Jeff Vines is a personal friend of mine and preaches in California. And as a preacher he says that Jesus Christ is the most inclusive, exclusivest to have ever walked the planet. Seems like a contradiction but it's true. He is inclusive and exclusive. Even the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3.16, says that whosoever believes will not perish but have everlasting life.
That sounds like a wide embrace. And you've got passages like 2 Peter 3.9, that God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. And you've got passages like 1 John 2.2, that Jesus Christ is the atoning sacrifice, not only for our sins, but for the sins of the whole world. world.
In the book of Acts, on the day of Pentecost, Peter said that this promise, this salvation promise, the Holy Spirit promise, is for you and your children and for all those who are far off, as many as the Lord God will call. You cluster those passages together and they underline the grand inclusiveness of Christ, his wide embrace of everybody. But this one who is so loving and broad in his appeal. is also quite narrow and exclusive in his claims. In the Upper Room Discourse of John 14, he says that famous statement in verse 6, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No one comes to the Father but by me. Sounds like if you're not going through Jesus, you're not going to get to God. Likewise, in Acts 4, verse 12, one of the hardest verses to hear in Western civilization today is where Peter says, after being called in the carpet for an act of kindness to a child.
disabled man, salvation is found in no one else, for there's no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. And in the Sermon on the Mount, as Jesus ends the sermon, he even says, enter by the narrow gate, for wide is the gate that leads to destruction, but the narrow road is hard. I think Jeff Fiennes is right, that Jesus Christ is the most inclusive, exclusivist to have ever walked the planet.
In fact, Jesus is this very stunning and polarizing figure of human history. John Ortberg tried to get at that in his book, Who Is This Man? , where he shows the incredible cultural impact of Jesus Christ. You can't turn the dates in your calendar.
You can't talk about, you know, the role of women, his view of children, limited government. Ortberg just tries to outline the incredible impact that Jesus Christ has had on the world. has had. Now, of course, in this lesson, we would probably have to deal with the inextricable link between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
But since this is lessons exclusively on Jesus, we will just focus on Him in two regards. I'd like to talk first about His person, and second about His work. When scholars discuss the ministry of Christ and the doctrine of Christ, that's usually how it breaks down. His person, that is, his identity.
How much is he really human? How much is he really divine? Scholars have debated it for years.
And then his work. Well, he did many works. In fact, that becomes a synonym for miracles at times.
His encounters, his testimonies, various things. But when scholars talk about the work of Christ, they specifically mean his atoning work on Calvary's cross. I.
Howard Marshall, the great Methodist scholar, talked about a book just in a little paperback. the person and work of Christ, and he means his identity and his atoning death. So that's the direction I would like to take this if I could. First of all, dealing with the person of Christ. Have you ever wondered why so many people in the first century A.D.
seemed to miss the Messiah when he came? I mean, his family got on board a little later. The disciples got on board a little later.
But clearly the crowds and the Jewish people at large, specifically the leaders, Missed Jesus by three million light years. Why did this happen? And I hope this doesn't sound irreverent to the Bible, but to be real honest, the Old Testament does not give us a clear path to his personhood in the prediction of this Messiah that would come.
And so maybe we should be a little kinder, gentler, with regard to our Jewish forefathers who just wrestled with this Jesus of Nazareth figure. Who is he? And partly, it's just the nature of predictive prophecy.
Now, you would know that the Bible uses prophecy a lot, but most of the time, the prophecy is to the people to whom it's coming right then and there. Predictive prophecy is kind of piecemeal. It's fragmentary. It just happens here and there, and then it's picked up a little bit later. In fact, you never really know, you know, about predictive prophecy until it's finally fulfilled.
And when that happens, then it's 2020. messianic kind of thing. So, maybe to start with the person and work of Christ, we could deal with his identity this way. What do we see specifically in the Old Testament? What kind of Christ do we see predicted? Well, maybe it would be in the name of God himself.
In the beginning, God. But the word for God is Elohim, and it's plural at the ending. So, what does that mean, and what do we do with that? I'm rather convinced it really is not talking about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
It's just using a majestic view of God that God is the only one. But some people get into the person of Christ by that very first line in Scripture, in the beginning God. So what role does this particular person of the Godhead take on?
Maybe we see Jesus in the Old Testament in terms of a special messenger. In Genesis 18, Abraham is at his tent. He receives three visitors and, of course, hospitality in the ancient world, you would take these people in. But one of them is called the angel of the Lord.
And a little later in the narrative, it actually refers to him as the Lord. Is this a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus? Or in Daniel chapter 3, when Daniel's three friends end up in a fiery furnace, Nebuchadnezzar looks and there's a fourth guy walking in the fire. Is this a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus? Some people think so.
Or still staying in the Old Testament a little bit, is this the messenger of wisdom. Proverbs 8 talks about that wisdom was here before any of creation was here, and wisdom helped God to frame up creation. And Paul, connecting those dots, says that Jesus Christ is our wisdom.
So is that a little bit of a glimpse? Or what about various prophetic titles or passages of Scripture? When God is giving the curses...
In the Garden of Eden to Adam and Eve and the serpent and creation, he says that she will bear a seed who will come and crush Satan's head. Is that a reference to Jesus? Or what about Isaiah 53? That's pretty clear about this suffering servant, this man of sorrows acquainted with grief. When our friends, the Jews for Jesus, go out witnessing in Philadelphia or New York City or Jerusalem, they will read Isaiah 53. to their fellow compatriots, their Jewish people, and they would say, who do you think this is talking about?
And even secular Jews know enough to say, that's Ushia, that's Ushia, that has to be Jesus. He's the only one that fits the bill in that minor prophet Haggai. He's referred to as the desire of the nations. Again, back to kind of the inclusive idea. And he's son of man in this prophetic title and divine title of Daniel and Ezekiel.
So once again, just staying in the Old Testament, maybe it has something to do with typology. Now, typology, just as a reminder, is the issue of persons or places or events or things that predictively and prophetically foreshadow something coming later. For instance, as far as people goes, Moses said, God will raise up from among you someone like me.
So is Moses a type of Christ? What about David in Psalm 110? The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a stool for your feet.
So Davidic connection there as a person. What about the tabernacle? Jesus represents the presence of God and Solomon's temple, the presence of God.
So that's not a person. That's a thing or an event, which then would lead us to the Levitical sacrificial system. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, The reason that we debate how Jesus is perceived and understood in his person, his humanity, his divinity, is because the Old Testament is a little bit scattered on all of this, quite frankly.
My friend, Dr. Shane Wood, would say that we have to kind of dispel four myths with regard to the Messiah. First of all this, that many, many, many passages of Old Testament point to a Messiah. Well, yes and no. If you spread out your contextual perimeters, then yeah, you will be able to see Christ in the broader sweeps of the Old Testament.
But if you're just looking for individual book, chapter, and verse, it's actually quite scanty, which also would give evidence to why the Jews made such a mistake of missing Jesus. So that's one myth to dispel. A second by Shane Wood is people were earnestly looking for the Messiah in the first century AD.
Well, again, yes and no. I mean... Galatians 4.4 says that God sent forth his Son in the fullness of time, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law.
So, yeah, it seems like there was a timeliness to this. And yet, there doesn't seem to be a mass level of people looking for the Messiah in the first century. Gamaliel's address in chapter 5 of Acts talks about Thutis and Judas. Makes you wonder if they were twins.
But these were rebellious guys and revolutionary types. And yet there doesn't seem to be. So we sometimes think, oh, everybody was looking for the Messiah by the first century.
Well, maybe not so much. Here's a third myth to dispel. That people believe that the Messiah was some kind of God incarnate. I don't know that too many believe that at all. Now, they did believe that the Messiah would come and maybe help them overthrow the Romans or some such thing.
But to think that God would come in flesh? The Old Testament actually says the opposite. It says, if you see God, you're going to die.
So that's a myth that has to be dispelled. Fourthly, the myth is that there's a clear consensus on the picture and person of the Messiah, as you can already see from what we trace. No, that's just not true. So it lets us have a little bit more grace and liberty with our Jewish forefathers who kind of missed Jesus.
Now, when we add to that the whole element of Judaism and intertestamental literature and the antiquity scholars to the mix, we see all kinds of other things that made it fuzzy about who the Messiah would be. Could he be? A political revolutionary? Well, in some ways, Jesus could be labeled that.
Is he some kind of famous magician? Well, he did work miracles, and miracles existed in those realms and those days where people would make those connections. What about an exorcist?
Yes, he did cast out demons. That's true. What about some kind of charismatic leader that he was just a compelling leader that people would follow? True. What about the ideal rabbi?
One of his favorite... Direct addresses. The vocative was teacher, rabbi. What about an ideal Pharisee? Some people thought that Phariseeism at its best really was what God was really wanting.
Separate from the world, but doing God's business. Is he kind of the ideal Pharisee? A Gamaliel, a Hillel, a Shammai on steroids.
Is that what he is? Some would suggest, well, he has kind of Essene qualities. I think I see this more in John the Baptist.
than I do in Jesus, but some would say he's withdrawn from the world. Even Luke 5.16 says he would often withdraw to go away to pray. Is he kind of a private mystic of sorts?
Ben Witherington down at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, would say, oh no, he's a sage. He's a wisdom sayer. He just, he spits out these little proverbs all the times to people.
Other philosophers say he occupies the role of a cynic, kind of not just being negative necessarily, but analyzing. culture, analyzing ways. And then finally, people like N.T.
Wright and Michael Byrd and James Dunn and others say, no, no, no, what he is is an eschatological prophet. Now, the point is, every one of those has some elements of truth to it. But that's the problem, is that we come at this at so many levels, it makes Jesus, the real Jesus, kind of fuzzy in who he is, his identity.
And to this list, we could add a few more things like, his own self-designations. One of his favorite titles was Son of Man. And that's kind of nebulous. It's purposely ambiguous, if you will.
And what about titles, maybe that he assigned or that others people gave? He said, I, your teacher and Lord, have done this, so you need to do this in the case of washing the feet of John 13. Sometimes the gospel writer will make some connections. When I'm in Matthew chapters 1 and 2, I like to talk about Jesus being the new Israel that will get it right.
Old Israel didn't get it right, but Jesus is the new Israel. He retraces Abraham's steps, the wise men coming to visit him, things like that. But Matthew doesn't say that. That's just kind of connecting dots of what we see in the narratives.
Sometimes we learn a little bit about who Jesus is, his person, by the antagonists, the Pharisees, the people that play the other role, the Romans. They will say things like, I don't find any fault in this man. Or they will say, we know you teach the way of God in truth because you don't... play favorites. You respect people's, right?
You don't regard the face of man would be one way they would talk about that. And sometimes it was the miracles themselves that would give something about his person, claim something about his person, such as, you know, Nicodemus comes to him at night and says, we know that no one could do these signs that you do unless God was with him. So the miracles, Jesus said, if you don't believe me, believe the miracles.
Sometimes just his own claims and his own teachings in that context. And here's one, what he sometimes received from others is interesting in terms of his person. Because like when Peter, you know, is at Cornelius's house, Cornelius bows down to him and Peter says, don't do that. And the book of Revelation, John bows down to an angel and the angel says, don't do that.
But people bowed down to Jesus and he let them do that. So what he received in terms of adoration and praise would seem to be sort of godlike. So what we come down to when we're talking about the person of Christ, his identity is basically this. There's no unified portrait.
Rather, there is a plurality of pictures, which when we understand that, again, it might help us be a little kinder and gentler toward those first century folks. No one picture. Exhaust.
Jesus the Messiah. He's like turning a diamond and seeing every facet of it. At the end of the day, at least we can say from the Old Testament, three things shake down.
He's prophet, he's priest, he's king. Now, he's fully human, fully divine, but those three things get picked up in the New Testament quite a bit. He's prophet in that he speaks the message of God.
He addresses issues of social injustice. He talks about people being disenfranchised. marginalized, things like that.
He's a prophet. He's also a priest in that he represents people to God and represents God to the people. And of course, in his high priestly act, in the work of Christ on the cross, he will do something about sacrifice. And then lastly, he is king.
He told Pilate he was a king and son of God and son of man. Those are kind of kingly titles. So at the end of the day, those were folks in the Old Testament anointed, like as with oil falling down on the beard of the person.
to say that these were God's special emissaries. So even though the picture is a little confusing when we look at all the evidence, it's evidently clear enough that God held the people of Israel responsible for it, so his person. Now, secondly, let me come, when talking about the person of Christ, to his work. Jesus had many works, plural.
The miracles themselves were that, his sermons, his encounters. But when scholars talk about the work of Christ, they mean the primary work, pathema, his spirit. suffering, his passion experience on Calvary's cross, or if you will, the word atonement.
I'd like to give several cautions about understanding atonement as we start with atonement. The first is this, beware that the gospels don't say much about the atonement. Granted, they don't say as much as the epistles, that's for sure.
I mean, after all, you've got Jesus living out these three years of ministry with his disciples, and then he dies on the cross. So we shouldn't expect the gospels. to give us a full-blown view of the atonement. And yet, there are bits and pieces here and there about it. Like, for instance, in Mark 10, 45, the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom.
Ransom. Whoa, that's a salvific term. For, which could be translated on behalf of or in place of, many.
So, there are bits and pieces here. And sometimes even in the teachings of Jesus, the parables, allusions to what this one would do. But beware that the Gospels don't say much about the atonement.
They say maybe more than we think. Secondly, beware that the epistles were efforts to explain the life of Jesus to the church. 21 of the 27 documents in the New Testament are epistles.
They're letters trying to give the theological underpinning and understanding of what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were trying to tell us about the life of Christ. So we should expect... In the epistles, more about the atonement, which we have buckets of.
Thirdly, beware that the miracles in ministry were previous or previews of the atonement, to the atonement. When Jesus performed a miracle, I'm persuaded anyway, for a brief moment, he was pulling back the veil of eternity and letting us look into a world that's perfectly whole. No more pain, no more death, no more crying, no more mourning, for the old order of things has passed away. And so the point is, every time you see a miracle, That's a little glimpse of all creation being healed, which is what the atonement was partly to do.
Here's a fourth caution. Beware that the New Testament writers didn't feel obligated to give a systematic outline of the salvific experience. They were telling the story of Jesus.
They were telling churches how to live. They weren't interested in necessarily giving us a systematic theology, even though we can derive some things that way. Fifthly, beware that there may be...
a progression to our understanding of salvation, the work of Christ, but concepts also greatly overlap here. We talk about census plenure in the Bible. We talk about progressive revelation in the Bible. In other words, we know some things later on in Scripture that we didn't learn earlier. The Bible progresses, if you will, and we get the fuller sense a little later.
So we have to come to latter parts to understand. Sixthly, a caution. Beware that you can't have everything in a word or concept.
You just can't have it all. Sometimes I think we expect to understand the whole nature of the atonement or the work of Christ just with one word. And that never works. No, salvation, like the person of Jesus, is a multifaceted jewel, a diamond that you have to look at. It's a multi, many-splendored thing.
And finally, number seven, beware of the idolatry of salvation. I use that phrase. It's been thrown around a little bit.
And all I mean by that is to only deal with the work of Christ from the perspective of forgiveness of sins. Now, forgiveness of sins is huge. One man said, that the forgiveness of sins is the most incredible, potentially saving thing in life. So I don't want to denigrate the idea of forgiveness, but the cross and the work of atonement is bigger than just that.
It's not just the forgiveness in the notch of the belt. Oh, no. No, it's the healing of all creation.
It's the lost being found. It's the guilty being forgiven. It's the sick being made well.
And so if we have a puny view of salvation, we won't really understand the vastness of atonement in the work of Christ. Then when you add to all these cautions, the vocabulary of the New Testament, you see how much more the work of Christ spills out to us. All the big T-I-O-N words, for instance, justification. And what the writers of the New Testament were trying to do when they looked at Calvary was trying to find worlds of these words that would somehow describe what's going on. Justification was a courtroom term.
for instance. The gavel hits the bench and one is declared not guilty. Justification, a courtroom term.
Or propitiation, that's a temple term. The high priest on Yom Kippur in the fall would go into the Holy of Holies and take some blood and there was the Ark of the Covenant in which was the law. On top of the Ark of the Covenant was the angels, if you will, with wings outspread to one another, the mercy seat, and the priest would sprinkle the blood on top of to cover, to cover. It's a term that means if the blood is there, it will avert the wrath of God. Thirdly, redemption.
It's a marketplace term. Even today, we use it that way. Coupons and going to the store and garage sales and to redeem things.
Fourthly, reconciliation. It's a marriage term. Sanctification.
While sometimes describing the after one becomes a Christian, the growth in holiness in the Christian experience, this word sometimes is used to talk about initial conversion or regeneration. That's a cosmological term. You know, when God got the whole thing going, what do we have?
And the Spirit of God moved on the waters. And God said. So to create creation originally, you have water and wind, Spirit, and word. What does it take to make a new person in Jesus Christ? Water, wind, word.
So regeneration. Adoption, election, calling. Those are our family terms, familial relationships.
And then finally, deification. That may sound like an odd one to you, but all I mean by it is that as we grow in Christ, we become more like him. Jesus said in John 10, I say to you, you are gods. And of course, meaning kind of as Luther would say, little Christs of sorts.
Peter kind of really nails it in 2 Peter when he says it this way. He said, everything we have for life and godliness has been given to us through the knowledge of Jesus. And then he says that we may become partakers of the divine nature. The scholars call it. theosis, the becoming of like Christ.
So, the vocabulary drives atonement, even when there is some cautions we must have about it. So, are there some major theories? I don't know if I want to call them theories as much as models, where people have articulated, this is the work of Christ.
This is what happened. Well, there are. Let me mention at least five.
Number one is what's called the penal substitution theory or model. This is where Christ, by dying on the cross, has been substituted for the judgment against us. And while that might not be the oldest view of the atonement, it is one since the Reformation that gets a lot of press. Second is what's called Christus Victor.
It simply means Christ won the victory over the devil on the cross, and Colossians 1 and 2 at least speaks to that. A third view of the work of Christ, as far as atonement goes, is called the moral exemplar view. This is where Christ showed us how to live. And the idea of this is before you get to Calvary, you have these three years of ministry. So we have to walk in his steps, as Charles Sheldon said, even though he was a Christian socialist.
The idea was somehow that it's the life of Jesus that tells us how to be and act. Fourthly, is satisfying God's honor. That is to say that Christ didn't just die for sin, but he died to restore God's honor.
He had to keep his truth to himself. He had to be true to himself. He said, I'll punish sin. And so this was Anselm's view and some others in church history.
Finally, number five is recapitulation. And this view simply means that Christ is the second Adam, which Paul calls him that in Romans. And therefore, he's giving it a second shot.
To give the example of a perfect human righteousness would be not the first Adam, but the second heaven. So we're recapitulating, if you will. These are all just ways to talk about it. I tend to be a little eclectic.
I think there's some nuances of truth in each of these and we can draw. Maybe some of them have more explaining power than others, but that's the work of Christ. So what can we say to pull that together? I think this. First of all, atonement is rooted in the story of Jesus.
Atonement is rooted in the story of Christ, the whole story of Christ. One of the great things that N.T. Wright has done for us is to say it's not just about the last few pages.
It's about the whole gospel book. I think he's right. Number two, this work of Christ is celebrated in the Lord's Supper. Whether one takes a more orthodox or Catholic view that this is transubstantiation, that the elements become the body and blood of Jesus, or a more Reformed view, consubstantiation, or an evangelical view like these are, you know, metaphoric symbolism, something's happening when we say, Take this bread, eat this bread, drink this fruit of the vine, celebrate it. Whatever he did on the cross is celebrating the Lord's Supper.
It's also thirdly evident in conversion and in baptism. In baptism, there's something of the work of Christ going on to contact what he did. Fourthly, it's bigger than just going to heaven or having a relationship with Christ or God.
Those are kind of Western ways of talking about almost marketing terms of sorts. And it's just bigger than that. Finally.
It's really experiencing a whole new creation, being restored to co-rule with God and become partakers of the divine nature. In C.S. Lewis's book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he has to get Peter and Edmund, the sons of Adam, and the daughters of Eve, Lucy and Susan, to sit on those four chairs in Caraparaval. Caraparaval means holy place. He's trying to get us to co-reign with him once again.
So, of course, the doctrine of Christ has, whether we're talking about his person or his work, has morphed some in the history of the church. Certainly in postmodern times, it has morphed again. Media has made it morph again. But church history, if it shows anything to us, shows us this, that we tend to make Jesus in our image more than looking at him the way he's really portrayed in Scripture. Make sure that when you speak of the person and work of Christ, that you're not just...
You have a biblical Jesus.