Word of Salvation – Vol. 32 No. 24 – June 1987
Jesus Christ, The God-Man Saviour
Sermon by Rev. M. P. Geluk on Lord's Day 6
Reading: John 1:1-18; Hebrews 1:1-4
Singing: PsH. 286: 1,2; PsH. 286: 3,4; PsH. 376; PsH.252: 1,2,3; BoW. 14:1,2,5
Most people do not like to hate for they know from experience that hate leads to terrible things. Violence, terrorism and war all stem from hatred, and they lead to hate, thus forming a vicious circle.
The followers of the Raja Yoga meditation movement say they have the solution and know how to bring about personal peace and world peace. Their formula for peace was printed some time ago in millions of leaflets which were distributed right across the nation. In case you have not seen their leaflet, then I can just say here that they proposed that each person spends a few minutes each day thinking about positive actions that will patch up and improve your relationships with others. The idea is that you sit in a comfortable position and meditate for a minute or so. In that time you turn your thoughts inward and slowly your mind becomes calm and you begin to experience peace within. Then somehow from within you the feeling of peace will spread like an invisible force across the world and when it settles upon other people they will all want to work for peace. Now we can be quite certain that a lot of people fell for this formula for peace. Even if the connections with eastern religion were not altogether appreciated, many would have said that there is no harm in trying to do it this way for you never know, there may be something in it.
But Christians, if they hold to the teachings of the Bible, will have to say that a thing like this won't work. Christians confess that there are scriptural doctrines that explain why personal and world peace will not come about as the Raja Yogis say it will. With the Heidelberg Catechism we confess that man is a sinful being and unable to bring about a lasting peace. There are forces in the human heart which are not peaceful and positive but evil and destructive. And God is not some kind of power that is hidden somewhere inside man, who, when he meditates, can tap into this power and derive good from it. No, God is a personal Being outside of man. God is spirit and has an existence quite independent of man. God is eternal and in time created man and everything else. But man who was created good fell into a sinful state. And man now has to answer to God for what he has done wrong. And God who is infinitely just and holy still demands perfection and complete obedience. Thus you have a break, a separation between God who is holy and man who is sinful. Man himself can't repair this breach and therefore God in His great love has bridged the gap Himself by sending His Son Jesus Christ. Christ brings man and God together, He restores the peace. Not a peace from within man as the Raja Yogis say, but peace through Christ.
With Lord's Day 6 we confess how peace with God and peace within is brought about through Christ. We have to see Christ as the God-Man Saviour,
- and firstly we see that this is how we should confess Him;
- and secondly this is how the Bible describes Him.
1. In the first place then, we see that we have to confess Jesus Christ as the God-Man Saviour. As we seek to interpret the biblical teaching about Christ, we see that in His work of saving man, this work in which Christ restores the peace between the holy God and sinful man, and by which saving work Christ gives us peace, then we see that as Saviour, Christ has to be both God and Man. Now is this your confession? Is this how you see Christ? As one who is both God and Man? Christ Himself once asked His disciples how they saw Him. Obviously they knew Jesus to be human for He was standing in the flesh right in front of them as He asked this question. And the disciples knew Jesus' mother and His brothers and sisters, so Jesus being a human was not in question. But Christ knew that these disciples had to also see Him as God if they were to have peace with God and later be messengers of peace themselves. So He asked them how they saw Him. Well, they did not come straight out at first by saying what they thought of Christ. They told Jesus what views some others had of Him, like seeing Him as a great prophet, such as Elijah or even John the Baptist. Evidently these were people who saw Jesus as a great teacher, a great man.
There is no doubt that many still see Jesus in that way. I don't know what the promoters of personal peace and world peace say of Jesus, but it's a pretty safe guess that they see Jesus as a great moral teacher, and that He did His best to promote peace. In fact, there are many people who look to Jesus as one of their examples for meditation. After all, Jesus often went to be somewhere by Himself to pray. There were times, His admirers today would say, that Jesus' thoughts went inwards, deep into Himself, and thus enabled Him to be that God-like person who could do the things He did because of the inner strength and peace He possessed.
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But, as C.S. Lewis so clearly demonstrated, if you see Jesus Christ in this way then you are barking up the wrong tree. When Jesus began his public ministry, He started doing things and saying things as if He was God. Jesus claimed to forgive sins. He said He always existed. He said that He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. And when Jesus identified Himself as God, it's very important to realise that Jesus was not thinking of some kind of god-in-man, no, Jesus was talking of God as a Being outside the world, who made it and put man on it and who is infinitely different from anything else.
Now unless Jesus really is that God, then the things He said about Himself would amount to arrogance and conceit. The Pharisees who did not want to believe that Jesus was God did the logical thing. They accused Him of blasphemy. They did not think of Him as a great moral teacher at all. To them Jesus was terribly immoral, going around forgiving people their sins when they had nothing to do with Him before they came into contact with Him. He was just a great pretender, a religious crank. If it wasn't so serious they could have just ignored Jesus as an eccentric person. But they couldn't ignore Him because of the way He behaved. So, convinced that He was not God, they said Jesus must have a devil in Him. But a great moral teacher, or some prophet...? No, definitely not that. So when people today say that they are ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but do not accept His claim to be God, then we should react like C.S. Lewis who said, "That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." (P.53/54 'Mere Christianity.")
Well, this helps us see why Jesus pressed the disciples into giving their own opinion about Him. "Who do you say I am?" It was Peter who answered as the spokesman of them all, "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God." Later, after Jesus' resurrection from the dead, that truth about Christ being God was confessed personally also by Thomas. Thomas knew Jesus to be a man, for he had seen Jesus suffer, bleed and die. But then the same Jesus stood in front of him again after He had died, and Thomas said as he worshipped Jesus, "My Lord, and My God!"
So Jesus Christ is both fully man and fully God! But was Jesus as man not different from us? Yes, the one big difference between Jesus' humanity and ours is that He was sinless. That cannot be said of us of course. But being without sin does not make Jesus more or less human. Adam and Eve for a while were without sin too, but God created them fully human. The presence of sin in a person's life and nature does not make him less human. If anything, sin makes us inhuman. And because man is no longer what he was originally, he needs salvation. Christ came to save us from the inhumanity man brought upon himself through sin. Salvation consist of making man fully human again by removing all the sin and guilt that makes man inhuman.
It's interesting that the Catechism here in Lord's Day 6, answer 17, speaks of a restoration to righteousness and life. The term "salvation" is used so often that we tend to overlook its significance. It's therefore refreshing to hear salvation expressed in different words, like "righteousness and life". Indeed, Christ gives us who are by nature unrighteous, a perfect righteousness, a right standing with God. It's having this peace with God, and it results in personal peace. Another way of saying it is: having been justified with God through Christ. And those who are justified have peace with God because the barrier of sin and guilt has been removed. And salvation is life because Christ by His death has saved us from death and through His resurrection has given us to share in His life. Sin brings death but Jesus gives life. But for Jesus to restore the sinner to righteousness and life He had to be sinless or righteous Himself. If He wasn't that, then He would have been sinful like us and deserving death. Then He could not have done anything for us, for He would have been in the same boat with us, so to speak. And if Jesus had sin, then He would not have been God either.
Christ then must be seen by us as the God-man Saviour. That's how we must confess Him.
2. Then in the second place, let us see that this is how the Bible describes Him. To say that Jesus is the God-man Saviour is one thing, but from where do you know this? Answer 19 in Lord's Day 6 points us to the holy gospel by which the whole Bible is meant. But how do we know that we are understanding the Bible in the way God wants us to understand it? When the Jehovah Witnesses at my door tell me that Jesus is not eternal nor fully God then immediately I am in an argument with them as to what the Bible really says. Different people use the Bible in different ways. So how do I know that I am understanding the Bible in the way it is meant to? Is there only one way to understand it, or are there several? One way for the Raja Yogis and another way for the Christians, one way for the politician and another for the preacher, one for parents and another for children, one for the Jews and another for the Gentile, one for the east and another for the west, one for Europe and another for Australia? There are 66 books in the Bible and 39 of them are in the Old Covenant and 27 in the New Covenant but many were written by different authors and at different times which had different cultures. Can I make a difference between what Jesus taught and what Paul taught, giving to the one more authority than to the other? As you well know there are different interpretations. And different people follow different rules – or none at all – if they want to suit themselves. Beware of them and beware of the sects and cults who, whilst insisting they believe every word in the Bible, are a snare to the church and a disgrace to Christ with their ways of interpretation.
Well, here in Lord's Day 6 we confess that the right way of interpreting the Bible is when it describes Jesus Christ as the God-Man Saviour. Not just in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and not just in a wider sense of the New Testament, but in the whole Bible. Christ is already spoken of in paradise, in the books of Moses, in the historical books in the prophetical books and poetical books, as well as through the Old Testament sacrifices. Yes, from Genesis to Revelation the Bible points to the God-Man Saviour Jesus Christ. The Bible is not just a book of stories and teachings which are all independent and unrelated. No, the Bible is the Word of God about His coming to restore sinful man to righteousness and life through Jesus Christ. The coming of God in Christ is an act of deliverance from sin and death, and is announced immediately after the fall into sin. Adam and Eve were the first to sin but also the first to hear of salvation. And as time went on, God revealed more and more about Christ. Moses knew more than Adam and Eve, and Isaiah more than Moses and John the Baptist more than Isaiah. Christ Himself is the fulfilment of the Old Testament Scriptures. He is, in the words of Hebrews 1:3, the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being. And the letters of the New Testament go on to explain the full implications of all that Jesus said and did. The New Testament goes on to explain how Christ's first coming points to His second coming and that God will then be all in all as God's kingdom is fully established, Satan completely overcome, sin and death forever banished, and heaven has come on earth. Then history will have made full circle, from paradise at the beginning to paradise at the end.
From beginning to end, therefore, the Bible is a record of what God has done and will do in Christ. It makes the Bible a history book, but not in the sense that history is usually understood. No, a special history, in fact, the real history, a history of what God does in the world for and on behalf of His people with whom He has covenanted Himself to save them through Christ. The Bible is thus the history of God's covenant dealings with His people.
You can understand now why the Christian church can be so excited about the Bible. Because when we see it as we are meant to, then we see Christ as the God-Man Saviour being the very centre of it, both the Old Testament and New Testament. Christ is not an after-thought of God, as though He had to bring Him in because the Old Testament way of salvation failed to work. There is only one way of salvation. God did not change the rules between Old Testament and New Testament. Now this way, then that way, and finally through Christ. No, throughout the covenant of God with His people, from Adam and Eve right up to the very last of the elect to be saved, salvation is the same through the God-Man Saviour Jesus Christ. Some of those saved had to look forward to Christ's coming, as was the case of the Old Testament believers, and others, like ourselves have to look backwards to Christ's first coming, as well as forwards to His coming again. But all are restored to righteousness and life only by faith in Christ, seeing Him as the God-Man Saviour.
The Bible then only makes sense when we can see it describing Christ as God and as Man. Our understanding of it and our interpretations of it are to be such that each part, each happening, each book, each letter, each parable, tell us something of the person and work of Christ. Failing to understand the Bible comes about when we lose the centrality of Christ.
It's for this reason that films, plays and musicals about some part of the Bible are quite meaningless when these fail to bring out the real meaning of Christ. Anyone can make something exciting about Samson or David, or Paul, or even Christ for that matter, but if it fails to make plain how God through them comes to His people in His saving love in Christ, then more harm is done than good.
In any case, the Bible's real message is something out of this world and it is only Christians who are enabled by God's Spirit to convey its true message. For just look at the way God saves His people. It's God Himself, in the person of His Son, who steps into man's humanity. In Christ, God became Man and yet remains God. This is unique, you can't find a similar thing anywhere else. In all other religions man has to attain god-like qualities. Mohammed, Buddha, Ghandi and all the gurus of the present, all human, are elevated to god-status, if not by themselves, then by their worshippers. In fact, is this not true also of Mary in Roman Catholicism? She too has been given a god-like status when it was propagated that she remained a virgin, and even bodily ascended into heaven. The religions are different, yet, there is this one thing they have in common. The founder, or the key person, rises from the level of humaness to being god. It's man becoming god, immortalised and honoured, served and worshipped. And salvation is seen as following the human-now-god leader and rising from the miseries of this life into a new god-like existence where all humanness is left behind.
In fact, such attempts at reaching god-like status is not just to be found in the world religions. Similar attempts are found in classical literature and films, even comics. Humans are made into superstars who acquire a god-like quality and who rise above the normal world of men and things. Humanity seems to have a passion for man-made saviours, so they create them on the cinema screen, from the rock-music industry, from sports heroes and popular politicians, and then make them into gods who are idolised and worshipped. They are looked to as examples to follow, to copy, to become like them. Some of these fade quickly and disappear from the scene, but others become new religions.
But man is not going to add meaning to life by making some human into a god and expecting from that god a whole new dimension. Man will be restored to righteousness and life when he turns to the one, true God who did the exact opposite, by becoming man. Christ came to man, into our existence, took on our flesh and blood, and made us new. Not as gods, but as creatures, new human beings, equipping us to live as sons and daughters of God right here on earth, and later on the new earth. But we will still be people, except there will be no sin and no crookedness, and God will be amongst us.
Amen