During the years when the first Christian lived as a teacher and healer of men in the Galilean country, the sins and sufferings of mankind haunted his footsteps. As the Master journeyed from countryside to city, meeting with fishermen, priests, lawyers, money-changers, civilians, and soldiers, the evils of the times clamored for redress. And the Master was aware that he had been sent of God to take away the sins of the world, the beliefs in power apart from God. Inasmuch as he declared at the close of his sojourn that he had accomplished his mission, what significance of Christian power must lie within his procedure as example for his followers!
Though partaking of the daily life about him, he seemed never to lose sight of man's oneness with God, of man's holiness. He insisted upon this as he preached and based his healing work upon it. Embodying this divine characteristic, he was able with serene supremacy to triumph over temptation, to cast out devils, to heal both open and secret sin, to prove the powerlessness and unreality of evil. The cruelty and sensuality of the era in which he worked failed to accomplish his overthrow or prevent his ascending proofs of man's God-given dominion.
Man's God-given dominion—that is what holiness is. This quality of being was not confined to Christ Jesus, for the Bible states in the first chapter of Genesis that God made man in His likeness, so that basically the nature of God must be the character of everyone. Jesus accepted this and prayed that his followers might know that holiness, the purity of immortality, is forever reflected in man—unassailable, untemptable, indestructible, supreme. This is fact both of man's origin and of his continuity.
