye are gods?”
(John 10:34).

These men were not Christians.
They had not been transformed by any spiritual enlightenment as yet.
They were men, as we would say, living in sin.
Yet to them Jesus said,
“I said, Ye are gods.”

If that is a fact, if these men who were sinners in the common use of the term were gods and were declared so by God Himself through the prophet, and so affirmed by Jesus, then there must have been something inherent in their nature that made them gods.

As we view the Scripture from beginning to end we see the wondrous truth that man is not a separate creation detached from God, but he is a part of God Himself.

God breathed His own being, His own self into the nature and being of man and “Man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7).
God breathed into man the heavenly materiality of which God Himself is composed.

Someone might say, “I thought man was mortal.”
As I understand the organism of man, we have our physical body with its five sensory organs, and through these organs we are brought into contact with a certain range of activity that is purely physical.
But that is not all of man!
Aside from his body, there is an inner man, a spiritual man, that inhabits and pervades the outer physical man.

That is the man that came from God.
The man that was breathed into the body.
The man that is a part of God.
That is the undying man.
That is the man you cannot annihilate.
That is the man who cannot destroy himself.

And I do not believe it is any violation of the spirit of the Word and the truth of God to say that that is the man whom God Himself cannot destroy.

Why? Because God cannot destroy Himself, and man is of the substance of God.

That is what Jesus had in mind when He looked into the face of the Pharisees and said,

“I said, Ye are gods.”