However, Mr. Darby has boldly avoided these subterfuges, and avowed the grounds of his destructive doctrine, viz., “that they had no idea of owning Him as God.” Were Gilbert Wakefield alive, who translated the New Testament, exactly in the same way, and Priestly and Belsham, these noted Unitarians, they would say: “Let us shake hands, good sir; we are agreed so far, at all events.” Not that we say Mr. Darby holds Unitarian sentiments; but we say that no evangelical man living has, so far as we know, played better into their hands or more gratuitously.
ANSWER.
The answer to the doctrinal reasoning of Mr. Darby is this: The same Scriptures that proscribed and denounced idolatry and false worship as the greatest sin that could be perpetrated, confining worship to Jehovah, carefully prescribed and proclaimed the worship and divinity of the Messiah when He should come. Hence the question was, not whether Messiah was to get divine worship, but whether Jesus of Nazareth were the Messiah? And it is clear that all in Israel who believed Jesus to be Messiah did, and should, give Him divine worship, and He accepted it. A few quotations will make this evident: “Worship him, all ye gods. (Ps. xcvii. 7.) “Let all the angels of God worship him.” “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom.” (Ps. cii., Heb. i.) “To him whom man despiseth, to him whom the nation abhorreth, to a servant of rulers, kings shall see and arise, princes also shall worship.” (Is. xlix. 7.) “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (Is. vii. 14.) We need not multiply references. And the Lord Jesus, when born, was announced by an angel as this “Immanuel—God with us” (Matt. i.), and acknowledged at the beginning of His ministry as “him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write” (John, i.), and confessed by Peter as “the Christ the Son of the living God.” “Doing works which no other man did amongst them.” (John, xv.) As “he that should come.” (Matt. xi.) Therefore the disciples and all in Israel who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, did, and should, give Him divine worship, and He accepted it of them. Even the legion gave it to Him in terror, as the great Judge; and the soldiers in mockery, as the great King. But whether in pretence or in truth, worship He got, and worship He took “as God”—God with us—Immanuel. “The word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”
