Tonight, we are going to be looking in our third major discussion together at the identity of the Word of God. Who is the Word of God? Chapter 16, beginning in verse 13, we begin to read this.
When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, Who do people say? that the son of man is and they replied some say john the baptist others elijah still others jeremiah or one of the prophets but you he asked him who do you say that i am simon peter answered you're the messiah the son of the living god jesus responded blessed are you simon son of jonah Because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven.
Whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven. And then he gave the disciples orders to tell no one that he was the Messiah. And to point out to his disciples that it was necessary for him to go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders, chief priests and scribes, be killed and be raised the third day. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. Oh, no, Lord, this will never happen to you.
Jesus turned and told Peter, get behind me, Satan, for you are a hindrance to me because you're not thinking about God's concerns, but human concerns. Can we pray? Father, we pray that you will reveal your Son to us by your Word and by your Spirit this very evening, and help us to glorify him as we glorify you. In Jesus'name, amen. So, who is the Word of God?
Now, Christian theology discerns the most exciting story ever heard. The good news it rehearses takes the tedious monotony and utter insanity of the present world and turns it upside down. It does so with the seemingly incredible assertion that the eternal God became a man and died on the cross for the sins of the world. This world, which he originally created, revolted against him. It then had the gall to kill the very son whom God sent to reconcile the world with himself.
However, God is not deterred either by rebellion or neither by rebellion nor by death. Instead, the son swallowed up death into himself, destroying it forever. Isaiah 25, 8 and 1 Corinthians 15, 54. I think that idea of what he did with death is very important.
He swallowed it. You may recognize her name. She was a novelist, detective novelist, but also one of the Inklings. And she famously corrected the dull preaching of the English clergy with her claim, the dogma is the drama.
The dogma is the drama. Christian dogma discloses the cosmological drama, whose principle is the divine son who became man. The plot pivots, she says, upon a single character, and the whole action is the answer to a single central problem.
What think ye of Christ? Sayers comes from a long line of Orthodox theologians who recognize the Bible focuses on the cosmic mystery of the one Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal word. Cosmic meaning universal. It covers everything.
And that mystery of the cosmos is located in the one Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal word. But exactly who is this word who dominates the divine drama? It is said that he both grants reason to all creatures and makes sense of every word uttered in creation, revealing God perfectly.
This Word is our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God. He is the eternally begotten Son, one God with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Christ is God in his ontology. And by the way, I'm going to give you a lecture about an article in the Baptist Faith and Message that is shorter than the article on the family, Jesus Christ, which tells you we might have some work to do.
Moreover, there's very little about Christological ontology, who he is. Not just what he does, but who he is. In recent centuries, the divine ontology of the Son has been underplayed, so the truth of his personhood must be recovered. Christ is also God in his economy, not just his ontology.
The triune God created all things, and when humanity fell into sin, the eternal word assumed our humanity. And I'm going to be using that word assumed when I talk about him becoming flesh. That's also another language that we need to take care of.
So Christ is the word. He assumed humanity. The form of a servant, right? That's the language of Paul.
Assumed or took. Without distorting his person or diminishing his divine perfection whatsoever, he took upon himself our humanity. The Word became man in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ.
He was like us in all ways, except that he never sinned. Christians have come to recognize he is one person, truly God, and truly man. One person, truly God, and truly man.
The Word then died on the cross to atone for the sin of the world, but death and the grave could not contain him. The one who is God and man conquered death by rising again, promising to justify whosoever will believe in him. After conveying this true hermeneutic of Scripture to his apostles, you can read of that in his discussion with the disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. and his subsequent discussion with the apostles, he told them how you read the Old Testament. You read them by looking at Christ.
So after conveying the true hermeneutic of Scripture to his apostles, the Lord commissioned them to disciple the world with this truth. He then ascended to the right hand of the Father. He now intercedes for us on the very throne of God, but one day the Word of God will return to trample the winepress of the...
fears wrath of God. Revelation 19. The kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, who remains perfect for it of God, even as he brings to perfection, our humanity in himself will never end. Now, I've said a lot in that, and you're probably not catching it, so we're going to unpack a lot of this as we go on this evening. To perceive well the contours of this life-giving and wrath-dispensing Christian drama. we must consider the eternal Word of God, who he is and what he does.
The Word in his person and work constitutes the central, indispensable, and unalterable dogma of the Christian faith. That's a big claim. So let me say that again. The Word in his person and work constitutes the central, indispensable, and unalterable dogma of the Christian faith.
All heresies arise in what they do with Jesus Christ, diminishing Him here in some way. We'll go through those heresies too, later. Yes?
Did you say dispensable or indispensable? Indispensable. No, you can't dispense with it.
Indispensable. So I'll say it one more time. The Word in His person and work.
constitutes the central, indispensable, and unalterable dogma of the Christian faith. His inspired apostles and prophets tell us how we can know him and the provision of reconciliation to God. So we're going to begin our portrait of Jesus Christ by surveying the biblical terms.
presented of his person. His divine names include Word, Son of God and Son of Man, among others. So over the next few lectures, we will review the Christian faith's striking sketch of his divine and human person and work. That exalting and terrifying scriptural portrait of our King, Priest, and Prophet is progressively unveiled.
I pray we will grow in our appreciation of both his holy person and his sacrificial love. We begin our review of our one Lord Jesus Christ by focusing on his name, Word. So this is the word about the word, if you will. First of all, let's look at the cross-cultural background of the New Testament logos.
And here you'll see an outline. Christopher will bring up the outline showing where we'll be going. So we're going to look at the cross-cultural background of the New Testament Logos.
We'll identify the Logos. We'll also see that the Logos is the one Lord Jesus Christ. The Logos is the only begotten God.
The Logos became man. And then the question will be, who do you say that he is? So first of all, the cross-cultural background of the New Testament Logos. Now, English scholars and Bibles typically translate the Greek logos, and sometimes you'll hear it pronounced logos. Nobody knows.
Do your best. Say it with confidence, and nobody will notice the difference. Okay, so we typically translate the Greek logos with word. John's use of the term in the prologue to his gospel, which is a key Christological text, brought together. major intellectual patterns from two diverse cultures, the Hebrew and the Greek.
The New Testament doctrine of the divine logos is rooted in the Old Testament, yet it is conversant with Greek philosophy. The Hebrew scriptures picture the word as the agent of divine creation. In Genesis 1, we're told that God created as he spoke.
The word is dabar. 3, 6, 9, and so on. The psalmist similarly declared in Psalm 33, by the word, that is the debar of the Lord, the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth, all their hosts. That's interesting. By the word and the spirit, he made everything.
Wisdom is another important term. Wisdom in the Hebrew, chakma. Proverbs 8.12.
Wisdom is a personified synonym for sage speech in Proverbs 8. Wisdom was with God from eternity or before creation in verses 22 through 26. And by the way, you have three different terms to establish the eternality of wisdom. He is from. olam everlasting he is from rosh the beginning and kadem the earliest and so he is from before let me see if i can put it on the board in this way introduce some graphics which always is i've told you before tends to heresy if you take it too far okay so let's do a little truth that can tend to heresy if you drive it too far.
All right. So we have the beginning, right? John 1.1, for instance, in the beginning was the Word, right? Genesis 1.1 says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
And so you have a beginning, and it's going somewhere. And what we're discovering in Proverbs 8, wisdom before creation. All right, so hold on a second.
We have a beginning, and then we have a before. And what that is telling you is that it is pointing beyond the limits of what our understanding can possibly be, because it's pointing beyond the beginning of time. Does that make sense?
So, before, from eternity. And, by the way, the language in verses 23 through 25 of Proverbs 8... describes wisdom as being formed, born, given birth from this eternal perspective. So somewhere out here, he is born.
Does that make sense? And in the Greek Septuagint, he is begotten. Wisdom worked joyfully with God in crafting the world in verses 27 through 31 of Proverbs 8. So word or wisdom exists, and we're still in the Old Testament.
Word or wisdom exists and operates on the divine side of the creator-creature divide. Remember, I also said we need to have this division in our minds. There is creation, and there's God.
And so what Proverbs is doing is putting wisdom on that divine side and putting word on that divine side, because God creates by his word. The personal agency of divine speech did not cease with creation, for the world of our God, the Dabar Elohim, Isaiah 40 and verse 8, remains forever. Isaiah described the world's continuing sovereignty over creation.
One note, if you're online and the microphone goes out again, don't suffer. Let us know so we can fix it. Isaiah described the word's continuing sovereignty over creation.
He says in chapter 55, my word, kabar, that comes from my mouth will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I please and will prosper in what I send it to do. So the word is with God and is sent down into the world to work. The Old Testament understanding of word and wisdom suggests an eternal, creative, and personal agent.
Did you catch that? He's eternal from before, he's from above, right? He's creative, and he's personal. He does things.
He's volitional. The Old Testament understanding is what we need to remember as we move on. The Septuagint, the Greek version of our Old Testament, translated the Hebrew Debar as Lagos. Even as the Old Testament prophets concluded their contributions to sacred scripture, the Lagos as the intellectual center of the universe became a key agent in Greek philosophy. And if you'll bring up the PowerPoint.
In the 6th century BC, Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher of enormous influence, described the Logos as the omnipresent wisdom by which all things are steered. Boy, that sounds awfully close to the Hebrew witness, doesn't it? Among the Stoics who came to prominence in the late 4th century BC, Logos was the law that guides nature like a divine fire.
In the first century of the present era, Philo of Alexandria, the outstanding representative of Hellenistic Jewish culture, described the logos as the agent of nature, the medium of divine government in the world, and the means by which man may know God. Does this sound familiar? It ought to.
In the wisdom of Solomon, A popular Jewish text written between the close of the Old Testament and the opening of the New, the Word of God was portrayed as moving with personal agency and powerful vigor. Listen to what it says. Thy all-powerful Word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne into the midst of the land that was doomed, a stern warrior carrying the sharp sword of thy authentic command. Does that sound like the book of Revelation a little?
It should. very, very evocative of the apocalypse. The word acted as a divine intermediary, touching heaven while standing on the earth. Among rabbis in the New Testament era, word and wisdom became dynamically intertwined. After reviewing the rich, multicultural background, if you'll advance the slide, George Beasley Murray concluded, The employment of the logos concept in the prologue to the fourth gospel is the supreme example within Christian history of the communication of the gospel in terms understood and appreciated by the nations.
In other words, John was engaged in a little cross-cultural or multicultural truth-telling. He's using many cultures. Thorley Bowman pictured the Hebrew term of dabar, logos, merging with the Greek stream of logos in the New Testament. Where the Hebrews emphasized the words activity, the Greek emphasized the words thought. The Apostle John involved the divine logos in both reason and deed.
So he takes the reason of the Greeks and the deed of the Hebrew logos, and he brings them together. He correlated the personal agency of the Hebrew tradition with the enlightenment activity of the Greek tradition. He associated logos with that light, the Greek phos, which gives light to every man and was coming into the world, John 1.9. A close synonym of logos, message, the Greek rhema, was likewise both used in the Septuagint and applied in the New Testament to Christ and the proclamation about Christ.
and paul wrote this in romans 10 8 the message the rhema the word is near you in your mouth and in your heart this is the message of faith that we proclaim and then in verse 17 he writes so faith comes from what is heard and what is heard comes through the message or word of christ does that make sense the word is a divine agent creating mediating. So let's identify the logos next. And on this PowerPoint, I want you to see three truths that I would argue, if you're going to get to a correct Christology, these are three truths you need to hold on to. Okay? The first one is known as the hypostatic union, historically.
The Christological truth Truth we should garner from the biblical presentation of the eternal word of God and its orthodox reception by believers emphasizes these three major truths about him. Number one, the word is one person even as the fullness of his being is revealed by many names, titles, and actions. One person. Everybody got that?
Say after me, one person. Second, the word is the eternal God. He is the only begotten God, one with God the Father and the Holy Spirit.
All right, say this with me. He is God. And then third, the Word became a man, assuming our human nature to his person. He became human in totality, except for sin, to personally redeem and perfect our humanity. So can you say he became a man?
So these are the three truths that I would argue you have to hold on to if you're going to have an orthodox doctrine of Jesus Christ as the eternal word. These truths are sufficiently narrated in the first four books in the New Testament. In the canon, they are the Gospels, the synoptic Gospels. The first three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, portray Christ in narrative form according to the perspective of the disciples who possessed immediate knowledge. of his humanity.
You see, the first disciples gradually came to the knowledge of his deity alongside his humanity. And now scholars refer to their approach as a Christology from below. I didn't create a slide for this, but really you should know it.
We need to speak of a Christology from below. The Christology from above. And a Christology from behind. You know, we could also speak of a Christology from in front. Book of Revelation.
There's your Jesus Christ coming right at you from in front of you. But we'll stop with front behind. So the synoptic approach is a Christology from below.
You have... The knowledge, the disciples are encountering Christ, and they're like, who's this guy? They think of him as a man, right?
And then they begin to say, there's something else about him. And that's where they begin to grow in knowledge of him. The first recorded Christian sermon also presented Christology from below. Look at Acts 2, verses 22 through 24. Peter. presents him from below.
By contrast, the gospel of John, due to its overarching emphasis upon his exalted nature, has been described as a Christology from above, that is, from the perspective of his deity. How does it start? In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. There's your high Christology from the very beginning of the text.
However, John also made clear the disciples by degrees came to a fuller knowledge of his person and perceived his life-producing deity only after seeing him conquer death. The letters of Paul, as well as the books of Hebrews and Revelation, present similar Christologies from above. Paul's different because John gives you a lot of ontology.
Paul gets to the ontology, but it's always through soteriology. Paul's concerned with how you can understand Christ as Savior and Lord. The immediate method by which a theologian decides to approach the person of Christ, whether from above or from below, is a matter of wisdom and freedom. I'm going to approach it from above.
Scripture manifests both approaches. The ultimate question is the outcome, the final or completed Christology. So it's not really your method, it's your conclusion that matters.
And Daniel Aiken also calls for Christology to be developed from behind, recognizing the importance of Old Testament messianic prophecy. 2 Samuel 7, Daniel 7, Daniel 9. Isaiah 52 and 53, Psalm 2, Psalm 110, all these psalms have messianic prophecies, and many more besides the texts I've mentioned. So we need to recognize the importance of Old Testament messianic prophecy.
Now those who wish to incorporate the full witness of Scripture and maintain the claim to be Orthodox will use each of these messages. methods to develop their Christology from above, from below, from behind, and we could even say from in front. They will thereby be led to affirm the full truth about the person of the word by maintaining his personal unity, his true deity, and his true humanity. So I'm going to be arguing that's the conclusion you have to come to.
Personal unity, true deity, true humanity. So test us on this, if you will. So those are our three claims for a...
Christological ontology. The person of Christ, you must affirm his unity, his deity, and his humanity, and you can't adopt a false unity or a false deity or a false humanity. You got to stay true, and that's often harder said than done. That means taking your ideas and constantly submitting them back to the Word and being corrected by the Word. That may mean you have to correct something you taught or preached before.
That can be embarrassing, but it's true. If you want to preach the truth, preach the truth. So let's look at, first of all, his true or personal unity.
So our third point is this. The Logos is the one Lord Jesus Christ. The New Testament consistently ascribes to the Lord personal unity, just as Jesus Christ always identified himself as one. There is no evidence whatsoever that he was perceived as two or more persons. Paul emphasized Christ is the one mediator between God and mankind.
And the Lord said of himself, no one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. Jesus and his apostles hereby maintained Christ's personal unity from his divine pre-existence through his human ascension into eternity. I guess what I'm trying to tell you is, go back, what did we say was Dorothy Sayers'claim? The dogma is the drama? What's the drama?
God became man, died on the cross, arose from the dead, ascended to the right hand of the Father, will one day return. to judge forever. That's the divine drama.
That's the dogma as well. And if you can keep that sense of movement, even in its various truths, there's a descent, isn't there? And an ascent. But you have to keep that drama before your mind or you're going to lose it.
It's a little difficult in an Enlightenment age that is not as concerned about. the story as is the more romantic among us. The artist in some ways has a benefit over the scientist when thinking of the divine dogma, the drama. In the Old Testament, the Lord God was named the Righteous One. The earliest leaders of the church from Peter, to Ananias extended the divine identity to Jesus Christ by also naming him the righteous one.
The apostle John also called him the righteous one. While simultaneously affirming both his humanity and his deity, the righteous one, he says in 1 John chapter 4, has come in the flesh. So 1 John 4, 2, the righteous one has come in the flesh.
1 John 4, 15. and God remains in him and he in God. One flesh God. Make sense? One flesh God. And the apostle Paul named him one, Christ, Lord Jesus Christ, 1 Corinthians 8, 6. He elsewhere located Christ's deity inextricably in...
personal unity with his humanity. He says this in Colossians 2, verse 9, for the entire fullness of God's nature dwells bodily in Christ. Did you catch that?
The entire fullness of God's nature dwells bodily in Christ. An early Christological hymn rehearsed by Paul similarly began with the Lord as a divine person and incorporated his human life therein. Bring the next slide up if you don't mind.
Known as the mystery of godliness. Do a study sometime of mystery in Scripture and how it's used. But known as the mystery of godliness, this Jewish Christian song presumed Christ's personal unity. from his divine pre-existence, through every aspect of his human life, including his incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension.
The ancient Jerusalem church's six stanzas of creed preserved in song Christ's unity of person with both his eternal deity and assumed humanity. Look how this reads. He who was revealed in human flesh was made victorious in the spirit. He who was seen by God's messengers was heralded to the pagans. He who was received in faith in the world was taken up in glory.
So he who was revealed. Now that means he already was, but he's revealed in the human flesh. He was made victorious in the Spirit. How is he made victorious in the Spirit? The Spirit takes the verdict of the world, which put Christ to death and overturns the verdict by the resurrection.
So his victory is by the Holy Spirit. He who was seen by God's messengers. Now, the Greek term is angelos, and so your translation may have it as angels, but the better translation is messengers.
And these messengers are a reference to the apostles, the ones that Christ sent. That might also help you to interpret. the letters to the churches of Asia in the book of Revelation with regard to these angels or messengers.
He who was received in faith in the world, so he's received in faith in the world through the preaching of the messengers, because he's been heralded by the messengers to the pagans, he was taken up in glory. And scholars do believe that this creed on dates most likely to the first decade of the church's existence in Jerusalem, at most the second decade. And they do it on the basis of its Aramaic form and background, which underlies the Greek. Did you have a question? Yes, this may be a silly question, but here's my translation of the ESV.
It says, He was manifest in the flesh. vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on the Lord, taken up to glory. Is that misleading? It's insane. He was vindicated, he was seen by angels, and then proclaimed among the nations.
That's quite different from St. Mark's Gospel. That's what I was getting at. How do you interpret Angelos?
And I agree with Quinn and Wacker. who argue that Angelos here is a reference to messengers. And there are other places in scripture where it's the same.
So the NIV, in other words, I'm saying got it wrong. Won't be the first time, nor the last. All your translations, by the way, are going to be matters of interpretation, which will introduce variation.
As we shall see in our review of historic Christology, the unity of Christ's person required subsequent defense against various heresies. For instance, in a pair of opposing heresies, the Nestorians disastrously compromised the unity of Christ. They ended up having two persons, the divine and the human. while the Eutychians overemphasized his unity to the detriment of his two natures. So in order to keep his deity in the humanity, the Nestorians begin to separate his deity in his humanity.
The Eutychians, who were the opposite to the Nestorians, so emphasized his unity that begin to compromise his deity in his humanity. You got a problem if you go... if you go away from this threefold description.
Again, through another set of differing errors, both adoptionists and Apollinarians maintained his unity, but only by diminishing his humanity, or they maintained his unity by diminishing his deity. The adoptionists diminished his deity. The Apollinarian diminished his humanity.
Later, Canonicism, yet another error, maintained his unity by diminishing his deity. They're the ones who read Philippians 2 where it says that he emptied himself, and they say, well, he didn't exercise or let go of some attributes, some of his perfection. So what do you do when you do that? You diminish his deity. You got all sorts of problems if you move away.
from holding on to all three truths that Scripture holds. The Chalcedonian formula helpfully maintained the truth of the unity of Christ's person, even while it upheld his distinct natures. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 confessed his unity repeatedly while denying any division in his person, and we'll come back to the Chalcedonian formula at the end of the course, the lecture. Christ is, they said, one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
He is one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten. He is a single person and a single subsistent being. In conclusion, he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same only begotten Son, God, Word, Lord, Jesus Christ.
The 6th century Athanasian Creed similarly confessed Christ as one Son, and one Christ. One, moreover, it continues, not because he has converted divinity into flesh, but because he has assumed humanity into God. One, entirely not by confusion of substances, but by unity of person. For as the rational soul and body are one man, thus God and man is one in Christ. You see them going back and forth.
He's God. He's man. He's one.
But don't confuse the natures. Don't divide the person. Don't diminish the humanity. Don't diminish the deity. True humanity, true deity, true unity.
But our minds want to push us away from the revealed truth about him. Why? Because to us, he is either above the creator-creature divide, or he's below. But what we're seeing in Scripture is that He became flesh.
God became man. And that's what really messes with our minds. Scripture, interpreted by Orthodox believers, thus proclaims the complete unity of Jesus Christ, even as it maintains both his eternal deity and his assumed humanity. Before I move on, any questions about his unity? All right, everybody nailed down on his unity?
You're not? Okay, I'm just joking. Go ahead.
With his unity in mind, how do we explain, like, maybe in the garden, I know we talked about human nature versus human nature. He says, the spirit is going, the flesh is me, Father, we can pass it on. Yeah. It seems like, you know, on the surface, some kind of division or some kind of conflict.
Yeah, there's a duality there. And we're going to actually come more to that down the road, but Christian orthodoxy has affirmed that Christ has two wills, the divine will and the human will, and that at the garden he was submitting the human will to the divine will, and that's the solution. And there are other texts beside that.
Now, With that said, there are some today who would say that the Son eternally, the eternal Son submitted His will to the eternal Father. And so they end up dividing the will of God into two and three wills. That's got a lot of problems with it.
Okay. Hello. Can you hear me?
Yeah, go ahead. I was wondering if you could clarify on the identifying the logos slide about the, when you were talking about the above, below, and behind, if there is a front runner, or if they're all just three different perspectives that are accurate? I think they're all three different perspectives that are accurate, and you'll notice I'm approaching this primarily through the Gospel of John.
There's no doubt about what I'm doing here, which is a Christology from above. So John begins and ends with the deity of Christ. He begins with the prologue. He ends with the ascension, but, you know, Christ giving the Holy Spirit, with Thomas proclaiming, my Lord and my God. So he begins and ends on a very high Christological note.
Whereas... when you read Mark, Matthew, and Luke, he... Matthew and Luke have the virgin birth, and Emmanuel means God with us, right?
So even then you have a little bit of high Christology, but it's not really understood. What you do have in the Gospels is a recognition, a growing recognition, of that this man is God, and that's the Christology from below. So I would argue that both... from above and below are scriptural and therefore you can approach both again the point is where do you conclude are you with the disciples in your growth into his deity from his humanity good are you with john and paul and the book of hebrews you start with his deity you move to his humanity good Do you deny either his humanity because you start with his deity and you can't handle also calling him man?
Or do you deny his deity because you can't take and handle calling this man God? That's where the troubles are. So the method, I would argue, and from behind, I mean, let's be honest, the New Testament uses the Old Testament repeatedly.
The book of Hebrews is a... constant commentary on Old Testament Scripture. It's just one example, but throughout the New Testament.
So I think all three are legitimate approaches because all three can be found in the biblical text itself. All three approach Christ from these different perspectives. Does that answer your question? Yes, sir. I was just making sure that it wasn't.
you did a one two three so i didn't know if that was like a this is the best number one is the best and then number two you know well obviously because approaching it from the high perspective i i think two's best but then matthew mark and luke would tell me i need to straighten out my act and peter you know the leading apostle so yes thank you yep You know, and Jesus also, you remember, told them not to tell people who he was. I think that for sometimes, it may be, especially with the early disciples, they couldn't handle the truth about who he was, because they would have tried to make him king already. And Christ said it was necessary that he suffer and die. So Jesus is going to... reveal himself progressively from below in his lifetime.
And that helps understand the gospel of Mark's so-called messianic secret, don't tell. And it's because he's trying to keep them from revealing too soon who he is. Yes. Do you think he had a Christological perspective issue, or do you think he was a coward?
Who? The man at Bethesda in John's Gospel where he rats on Christ as soon as he finds out who Christ is to the Pharisees and Christ comes to him. Oh, no, I don't know that he's ratting on Christ.
I think he's being pushed into it. So, yeah, I'm not so sure I'd assign him that motive. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but I'm not sure I'd assign him.
I guess what I'm asking, do you think the reason why he went back to the Pharisees? You had a Christ-beloved question? You didn't see Christ as a holy God? Well, he was telling the Pharisees, in the Gospel of John in particular, constantly, you are of your father the devil.
I know my father. So he's kind of in your face with it. He had not read that book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, had he?
He was telling them who he was from above at that point. But the thing is, is he was telling them because they should have known. They had the revelation and they rejected it. To this day, Isaiah 52 and 53 are overlooked, ignored in most synagogues because it presents a suffering Christ. That's hard to handle.
Yes, ma'am. How do you break them through? Like the true unity, true deity, true community and the passage where Jesus yields his spirit on the cross. Oh, yeah. he kind of and i know this isn't true but when i read that i'm like oh he's just like it's like oh that's like that separation from god at that point and so it's like he's like steps to the side for a second which obviously can't happen but i don't i don't know how to This is why, I mean, you're beginning to explore one of the most mysterious and difficult aspects of Christian theology, and that is what happens at his death.
We know God is life-giving himself. He doesn't die. We know Christ does die. Father, into your hands I yield my spirit.
I take that to mean that he yields his human life into the hands of the Father. And the Father is faithful to raise him by vindicating him from the dead by the Holy Spirit. But artists in the medieval period have tried to picture this, and their art has great difficulty nailing this down.
There's a certain mystery here, because, again, We're holding to true unity of his deity, which is true, and of his humanity, which is true. We cannot surrender his humanity. We cannot say he did not die because he died. That's his humanity. And yet he swallowed death and victory.
That's his deity. And yet this is not one person and another. This is one person.
So we're driven, I mean, I think the text is driving us to these three claims. There are other claims, but to these three claims, and we have to hold, maintain all three. You cannot surrender any of these three without surrendering biblical Orthodox Christology. Yes, sir. His deity was built from himself.
His deity was. Oh, you're talking about the knowledge. He was bailing.
Yeah. So he grows in wisdom and stature. That's his humanity. As God, he doesn't grow.
He's perfect. There's nothing for him to grow into. We're still all there. He's there with the Father.
Absolutely. growing. Not as a baby, obviously.
He's growing into wisdom and knowledge, growing into wisdom. As God, he is wisdom. As man, he grows in wisdom.
As God, he does not change, he does not suffer. As man, he is perfected through his sufferings. You have to hold both those truths at the same time of this one person.
I struggle with the same thing when he was praying, your will be done, but not my will. Was he fully understanding of exactly... He was fully understanding of exactly what was going to happen, that he was going to die, he was going to be brought back. He did.
But for some reason, he still struggled with knowing that he was going to have to die. Yeah. Yeah. Why did he struggle?
Ask yourself that question. I think he may have struggled not just because of the physical. I mean, who wants to die?
Who wants to suffer? But why does the Holy One want to receive our sin upon Himself? It's repulsive. Ultimately, we're repulsive to the One who is the Holy One Himself. He's the righteous One, and yet He receives our unrighteousness.
Yes, sir? So, maybe go off there. Don't shoot me yet.
But how does God the Justice just not employ His Son when He takes on all the… how did what say that again how does God's justice how does like the justice of God just not implode the son well it does he dies okay I mean he He dies. He pays the price for our sin. By no means will I clear the guilty, he said. He's got to punish sin. The wages of sin is death.
That is not done away with by the cross as if, oh, you don't have to worry about it. No, no, no. You have to worry about it.
He has to worry about it, and he takes our sin upon himself. He atones for our sin through his death. The death is real, and it is a punishment. And of course, that raises all sorts of other issues, which we're going to get into.
But I thought God is love, and yet God is wrathful to the point of killing his son? Absolutely. Why? Out of his love.
And that, to us, it's either one or the other. But what we're saying in the perfection of God, he is. righteous, holy, and loving all at once. All right, let's take a 15-minute break, and then we'll come back and make it even more difficult.