No student of Scripture can have any doubt as to the course actually adopted. In the

first place God condescended to use human language and human imagery, and then

finally, in the fullness of time, He manifested Himself in Christ, so completely that it

could be said: "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father."

By his very constitution as originally created, man is a creature whose ideas are first

of all received through his senses. These sense-impressions are the only raw material for

thought to work upon. If we could conceive of a man being created, and deprived at the

outset of his five senses, we should have a being who could never think, and could never

understand or know anything. When God created man, He made in His own likeness and

image, and it is in this likeness that we have the one medium whereby the unseen and

invisible may be translated into terms intelligible to man.

The Scriptures abound with metaphors and analogies. The invisible God is spoken of

as having eyes, ears, hands, feet, nostrils, and as experiencing such feelings as anger and

wrath. The attributes of goodness, righteousness, and power are ascribed to Him, but

every word that is used, and every image expressed is essentially human. We must

always bear in mind that when we speak, for instance, of God's "goodness", we are using

a human term, which employs something which is known to man, and by virtue of its

resemblance to the Divine reality, allows us to see the true goodness of God "as in a

glass, darkly". Revelation does not come to man with a new set of ideas and express

them in an entirely new language. If it did, the revelation would be useless. What

Scripture does is to take terms that are known to man, and transfer them by analogy to the

corresponding realities of the spiritual world.

The early writers saw this fact clearly. God was called Anonymous ("Without a

name") because He is in Himself inexpressible in human language. Justin Martyr says:

For this reason the Lord Jesus Christ is revealed as "The Image of the Invisible God",

"The Logos", "The Form of God", "The Express Image (visible character) of His

Person" (or Substance, the underlying invisible reality),  "God manifest in the flesh".

If Adam was ever to understand God, it was essential in the very nature of things that

there should be at the outset an element in common, and for this reason man was made

"like" God.

In every normal man there is a set of what we may call a priori laws of the mind. If

the mind is not utterly mendacious, it affirms, positively and unreservedly, that the two

and two are four, and that acceptance of this fact is essential to all intellectual activity.

The ideas and beliefs which come to us in this way are the common basis upon which all

subsequent reasoning and revelation rest. It would be the annihilation of all reasonable

thought to deny such a self-evident axiom as that the shortest distance between two points

lying in the same plane is a straight line.