esh and dwelt among us. In the person of the babe
of Bethlehem we have a being that never before existed--a being both
human and divine. He brought from the skies the divinity of His Father,
and dwelt among men with the humanity of His mother. Hence the mighty
chasm between man and God, between earth and heaven, is bridged over in
the God-man, Christ Jesus. His divinity reaches half-way from heaven to
earth, and His humanity half-way from earth to heaven, and the two
unite in Him.

In the life of Jesus we see His two natures constantly manifested. As
He hungers and thirsts and sleeps; as He weeps over the sins of men,
and sorrows over their afflictions, we see His humanity. He seems to be
only a man. But when He stills the tempest on the Sea of Galilee, or
calls Lazarus back to life, we see His divinity. It is interesting to
study His life with a view to the manifestation of His two natures in
each event--their distinctness and their blending.

We may never know in this life the reasons for the blending of the
divine and the human in the person of the mediator. These things are
doubtless beyond the ken of an archangel, in all their fullness. Yet
from our point of view, obscured by our fleshly weakness, we may see
some reasons lying on the surface why this was a necessity. Some of
these let us consider.

Man fell through the weakness of the flesh and the power of temptation.
Satan works through the flesh to pollute the spirit. In order to be one
with us in our temptation, and perfect Himself as an experimental
sympathizer, our mediator must be tempted in all points like as we are,
that He may know how we feel under temptation. This demanded that He
take upon Himself not the nature of angels, but that of the seed of
Abraham. He must, therefore, be a man. But this temptation is to be
successfully met. It is to be without sin. No man had ever successfully
withstood the assaults of Satan. Our mediator was to do this. Hence the
necessity of divinity. He must be human to be tempted; He must be
divine to resist it. And to make His victory the more complete, He had
His flesh put to the sorest test. After a fast of forty days, when His
long pent-up hunger rushed upon Him as a lion upon its prey, Satan
approached and exhausted his strength to overcome Him. Not only did He
give Satan this advantage, such as he had never had nor needed over
men, but He even went out of the flesh, into the citadel of which Satan
held the keys, and