The person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ are foundational and central to the Christian gospel which is to be proclaimed to a needy and dying world.
How often the New Testament emphasises this! Here is a small sample of verses:
- “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23)
• “For no-one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11)
• “I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3-4)
• “We do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord” (2 Cor. 4:5)
• “We proclaim him” – that is, Jesus Christ. (Col. 1:28)
As Jesus Christ is foundational to the gospel message, it is equally true that He is central and foundational to Christian experience and conduct.
Thus, many places in the New Testament have the following short phrases: “on the Lord Jesus Christ”, “into him”, “in Christ”, “in him”, and “by him”.
These indicate that Jesus Christ Himself (and not only statements about Him) is the object of real saving faith and that the status of true disciples of Jesus derives from their union with Him. Union with Christ is the soil from which all true Christian experience grows and it is the basis for the New Testament calls to holiness.
It is therefore a self-evident truth that we need to be clear as to who the real Jesus is and what He is like. This is why Paul expressed his concern to the Corinthian Christians regarding those who preached a Jesus other than the Jesus whom Paul and his co-workers had preached: a different Jesus means a different gospel (2 Cor. 11:4).
The real, historical Jesus
Who is the real historical Jesus of whom the Bible speaks? This glorious person is so vast in His person and work that it is impossible for anyone adequately, let alone fully, to declare the truth about Him; but although this be so, we may, as the late Francis Schaeffer used to say, speak “true truth” even though we cannot speak exhaustive truth. More than 1,500 years earlier, the great Augustine of Hippo had said that we can deny denials of the truth and put a fence around the mystery.
The following truths are essential to a proper realisation of who Jesus is:
- He is fully God, in every sense of that word.
The promised Messiah would be none other than “Mighty God” (Isa.9:6). Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are really recycling an ancient heresy called Arianism, love to say that this verse states that He is Mighty God, rather than Almighty God. The problem with what they claim is that in the very next chapter, in speaking of the Sovereign God Himself, Isaiah refers to Him as “Mighty God” (Isa.10:21). The Messiah is Jehovah or Yahweh.
I shall not labour this point by adducing the wealth of Biblical material which both directly and explicitly, and indirectly and implicitly, asserts that Jesus Christ is God. The following is just a handful of verses from a plethora of material: John 1:1,3; 1 Cor. 2:8; Col.1:15-17; Heb.1:8-12; James 2:1. Before focusing on the main concern of this article, however, I wish to mention two other realities of Christ’s person. - He assumed full human nature.
Although Jesus had always been fully God in the fullest sense of that word, there came a point in time when He assumed full human nature, without divesting Himself of any of His deity, without laying aside any of His essential attributes as God or of His person as Son of God. Numerous verses teach explicitly that Jesus was truly human (Rom. 5:15,17,19; 1 Cor.15:21-22; 1 Tim.2:5). Passages which speak of Him being hungry, thirsty, tired, sleeping, bleeding, dying, and (though sinless and righteous) being tempted by Satan, all indicate that Jesus became truly human, for none of these things was true of Him as God-in-Himself but only true of Him as the God-man. This leads to the final thing I wish to say before exploring a theme which we can easily forget… - He is one person
Jesus Christ has always been and will always remain one person, the person of the Son of God. Thus, it was the child to whom Mary gave birth who was called Immanuel, God with us (Matt.1:23). It was the child who would be born for us who was called “Mighty God” (Isa.9:8). The same Jesus who said “Before Abraham was, I am” was the one who also said “I am thirsty”. The Scriptures never refer to His human nature doing or experiencing things or His divine nature doing or experiencing things, but always of the one person who experienced and did things.
This is why in the early church the word “Theotokos” was coined: Mary was Theotokos, the God-bearer, or, as it has often been translated, “the mother of God”. However much this phrase has been abused so as to elevate Mary to a position which she does not have, the phrase is singularly appropriate because it emphasises that although it was only the human nature of Jesus Christ which Mary conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, that human nature did not exist for even a nanosecond without being in union with the one person of the Son of God.
Indeed, John the Baptist’s mother could refer to Mary as “the mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43). Jesus Christ is not two persons but one. He did not assume a human person into union with himself but human nature, human nature which has its personhood only by virtue of being united to the person of the Son of God.
The human Jesus and the Holy Spirit’s anointing
The foregoing, however, needs to be handled with great care. Since God cannot be tempted, although it was the person of Jesus who was tempted, He was tempted as to His human nature; since God neither slumbers not sleeps, although it was the person of Jesus who slept, He did so as to His human nature. This has some important implications.
- The Scriptures make it very clear that it was the person of the Son of God who was anointed and empowered by the Holy Spirit, but this likewise must be understood as to His human nature. It is at this point that, to quote the apostle Peter, we must prepare our minds for action (1 Peter 1:13): that is to say, we must be prepared to apply our minds to what the Bible says in order to benefit from its riches.
- Indeed, it is nothing other the words of Jesus Himself, in the Great Commission as recorded by Matthew’s Gospel, which demand that we have to think deeply and carefully. In Matthew 28:19, Jesus says that those who are made disciples are to be baptised “into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”.
- To the Hebrew, the name of someone indicated something of their character and being. There is only one divine name: Jesus did not say “into the names” but “into the name”.
- There is only one God, only one divine being. But this divine name or divine being is that of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Jesus did not say, “into the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit”, which might suggest that these are just three different names for the same person. (There have been those who have taught this and it is a heresy known as Modalism or Sabellianism.) Jesus clearly indicated that the divine being is of three distinct persons.
This does not mean, however, that the Father has a bit of the divine being, the Son another bit, and the Holy Spirit has the third bit; rather, Jesus is teaching that each of these persons is fully God and yet there are not three Gods.
Jesus and the mystery of the Trinity
It is at this point that Augustine’s words are so important: we deny denials of the truth and put a fence around the mystery. Since God is altogether unique and other, there is nothing and nobody with respect to what or to whom we can compare or illustrate this profound mystery of the being of God. All such illustrations will be bound to mislead.
Theologians have employed a Greek word, perichorēsis, in an attempt to express this profound truth about the blesséd and holy Trinity. Robert Letham helpfully explains the reality which this word seeks to capture: “Since all three persons are fully God, and the whole God is in each of the three, the three mutually contain one another.”
The above explains why it is necessarily true that although it was the person of the Son of God who was anointed by the Holy Spirit, this was as to His human nature. The reason for saying this is that as to His divine nature and being, He is as infinite as the Holy Spirit and, in the interpenetration of the divine persons in the unity of the one God, there could never have been a point in time when the Son, as God-in-Himself, could have been anointed by the Holy Spirit, since God is eternal.
But the Scriptures clearly teach that the Holy Spirit anointed Jesus for His public ministry at a specific point in time and, further, that it was after His glorification that He received the Spirit to pour upon His church (Isa.61:1-3; Luke 3:21-22; 4:1,14,18-21; Acts 2:17,33). What Acts 2:17 makes clear is that it was the LORD God who poured out the Spirit, and v.33 spells out that it was Jesus, as the one exalted to the right hand of God, who received the Spirit to pour Him forth.
The vindication & reward of Jesus
The point to understand here is that it was the person of the Messiah, the Son of God, who was fully God who received the promised Holy Spirit to pour Him forth; but, as the entire thrust of Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 makes clear, this was the climactic vindication of Jesus Christ and the reward for His obedient work.
As such, therefore, it was what this blessed and glorious person did but His obedient work and vindication was what He did in His human nature. This, surely, is what Paul means in 1 Corinthians 15:45: “So it is written: ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit.”
Indeed Peter explicitly refers to Jesus as a man accredited by God to the people by miracles, wonders and signs which God did through Him (Acts 2:22) and how God anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit and power, and how He went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil because God was with Him (Acts 10:37-38).
Although it was the person of the Son of God who did these works, these verses spell out that He did so as to his Spirit-anointed and Spirit-empowered human nature. His supreme act of offering Himself as a sacrifice for sins was done “by the eternal Spirit” (Heb. 9:14): He offered Himself, and this refers to the infinite person that He is and therefore the infinite value of His sacrifice, but it was as to His human nature that He did this (since God does not bleed and die) and it was as empowered by the Holy Spirit.
Jesus was not a “superman”!
Jesus’ prayers to His Father, especially in Gethsemane (a prayer gloriously answered by the Spirit’s enabling Him to offer Himself without spot to God); His resisting Satan’s temptations by quoting from the Scriptures: these realities indicate that Jesus was, though fully God, equally fully man, not a superman. Although as the perfect God-Man His work is unique and His atoning, propitiating sacrifice for our sins is that which He alone could accomplish and which neither needs supplementing by us nor can it be added to by us, the example He has set us to follow in the areas of loving and humble obedience to God and sacrificial service of others can only be an example for us precisely because He did not draw on His deity to empower Him; rather, He was empowered and sustained in the same way as we are to be empowered and sustained: by humble and prayerful dependence upon our Heavenly Father to grant us the help of the blesséd Holy Spirit and by hiding God’s word in our hearts.
This point is frequently misrepresented, both by sincere and godly Sunday School teachers as well as by fine pastor-preachers and evangelists who wish, for all the right reasons, to exalt the Godhood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed, we must never think of Him without recognising Him as fully God.
This is what the late Professor John Murray was concerned to emphasise when he said that in the person of Christ there are two centres of consciousness (divine and human) but not of self-consciousness (there is only one self, one person, that of the Son of God).
Jesus’ deity & the forgiveness of sins
But one may mistakenly see the truth of Jesus’ deity where Scripture is referring to something quite different.
Take, for example, the account in the Gospels of the paralysed man who was let down through the roof (Mark 2:1-12). Jesus told him that his sins were forgiven (v.5), and some of those present were outraged, asking who could forgive sins but God alone (vv. 6-7).
Frequently this passage has been understood to be an implied claim by Jesus to be God. But the point is much more subtle than this. For if Jesus were forgiving the man simply on the basis of being God, this inevitably raises the question as to why Jesus had to come to earth in the first place, why He had to assume human nature, live an obedient life and die a sacrificial death.
Why not simply forgive sins as God? But this, as countless passages of Scripture teach, cannot be: there had to be atonement. So what is really going on in this passage of Scripture?
Jesus’ critics probably meant something like this: only God can forgive sins but He has told us how this is to be effected. And it is essential that the right sacrifice(s) be offered at the temple, that the worshipper present and kill the sacrificial animal, whose blood the priest pours against the base of the altar of burnt offering, and whose corpse, or parts of it, are then burned on the altar. And, of course, repentance must accompany the worshipper’s bringing of the sacrifice.
In pronouncing the forgiveness of sins, Jesus was, in effect, bypassing the temple worship and sacrifices. Only God can forgive sins: yes. This had to be done through the divinely appointed sacrifices: yes. But the Messiah, the Anointed One of God, had now come, to whom the Old Testament sacrifices, priests, and temple pointed, and of which he was the fulfilment.
This being so, on the basis of the work which He was to complete on the cross and in His resurrection, His ascension and His heavenly ministry or session, He could pronounce forgiveness of sins.
Yes, the one who pronounced this forgiveness was God Himself because Jesus always has been and always will be God. But – and one says it with reverence – not even God Himself can simply forgive sins. And so it is not simply because He was God that Jesus pronounced the forgiveness of sins but as the God-Man who would die and rise again.
Startling and disturbing?
Although I maintain that this is a thoroughly Biblical emphasis, some readers may find it novel and even startling and disturbing.
But one finds this understanding in the writing of the great 17th-century Puritan, John Owen, and of two great Scottish preacher-theologians of the 19th century, Hugh Martin and George Smeaton.
More recently, in the late 20th century, it was expounded in a wonderful series of sermons preached by another fine Scottish preacher, the late Douglas MacMillan, and published in his book, Jesus: Power Without Measure. The Work of the Spirit in the Life of our Lord.
If this article leads you to a greater sense of wonder that your Saviour triumphed, not by drawing on His undoubted deity but as the Last Adam, making use of the means of help provided by His heavenly Father through the work of the Holy Spirit, then it will have served the purpose of all expositions of Biblical doctrine: praise of our glorious God and Saviour.
And that, in turn, should spur one to greater holiness, by resolving to keep looking to Jesus, feeding on His word and imploring the aid of the Holy Spirit as one seeks to follow Jesus’ example: for, as Paul told Titus, it is the knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness (Titus 1:1). The expounding and receiving of Biblical doctrine remains arid and dry unless it leads to enhanced experience. And true Christian belief must always lead to authentic Christian behaviour. May it be so!
