Clough John Lesson 59
Christ’s Prayer for Disciples and the Hypostatic Union – John 17:1
Tonight we’ll be studying the first part of John 17, the so-called high priestly prayer of Christ and because we’re doing that we are really actually beginning an emphasis on doctrinal teaching because from here on out the emphasis will be quite heavy on the person of Christ and His work as we culminate in His crucifixion. On Wednesday nights we’ll be working with the doctrine of the Trinity; over Labor day weekend we’ll have an intensive study with Arnold Fruchtenbaum on the Hebrew aspects of the life of Christ from a Jewish perspective. And in the fall family training program we’ll be on the fifth Framework pamphlet which will deal with the doctrines of Christ once more so hopefully by the new year you’ll have a good basic grasp of who Christ is, some of the great debates that surround His person, why these debates are not trivial, why they are extremely important and when neglected always yield up a very weak form of Christianity, and why today many people who say they love Jesus do not know what they’re talking about for the reason they don’t know who Jesus is and you cannot love someone whom you do not know. We call that infatuation, not love. And many people are infatuated with the symbol of Jesus but they do not love Him; never have, and as long as they remain ignorant never will.
So the doctrines that are associated with Christ now are the end point of a four or five year emphasis that we’ve had of plodding our way through Scripture, one book at a time, historically, on up to the time of the New Testament and here, where those of you who have stuck with the program and have patiently endured a lot of the Old Testament will now see where all of that pays off because you’ll have a treat in seeing the person of Christ and who He really is. Tonight we begin where we have to confront these doctrines about His person; there’s no way of escaping it, we could go through and make trivial remarks but that’s not the solution to the problem either.
In John 17 we’ll begin with this great prayer of Christ, and remember when this prayer happened in the career of Jesus, from John 13-16 Christ has dealt with the briefing of the disciples, He has prepared them by teaching them certain propositions, certain doctrine, certain things that they ought to know and they need these things to pass through the great tribulation of their own immediate experience and therefore these are… as much as He does to the disciples. But in chapter 17 He’s petitioning the Father to back up that doctrine with gracious action. And so you have the two-fold thing of, again, law and grace. You have the law that is God speaking, telling us something, telling us what we’re to do, what we’re not to do, where we are to trust Him, for what are we to trust Him, and so on. Then we have Him at the same time working out so that grace will be provided to provide the fuel to run the engine and to enable us to work in the Christian life.
So now in John 17 Jesus begins this prayer, and this prayer is a very, very in depth kind of prayer. There are a lot of doctrines here and you cannot sit down and read this thing fast; it just will go right through and there will be absolutely no benefit, so far better to just concentrate on a few words and a few verses and walk away understanding something than going like a shotgun through this thing and hoping you’re going to hit something.
John 17:1, “These words spoke Jesus, and lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour has come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify Thee. [2] As Thou has given Him power,” that is authority, “over all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as Thou has given Him. [3] And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.” Now He’s just said a mouthful in three verses and so we have to spend some time going back and starting at the very beginning, verse by verse, word by word.
Notice that Jesus Christ is speaking verbally to God which tells us immediately that in His prayer life, His prayer life generally was not silent; it was oral, and He verbalized. Like I told you before about how they used to read in the ancient world, they did not silent read. They read out loud, and that doesn’t mean that you can’t read silently. We have a printing press, our words are clearer and so you can speed read, but like Mortimer Adler has said, it’s not the issue how fast you read, the issue is how fast you comprehend what you read. And you can be a speed reader and comprehend nothing and it does you no good except waste the muscle fibers on your eye muscles. So don’t ruin your eyes speed reading if you’re not comprehending it. Learn to comprehend and read no faster than you can comprehend. Let that be a basic rule, and if you read a difficult passage of Scripture or a difficult book, something that’s very hard and you ought to, stretch your mind, if you have to do this and it comes hard to you the only way I know is to sit down and read it out loud, over and over and over and over until it makes sense to you. This is the way to do it; it helps you concentrate. Speaking orally like this, rather than in your mind, puts your lips in motion and it puts in gear more of your nervous system, it gets more muscles working and therefore focuses your attention better.
And this is why when Christ spoke, particularly this critical prayer, He spoke out loud; His disciples, had they not been zonked under the nearest olive tree they would have heard the whole prayer. Obviously, Christ had to repeat this to John the Apostle afterwards. But the prayer here is being made with tremendous depth of concentration and it’s just awesome to behold standing by watching someone pray a prayer like this because we’d have trouble just keep up with the thought, leave alone what He’s doing with it, as you’ll see in just a few moments.
Notice something else about His posture; other times He bows His head, but sometimes He prays with His eyes open to heaven. Now every once in a while someone is facetious with whom I have a discussion, saying is God up there or is He at the other side of the world. Now they’re just showing their own facetiousness because it’s not well known what a straight line is in the universe for there are very interesting theories for the fact that the universe is a curved universe and you start out with a straight line and wind up at exactly the point where you started and never curve. And this is a logical possibility.
So therefore all we can say is that Jesus looked up. Now comment the way you want to, that’s the way it was, and He looked up and I’m sure He wasn’t looking at the clouds when He was praying; He was piercing with His vision out into the depths of what we would call outer space. And into those depths of outer space, somewhere, at a point location, is the throne room of God. That’s how spatial the Bible is, don’t go into this platonic nth dimension thing you get from science fiction writers that are basically pantheists. The Bible insists that the throne room is in a place. Jesus’ body tonight is in a place. It’s not in the nth dimension and that wherever this place it is it is going to come very close to the earth at the Second Return of Christ. If fact it’s going to come slow enough so the earth will have ample warning that something very, very strange indeed is about to happen, for Christ will become visible, the sign of the Son of man shall become visible in the heavens.
Now Christ, as He lifts up His eyes, is physically talking to His Father. And the moment that Jesus Christ begins to physically talk to His Father we are back up against the wall to the most complicated doctrines in all of Scripture. Now one thing before we get into the Father/Son relationship, that we ought to get out of the way first, it’s a little less complicated and therefore we can dispense with it more quickly, is this phrase or clause, “the hour has come.” Now if you’ve read carefully the Gospel of John you will have seen that over and over John has mentioned this thing about the “hour.” Remember at the wedding feast, Jesus’ mother comes up to Him and she says, Jesus, these people have run out of wine. And He says what is that to you and to me woman, “My hour has not yet come.” And so at time after time in the ministry of Christ He mentions kind of cryptic statements about this hour that was to come. Now He says, definitely and dogmatically, this hour long looked forward to has come. It obviously, as far as John’s report is concerned, is the pinnacle of the historic revelation of God.
And we therefore come to a very interesting point that in the Bible the maximum, the highest, highest level of revelation is past, not future. Now normally people would think well, I thought when Christ comes again and there’s this physical manifestation that that would be the highest, the most clear stage of revelation, and John the Apostle would argue with you and say no, you missed the whole point. John would argue and say the highest revelation is the revelation of understanding God’s moral and ethical character, not His physical glory. This is why John’s Gospel more than Matthew, Mark and Luke has suppressed things like the Mount of Transfiguration experience. Do you notice, he never covered it in this Gospel. You notice he never covered a lot of those, what we would call, flashy forms of revelation. John insisted, as we always read in our communion service once each month, that “we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” And the glory that John refers to is the ethical character, the spiritual nature of God, not what is physically observed but the moral character, that He loved, that He responds, that He’s a person, that He’s an infinite person. The exposure of His personality does not require a physical theophany. The exposure of His personality simply requires the revelation through His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now “the hour” is the hour of the cross of Christ; the hour of His death, because at this point, and you are going to learn, hopefully in the next few months, to deeply appreciate what that cross means, to walk away not just saying oh well, that’s a cross to wear around the neck and it’s a nice little Christian symbol. The cross is a very profound moment because on the cross you have God and man in one person somehow dying. And the reason He’s there dying is purely voluntarily on His part; don’t make a mistake, Christ was not killed on the cross. Jesus Christ on the cross did what no man has ever done in history before and what we know no man will ever do in history in the future. And that is, He gave us His spirit. Now always in other places when men die God takes their spirit. If you die tonight it will be passive; through death, through a crisis, an accident, disease, something, God will take your spirit. When your time is up, that’s it, insurance policy or not, it doesn’t make any difference, God is going to take your spirit to be with Himself. Now the moment that happens He has acted on you and you have been the passive agent of the death process. But not so with Jesus.
On the cross Jesus voluntarily stays alive, that’s the battle, He stays alive and the race is this: will His body be destroyed before His work is finished? And so for three hours, you might say from the human point of view it’s in doubt, whether that soldier, when he comes and he thrusts the spear through His side is going to get there ahead of the time when Christ is making atonement for sins. And so there’s a race with the clock as to whether He can bear the sins of the world fast enough and accomplish the judgment quickly enough to finish it before His own body will be destroyed. And of course He does. And before His own body is destroyed, even though His heart apparently by this time, some people who have medical background comment that He probably ruptured His heart sometime during this prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and for some 24 hours or close to 24 hours actually lived losing a lot of blood throughout His body through this rupture in His heart, and during this time he kept alive until His work was finished and when His work was finished, you might say Jesus killed Himself because He said now Father, I give you My spirit. It was an active voice, not passive.
And so in all of this cross work we’ve got this “hour” that has come, the hour of maximum glorification of God’s character. Tonight we can only touch, only give a very, very elementary part to what went on on the cross, but we’re proceeding slowly into that part of the Gospel where the death of Christ comes out and on that cross you have God and you have man united in one person paying for our sins in some way we do not understand, whatever the process was it was working at that time, it seemed to absorb physical energy from the immediate environment because physical light dissipated. There was no physical light in the vicinity of the cross and I’m going to show you search evidences that this was known in the ancient world and was talked about in the ancient world; it was not an eclipse of the sun. The mysterious darkness that accompanied the cross was just an absence of energy of some sort that was coterminous with this bearing of sin the He was doing, just an eerie darkness. Again we don’t know what it was or why it was. These are all the mysteries that go on with the death of Christ on the cross, but all of it is summed up by John is this is the hour, the hour of the maximum revelation of God’s character. This is the John 3:16, it shows God’s love for us and we will not appreciate God’s love for us until we appreciate what it cost Him and all of the tremendous things that Jesus Christ had to do during that very short time, things which we can only learn of, not from modern theology, not from the philosophers, but only by God’s revealed Word.
All right, “the hour” then refers to the hour of the atonement, the hour when this mysterious character of God is going to be seen like it has never been seen before in history. And in the future when Jesus Christ returns to the earth and there’s all the miraculous geophysical changes people are going to say boy, this blows my mind. But that’s just physical play to the unregenerate mind; the real believers will already have known the character of God. As I have said before, you are not going to be surprised; if you’re a Christian and you die and you go to be face to face with the Lord, you are not going to be surprised when you finally see Him face to face. Oh yes, there’ll be the spectacular, but as far as the person of God is concerned there will be a very deep recognition that after all, this is the person that you had known all these years through the pages of Scripture. In other words, there’ll be a familiarity that will be there. It’s like when you go into another geographical area, have you ever noticed, you can meet a Christian a thousand miles from home, know nothing about that Christian’s background but know that they are in common with the Word of God, that they exercise trust in Him, that they’re aware of the doctrine and immediately there’s a fellowship there that you have. You don’t know anything them but there’s a commonality that’s immediately produced. All right, that on a much more bigger scale is going to be what’s produced when you meet the Lord face to face, that is, if you know Him through Scripture. Now if you’re one of those Christians who are barely in the kingdom and have gone around with all of your emotionalism about loving Jesus and frothing at the mouth and so on, you are in for a shock because you are in love with an infatuated view of Jesus, not the real Jesus whom you can only know through the pages of Scripture.
Let’s look at this Father/Son thing. He looks up, He talks about “the hour has come” and He addresses God as Father. Now this was radical in His day. The word “Father” can also be known as Abba, in fact, it would be more equivalent to our word “daddy,” like poppa. Well, the little Jewish and Aramaic boys and girls, when they grew up they would refer to their daddy as Abba; it comes from the fact that Ab is the adult word for father, and the little boys and girls would have trouble just stopping after b, one b, and so they’d add to it, Abba, from which they get the word that would be equivalent to our word daddy. Now that’s the intimacy with which Jesus Christ now prays to God, “My Daddy,” and He begins to have this tremendous intimacy that is unobserved for the average creature.
And with this we are now face to face with something that we’re going to have to go through, we’ll go slowly through part of this doctrine; on Wednesday night I’m going to supplement this with a short section on the doctrine of the Trinity but tonight we’re going to try to start the doctrine of the Hypostatic union. So this will be new for some of you, you’ve heard the summation of the doctrine before, that’s the thing that we’ve often said: undiminished deity united without confusion in one person with true humanity forever. That’s a summation of the doctrine, now we are going to go through on some of the points on this doctrine and some of the verses of why this doctrine is true and why it took 600 years for Christians to settle on this doctrine—600 years, and in those 600 years of controversy and battle I assure you that every modern idea of Jesus was considered and found wanting.
Those who are, for example, in the
Jehovah’s Witness cult have a doctrine of Jesus called Arianism, and Arianism
was tried and found wanting in the development of the doctrine of the
hypostatic union, and it was thrown out in 300 AD. At least be original but don’t come up with
some doctrine that has been discussed and discussed and discussed and hashed
over and hashed over and discarded as garbage, and this is what happened. While I was out in
The first point in the doctrine of the hypostatic union we are actually going to skip tonight because it’s going to be covered on Wednesday night, and that is the fact that the Son is a distinct person from the Father. You say well, I knew that all along. Well, that’s nice but you know it took Christians 250 years to decide that question because there was this modalist heresy that argues that the Father and the Son are not different persons at all, the same God just wearing a different mask; at times when God shows up He shows up as the Son; at other times when He shows up in history He shows up as the Father. At other times when He wants to He shows up as the Holy Spirit. And this was a very attractive thing, particularly if you were a sole monotheist, you want to believe in one God and so therefore you accept this kind of thing. And this was a tremendously popular doctrine. So just take it right now, I’ll show this later on but the Son is a distinct person from the Father. Said another way, Jesus is not talking to Himself in verse 1; Jesus is a distinct person, the Father is a distinct person and they’re having a personal conversation. But that first point of the doctrine of the hypostatic union is actually the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity and since that’s a whole bucket itself we’ll get into that later.
Now let’s go to the second point on the doctrine of the hypostatic union and this is one of the things that was fought over, probably the most violently, in church history for many, many years. It is the one that is with us today, I don’t know of one… I’ll just say most cults today violate this second point, it’s just a rehash of the same old song, second verse. What is it? Christ’ subordination to the Father, and He is subordinate to the Father, Christ’s subordination to the Father is not one of essence. Christ’s subordination is NOT one of essence it is one of role. There is a subordination of Christ to the Father. I’ll prove it to you because I’m going to take you to the verses that were used in the historic debate; these are the same verses that people trot out today after 1900 years; same old verse, same old thing. And every once in a while some poor Christian that’s been taught all his life that Jesus is God and the Father is God and someone shows them these verses and he throws up his hands, gee, I never saw those before in the Bible. Well, if there’s anyone like this right now in five minutes from now there’s going to be no one else left in this auditorium that can be in that status. So just follow a few of these verses and I’ll show you the verses that are always resurrected for this discussion. I checked these out, I went back and studied church history, I’ve listed all the key verse, I’ve read the cult literature, which is a gross waste of time, but somebody has to read the stuff so I had to plod through it and pick out so it’ll save you the headache of having to waste your time.
Matthew 19:17, this is one that always comes out; I don’t know of one time I’ve
ever been in a discussion that this one hasn’t been brought in. Now what we’re looking at is a chain of
verses to show that there is a…a
subordination to Christ and the Father.
Then we’re going to talk about what kind of subordination this is, but
first all we’re trying to do, very simply right now so you can follow, it’s
going to be hard to follow this but very simply all we’re saying is that Christ
is somehow subordinate to the Father.
And here are the verses used to show that. Matthew
A far more serious verse for those who
really think is Mark 13:32, I’ve tried to put these in the order so you can
just go through your Bible, not book by book because there are only six verses
but in the order in which they are there.
Mark 13:32, this is the most serious.
In all the verses I’m going to show you this is the most serious
argument ever brought to bear against the deity of Christ. “But of that day and that hour knows no man,
no, not the angels who are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” Surely doesn’t this verse argue that Jesus is
not omniscient, that the Father is omniscient and therefore Jesus lacks
deity? That’s exactly the argument that
has been used down through the years, that Mark
Luke
John 14:28, this also, like Mark’s
reference, is a real verse; the Luke verse and the Matthew verse are just
tricks but Mark 13:32 and John
Turn to 1 Corinthians 11:3, Paul, again we are simply showing one truth of Scripture, there is some sort of a subordination of the Son to the Father. The question is not whether it’s there, the question is what kind of a subordination is it? “But I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man,” notice ERA advocates, “and the head of Christ is God.” Now this, by the way, is not just being facetious because do you know that however we resolve the subordination of the Father to the Son in the hypostatic union, there’s your solution to the woman’s rights and the man’s rights. And this verse is the link, because of the analogy in this verse, it shows that whatever the subordination of the woman is to the man, and she has a subordination in Scripture, whether someone believes it or not, there is a subordination of a woman to a man in Scripture. What the subordination is, is precisely the same question as what is the subordination of the Son to the Father.
Now always the advocates of equal rights make it appear as though the woman is some sort of half-animal half-man, sort of a plaything of the male. And she’s to be kind of used in the kitchen and to change diapers and to go to bed with or something like that and that’s it. And this is the picture of the subordination of the woman to the man that’s popular, that she is somehow less in her being than the male. But apply that, that’s a very interesting two-edged sword because if that’s what this verse is talking about it’s denying the deity of the Son, because if the woman is less in essence than the man then it must also be true by this verse that the Son is less in essence than His Father, in which case you’ve got a major heresy on your hands. So you see, what we’re talking about is not just some academic discussion for seminary students; this is a discussion that’s right into the heart of the controversy… right into the heart of one of the major controversies of our generation, the role of the woman versus the role of the man.
I Corinthians 11:3, “the head of Christ is
God,” obviously teaching subordination of some sort. Now further in the same epistle, 1
Corinthians 15:28, this concludes the set of verses that speak of a clear
subordination of the Son to the Father in the New Testament. “And when all things shall be subdued unto
Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things
under Him, that God may be all in all.”
That middle part in verse 28, “the Son be subject unto Him,” that’s
obviously subordination. So you’ve got
the Son subordinate to the Father in Matthew
Now one of the great answers that was given in the early days of the Church was an answer given by one man called Arius. He had a very inglorious end, he had a gastric problem when he was taking over a church and fell in a latrine and died. And the church always used that, the death of Arius as falling in an Egyptian latrine to show what happens to heretics. He developed the Arianist view, Arianism. Now Arianism took these verses and said this: the subordination of the Son to the Father has got to be subordination of essence. The Arians said that the Father is greater than the Son in essence.
What do we mean “in essence?” Let’s look at the essence of God. Here’s God’s character. God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, immutable and eternal. Those are the attributes of God, that is what God is like. The Arians insisted that that’s okay for the Father but the Son isn’t like that; the Son has less of those attributes, or the attributes are reduced in the Son. For example, that Mark passage, they would say the Mark passages teaches that omniscience is compromised in the Son, so the Son doesn’t have that attribute. And therefore they argued that the Son is less in essence than His Father. The Father is full, full deity, but the Son is somehow less divine than the Father.
Let me read you a statement by Arius himself lest you think I am making all this up. And as I read this statement by Arius I want you to think ahead just for a moment, before I start reading, and see if you can guess where the mistake is. In other words, as you become more mature in the Word you ought to think this way; if I make a mistake in this doctrine over here it’s got to have some results over here. For example, you ought to understand that if I am screwed up in some doctrine about what Christ did on the cross, that surely is going to affect what I have to believe to become a Christian doesn’t it. It’s like bowling, you knock one of those things and it’s very likely that you’re going to knock over other pins along with it. And that’s the same in doctrine, you mess around with one area of doctrine and you’d better be prepared to accept some bad news results in other areas.
So if I diminish the deity of Christ, what have I done? Think of it for a moment; what do we have because or our relationship with the Son? We have salvation; why are we saved? Because we have a personal relationship with Christ and who is Christ? A super angel or God Himself? God Himself. Well then if my salvation is due to the fact that I have a personal relationship with God Himself and not something less than God it means that if I suddenly foul up over here in what I believe Christ to be and make Him, instead of full God, I make Him less than God and now I have a relationship with something less than God, I’ve jeopardized my salvation because that salvation in the first place was grounded on a personal relationship with God Himself. You see how dangerous it is; mess around with the deity of Christ and you’ve just messed around with the very basis of salvation. Do you see why Satan likes cults? Mess around with the deity of Christ and you mess around with knowing God personally. You don’t know God personally; all you know is someone less than God but you really don’t know the God who’s in back of Him. Who’s the God in back of Jesus if Jesus isn’t God Himself. Well, He’s the unknown God. Now listen to Arius’ own words, translated from the original.
Arius says: “God Himself, then, in His own nature is unknowable by all men.” A tremendous admission; tremendous admission! “Equal of like Himself, He alone has none or one in glory,” that means there’s not another person in the Godhead, and he calls the Father here the “Unbegun.” This is his word for the Father, the Unbegun, [can’t understand word] this word for eternal. “The Unbegun made the Son a beginning of things and then He advanced Him as a Son to Himself by adoption; He has nothing” that is the Son, the Son “has nothing proper to God in substance for He is not equal or one in essence with the Father. God is unknowable even to His own Son.”
Now what Arius has done; Arius has is honest, like many of the real brilliant heretics… if you want to get good heresy at least go to a smart guy but don’t get your heresy from some dope. The best thing to do if you want to read the criticism of the Christian faith, read a genius because geniuses will tell you, they’ll let it all hang out and show you what’s going on. And Arius is one of those geniuses, he says see, mess around with the deity of Christ and what have I done. All right, here’s God, and here’s the creation. There are only two categories of being, the Creator or the creature. Arius would submit to that because he comes out of a biblical background. If, then, we have the Father here on the top part of the line and we subtract off one of His attributes, on the basis of the Mark 13 passage and say ah, the Son isn’t omniscient, we make the Son less than God but if we make the Son less than God there’s no room up here any more for Him and so we drop the Son down inside the creation. And now when the Son is down here and the Father is up here we’ve got the barrier between them and you’ve lost your communication, you’ve lost your revelation, the whole link is cut, the umbilical cord is cut. So this is what’s happened and Arius is sensitive to this.
So Arianism said that the subordination is a subordination of essence but they admitted that once they made the subordination a subordination of essence you wreck all knowledge of God, you wreck and destroy revelation and you destroy salvation. So obviously that was quite controversial in the Church. When it began to be debated and Christians began to realize, hey, wait a minute, this looked innocent enough but then when we started working with this thing we found good night, look where it goes. It goes all the way over here, yikes, I can’t take that result, that’s obviously out of line. So we must have made a mistake somewhere back here. If some of you ever work with computer programs, the computer programmers have a saying, garbage in garbage out and what it means is that you can have the finest program and you feed garbage to the system and that’s all you’re going to get out at the end of the system. And we have a fine logic machine but if it’s keyed wrong theology in one end you’re going to get garbage out the other end. And Arius has just confessed to his garbage.
So the orthodoxy crowd was led by another man, it was led by several but one of the most famous ones was Athanasius. You kind of like to remember that if you’re a man; Athanasius was a deacon, he started off like Stephen, he wasn’t even a full pastor-teacher but he was a tremendous student of the Scripture. And Athanasius got to smelling a rat in all this thing and he didn’t like where Arianism was leading and he began to fight against it. And he was one of the great proponents of the orthodox position. The orthodox position argued that Jesus Christ was full deity and however you’re going to explain the subordination it can’t be one of essence. So he’s negative, he’s not positive, he’s not saying what the subordination is, he’s just denying that it can be one of essence. Athanasius subscribed to the full deity of Christ. Eventually Athanasius won out and for those of you who have been brought up in liturgical churches I’m sure you can almost recite from memory that creed that you probably had to recite Sunday after Sunday, the Nicene Creed. And for those of you who remember reciting the Nicene Creed, it’s too bad for some of you uncultured people who never had to recite the great creeds of the Church, do you remember this phrase, this paragraph: We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, only begotten of the Father, that is of the substance of the Father, God of Gods, begotten, not made, being of the same substance with the Father. That was that magnificent statement injected by the orthodox party.
I’ll read it again and listen how hard they’re banging the changes that Christ is of the same essence as the Father. How do they say it? I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, the only begotten of the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father, God of Gods, begotten, not made, being of the same substance with the Father. We would say the same essence with the Father. So the Nicene group fought against Arianism by saying that Jesus Christ had to have full deity. Now let’s see why He had to have full deity, what reasons were use to shore up against these verses that I just read to you, because the Arians had their verses too. And so obviously the orthodox party must have had quite a few references on their side and in fact they did. So we’re going to look at those references.
But before we do let me just go into a little quirk that happened in history at this time and maybe this will cause you to appreciate the expression, maybe you’ve heard this expression, it doesn’t matter one iota, or one iota of difference. Do you know where that expression came from? The debate right here; let me show you. The Arian word for Jesus Christ’s substance looked like this, homoiousion, that is that Jesus Christ was made of like substance with the Father; ousin is the word “substance,” homoi means “like;” and so they said that the Son wasn’t really deity, that he was like deity, sort of like the Jehovah’s Witnesses today say that Jesus really…He’s divine but He’s not really God; same thing. Homoi, “oi” and that’s the Greek iota. Well, the orthodox party said that Jesus Christ was homoiousion, the same, and it was only the iota.
Now that lasted in history until along came
a very famous historian by the name of Gibbon.
Some of you know his book, The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it’s a very famous book. But Gibbon was a hater of Christianity; he
tried to blame Christianity for the fall of
What is the evidence against the Arians? Three categories; now some of you have had this before in the basics about the deity of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity but what I’ve tried to do and I was doing this in the 5th framework pamphlet, I try to categorize this for you to get a handle on it so I’m going to give you a lot of the evidences for the deity of Christ and that’s about all we’ve got time for, and to answer this Arian thing, so obviously we’re not getting through the doctrine of the hypostatic union for a while. But here are the three categories of evidences and what I’ll do, I’ll give you the categories and then I’ll fill up each category for you. So if you get the category heading this will be your tool to recall this information.
The first category; category one evidences that were used and can still be used, actually some of these were never even used in the early church today so you’ve got a lot more ammunition than they had, they never even deployed. The first category is the phenomena of the twin theme of Old Testament revelation. The twin theme of Old Testament revelation; by this we mean that in the Old Testament there was two messages being transmitted from heaven to earth. One, that Messiah would be man, that was one message, that’s obvious, the seed of David, 2 Samuel 7, those kind of passages. That was one of the two streams of revelation, that there was genuine humanity of the Messiah, and classic Judaism said yes, Messiah is a person, and so it locked down on a stream, which was full humanity, that Messiah was going to be a man, passages like 2 Samuel 7, Deuteronomy 20, etc. That was one line of revelation in the Old Testament.
But along with that was another interesting theme and that was that the final chapter of history, we’ll call this b stream, the final chapter or the end of history would be that time when God and man were face to face. The Jewish people looked forward to that end time when God would reign on earth, physically in some way. What the “some way” was is left a secret but they had that thing in their stream of revelation. Historically it was not connected to the Messiah, which is unfortunate. But it was there in the Old Testament, places where this second stream, parallel to the first one, occurred. Key verse: Isaiah 52:7, one of the occurrences of the Gospel, Isaiah 52:7 which states O Israel, hear the gospel, “Thy God reigns!” And it’s a picture of that ultimate end of history when God Himself is going to come and reign. Don’t say that’s a man there, it isn’t, because David and the whole Davidic line is just one [can’t understand words] you say good night, look what men did, they screwed up, so it wouldn’t have been good news to have another man, he might screw up just like David and Solomon did. So the goal of reigning was that God would reign somehow physically in history at the end.
Follow up Psalms: there are at least five Psalms that speak of this end of history with God reigning face to face and they are called the enthronement Psalms; Psalm 47, 93, 97, 98 and 99. Let’s turn to one of those so we can get an idea what it looks like. Turn to Psalm 99; if you get in a pinch someday and you can’t remember this, just think of the 90 Psalms and start looking through those 90 Psalms, Psalms that are labeled in the 90’s and you’ll catch it. These are called enthronement Psalms and speak of the end when God shall reign face to face. Now look at how it starts, Psalm 99; that’s the key that it’s an enthronement Psalm “The LORD reigns; let the people tremble. Now that’s speaking, not of some spooky spiritual thing; that’s speaking of God physically reigning on earth; that’s what that’s talking about. So you have this second theme. So let’s look at what we’ve got here. Our first category of evidence is that we’ve got the idea there’s going to be an ultimate king who has full humanity but we also have a parallel line in the Old Testament that says at the end of history God will reign on this planet face to face. And ending to history less than that is inappropriate to men. So that’s going to happen. So that’s going to happen. Now the question comes, do we ever have any hint in the Old Testament that these two parallel lines, in fact, converge because if we can find evidence of that, we’ve got a setup for the true nature of Jesus Christ. Can we find a place in the Old Testament, not the New Testament, the Old Testament where these two streams merge? Yes we can. Psalm 2, we’ll just go through these and because of our time we’ll not go into deep exegesis on these but I just point the passages out; if some of you have questions I’ll be more than glad to discuss this later with you.
Psalm 2, it’s apparently speaking of the Messiah, the king. Psalm 2:7 speaks of this, the coronation of the king, it says, “…Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten Thee. [8] Ask of Me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance,” it’s talking about the Jewish king, but if your eye keeps on looking down at the text, suddenly you notice verse 12, and it says, “Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and ye perish from the way… Blessed are all they who put their trust in Him.” Now can you imagine a monotheism, and Old Testament vigorous monotheism that would dare say put your trust in a man; that’s the whole message of the Old Testament is don’t put your trust in man. So the last of Psalm 2 is a very descriptive verse and it was never really understood in the Old Testament times. People just read it and they read it and they went on and it just never grabbed them. But it’s a very odd verse; the Holy Spirit put that verse in there as kind of a signal, something weird going on there.
Another Psalm where these two parallel lines seem to merge. The famous Psalm 110, and by the way, we’re on solid ground here because the Lord Jesus used Psalm 110 as His favorite verse, “Yahweh,” if you have a King James you’ll notice there’s a capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D for the first “LORD” in verse 1. Do you know why that’s there? That’s a signal to you, the reader, that this means… it’s a translation of the Tetragrammaton, it’s the name for Yahweh. That’s God’s name, Yahweh. “Yahweh said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.” Now that’s David talking; you see the title of the Psalm, David is the highest civil authority in the land. Then if David is the highest civil authority in the land, who could be above David? David, doesn’t it say “my lord,” my superior? But who could be superior to David; that’s the mystery and Jesus challenges His generation, answer Me, to whom did David speak; of whom was David speaking when he said “my Lord.” So you have God, Yahweh, talking to Adonai who’s over David. Who’s the mysterious second “Lord” here in verse 1? Notice again it says, verse 4, “Yahweh has sworn, and will not repent, You are a priest forever,” that means eternally, “after the order of Melchizedek.” Who is this mysterious Adonai that appears here? In one way he seems to be the king, he’s spoken of in kingly terms, but in other ways he’s above David and David is the highest human in that situation. So again Psalm 110 like Psalm 2 is one of these kind of mysterious things, of the Old Testament, that the two parallel kinds go both briefly like that [sounds like he puts his hands together] and set apart again, so that the alert believer in the Old Testament might possibly have guessed that something more was on tap here in history.
But there’s even more places where these two streams touch and then divert quickly. Isaiah 9:6, “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” Now obviously, “a child is born” is referring to the physical; that’s one stream of revelation but notice how very quickly Isaiah seems to almost, with no problem whatever, just quickly slop over… remember Isaiah is a monotheist, he’s not out of India somewhere where the Creator/creature distinction isn’t clear. He’s a Jew, he’s the most rabid monotheist of the Bible, Isaiah. And he just apparently, with no problem whatsoever to him, he starts talking about the son is given, this human being, all of a sudden he talks about Him, He’s called The Father of eternity. Now that’s a title only applied to God. He calls Him “The Mighty God.” And people say oh well, that’s just kind of like a divine thing, it’s not really the Mighty God. But on the other hand, the Mighty God is used in the very next chapter to refer to Yahweh Himself. Isaiah 10:21, so in the immediate context the term “Mighty God” refers to Jehovah. Oh, now isn’t that interesting; a child is born, physical, human, but his name is called El Gibbor, the Mighty God. So again we have a reference in where these two parallel lines really don’t seem to be too parallel do they; they seem to almost briefly touch and then they quickly diverge again.
Two more verses that would suggest this:
Jeremiah 23:5, you see the orthodox argument of Athanasius and his followers
had a lot more verses than Arius, and we’ll show you eventually how it all
works out, not tonight, but at least we can wrap up one thing here, this
parallel theme thing. Notice what it
says in Jeremiah 23:5-6, again at the same time of Isaiah; Jeremiah a rabid
monotheist who wouldn’t for the life of him slur and smear the distinction
between the one God and the creature, and yet when he deals with these two
parallel line he isn’t adverse to letting them touch a little bit. Verse 5, “Behold, the days come, saith Jehovah, that I
will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper,
and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. [6] In his days
I’ve given you Psalm 2, Psalm 110, Isaiah 9:6; Jeremiah 23:5-6, one more, the end of the Old Testament, Micah 5:2, “But thou, Bethlehem…” this is the prophecy of where Christ is going to be born. “But thou, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel,” fine, but now look at the last clause, “whose goings forth have been from old, from eternity.” So now what’s that, it’s obvious he’s talking about somebody who’s lived forever.
So let’s look at what we’ve done. We’ve
said that in the battle… we’re talking about the streams, we’re in the middle
of a stream right now, but the first point in the doctrine of the hypostatic
union so you can follow is: the Son is distinct from the Father. We said okay, we’d talk about that in the
doctrine of the Trinity. The second
point we made tonight is that Christ subordination to the Father is not one of
essence but one of role. We started off
showing you the verses, that there was a subordination of some sort that has to
be explained. I gave you those five
verses. Matthew
Now that’s category one evidences that substantiate that when it [can’t understand words] is claiming to be Messiah He’s going to pull these two streams of revelation together [can’t understand words] and it’s not going to be something that’s totally at fault with the Old Testament. In fact, it’s going to be in line with all those hints for all those centuries that the two themes do in fact come close to one another.
Now that was category one, next week we’re going to deal with further categories for the deity of Christ. We’re still on that second point in the doctrine of hypostatic union, we haven’t moved a bit, we’re still on the point that says that the Son’s subordination to the Father is not one of essence, it is one of role. And when we get all done with these categories of evidences, then you’ll see what that subordination is. But we’re leading you through this apparently long roundabout way because that’s the only way you’re ever going to appreciate why Christians are so dogmatic, why over the centuries we have never permitted anyone in the orthodox church to deny the deity of Christ. And in our generation, and we have people by the tons say oh, but let’s just hold hands and love everyone because if we just hold hands and forget the doctrinal differences and just all come together under this amorphous banner called Jesus then we can have fellowship one with another and so on, whatever that’s supposed to produce. But here’s what’s wrong with that. If we come together under the banner of a false Jesus, we’ll have fellowship one with another but fellowship over what? What good will our fellowship be? And if you happen to be born again Christians and we are just confused and we have fellowship one with another and we’re confused, what’s going to happen to our children? What kind of a gospel are they going to get. And furthermore, what’s going to happen to their children? You see, we’re not fighting the truth in our own generation, but if we wobble and we foul up in our doctrine here we’re not fighting for our spiritual health. There may enough momentum that you could be an Arian and be saved, simply because you’re not a good one, you don’t recognize what you’ve really said. But you go on being orthodox in your beliefs that the Arian is teaching and you can keep the momentum going but the gospel you’re going to teach your children is going to be a false doctrine and the gospel they’re going to pass on to their children is going to be downright lifeless doctrine and the Church will come grinding to a halt and this is why there have been those impetuous old fighting fundy disagreeable type people, like Athanasius, they always are kind of like sticks in the mud, they never go along with the [can’t understand phrase], but they insist on the fact that I want truth and I will not have fellowship on any Jesus, it will be only the Jesus who has true humanity and undiminished deity united without mixture in one person forever. Only that Jesus do I kneel to and declare my allegiance.
So this is the battle we’re facing, not
just for us but for our children and for our children’s children. Errors made today have disastrous results
tomorrow.