Clough John Lesson 60
Hypostatic
We’ve gotten to that great priestly prayer in John 17 and to understand that priestly prayer we have had to begin explaining the doctrine of the hypostatic union. This is the doctrine that describes the person of Jesus Christ, that Jesus Christ can be true humanity, undiminished deity, united without mixture in one person forever. It is one of the great classic doctrines; it is, to cite the Wednesday night series where we’re dealing with the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the hypostatic union was taught along with the Trinity, it was devised and fought over and finally verbalized all during the same time that the hypostatic union was being devised and pulled out of Scripture and jelled. And during those many centuries when the church fathers debated the issues they finally brought these two doctrines to a statement; the doctrine of the Trinity which answers to the philosophic problem of the one and the many and the doctrine of the hypostatic union which answers the question of the Creator/creature distinction. Both of these doctrines therefore sit on top of the two greatest questions that men have ever raised. One, the question of origin, yielding the Creator/creature distinction, and two, the problem of the one and the many.
We said as we developed the doctrine of hypostatic union in preparation for John 17 that we could explain this under several points. We said the first point of the doctrine of the hypostatic union was that the Son is distinct from the Father within the Godhead, and this is nothing but a restatement of the Trinity, that the distinctions between the Father and the Son are distinctions that are real, they’re not faked and for a long time in church history they were plagued with a modalist idea, that the Father and the Son were just kind of masks, one time God shows up He’s wearing the mask of the Father; He puts that off and He shows up over here with the mask of the Son. So the Father, Son and Holy Spirit distinctions are only superficial distinctions, they’re not real distinctions. And that would make then, of course, the Father unknowable, the Son unknowable, or at least the God behind the masks unknowable. So this first point in the doctrine of the hypostatic union is just where these doctrines crisscross and depend on one another. And the hypostatic union does depend on the Trinity and the first point of the doctrine of hypostatic union is the distinction between the Father and the Son is real and it’s within the Godhead.
Last time we began the second point in the doctrine of hypostatic union because the first point was going to be covered in the doctrine of the Trinity so we let that go and moved to the second point which is the fact that the Son is somehow subordinate to the Father. And we said the way you state this is that Jesus Christ is subordinate to His Father not in essence but in role, that He is with respect not to essence but with respect to role. And this was fought over and fought over for many, many years and the reason it becomes so critical is because this is the only way to put the stuff together that matches with all the Scripture. Every once in a while you’ll get somebody from some cult that will come knocking on your door and they’ll give you this line, this song and dance and all their literature that basically the problem is that the Church was all right until the theologians got thinking up the Trinity; now friend, they will tell you, can you see the word “Trinity” in your Bibles? No you can’t see the word Trinity in your Bible and you know why? Because the Trinity isn’t in your Bible, it’s something the Church added afterwards. But not so; the doctrine of the Trinity is something that the Church summarized from Scripture, and the same with the hypostatic union and the idea of Jesus Christ’s deity and so on. Christ’s subordination to the Father is not one of essence but one of role. And we said last time that this parallels the problem of the male and the female.
In Scripture the female is always said to be subordinate to the male in divine institution number two and because of this people have argued that the subordination of the female to the male is one of essence, but this is to make precisely the same error here that was made up here; it’s wrong. That’s not what the subordination is all about, it’s not one that’s saying that the woman is less than the man at all; it’s simply saying that her role is geared to and subordinate to the man. And if anything it just simply lays greater responsibility on the man but it doesn’t diminish the dignity of the female. But yet that’s what the ERA proponents would like us to believe, that the old Paul, that old bug-a-boo bachelor apostle, that single apostle apparently, and he went around and he had a thing against women and so some person will say well, I like Jesus but I can’t stand Paul, and try to make this artificial distinction that Paul was the guy that screwed everything up and if Paul hadn’t come along we’d have everybody loving one another and all the rest.
Now Paul was God’s doctrine man and he clarified many issues and he always argued the issue here on the basis of the nature of God. So next time you walk into the Christian book store and you pick up “How to Be a Greater Woman” or something, whatever the titles are on the pieces of Christian material which is the best thing I can say for them, the next time you read something like that and the authoress goes to some passage of Scripture and she says oh but these passages in 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 11, I know they’re there but they’re culturally conditioned, after all, in the ancient world they had slaves and they had at the same time this sub par image of women and so the author of the epistle as he accommodated himself to slavery is accommodating himself to the cultural morays of the time. Only one little problem with that, that these authoresses have not done and that is they have not studied the context of those passages to notice a very interesting difference. When slavery is being discussed it never is discussed in connection with the creation. But when the role of the woman is discussed it’s always discussed in connection with creation, which therefore suggests that it is not conditioned at all; the slavery matter is conditioned because it’s not anchored to the creation but when you get into the role of the male and the female and every passage of the New Testament is always linked to creation, and therefore we’re talking about something that is absolute, something that is not culturally conditioned any more than the doctrine of the Trinity itself is culturally conditioned.
So the Son is subordinate to the Father and under that point we began to develop these sub points. We said first of all that there were… I gave a whole list of verses, and these verses were to introduce the subordination theme and to at least draw your attention to it so you can look at these passages in a friendly environment because someday you’re going to be in a hostile environment and somebody is going to pull these on you and if you haven’t looked at them you’re going to be swept off your feet, unprepared to face this kind of an assault. So I gave you the verses, all the verses that the Arians used back in those centuries ago, all the verses that the Watchtower Society is using today, same chain reference. Again, Matthew 19:17; Mark 13:32; Luke 18:19; John 14:28; 1 Corinthians 11:3; 1 Corinthians 15:28. Those are the verses that will be pulled out against you so know what verses you’re going to see in combat someday.
Now we said that the argument was first
stated that Jesus Christ, in Arianism, by the teacher, his name was Arius, he
said that the Son is subordinate to the Father in essence, which would mean
that the Son is not full deity, that you
have in the way of divine attributes, and the way of the Father, you
have sovereignty, righteousness, justice, love, omniscience, omnipresence,
omnipotence, immutability, and eternality.
These are the attributes of God that the Father has, but said Arius, the
Son doesn’t have those attributes, or at least He doesn’t have all of those
attributes. For example, they would
argue on the basis of Mark
So the counter to this is very simple, very easy. Prove the full deity of Christian from Scripture and there we left last time on proving the full deity of Christ from the Scripture so that you could take the full deity of Christ and argue that whatever the subordination is in Scripture it can’t be one of essence. If you’ve proved that the Father has a set of attributes and you’ve proved that the Son has a set of attributes and you do it solidly on the basis of the text of Scripture, then you’ve got to admit that whatever this subordination is that we do observe cannot be one of lesser attributes, because by definition the Son has all the attributes and the Father has all the attributes. This is why now we’re still concentrating on proving the full deity of Christ and we said there are going to be three categories of proving the full deity of Christ. We said the first category was the fact that in the Old Testament there were twin streams of revelation. That means there were twin ideas or twin doctrines that God revealed time and time and time again in the Old Testament.
These twin streams were, first, you had the human Messiah who was to be out of David, the seed of David’s family, therefore he was to be human, and most Jews accepted that, that the Messiah was going to be human; no problem there, many references, you could use the Davidic Covenant for it and so on. But then we said in addition to that stream of revelation coming down over the centuries to the Old Testament there was another stream of revelation; in addition to the Messianic stream there was the stream that at the end time God would rule face to face. The Jew could never conceive of history ending without getting God down here and ruling face to face. And so we had the series of texts showing that God ruled face to face at the end time. Then we finalized this category of evidence, two streams of revelation, by asking the question, are there any places in the Old Testament where these two parallel streams, the human Messiah and the divine face to face ruling of God at the end of history, are there anywhere these parallel lines aren’t parallel and where in face they kind of touch. And we said yes, there are certain places in the Old Testament where these parallel lines kind of warp, they don’t really merge, they kind of warp and suggest they’re going to touch. And we gave for references Psalm 2, Psalm 110, Isaiah 9:6; Jeremiah 23:5-6; and Micah 5:2.
Now it’s true that in the Old Testament those streams are not clearly merging. You have to admit this and it’s not going to weaken the argument but just be honest; if you get in an argument some day don’t trot out and try to prove that these two streams are merging because they really don’t in the Old Testament. They suggest a merging; they allow logically for a merging but they don’t really fully merge; it’s kind of a mystery in the Old Testament. This is why in 1 Timothy 3:16 God incarnate is called a mystery, meaning obviously it wasn’t revealed before. Now that’s one category of evidence, the category of the twin streams of Old Testament revelation and when Jesus of Nazareth walked the face of the earth, what He did in His teaching was He took stream one and stream two and He merged it in Himself. And those were the texts of Scripture and this is why Psalm 2, Psalm 110 are the two most quoted Psalms in the New Testament. That’s why Jesus majored on those two Psalms. Look at it for a concordance for yourself if you don’t believe me. Count it up; how many times did Jesus quote, how many times did the apostles quote; their favorite Psalms were Psalm 2 and Psalm 110, and the reason—because it was in those psalms where those Old Testament streams began to merge.
That’s where we left off last time. Now we come to another category still proving the deity of Christ because we’re still trying to show that He’s full deity. So however you treat the subordination theme you can’t do it by saying it’s subordination of essence; you must argue something else. So we’ve covered the streams of Old Testament revelation and we’re going to come to a new category of data. These are what we call New Testament Christ for Yahweh or Jehovah substitutions in Old Testament quotes. That is, monotheistic authors of the New Testament, they’re not the gurus from India who do not have a clear distinction of monotheism, these are monotheistic Jews, not Indians, and its these monotheistic rabidly fanatical monotheistic Jews who have no trouble whatsoever in substituting Jesus Christ in Old Testament quotes that when you look at the context refer not to Christ but to Jehovah and there’s only one conclusion. These men are calling Jesus Christ Jehovah by these substitutions.
Let’s look at a couple of these substitutions and see how easily monotheistic
apostles did this. Now keep in mind if
you ever want to use this material, keep in mind to preface what you say by
saying yes, this kind of substitution could have happened in India, sure,
Krishna could be an animal, a dog, a cat, a pig, or a man, it doesn’t matter;
there wasn’t any problem. But that’s
because the whole Indian oriental idea of God is screwed up; they don’t have
the Creator/creature distinction right.
They’re not true monotheists, they’re pantheists. But what we’re talking
about, these substitutions are going on in
Let’s look at some these, turn to Acts 2; this is one of this
these times when you’re going to have to use both hands, one hand at the New
Testament quote and then we’ll flip back to the Old and I’ll show you the Old
Testament quote. There are more quotes
than these but I’m just showing you samples of how easily New Testament
monotheistic Jews would think nothing of quoting a passage referring to Jehovah
and completely kind of blow the passage by putting Christ right smack in the
middle of the thing. Now what are they
saying? There’s no way you can get around it; they’re obviously arguing Christ
is Jehovah. In Acts
Now look at Acts
Turn to Ephesians 4, again we’ll turn to a New Testament passage and we’ll turn to the Old Testament passage, just to prove that these men who know their Old Testament far better than we thought nothing of freely flipping back and forth between Yahweh and Jesus. If you want to get one of these Watchtower people angry at you, but it will get the point across, is always refer to Jesus as Jehovah Jesus and you’ll make your point real quick, I guarantee, and then you can simply go to these verse and show them; see, I stand in the apostolic position of Jehovah Jesus.
In Ephesians 4:7-11 is that famous passage on spiritually gifted men and it talks about, verse 8, “Therefore, he says, When He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.” Now there it’s speaking of Christ; Christ is the one that led captivity captive. Turn to Psalms from whence cometh this quote; Psalm 68:18, it is speaking of God, Elohim Jehovah, notice verse 17, “The chariots of Elohim are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels; the Lord [Jehovah] is among them, as in Sinai, in the holy place.” And then the Psalmist turns to the Lord in verse 18 and says, “Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led captivity captive. Thou hast received gifts fro men, yea, for the rebellious also, that the LORD God might dwell among them. [19] Blessed be Yahweh….” So obviously this passage is speaking of Jehovah or Yahweh and it is this passage that Paul thinks nothing of, though He is a monotheistic Jew he thinks nothing of taking Psalm 68 and using it to refer to Jesus Christ.
Let’s look at another one, turn to Isaiah
45:23 and with the other hand turn to Philippians 2:9, again what are we
looking for? Keep our attention focused
on what we’re looking for; we’re looking to show that these monotheistic
apostles thought nothing of switching back and forth between Jehovah and Jesus,
Jehovah and Jesus, Jehovah and Jesus. In
Philippians
One final reference. Turn to Isaiah 44:6 and Revelation 1:8. What
do we read in Isaiah 44:6, who is doing the speaking in Isaiah 44:6, “Thus
saith the LORD, the King of
Look, the writers of the New Testament are
Jews, they’re monotheistic Jews. Do you
see their claim now? So therefore the
second category of evidences that we’ve gone through, the New Testament Christ
for Yahweh substitutions, is a whole body of data that clearly and
unambiguously establishes the complete deity of Christ. And how does it do it? Run through the logic again; the logic is
this. This argument is set in
That’s one category of evidences for Jesus Christ. By the way, few people know this argument; it’s to me one of the most obviously arguments that you can get out of the New Testament; it short-circuits a lot of other problems. Now we have a third category of evidences to prove the full and complete deity of Christ. These are the more classic references, we’ll call them the Christ for God role substitutions, role and name substitutions. That is, that Jesus in the New Testament takes on the role of God and He takes on the names of God. Now this body, this third body of evidences to prove the full and complete deity of Christ, this body, this third body, is the one that most people refer to when they try to prove Christ’s deity. Evidences I this third category would include John 1 where Jesus Christ is said to be the Creator of all things. That’s John 1:3, the Logos. He is the Creator of ALL things, which means therefore He is the same one mentioned in Genesis 1:1.
In Mark 2 Jesus Christ is the forgiver of sins. There’s three things where Christ takes over the role; He takes over God’s role as Creator in John 1; He takes over God’s role as forgiver in Mark 2, now careful on this one because if I were a clever opponent to you and you brought this evidence up to me do you know what I’d reply back to you? Well, didn’t the Levitical priests forgive sins in the Old Testament? No they didn’t; the Levitical priests in the Old Testament pronounced a forgiveness of sins that God had done, but they weren’t doing the forgiving, they were only pronouncing what God had done and therefore that is not what Christ is doing in Mark 2. In Mark 2 Christ is not pronouncing sins forgiven that God has forgiven. In Mark 2:5 He is pronouncing the forgiveness itself as God [“When Jesus saw their faith, He said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins are forgiven thee.”] And you read Mark 2 and you see the Jews catch on very quickly, [7] “Who can forgive sins but God.” You know, you go out and break the Ten Commandments and you meet a guy on the street and he says I forgive you for breaking them, you begin to suspect that either the guy is funny or you really ran across a very interesting person.
In the third role that Jesus Christ uses to take over God is that He is the judge; many passages, John 5 and other passages. So the three most critical roles of God in the Old Testament, that he is the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Judge, Christ seems perfectly at home just walking both feet right in the middle of these roles. Now you can excuse some things by poor communication and maybe something got lost in the translation but when you have Jesus just unambiguously plowing like a bull in a china shop right down three of the roles of these major aisles of God’s work you begin to suspect that can’t be explained away by some cultural mistake. Christ is actually and fully claiming these roles for Himself. Remember He said I’m going to be the Judge in the last day? You’re going to be the Judge? Yes, I’m going to be the Judge in the last day. Can you imagine this falls on the ears of someone who has been taught all his life that Jehovah is going to be the Judge. There are some of the rolls that Jesus Christ has.
Now some of the names. I will give you five verses where Christ is clearly called God in the New Testament. Two of these five verses are hard to defend against a clever opponent and I’ll warn you about them. They can be defended but the average person would have problems against a skilled opponent. So as I give these to you I’ll tell you to put an asterisk and footnote it somewhere in your notes and that is know what you’re doing if you’re going to trot those out. But the other three are pretty God.
These are the five verses where Christ is explicitly called God in the New Testament. (1) John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Now the Jehovah’s Witnesses have changed the translation, the New World Translation, and they’ll argue with you that the Word was “a God.” And they go into a big long song and dance but it cannot be, and I assure you, you can go to any Greek authority, any man who’s skilled in Greek, if you want to go to any of the great translations of Scripture and apart from Moffitt’s translation there’s not another translation beside the new World Translation that takes this any other way than full deity. So John 1:1 is a safe verse if you want to chase down and prove that the great translators of Scripture have always interpreted it that way, have always taken the Greek grammar that way.
The second verse in the New Testament where
Jesus Christ is called God, and this is the easiest verse to use and the
easiest one to defend against, that is Titus 2:13. Let me show you how to use it; please don’t
think of these verses as only limited to bullfights. We’re not just giving you these verses for a
religious bullfight. We’re giving you
these verse to show first the deity of our Lord so that when we say we love
Jesus we’ll know what it is we’re talking about, we won’t have this half-here,
half-there expression. Titus 2:13,
“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and
our Savior, Jesus Christ.” Now this is
easy to defend because a man by the name of Granville Sharp was one day in
The third verse where Christ is explicitly called God in the Bible. 1 John 5:20, “…This is the true God, and eternal life.”
Now there are two other verses and we won’t have time tonight to go into and defend but you can add them and play with them a little bit; Hebrews 1:8 and possibly Romans 9:5. The reason why these are ambiguous, and Hebrews 1:8 has a problem with the fact that it comes from an Old Testament quotation and there’s plenty of room for a slippery critic to kind of eel his around that Old Testament quote. That’s why Hebrews 1:8 is not too useful in battle. In Romans 9:5 the weakness is that some texts don’t read that way; it’s all based on punctuation of a sentence. And this one can be angled out by a relatively smooth opponent. “Whose are the fathers,” Paul says, “and of whom, as concerning the flesh, Christ who is over all,” it reads in the King James, “God blessed forever.” But if you change, and by the way, in the original Greek there are no commas; commas are injected purely by the editor as to how you take the Greek; the Greek is just written one letter after another and you kind of just have to edit it yourself. So another way of taking this is, “Whose are the fathers, of whom, as concerning the flesh, Christ came, who is God over all, blessed forever.” That’s another way of taking it. So those two verses I believe do teach the deity of Christ, but for purposes of sidewalk discussions they’re not too useful.
The conclusion to the second point of the doctrine of the hypostatic union: what was our point? Our point was that the Son is subordinate to the Father, not in essence but in role. We have proved this in the following way: We have proved it by showing the full and complete deity of Christ and therefore Christ must be of full stature with the Father, and therefore the subordination that we observe in the text cannot be one of essence; that’s knocked out by all this data we’ve just shown you proving the full and complete deity of Christ. That being the case we are left, then with a role, and that’s indeed what the Church Father came to, that when it says “My Father is greater than I,” He is talking about in some way, in which way we have yet to deal with and we’re going to deal with it a little bit later, in some way that refers to the Son’s assignment, His work, His role as less than the role of the Father and the work of the Father.
Now that’s the second point in the doctrine
of the hypostatic union. We leave
Arianism and its modern day opponents in the Watchtower Society and all other
cults really, I don’t want to just pick on the Watchtower Society, all cults
deny the deity of Christ; this is one of the reasons we call them cults. You may wonder, is the word “cult”
arbitrarily assigned? Not at all; a cult
is any group of people that denies the basic orthodox of the Christian
faith. This is why in basic orthodoxy we
don’t distinguish Catholicism, Baptist, Presbyterians, Methodists, they’re all
considered part of orthodox Christianity in its general form. The cults are sticking out here, they’re the
Mary Baker Eddy Glover Patterson, whatever her names are, and John Smith who
lost his spectacles some place,
Why then do we say Arianism is wrong? Because we like to say the Arians are wrong? We like to say ha-ha at them, we laugh at Arius because he fell in a latrine and died down there? No, we have better reasons for saying that Arianism is wrong. Arianism is wrong because it doesn’t fit all this massive amount of material in the New Testament that substantiates Jesus’ identity with Jehovah. It sub-biblical, that’s why we deny it. It has nothing to do with some Greek philosopher that turned into the church in the third and fourth century. [Tape turns]
… a dream, and the Docetists argue that Christ really wasn’t real, he just kind of faked out everybody into thinking He was real, He had no true humanity. And you say well, that didn’t last too long so that’s not much of a heresy. That’s right, but it has a subtle form. After Docetism was eliminated there were other people that came along and said oh yes, Jesus has a body but when God indwelt the body He took the place of the human spirit. So the more subtle versions of later Docetism denied the full humanity of Christ. Docetism denied the obvious, that Christ didn’t have a body, but there were these little sneaky heresies, some denied that He had a soul and others denied that He had a spirit. There was always some piece of His humanity missing that God kind of substituted in.
The Church has given over the many centuries of discussion five reasons why Christ must have all pieces of His humanity together. He must have a real human spirit like you do; He must have a real human body like you do; and He must have a real human soul like you do. The Holy Spirit never replaced, when God created Jesus in Mary’s womb He didn’t look down and say let’s see, here’s the body, I’m shaping the body but instead of breathing in a human spirit He blew in Himself, kind of, the Son. Well, that’s not the story. Christ had full humanity, body, spirit and soul. Why? Why do we need a full humanity. And as I enumerate these reasons keep again, this is not for a theological bullfight with someone, this is so you in the privacy of your own heart can worship Christ properly and you can appreciate Him when you sing some of the great hymns of the church, if we can find them in the hymnal. And as we read these and sing these you ought to take the doctrine in your soul and just let it kind of flow and think about the person of Christ. What a magnificent person He is.
These are the reasons why Christ had to have ALL of His humanity, not part of His humanity. First of all, there had to be perfect human obedience in history to generate real righteousness. There had to be +R, absolute righteousness, generated by true human obedience and if Jesus Christ wasn’t full humanity the obedience means nothing. God could have got a human body, put it on and walked around the face of the earth and it would have been God in His own righteousness generating the righteousness. But that wasn’t what was called for? What was called for was for a creature to be perfect before God, and you can’t have a perfect creature unless you have a perfect creature to begin with in the sense He’s all there. And so therefore the argument; by the way, this is based on Hebrews 5:7-9. Christ had to have all parts of His humanity because He needed to produce righteousness that was borne out of His humanity, a perfect obedience to the Word of God. Otherwise, Christ is not an example, otherwise Christ’s obedience means nothing to you, it means nothing to me because we can always say well, there was a special case. But if Christ is true humanity who has a spirit like you do and has a body like you do, then His righteousness means everything in the world because it means that when you look at the life of Christ you see what you could be like if you were morally perfect. It provides a real human standard.
Another reason why Jesus Christ needed to have full humanity and that was He had to fill the priestly role; the priest has to be a human being; Hebrews 4:14-16. Jesus Christ had to be a priest and you can’t have a priest with his head not screwed on. And that’s what these false partial ideas of Christ’s humanity always argue. What does this mean to you practically? Well, what it means to you is that the priest who is praying for you has walked in your footsteps. The priest that is praying for you isn’t some guy that’s just kind of up there, Michelangelo statue, contemplating infinity on the throne if the Father. It’s not that kind of thing. It’s, rather, that the priest had dirt under his fingernails at one time, and even tonight the priest can look at His hand and see scars. He was true humanity and He prays for you.
The third reason why Jesus Christ had to have true humanity was that He had to take over Adam’s role. Adam was given a creation mandate and we’ll see this when we get into John 17, you’ll see Him refer to His Adamic role, but Adam is the head of the human race, he was given responsibility to subdue the earth, and all things are placed under his feet. And the Bible insists that if ever the universe is to be redeemed, how do you suppose it’s going to be redeemed? A rocket ship and flying saucer from Galaxy 444. No, the only way the physical universe can be redeemed is by maintaining the original creation mandate. What was the original creation mandate? Who is the Lord of the creation? The Adamic human race. The human race was given the mandate to conquer. So when Christ conquered, even in the book of Revelation when He comes again with His sword to judge the nations, He comes as Adam; He comes underneath that original mandate, way, way, way, way, way, way back in Genesis 1:26, 27, 28, He comes to subdue the earth. So Christ stands in the tradition of Adam and He’s going to replace Adam, underneath that original design back in Genesis 1. That by the way is the argument, all these nitwit evangelicals who argue well, I don’t believe the first ten chapters of Genesis, that’s all myth, but I surely believe the Bible from Genesis 12 on. Well that’s very nice except for the fact that all the theological arguments here are grounded on the first 11 chapters of Genesis. So why don’t you just be honest if you have that inclination and just, instead of tearing out the first 11 chapters just tear them all out, and you have a cover and you can use it for something else. By the way, the Adamic role was given in 1 Corinthians 15.
The fourth reason for Jesus being fully human and that is that Jesus Christ has a genuine death for atonement. The fourth reason, the efficacious death of Christ is given in John 19, that Christ must die a death under what… now remember the third point, what did we say it was? Christ comes in underneath the creation mandate and He takes Adam’s position. Now in this point what does Christ come in under but the curse of Genesis 3. Christ must Himself come in underneath the curse of Genesis 3 and He must genuinely die the death that was mandated in Genesis 3 against sin; cursed be the one who sins, and Christ must take and absorb that curse and He must genuinely die. And you can’t die if you’re only partly there.
Finally another, a fifth reason for the humanity of Christ is that He must prophetically fulfill the Davidic Covenant. The Davidic Covenant presumes full complete humanity for all the seed of David; Christ is the seed of David, therefore Christ must have full, complete humanity. There are two references to Christ’s spirit and His soul; these were explained away by the critics but I give these to you anyway: Matthew 26:38 has reference to Christ’s human soul, and in John 13:21 we have reference to Jesus’ human spirit, showing He has all the parts that we have. This completes the third point in the doctrine of the hypostatic union of Christ.
What is that third point again; let’s go all the way back, make sure we’ve got it. The third point is that Christ has full humanity. Now let’s put what we’ve got together. The first point said the Son is a distinct person. The second point said that the Son subordinations to the Father is one of role, not of essence. So we’ve clearly established the deity. Now this third point has done what? It’s established His full humanity. So what do you suppose the fourth point deals with? The hypostatic union of the two. So now we’re going to deal with the unity, the unification of these two natures and if you thought the other points were hard, this one is the real blooper and this is where we have to approach it in certain ways, and we’ll show an error, then we’ll approach it another way and we’ll show an error, then we’re going to leave it; we’re not going to go into all the details in this fourth point because it’s just beyond us right now, we’ll just work with the text of Scripture and hope the idea comes across.
The fourth point as it was finally stated after centuries of discussion was that Christ had two natures, united in one person without mixture. United in one person means united in one hypostasis, and that’s where the word hypostatic union came from. If you want a less theological term, the doctrine of the personal union is what the doctrine of the hypostatic union means. The doctrine that these two natures are united in one person.
Now for the next 5 or 10 minutes we’re going to just go and try to describe to you what this is saying and I hope if you follow this you’ll see what a mind blowing thing this is. If you have any sense of the lost-ness of the modern man, the poor guy that’s wrapped up in Zhen or TM or something else and he has this conception of God as somehow a process and man is always separated from God or the guy is a liberal and he talks about God and has a lot of God words but he really doesn’t believe that there can be a real communication between God and the creature. If you have any sympathy in that direction, or experience or exposure in that direction, pay careful attention here because you can see where the church had anticipated this whole thing centuries ago and it already answered it before we even asked the question.
The best way of approaching this, a rather complicated statement, the best way of approaching it is through watching two errors that started in the Church. And if we look at these two mistakes we’ll see what the truth is, because as always each mistake was an extreme statement and the truth was simply taking the part that was true out of one, the part that was true out of the other, putting them together and they had the answer.
The first mistake that was made at this point in the discussion became known as Nestorianism, after the name Nestorius, who was a Christian teacher. Nestorius so emphasized the two natures that he drew them as parallel lines that never met. So he had Christ and His deity and He had Christ in His humanity and these were two cells. So what Nestorius had done was to emphasize the two natures so highly that he wound up with two persons. That was Nestorianism. You say so what, what’s that got to do with it. What’s that got to do with it; modern neo-orthodoxy is Nestorianism all over again. The Creator and the creature, God and man, never speak to one another, they are two parallel lines that never meet. Neo-orthodoxy is just a rehash Nestorianism. Nestorianism separates Christ’s deity and His humanity; if you can conceive of Christ, conceive of a silhouette of a man and then a silhouette of a man and the silhouettes perfectly shadow each other; that’s the Nestorius Christ, there’s God and there’s man, they’re walking together and the whole thing is called Christ, but they’re two selves, perfectly cooperate with one another but there are two selves. The danger is there is no coming together of deity and humanity as far as one person is concerned; they’re separated. And this violates all the Scriptures where Jesus speaks of Himself as single ego, “I.” He doesn’t speak of Himself as Me Me, I and I, God and man, you don’t see Him say that, even if He might say it fast but you still don’t see Him ever say that. He has only one ego, “I.” So therefore Nestorianism was rejected by the Church on the basis of the Scriptural evidence for one ego or one self for the person of Christ. Nestorianism was rejected. What it does, it makes the humanity weak and the deity unreachable; the practical application to this.
Well then, as you’d expect, somebody came
up with a brilliant opposite idea and this idea is known as monophysitism which
we’ll just say has one nature; they emphasize the fact of one person so
strongly they took the deity and kind of mushed it around and mixed it up with
the humanity so you have Christ with His deity and His humanity mixed together
in one jar. And what happened here? Why is this wrong? You just blew the deity of Christ out because
now His deity has become tainted with humanity, He’s lost His true deity. And you know a modern day illustration of
monophysitism—Hinduism. You talk to
somebody who believes in oriental religion and they’ll come up with this song
and dance to you, oh but Christian, don’t you know there were many incarnations
of God, don’t you know that
In this case we had the deity of Christ
smashed and you had a
Now let’s see if we can get the force of what’s happened here. Let’s take our Trinitarian triangle, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now look at the Son; here’s the Son in His eternal glory, dwelling forever and ever and ever as a person of the Godhead. He is, as a person He has intellect, will and emotion. He has the functions of personality as God. But now what happens? On the most climactic moment of history, the day that Mary delivered her baby, here’s what happened. The Son, still existing as part of the Trinity, but in His person united with a human body, human spirit, human soul. So the Trinity and this baby that came out of Mary’s womb was united at that instant under one person, the Son. One self, one person, who simultaneously can exist as God and man. That’s what the doctrine of the hypostatic union is saying; it is a mind blowing thing because what it’s saying is that the concept of personality in Christian orthodoxy is so lofty and so high that what we call “person” in our human bodies is identical to what’s inside the Trinity. That which is called personality is that which is just the same as God Himself is, and this is why Christianity has always had the high order of relationship between God and man.
Contrast this with the oriental religions; how does an oriental religionist have relationship with his god; one thing he has to perform a frontal lobotomy to get rid of his mind because to the oriental religion you don’t talk, that’s not the highest way of communication. The highest form of communication is kind of this ooumh and having a [not familiar with word; sounds like: sha tori] experience or crisis or as some of the Buddhists monks do, they stand on one leg, close one nostril and utter the mystical word oompah. And this is the relationship between God and man. Now obviously that idea of a relationship between God and man is derogatory as far as the [can’t understand word] full person; if I want to have a relationship with God I want to talk to Him; talking from one person to another, personal communication is not the lowest form of personal relationship; according to Scripture it is the highest form of personal relationship; not the lowest, the highest.
Why am I stressing this so much? Because here is where we part company with
our charismatic friends and these poor people are so bound to their
emotionalism they don’t even see what they’re doing. They’re like the Christians that were singing
this My Sweet Lord a few years ago
because what are these people saying and what are they are admitting? If you want a real deep experience with Jesus
you’ve got to have this unverbal, unverbalizable, encounter with Him. That is exactly what Buddha said centuries
before Christ. So what’s new? That’s the age old heresy, that God and man
don’t talk to one another, they have to ooumh at one another and here it’s
appearing very subtly with the charismatic guise; it’s all done in the name of
Jesus, all done in the name of the Holy Spirit, and philosophical and
theological it’s nothing but Orientalism that’s crept inside the door and nobody’s
recognized it for what it is.
Orientalism in a Christian God, and that’s the charismatic movement, and
that is why they hate doctrine and that is why they hate teaching because what
is teaching but verbalization; I talk about God, I know things about God. Oh, but that’s cold, that’s not the real
relationship; the real relationship you can feel it, that’s the real
relationship. No it is not! Jesus Christ at the worst point of His
career, which is right here in the
Look at some of these statements in John 17, look what He says in John 17:5, where’s the emphasis? The emphasis is on the thought that He’s sharing with His Father, that He and His Father can get there, they can talk to one another in a human language. And so He says, “And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self,” that means in the presence of your own self, “by means of the glory which I always had with Thee before creation.” Now you talk about a profound statement; here we, as finite creatures have the lofty privilege of listening in on an inter-Trinity communication. That’s John 17 and that’s what we’re headed for and this is why I spent two Sunday nights leading up to this great prayer, this inter-Trinitarian communication that we see here, this peering inside the very Godhead that runs the universe.
And we’ve had to prepare you by going back to the doctrine of the hypostatic union; if we’ve done nothing else in all this yak, yoking about the hypostatic union, at least I hope we’ve done one thing and that’s to show you the depth of the person of Jesus Christ. And maybe some of you have never been challenged to think in these areas before, you accepted Jesus but the nature of Jesus was foggy to you and you never could really bring it to a full statement; you never really thought through some of these verses of Scripture. And some of them maybe now as you read this prayer certainly you will be stimulated to review in your own mind your whole concept of the person of Christ. Do you really worship a biblical Christ or have you yielded to the silent song that’s being sung throughout out evangelical circles under the banner of Jesus; Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, soothing words with zero content. And what you’ve got is an infatuation with a five letter word; that’s all it is, infatuation with a five letter word. Notice they don’t say “Christ,” they say “Jesus.” Do you know why? Because Jesus sounds better, it sounds soft and gentle Jesus. Christ is too harsh; I don’t know what they’d do if they knew the real name of Yeshua but the point remains that this kind of silent song to tempt you to wipe out the doctrine, wipe out the absolute truth of Scripture, is being played in your direction and you’re very, very foolish if you don’t take this, at least this John series as a time to radically re-evaluate your own soul whether you really hold, in your heart you really hold to a biblical Christ. Father we thank You…..