Word of Salvation – Vol.44 No.48 – December 1999
Jesus Christ, The God-Man Saviour
Sermon by Rev M P Geluk on Lord’s Day 6 (Heid.Cat. Q&A 16-19)
Scripture Reading: John 1:1-8; Hebrews 1:1-4
Suggested Hymns: BoW 136a; 182; 111; 117
Beloved Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In the matter of salvation, not everyone believes that it is necessary to see Jesus Christ as the Substitute who suffers and dies for the sin and guilt of repentant sinners and thus opens the way for them to receive, not God’s condemnation but His pardon and grace. Those who don’t accept this prefer to see salvation as Christ teaching people how to be a good person. Their idea of Christ is not so much the Substitute for sinners but a great teacher to people, who are basically good.
It becomes very important, then, that Christ is preached today not merely as a wonderful person and a great moral teacher but as the God-man Saviour that He is. And that’s the teaching of Lord’s Day 6 – JESUS CHRIST, THE GOD-MAN SAVIOUR. In the first place we say that this is how we must see Jesus; and in the second place that this is how the Bible describes Him.
- This is how we must see Jesus
The Lord Jesus once asked His disciples as to how people saw Him [Mat.16:13ff]. The Lord’s concern was not His popularity but sinners who needed to be saved from their lost condition. The disciples, familiar with what people were then saying about Christ, said that some thought He was John the Baptist. John, who was before Jesus, had a reputation of preaching tough sermons about repentance because God was about to judge sinners. Many people who had heard John preach also heard Jesus and they saw many similarities. The same forthright preaching and the same lack of fear for the religious and political elite. So it was not surprising that a number of people were thinking Jesus was John the Baptist come back from the dead.
The disciples also said that other people thought Jesus was Elijah or Jeremiah, or one of the other prophets. From these prophets’ own writings or from stories passed down the generations, the people remembered them to be fiery preachers who spoke the Word of the Lord and did not care if people might be offended by what they had to say. From what they had seen and heard of Jesus some people felt He was much the same and so they thought that in the Person of Jesus it was like having one of the prophets come back.
The Lord Jesus then asked the disciples, “What about you? Who do you say that I am?” [vs.15]. It was a crucial question and it would reveal whether the disciples saw Jesus as just another prophet. Or would they recognise Him as the long-awaited Messiah, the Christ who alone could save lost sinners?
Jesus’ question is still of the greatest importance – who do you, who do I, who do the people of Australia, who do church-goers say Jesus is? Is He just a wonderful Person, a great teacher, someone with high morals and tremendous kindness, a leader who started another great world religion? Or is He to us what the Bible says He is – the Christ, the Son of God, who is both fully man and fully God?
What reply did the disciples give? They could understand why various people thought Jesus to be another John the Baptist, or an Elijah, or a Jeremiah. But the disciples had the privilege of sharing much in Jesus’ ministry. They had followed Him wherever He went. They had observed Him from close quarters. And now He was asking them who they thought He really was. On the one hand they could have easily said that He was just another human being, someone like them, of flesh and blood. For they had met Jesus’ mother and knew He had bothers and sisters. But on the other hand they had also experienced Jesus as an extraordinary person who spoke of the things of God in a marvellous way. So they could also have said that He was a great teacher. But there was more to Jesus. They had never seen Him commit a sin. His moral standing was not just high, it was unquestionably pure. And He spoke with great authority. Very different to the scribes and Pharisees. He appeared to know the mind of God. He quoted the Scriptures and knew exactly how to interpret and to apply them. They well remembered the Sermon on the Mount He had given. And He knew what was in peoples’ minds, even before they had spoken a word. In fact, what was most remarkable of all, He had performed miracles. He made the blind to see, the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, He cured the lepers and He had even raised a few dead people to life again. What’s more, He even forgave people their sins. On top of that, on occasions, He had said that He had always existed and that He would judge the world at the end of time. Yes, He said God was His heavenly Father and He spoke of being one with the Father.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Peter, voicing what his fellow disciples were thinking as well, that Jesus was “the Christ, the Son of the living God” [vs.16]. Peter came to that confession because of how he experienced Jesus. On the one hand Jesus was fully man because He looked and behaved like any other human being. He ate, drank, walked, slept, had emotions, prayed to God and did all the things that a human being does – except sin. Jesus did not sin. And that made Him a perfect human being.
It is very important that we don’t say that it was Jesus’ sinlessness that made Him also God. Of course God is sinless, but so was Adam when God created him. Yet Adam was not God, he was God’s creature. And you know what happened then! Adam allowed sin to enter his heart and he disobeyed God. His fall into sin affected the whole of humanity. All who came after Adam, us included, are born with sinful natures.
We call this condition that we are born with original sin. It causes us to commit sin and all people sin. We call that actual sin. And the wages of sin is death. But God in His love and mercy sent another ‘Adam’ into the world. It was Christ, His own Son. Once more a perfect human being entered the world of God. But this second Adam remained obedient and did not sin. Yet He suffered and died when He took the sins of others on Himself. In this way He saved them from God’s justice. And this is the very heart of the message of salvation. But in order to receive and experience its benefits, you need to believe and accept that Christ is both fully man and fully God.
He cannot be one and not the other. If Jesus was only a perfect man and not God, how could He have survived God’s death penalty on man’s sins? And not only survive but also deliver others from it? Jesus had to be God also in order to rise from the dead, break its power and thus conquer it. And not only conquer it for Himself but also for all those others whom He came to save from death.
When Peter confessed that Christ was both the Son of man and the Son of God, then Christ’s resurrection from the dead was still future. But the disciples had witnessed Jesus raise some people from the dead and that, in addition to Him forgiving sins and doing other miracles, had convinced them that He was also God. It does not matter to us that Peter, or the other disciples, are not here in person to tell us how they came to see Jesus as both fully man and fully God. The thing is that God has preserved their witness in His Word to us. God even inspired them with His Spirit to make their witness infallible and authoritative. The Bible is very much God’s Word about who Christ really is.
If Jesus is not God – and I want you to think about this, for many today only see Him as a great moral teacher – if Jesus is not God, then the things He said about Himself become the height of arrogance. The Pharisees, who would not believe that Jesus was God come in the flesh, never regarded Jesus as a great moral teacher. They did the very thing that their unbelief demanded. They said that Jesus was a blasphemer and had a demon.
Why did they did not think of Him as a great moral teacher, if they did not see Him as God? Because a great teacher does not go around forgiving people their sins pretending to be God. They knew, of course, that people can forgive each other. No one can remove other peoples’ sin from God’s sight. But that’s what Jesus was doing. He was forgiving people their sins that stood between them and God. The Pharisees thought this was blasphemous because only God can forgive sins.
The Pharisees also said that Jesus was possessed by demons. Why that accusation? Well, no human being can do miracles of healing of the type they saw Jesus do. And no one can raise the dead, except someone with supernatural powers. Only God and demons had such powers. The Pharisees refused to believe Jesus was God. The only conclusion they could come to was that He was demon-possessed.
All this must help you and me to confess Jesus as fully man and fully God. We can’t think of Jesus as just a great moral teacher. Whilst that would uphold Jesus as being human it does not explain how He forgave the sins of people who had not done Him any wrong, nor does it explain the miracles He did.
Imagine someone who has a reputation of being a great teacher suddenly saying that He has always existed and that He is from God and that He is God. Saying such things would spoil his good reputation very quickly. Nor can we see Jesus as someone who is no more than a very moral person. Imagine if you knew a person with very high moral standing and the two of you are walking through the town’s main street. Then some immoral person like a prostitute or a practising homosexual, whom your companion has never seen before in his life, comes up to him and says to him something like, “Sir, have mercy on me for I am a sinner.” In response, your companion replies, “my son, or my daughter, your sins are forgiven, go and sin no more.” Now if that were to happen, you would undoubtedly say to your companion, “Have you gone mad or something? Who do you think you are?” You would think he was a bit of a weirdo. But now the fact is that Jesus did do these things and the only explanation for it is that He is also God.
So why don’t more people confess Jesus to be God, if it is that obvious? Well, most of these people ignore or explain away the Bible’s testimony about Jesus being God. It is fixed in their unbelieving minds that Jesus is just a great man but they will say the same about Confucius or Buddha or Mohammed, or some Indian guru. Others simply reject the Bible altogether for they think it just doesn’t add up. It’s really nonsense. The terrible thing about these people is that they are lost because they reject Jesus as being fully man and fully God. They do not confess Him as Christ the Saviour. They do not believe that salvation is only through Him. They believe that they can save themselves. Or they believe they don’t need salvation.
How come Christians confess Jesus as the God-man Saviour and say with great conviction that His Name is above all names and that salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved? Because that’s what the Bible says [Acts 4:12]. There is only one God and His Son Jesus Christ is the only Saviour. No other name, no other person, can save anyone from God’s justice. Only Jesus can.
- That’s how the Bible describes Him
The Catechism asks, “How do you come to know this?” How do you know beyond any doubt that only through Jesus Christ can sinners be made right with God? The answer points us to a holy gospel, by which the whole Bible is meant. So, not the Koran, not the sacred writings of Buddhism or of any other religion, but only the written Word of God, the Bible.
And what makes the Bible more special than all other writings? The one big difference is that all the sacred books of other religions tell you what you must do in order to save yourself. But the Bible tells you what God has done for you in Christ. These other religions and their books will also speak of man’s failures and that some kind of salvation is necessary. But invariably they teach that their founder came upon a way that leads to that salvation and this salvation consists of the founder’s teachings which show others how to escape the misery and crookedness of this world. It will involve a number of steps of what to do and what not to do and through this process one supposedly can enter another world of peace and serenity.
But compared to what the Bible teaches about Christ, these other ways of salvation are without hope. Because sinful man cannot save himself. It’s like trying to pull yourself up by your own ears. How wonderfully different is the message of God’s Word! It’s not about man climbing up to a higher spiritual level by improving himself or by denying the very things God has given man to enjoy in His creation. The Bible is all about God coming to us, right down into our misery where the fall into sin put mankind. Straight after that terrible fall, God announced the coming of Christ. And as time went on God revealed more and more about Christ. Abraham heard more about Christ than Adam but Moses was given more information again than Abraham. Later in time, God enabled Isaiah, one of the Major Prophets, to see Christ more clearly than Moses, and John the Baptist was privileged to see yet more again than Isaiah.
But not only does the Old Testament contain prophetic messages about Christ. A number of Old Testament people were types of Christ. Moses was a type of Christ. David was a type of Christ. All the prophets were forerunners of the Christ as the chief prophet. And all the kings had to reign in such a way that the people had a better idea of Christ the perfect King. But there were many false prophets or true prophets, like Jonah, who did not do what they were supposed to do. And many of the kings failed terribly in their role as types of Christ. The failures of these prophets and kings made it more necessary than ever that a perfect prophet and a perfect king was needed. It helped to increase the longing for the Messiah, the Christ.
Furthermore, the whole Old Testament system of sacrifices was to help Israel understand how Christ would be the perfect sacrifice. The blood of sheep and goats could not take away sin. The death of these animals was only a type, a shadow, of the real sacrifice Christ. The role of the priest was to give a picture of Christ’s intercessory work. The priest represented the people before God. He spoke for them. But again, many priests failed because of their own sin. Some were quite corrupt. So here, too, the need of a perfect priest became obvious.
So Christ Himself is the fulfilment of the whole Old Testament Scriptures. But not only the Old Testament. From Genesis to Revelation the Bible points to the God-man Saviour Jesus Christ. The Bible is not just a collection of unrelated stories and teachings. No, the whole Bible is about God coming to restore sinful man to righteousness and life through Jesus Christ. In Jesus His Son, God revealed Himself and His salvation of sinners and the world most fully. The letter to the Hebrews says, “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by His Son …!” [1:1,2]. The four gospels in the New Testament tell us what Christ did in His teaching and deeds and then the New Testament letters further explain to the church the full implications of what Christ said and did. The New Testament also shows how Christ’s first coming points ahead to His second coming and that God will be all in all as Christ’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.
It is all so unlike the man-made religions of the world that see the world as an evil place from which man has to escape, and the natural things of man as an barrier to his spiritual freedom. The Bible shows God redeeming the world by destroying the evil in it, and man is returned to this new earth with a new body and mind with which he may once again enjoy all that God gave originally for Adam and Eve to enjoy.
From beginning to end the Bible is a record, not of what man has to do in order to win back what was lost through sin, but of what God has done in Christ in overcoming sin. It makes the Bible a history book, but not in the sense in which history in normally understood. It’s special history that shows what God does in the world for and on behalf of His people to whom He has covenanted Himself to save them through Christ. The Bible is really the history of God’s dealings with the people of His covenant.
And throughout that history Christ stands in the centre of it. He is not an afterthought, as though God had to bring Him in because the law of Moses failed to work. There is no Old Testament salvation that is different to the New Testament. There is only one way of salvation. God did not change the rules between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Not this way and then that way and finally through Christ. No, throughout the covenant of God with His people, which goes from Adam and Eve all the way up to the last of the elect to be saved, salvation has been and will be the same always. It’s the same Saviour for all – Jesus Christ, fully man and fully God.
In Old Testament times the people had to look forward to Christ’s first coming, to His birth, death, resurrection and ascension, and we of New Testament times have to look back to this coming. In Old Testament times sinners were saved by believing that Christ would come and make them right with God and in New Testament times sinners are saved by believing that Christ has come to make them right with God. In both cases it is salvation by faith in Christ alone. All are saved by believing that Christ has saved them from God’s justice and make them right with God. And to all the saved of both Old Testament times and New Testament times has the promise been given that Christ will come again at the end of time to establish His kingdom in full when there will be no more death, mourning, crying or pain. Then all things will be made new.
The Bible, therefore, can be properly understood only when it is seen pointing to Christ as being the second Adam and having the fullness of God. Each part, each happening, every prophecy, parable, book and letter, is to have its fullest interpretation pointing to Christ. In Him it all hangs together. In Christ all that God has done and will do begins to make sense. When Christ is not given this central place, then the Bible becomes a difficult to understand book and one part no longer connects with other parts.
When all the elect have been saved, then a multitude that no one can number will worship God and say to Him, You alone are worthy to receive glory and honour and power, because Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, was slain and with His blood you purchased men for salvation from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God. Yes, salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb [cf Rev.4:11; 5:9,10; 5:13]. All people outside of Christ will be gone forever. Only those made right with God through Christ will be there. Make sure, therefore, that you worship Christ and not men, and tell others to do the same.
Amen.