Who is Jesus?
The assault on Christianity since the early church has been on the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. The study of the person and work of Jesus Christ is called, technically, Christology. It is a term which comes from two words: Christ, from the Greek word CHRISTOS [Xristoj] meaning the anointed one; plus the suffix LOGOS [logoj] meaning the science or study of something—technically LOGOS means word but it came to mean the study of something, the reason behind something. The study of the person of the Lord Jesus Christ focuses primarily on the person of the saviour, and the event that pulls that together is the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, because the question is, Who was the baby in the manger? As the question is answered it brings together all of the issues of His deity, His humanity, His eternality, His presence in the Old Testament; all of that is part of understanding who Jesus Christ is. The second category, the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, focuses on the objective aspects of what Christ did on the cross in distinction from the application of the work. The work of Christ refers to His objective work on the cross in terms of atonement on the cross, whereas soteriology is looking at very much the same material from vantage point of its application in salvation to the individual. This study will focus on the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Matthew 16:13—“Who do people say that the Son of Man is? Matthew adds a phrase to the question in Mark chapter eight. Cf. Mark 8:27—“Who do men say that I am?” The writers of the Gospels were not giving a biography as we think of a biography today. The Gospels were like tracts written at that time to explain who Jesus is and what He did from a certain vantage point. They were to explain the gospel and were not a biography per se. Mark is going to include or exclude data depending on how it fits his thesis, Matthew is going to add or exclude data depending on how it fits his. For example, Matthew has many quotes from the Old Testament that are not included in either Mark or Luke. Matthew is showing how Jesus fits the picture of the Old Testament prophecy of the Messiah, so he is going to pick up a term like “the Son of Man” which is a messianic term from Daniel chapter seven. Mark left out the term “son of Man” because Mark was writing to a Gentile audience and Son of Man would not have communicated anything to a Gentile audience. Matthew’s account emphasizes the fact that Jesus is making a self-conscious statement about His identity as the messianic hope of Israel. He is making a specific claim to be the Messiah of Israel. In Matthew 15:29-30 Jesus is demonstrating messianic credentials. In Isaiah 35:5 there is a clear statement to the Jews, a prophecy that when the Messiah came He would give sight to the blind, the lame would be able to walk, and the deaf would hear; and that this was a sign of the Messiah. Only the Messiah would heal a leper and give sight to the blind. The point is made here that Jesus is doing that which was prophesied and predicted about the Messiah. Then Matthew 15 goes on with the account of feeding what was probably twelve thousand people, if the women and children are included. He is demonstrating His sovereignty as the creator by extending the seven loaves and fish to feed a multitude of people. In chapter 16 is seen the spiritual blindness of the religious Pharisees, even though Jesus has given sight to the physically blind. Those on negative volition were blind and deaf to what He has done and what He has said: they wanted a sign! Negative volition has its own agenda and it overrides whatever proof is attempted. Negative volition automatically suppresses the truth and distorts it. The issue is not reason, not intelligence, not a lack of evidence; it is volition and the orientation of the unbeliever to reject God (Romans 1:18) and to suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness. John 3—men loved the darkness rather than the light. This is the dynamic of negative volition at work.
In Mark 8, whereas Matthew had just given a sort of a grocery list of the different miracles Jesus had performed—sight to the blind, the mute healed, the lame were able to walk—Mark brings in a specific example of giving sight to the blind because he is making the point that Jesus is the one who can give sight, and that the Pharisees and the religious leaders are blind and deaf, and that the disciples because they had trusted in Christ are the ones who can understand truth—they have sight and hearing. Matthew 16:16—“You are the Christ [Messiah]. To understand who Jesus is it is necessary to understand what the Old Testament says. Matthew 21:10—Jesus is entering into Jerusalem: “Who is this?” This question is asked three times in Matthew in order to get people’s attention. You have to ask that question and understand the answer that question before you can understand the answer to the question, What did He do? The third time this question is asked in Matthew is in Chapter 22:42 during a dialogue with the religious leaders—“What do you think about the Christ, whose son is He?” Jesus was never on the defensive, He always turned the tables on the religious crowd. In the Old Testament there are two streams of data that are not fully put together until the person of Christ. They have to do with, on the one hand the humanity of the Messiah, and on the other hand the deity of the Messiah. Both streams are clearly present throughout the Old Testament but it wasn’t clear to the Jews that the Messiah was going to bring both of them together on one person. That doesn’t become crystal clear until you get into the New Testament.
“They said to Him, ‘The son of David.” They are focusing on the human stream. In other words, they are saying He is just a man, a human being. Jesus is going to come right back at them and quote from the Psalms and focus on the deity. In verse 43ff: “Then how does David in the Spirit called Him ‘Lord,’ saying, The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put thine enemies beneath thy feet?”’ Notice the detail here. Jesus is exegeting the text to them. In an ancient monarchy there was no one over the king. David is not answerable to anyone. In Psalm 110:1 David says “The Lord,” so there is one personality here; “said to my Lord”—second personality. Who is the Lord of David? No human being is over David so this has to be, can only be, a divine personage. “If David then calls Him ‘Lord,’ how is He His Son?” Jesus is pointing out this second stream of data from the Old Testament, and that is that the Messiah is not only said to be human, He is said to be God. These two streams, the deity and the humanity of Christ, are going to come together in one person.
From the first prophecy in the Scripture [Genesis 3:15] can be seen that this concept of the humanity of the Messiah and the deity of the Messiah are joined together and understood to be there from the beginning. What we have in the verse is two seeds. God is speaking and He is addressing the serpent. On the one hand we have the serpent and the serpent’s seed, and on the other the woman and the woman’s seed. When this passage was translated from the Hebrew into the Septuagint the Greek word that is translated “seed” that the Jews chose is the word SPERMA [sperma]. This is not the word that is found for a female, this is the male. So there is an interesting implication here that there is something unique about the descendancy from the woman. What we will see when we get to the virgin birth is that this has a prophecy in it that relates to the virgin birth, because Mary is going to conceive apart from male involvement. There will be a supernatural virgin conception. So she understands from this that there is going to be something special. She is going to be given a descendant who is going to bruise the head, and this bruised head is a fatal wound. It is going to be her seed, so that means it is going to be human. But she understands more than that—Genesis 4:1. Cain is the first child and the first male child. Most English translations say, “I have acquired a man from the Lord.” But it doesn’t say “from the” in the Hebrew. What she says is: “I have acquired a man: YAHWEH.” She understood from the prophecy is that the seed solution is not going to be simply human but also deity. She doesn’t realize that it would be 4000 years before the Messiah would come, that God has to prepare the human race now because of the devastation of sin. He could not bring the Messiah in the first generation, there has to be a preparation—4000 years of preparation. That is why Paul says in Galatians 4:4, “In the fullness of time God sent the Son.” She is thinking, “This is it.” She has understood that the promised deliverer was not only going to be human but also divine.
This sets things up, because as you go through church history, from ancient church history to modern man, and are involved in conversations with people you have two things that are true about Jesus: He is true humanity and He is undiminished deity. And every heresy that has come down the pipe since the first century either distorts or diminishes His true humanity or it distorts and diminishes His deity. We have to show who Jesus is, and that who Jesus Christ is is not something that came along late but it has its roots in the very first mention of the gospel in Genesis chapter three, and it was understood that way by Eve at the beginning.
There is a book called the De Vinci Code and it has a lot of problems in it. The problem today is that this book has come out and people enjoy it, but when unbelievers read it they are thinking that some of these “facts” presented in the book are actually true. It is a misrepresentation of who Jesus is, and it states in the book that the deity of Christ was voted on by the Council of Nicea and that is where the idea comes in: that Jesus never presented Himself as divine, that He presented Himself as a religious teacher but not as God. The idea that He was God was something that came into being through the influence of Greek thought later on after Christ died. The book says that they just narrowly voted Jesus’ deity in. So there is a tremendous misrepresentation of these things and they are going to be picked up by people who read this book and will think that Christians made up all this stuff about Jesus. But the truth is that the deity of Christ is not something that came along at some later period, it was present from the very beginning of the Old Testament. Dr Walvoord wrote in his book “Jesus Christ Our Lord” that the eternity of the Son of God is the most important doctrine in Christology as a whole because if Christ is not eternal then He is a creature who came into existence in time and lacks the quality of infinity and eternity which characterizes God Himself. In the early church there was not much of a heretical problem regarding His deity. There were some movements in the early church that denied His deity but mostly what occurred was the denial of His humanity. It is left more to modern man to reject His deity.
In the early church the first group who denied the deity of Christ were called the Ebionites. They were primarily a Jewish sect who taught that Jesus was simply a son of Joseph and Mary (they denied the virgin birth) and that at baptism was when He was elevated to the position of the Son of God. This view later comes into the church and is known as adoptionism. In adoptionism Jesus is a man who is later elevated to deity but is not fully God, He is not eternal but is a creature who has a starting point in time.
Eternality means something more than simply His preexistence. In the early church there was another form of adoptionism that was known as Arianism, named after a presbyter in north Egypt whose name was Arius. The modern name for Arianism is Jehovah’s Witnesses. So there is a denial of the deity and eternality of Christ. Eternality is important because it means that there never was a time when Christ did not exist. Only God is eternal so therefore eternality means that Jesus Christ is full deity. He is preexistent but more than preexistent, He is eternal and existed before he became a baby in the manger.
Evidence: Micah 5:2—“ . . . whose goings forth are from long ago, From the days of eternity.” This verse was a prophecy that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem and was just one of more than one hundred detailed prophecies in the Old Testament that indicate specific things about the Messiah that were literally fulfilled by Jesus Christ in the first advent. Another passage which emphasizes His eternality is Isaiah 9:6—“ … Mighty God, Everlasting Father,” a bad translation from the Hebrew because the Son is not the Father. The term in the Hebrew is the word for “father” but it should be translated “Father of eternity,” an idiom for eternality. This is another Old Testament indication that the Messiah would be God. He was eternal. In the New Testament there is the same emphasis on Jesus as being full deity. John 1:1—“the word was God.” John 8:58—“Before Abraham was, I AM,” the present tense of the verb EIMI [e)imi]. The words EGO EIMI would be related to the Old Testament title for God, YAHWEH, which was from the to be verb meaning the self-existent one, sometimes translated I AM THAT I AM. When Jesus uses EGO EIMI he is making a clear claim to be God. Furthermore, the present tense in contrast to the past tense for Abraham is to indicate that Jesus was in existence at the time of Abraham. Colossians 1:16, 17—“by Him all things were created.” Jesus Christ is seen as the one who was the active agent in creation. Then in Revelation 1:8—“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” the beginning and the end. So Jesus Christ clearly expresses His eternality. He was and is God.
The names of God: YHWH (Jehovah) and ADONAI. There are a number of passages in the Old Testament that are picked up by writers in the New Testament to indicate that Jesus was God, where statements related to YAHWEH in the Old Testament are applied to Jesus in the New Testament. Zechariah 12:10—“…they will look on Me whom they have pierced.” The speaker is YAHWEH. This is picked up in Revelation 1:7—every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him.” Jeremiah 23:5, 6—“The Lord our righteousness.” 1 Corinthians 1:30—the righteous branch of Jeremiah 23 is equated to Jesus Christ. Psalm 68:18—this is applied to Jesus by Paul in Ephesians 4:8. Another example is Psalm 102:25-27, ascribed to YAHWEH, and the same is ascribed to Jesus in Hebrews 1:10-12. When we come into the New Testament what we discover is that these Jewish writers went back to the Old Testament and pick up passages that were applied to YAHWEH and them to Jesus. They would never ever do that unless they were convinced that Jesus Christ was full, undiminished deity. These were Jewish monotheists and it would have been the height of blasphemy to attribute any of those Old Testament passages to someone who was a mere man. So the deity of Christ was not something that was voted on by some church council some two or three hundred years later but it is the consistent testimony of church from the writings of the New Testament all the way through. Isaiah 6:5 is another great example. Cf. John 12:41, John says that the glory they saw of the Lord Jesus Christ was the same glory that Isaiah saw. So that again identifies Jesus Christ with YAHWEH of the Old Testament. Then the identification of Jesus with YAHWEH of the temple in Malachi 3:1—the Lord of hosts is speaking, and he says, “and the Lord whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple.” So there are two personages, and here it is the Father referred to as the Lord of the armies and it is the Lord Jesus Christ who is referred to as “the one whom you seek.” This is picked up in Matthew 12:6; 21:12-13. In Matthew 12:8 Jesus ascribed to Himself the authority over the Sabbath which was ordained of God in the Old Testament. This is the ultimate meaning of the term “Lord”. When we look at YAHWEH in the Old Testament this is translated into Greek as KURIOS [kurioj], and this comes over into English as “Lord.” This is seen in Acts 2:36—“ … that God has made [designated] Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified.” Who made Him Lord? God made Him Lord—not us! We don’t make Him Lord. This is in contrast to “Lordship salvation.” All one needs to do to be saved is to believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross as a substitute for his sins.
Another term that is applied to Jesus from the Old Testament is ELOHIM. YAHWEH is the personal name for God, the name related to His giving a covenant to Israel. ELOHIM is more of a generic term for God. It could have been, and was, used for any deity, but is specifically applied in passages to the Messiah. For example, Isaiah 40:3 –“Clear the way for the LORD [YAHWEH] in the wilderness, Make smooth in the desert a highway for our God.” This is applied to Jesus in Luke 3:4. Again, in Isaiah 9:6, 7—“Mighty God [ELOHIM].” So the Messiah is said to be God. Another allusion to deity is seen in Psalm 110:1, the second use of LORD is ADONAI, the first is YAHWEH. ADONAI simply means Lord; sometimes it can be used in simply a secular, everyday conversation in the context of referring to a master, or somewhat synonymously with “Sir.” It was used as a synonym for deity and in Psalm 110:1 the second word “LORD” is ascribing deity to the Messiah. All of these indicate that the Messiah was viewed in the Old Testament as being full deity.
A fourth title that was given to Jesus as deity is the term Son of God. This term is one that has some difficulties in that the concept of Son indicates some sort of temporal generation. We have to understand what this phrase “Son of” means in Hebrew. So we need to answer the question, Did Jesus become the Son of God” Was there a time when He wasn’t the Son of God? Further, we must discover if there has always existed a Father-Son relationship between the first and second persons of the Trinity, or is Sonship a role, a title, or a function of the second person of the Trinity which He acquired at some time in human history. What we are getting at here is to answer the question, Is Jesus essentially and eternally the Son of the Father. Are those terms “Son” and “Father” terms that designate an eternal relationship between the first and second persons of the Trinity? Is he a Son intrinsically or is he a Son simply extrinsically for terms of role title or function? The term “Son of God” is used 42 times in the Bible to refer to Jesus Christ. The term “Son existing on its own is used even more frequently. The problem is our understanding of the term “Son” and whether it is to indicate some sort of creaturely derivation, descent, offspring or birth. This was the problem of the early church, and when Arius came along he said there was a time when Christ was not. This raised the question in the early church of Jesus’ essential relationship t the Father: was Jesus of the same nature as the Father or a similar nature as the Father. This also became known as the war of the dipthongs. In Greek there are two words: HOMOOUSIOS [o(moousioj] and HAMOIOUSIOS [o(moiousioj]. The only difference in the two words is the first letter “I” in the English or iota in the Greek of HOMOIOUSIOS. It is lacking in the first word and it would suggest that Jesus is of the same essence as the Father; the second word would say that Jesus is of similar essence to the Father. The first word would say that Jesus is truly God, full deity. The second word would suggest that He is just like deity but not true deity. When they battled this out at the Council of Nicea they rejected the second term because it did not do justice to what the Bible taught about Jesus Christ being full deity. Their conclusion was that if Jesus wasn’t full deity then we don’t have a salvation. Jesus has to be fully God to provide a salvation. Even though His humanity is a substitute for all humanity it is His deity that provides an infinite value to what ever He does in His humanity, because they are united together in one person. The word “Son” has its roots in a Hebrew idiom. Numbers 17:10—the Hebrew word translated “rebels” is “sons of rebels.” So the words “son of” is an adjectival description. “Sons of rebels” is describing a characteristic of those individuals, so they are called sons of that characteristic. Another example is in Psalm 89:22—“The enemy will not deceive him, Nor the son of wickedness afflict him.” In the synonymous parallelism of these two stanzas sons of wickedness is parallel to enemy. This is a wicked person. It is not that his parents were wicked or his father was wicked, it is simply that he is described as being wicked. 2 Kings 6:32—“son of a murderer.” The individual is being called a murderer and this is not ascribing criminality to his Father. These are idioms describing the character of a person. All of these verses indicate that such titles as Son of God do not indicate derivation. They are not indicating that He came from someone. The phrase “Son of God” is emphasizing God! It is not indicating parenting, it is indicating His full, undiminished deity.
Then He is called “the firstborn”—PROTOTOKOS [prwtotokoj]. This word is applied to Jesus in five different passages: Romans 8:19; Colossians 1:15, 18; Revelation 1:5; Hebrews 1:6. This word has a Hebrew background, the law of primogeniture which meant that the older son would receive a double portion in the inheritance, that the older son would be rewarded with honor and prestige. But if the older son fell out of favor with the Father then he would be replaced by the younger son who would then be called a PROTOTOKOS. So the word has to do with being the highest in rank, not first in chronological order. The conclusion from this is that Jesus’ title ‘firstborn’ indicates that He deserves a preferential share in honor and inheritance. It is not a term indicating chronology.
The next term that is used to refer to Jesus is “begotten.” In John 3:16 it is translated “only begotten” and this is the Greek word MONOGENES [monogenhj]. Because it uses GENES many think that this comes from the Greek word GENAO [genaw] which is related to our word “generate” or to give birth. So we relate it to someone who has a beginning. But this generates a certain number of problems. The root should be GENES [genej], not GENAO, and it is etymologically related to the Latin word GENUS, as in a kind, genus of species. Compounded with MONOS this indicates the nature of the individual as being one [mono=one; genes=kind] and indicates His uniqueness. He is one of a kind, not an only-born. It is used in Hebrews chapter eleven, verse 17 to refer to Isaac who was the second born of Abraham, but is referred to as the “only-begotten” of Abraham. He is not the only son of Abraham but he is the unique son of Abraham, the son of promise. So the word indicates the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. He is the unique Son. He is the one who was designated to be our saviour and He is the one who takes on humanity. He is the second person of the Trinity who goes into hypostatic union for all the rest of eternity.
Another phrase that describes Jesus is the term “Angel of the Lord.” This is not a term that describes an angel. This is not the term for a messenger. In Genesis 31 when the angel of the Lord appears to Hagar he is designated the angel of YAHWEH but is also referred to simply as YAHWEH in the passage. The same thing happens in Judges chapter six when the angel of the Lord appears to Gideon. Gideon worships the angel of the Lord, builds an altar and sacrificed to the angel of the Lord. In Zechariah 1:13, 14 we see that even though in Genesis 31 and Judges 6 the angel is identified with God, that the angel is also distinct from God. “The Lord [YAHWEH] answered the angel who was speaking with me.” The angel who was speaking with him was the angel of the Lord. So there was a conversation between these two persons, so that indicates that the angel of the Lord was a distinct person from YAHWEH. This line of reasoning demonstrates to us that Jesus as the Messiah was always viewed in the Old Testament as being divine.
We live in a day when the church is under tremendous assault. Especially since the “enlightenment” of the eighteenth century the deity of Christ has come under tremendous attack. In the past it has often been the true humanity of Christ that has been under assault but today it is the attempt to reduce Jesus to just another human being.
In the early church after the close of the canon there are three basics questions that were asked of Jesus over the first five hundred years. If these questions are understood and answered we can pretty much walk our way through early church history. The first question: Who was Jesus before He came? Is He fully God or some kind of creature? This gave rise to a precise understanding of the Trinity. The heresy that took place during this period was known as Monarchianism, from the root “monarch” emphasizing king, and it focused on the fact that there is just one person in the Godhead—a Unitarian view of God, a solitary monotheism. There were two views of Monarchianism. The first was called Dynamic Monarchianism, from the Greek word DUNAMIS meaning power. It was a form of adoptionism. There was another form of Monarchianism that was called Patropassionism [the Father suffers], also called Modelism, the idea that there is only one God who expresses Himself in one of three modes. He shows at either the Father, the Son or as the Holy Spirit. So if there is only one person and one nature then it is the Father on the cross, the Father suffers.
A theophany is the appearance of the second person of the Trinity prior to the incarnation. The majority of them have to do with the angel of the Lord. The first appearance is in Genesis 16:7. The two main characters in this chapter are Sarai and Abram who have been given a promise by God of a child. At this time Abram is about the age of 86 and he hasn’t had a child yet, and Sarai is beginning to get a little impatient with the fact that God keeps promising but there is no pregnancy. She suggests Abram take a concubine, which was a legitimate practice in the near East. If a wife was barren then her servant could take her place. Hagar becomes pregnant and Sarai becomes jealous and treats her harshly and kicks her out. It is a situation of injustice and maltreatment. The angel of the Lord appears to Hagar, verse 7. The word “angel” here is a translation of the Hebrew word which means messenger, so it pictures this personage as a messenger sent from God. That is important because that is the exact role of God the Son in the plan of God. The angel of the Lord commands Hagar to return to Sarai and gives her a promise. The picture is an expression of two things. The integrity of God and the grace of God are expressed through the actions of the angel of YAHWEH. Hagar identifies the angel of the Lord as the God who sees, so she recognizes that the angel of the Lord is God. The next place the angel of the Lord is mentioned is in Genesis 22:18 where Abraham is told by God to take Isaac his only begotten son and to sacrifice him. Throughout this passage God is referred to as ELOHIM. And then when Abraham gets to the point where he is about to sacrifice Isaac it is angel of the Lord who calls to him from heaven—“ … you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.” Who was it who told him to sacrifice the son to begin with? ELOHIM. So it is a clear identification of the angel of the Lord with ELOHIM. So in both of these passages the angel of the Lord is identified with God. Other passages that do this are: Genesis 24:7, 40; 31:11-48; Exodus 3:1; Judges 6:11-23. But there are some passages where the angel of the Lord is seen as being distinct from God. In Genesis 18:1-33 God appears as a man with two angels to Abram. He is not stated as the angel of the Lord there, but as God. Another appearance of God is to the seventy elders of Israel in Exodus. Then the appearance of the Lord of hosts [armies]—Psalm 24:10; 59:5.
The
humanity of Christ in the Old Testament
In Genesis 3:15 we have the first allusion/reference to the gospel. This is the first reference to the spiritual victory that Jesus Christ will bring over Satan, the prediction that the Messiah is going to be the seed of the woman. A woman’s name in a genealogy was rare, so the fact that a woman is mentioned here stands out. Furthermore there is a reference to the seed of the woman, and seed usually references the male rather than female. Here we are told that the woman would have a descendant and this emphasizes the fact that the Messiah would come from a woman. And we see all of His humanity from His mother, not from father and mother. There is implicit in this the implication of a virgin birth. We have seen that Eve knew something about this when we looked at the translation of Genesis 4:1—“I have acquired a man: the Lord.” Eve has understood that the prophecy of Genesis 3:15 to indicate that there will be a God-Man Messiah, and she is mistaken only in the application.
The next major Messianic prophecy we will look at is Genesis 12:3. This again expands the concept of seed. This is the Abrahamic covenant where God promises Abraham a land, a seed, and blessing. The blessing comes through the seed. The term “seed” is not mentioned in verse 3 but the foundation is laid there by “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” The concept of “in you” is then expanded in Genesis 22:18—“And in your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.” The Hebrew word “seed” here [ZERA] is a word which is always in the singular and can either be a collective noun or an absolute singular. Some nouns are singular but can refer to a whole group, but an absolute singular noun refers to one individual. In this passage the noun is an absolute singular, and the reason we know that is because of the way the apostle Paul uses it in Galatians 3:16—“Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed… And to your seed that is, Christ.” In Genesis 22 we see that the Messiah will be a descendant of Abraham. In Genesis 49:10 we learn that He will come from the tribe of Judah. This verse is in the context of Jacob’s prophecy concerning his sons and the various tribes of Israel. “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until Shiloh comes.” The word “Shiloh” here should not be taken as a proper name, as it sometimes is. It is a possessive pronoun in Hebrew and it means “whose it is.” So it should be translated, “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until whose it is comes.” In other words, the rightful heir and the rightful King. This is the same way this word is translated in Ezekiel 21:25-27—“until he comes whose right it is.” The point of the prophecy in Genesis 49:10 is that Judah will maintain a ruling preeminence until “he whose right it is to whom the kingdom ultimately belongs arrives on the scene.” So we see that the Messiah is to be fully human, the seed of the woman; He is to be a Jew, the seed of Abraham; and He is to be from the tribe of Judah.
The next prophecy that is related to the humanity of the Messiah is in Deuteronomy 18:15-19, and it emphasizes His role as a prophet. The point is that He is going to be a prophet like Moses in five areas: Moses will be a prophet (Numbers 12:6-8); he will be called a redeemer in that he is the one who led the Jews out from their captivity; Moses was also called a mediator (Exodus 19:16-25); The Messiah is an intercessor, as Moses was an intercessor (Exodus 32:7-14); Moses is called a leader (Exodus 3:10).
The next passage which emphasizes the humanity of Christ is given in 1 Chronicles 17:10-14, the version of the Davidic covenant, given also in 2 Samuel 7. “The Lord will build a house for you …I will set up one of your descendants after you, who shall be of your sons; and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build me an house, and I will establish his throne for ever. I will be his father, and he shall be my son: and I will not take my mercy away from him, as I took it from him that was before thee: but I will settle him in mine house and in my kingdom for ever: and his throne shall be established for evermore.” This prophecy indicates that the Messiah is a physical descendant of David. Again and again these passages indicate that He is a full human being.
One of the most important prophecies in the Old Testament related to the Messiah is in Isaiah 7:14 and Isaiah 9:6,7. The entire chapter 7 deals with the pronouncement to king Ahaz that a conspiracy to destroy the Davidic dynasty would not be successful. The Lord provides comfort to Ahaz by way of Isaiah the prophet who is commissioned by the Lord to go to Ahaz. In verses 10 & 11 God is speaking specifically to Ahaz. The word “sign” is the Hebrew word OT and it indicates something that is miraculous. This is not normal, not something to be expected in the normal course of events or circumstances.
Is. 7:14—“Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Here the word “you” is no longer singular and addressed specifically to Ahaz, it is now addressed to the nation as a whole. The word that is translated “virgin” in this verse is a word about which there is a tremendous amount of controversy. Does ALMAH mean virgin? When this was translated into the New Testament they used the word PARTHENOS [parqenoj] which is the Greek word for virgin. But the liberal contention is that ALMAH does not necessarily mean virgin, it can mean a young unmarried woman. The Hebrew text starts out with the word “Behold,” and in Hebrew grammar that word precedes an active participle that refers to something that is yet future. The word here isn’t simply ALMAH, it has HA in front of it which is the Hebrew definite article. Therefore it is talking about “the virgin.” It is not just any woman, it is a specific woman. How would a Jew understand “the virgin.” To the Jew at that time it would be a reference to “the woman” back in Genesis 3:15, going back to the promise. So the definite article there clearly indicates a specifically known individual. There are two other Hebrew words we should focus on. The first is NAARAH which refers also to a young woman, though in some cases it could possibly refer to a virgin but is not exclusively that. In 1 Kings 1:2 it could refer to a virgin, but in Ruth 2:6 it is referring to Ruth and she was not a virgin. A second word that is used in a similar context is the Hebrew word BETHULAH, and this is what the debate usually focuses on. It can sometimes refer to a virgin but not always. In Joel 1:8 it refers to a young widow. So Isaiah chooses the word ALMAH under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit because this is going to refer to a young virgin. ALMAH was never used of a married woman. It is used six other times in the Old Testament—Genesis 24:43; Exodus 2:8; Psalm 68:25; Song of Solomon 1:3 and 6:8; Proverbs 30:18, 19. It is never used of a married woman, it is never used of a widow, it is always used of a young woman. Furthermore, the Jewish scholars understood from the context that it had to be talking about a virgin. Remember that it is a sign, a miracle. It is no miracle for some unmarried woman who is not a virgin to get pregnant. So the Jewish scholars who were translating the Old Testament into Greek, the LXX, understood that this referred to a virgin, so they translated it with the Greek word PARTHENOS. Then, if this was talking about a woman who was going to have an illegitimate child that would create a moral conflict with God; God would be using an immoral situation to bring about a sign of the certainty of His promise. In conclusion we have to recognize that this was to be a sign, a miracle, not just a Ahaz personally but to the house of David and the tribe of Judah.
Isaiah 9:6, 7—“For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us.” This is as close as the Old Testament gets to describing the fact that the Messiah will be both human and divine. A child born is a reference to human birth; a son given is a reference to that divine Son of Psalm two. “…and His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor”—these titles indicate His deity. The Hebrew word for “wonderful” is PELE which indicates that is incomprehensible, extraordinary, something beyond human capability. It is a word that is used only of God. “The Mighty God”—His deity. “Eternal Father” should be translated “Father of eternity,” indicating His characteristic of eternality, that He is fully God. “Prince of Peace”—we know that Jesus Christ is the only one who can bring real peace through His reconciling work on the cross; He brings peace between God and man. So Isaiah 9:6 is reminiscent of the Davidic covenant because of the term “a son is given.” As a result of this son being given peace is established and there is the rule of God on the earth.
Isaiah 11:1 gives us another focus on the humanity of Christ as Messiah. “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stump of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.” This is a picture of a tree that has been cut off and that there is a dead stump, and that something live comes forth from it. The emphasis there on the stump of Jesse is that here is rather an obscure family that is not prominent in Judah and that even out of this obscure, low family there is a shoot, a green stem that comes forth from the stump of Jesse. “And a branch from his roots will bear fruit.” The stem grows out to be a branch, indicating strength, and it produces fruit which indicates that eventually it is going to reverse the lowliness of its origin into something that is prominent. Once again the humanity of Christ is emphasized. Jesse was the father of David so it puts him in the line of the Messiah.
Isaiah 50:4-9—this says a lot about the hypostatic union. “The Lord God has given Me the tongue of disciples, that I may know how to sustain the weary one with a word. He awakens Me morning by morning, He awakens My ear to listen as a disciple.” The Messiah is talking about His relationship with the Lord God. Jesus Christ awakened every morning and had a private tutor session with the Lord. The term “disciple” means a learner, a student. So in His humanity Jesus Christ woke up every morning and went to school with the Lord, and He learned on a day by day basis. Verse 6 is a reference to the crucifixion. “I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting. For the Lord GOD will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed. He is near that justifieth me; who will contend with me? let us stand together: who is mine adversary? let him come near to me. Behold, the Lord GOD will help me; who is he that shall condemn me? lo, they all shall wax old as a garment; the moth shall eat them up.” In His humanity He relied exclusively upon God to sustain Him during that time of testing and suffering. This is His example for us, He is a pioneer of our spiritual life, demonstrating that we can be dependent upon God, handling any kind of suffering through dependence upon the Lord. These verses emphasize that during the incarnation the Messiah was a man. He needed to learn and He needed to be dependent upon God the Father throughout His life.
Zechariah 13:7—“ Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man that is My Associate, saith the LORD of hosts.” The Lord of hosts” here refers to the second person of the Trinity; “my shepherd” which emphasizes His humanity; “man” indicates that He is a human; “My Associate” can also be translated “My equal”, indicating that this Man is also the equal of the Lord of hosts. So this is a great verse for emphasizing both the humanity and the deity of the Messiah.
Typology
Persons who are types:
a) Adam, Romans 5:14—“ Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure [type] of him that was to come.” Adam is the head of the old creation, but Christ is the head of the new creation. Both entered into human history through a special act of God. Adam was specially created; the Lord Jesus Christ came through the virgin conception and birth. Both represent a constituency. Adam represented all of mankind and was our federal representative. It is Jesus Christ who stands at the head of the constituency of all those who are believers. The terminology in the Scripture is “the first Adam,” referring to Adam, and Christ is referred to as the last Adam—1 Corinthians 15:45-47.
b) The second person who comes along who is a type of Christ, who pictures something about the person of the Lord Jesus Christ is Abel. Abel is pictured in Scripture as a shepherd who makes an acceptable sacrifice to God. Jesus Christ is the true shepherd who made an acceptable sacrifice to God. Also, Abel was slain. Cain is a type of the world system, he represents the world. Righteous Abel was slain by Cain who represents the world, so Jesus Christ was slain by the world. As Abel’s offering was accepted by God, so Christ’s offering was accepted by God—Hebrews 11:4.
c) The third person who is a type of Christ is Melchizedek—Genesis 14:18-20. The historical context here is that the kings of the east have made war with the kings of the valley. As they have invaded they took various captives, along with Lot. Abraham goes out in pursuit and defeats them. Melchizedek is viewed at the king of Salem [peace] or the king of peace. His name, Melchizedek, means king of righteousness [MELEK=king; ZEDEK=righteousness]. So he is the king of righteousness and he rules in Salem, which means peace. On his return from victory Abram stops in Salem and is going to present an offering to God through Melchizedek who is a priest king. In Psalm 110:4 we are told that the Messiah will be a king-priest after the order of Melchizedek. Melchizedek is not a Jew, he is a Gentile; so this represents a priesthood that is distinct from the priesthood of the Levitical order. The name of Melchizedek as a king of righteousness is a type of Christ who is the King of righteousness. That he reigns in Salem which means “peace” is a type of Christ who will be Prince of Peace in Isaiah 9:6. He is a type of Christ in that he foreshadows a priest-king. A priest is one who represents somebody to God, so this indicates that as a priest He would be true humanity.
d) The fourth type is Isaac, the firstborn of Abraham. Hebrews 11:17, “the only begotten of Abraham. He foreshadows Jesus Christ who is the only begotten of God—John 3:16. The term “only begotten” MONOGENES [monogehj] emphasizes uniqueness. Isaac was miraculously born to his parents because he was born to his parents when they were well past the years of child-bearing. Isaac is a type of Christ in that both he and the Lord Jesus Christ had a miraculous birth, and both of them had births that were foretold and promised. Furthermore, he is not only a type of Christ by being an only-begotten but he is a type in sacrifice—Genesis 22. Isaac was to be sacrificed by his father on Moriah; Jesus was sacrificed on Moriah by His Father. In Genesis 24 Abraham secures for Isaac a bride. This is a picture of the Holy Spirit securing a bride for the Lord Jesus Christ. In the New Testament the Church is represented by Isaac. Te spiritual children of Abraham are analogous to Isaac—Galatians 4:28, in contrast to the descendants of Ishmael who are the children of the slave, Hagar—Galatians 4:29.
e) The fifth person who is a type of Christ is Benjamin—Genesis 35:18. Benoni means son of sorrow; Benjamin means son of my right hand. As Benoni, Jesus was the son of sorrow—to His mother Luke 2:35, because of His destiny to go to the cross and die for our sins, and He is the Man of sorrows because He paid the penalty for our sins. But as Benjamin He now sits at the right hand of God the Father, victorious in His battle just as the tribe of Benjamin was victorious as a warrior.
Events which are types:
a) The Passover—a picture of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. It focuses on a lamb that was without spot or blemish, a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ who was sinless, impeccable. “The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”—John 1:29. The Passover is also a picture of salvation because the blood of that lamb had to be applied to the door posts, and that foreshadows the application of the blood and the fact that the work of Christ on the cross has to be applied to each individual person.
b) Things—the construction of the tabernacle in which acacia wood was to be used and then the wood overlaid with gold. So the acacia wood which was temporal and corruptible represented the humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ and the overlaying with gold represents the deity of Christ—as in the ark of the covenant. So these two are brought together to represent the undiminished deity and the true humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ.
c) Institutions—the Melchizedekian priesthood and the Aaronic priesthood. Even though Jesus Christ was not of the tribe of Levi, a descendant of Aaron, there were certain things that the priests did which represent the high-priestly work of the Lord Jesus Christ in interceding for the people, in making sacrifice for the people.
d) Rituals—Passover, unleavened bread, etc.
There is no way to escape the fact that the Old Testament portrays the fact that the coming Messiah is both undiminished deity and true humanity united together in one person. This is not an invention of the Church Age, not something that the apostles came up with, not something later apostolic fathers or church leaders invented. This was clearly prophesied in the Old Testament.
f) The sixth person who was a type in the Old Testament is Joseph. He is the most complete type.
1) Both Joseph and Jesus were born by special intervention of God. Joseph was the next to last of the sons of Jacob to be born. Rachel had not been able conceive. Genesis 30:22-24; Luke 1:35.
2) Both were objects of special love from their fathers. Genesis 37:3; Matthew 3:17; John 3:35.
3) Both of them were hated by their brethren. Genesis 37:4; John 15:24-25.
4) Both were rejected as rulers over their brethren. Genesis 37:8; Matthew 21:37-39; John 15:24-25.
5) Both were conspired against and put in the pit of death. Genesis 37:18,24; Matthew 26:3, 4; 27:35-37.
6) Both were sold for silver. Genesis 37:28; Matthew 26:14-15.
7) Both were condemned though they were innocent. Genesis 39:1-20; Isaiah 53: 9.
8) Both became servants. Genesis 39:4; Philippians 2:7.
9) Both were raised by God from humiliation to glory. Philippians 2:10.
10) Both were eventually recognized and accepted by their brethren. Genesis 45:1-15; Jesus at the end of the Tribulation, Romans 11:1-27.
11) Both exalt their brethren to a place of honor. Genesis 45:16-18; Isaiah 65:17-25.
g) Aaron.
1) Aaron was appointed to his office, Hebrews 5:4; Christ is also appointed to His office, Hebrews 5:5, 6.
2) Aaron was appointed to the earthly sphere; Christ was appointed to the heavenly sphere. Hebrews 8:1-5.
3) Aaron ministered the old covenant; Christ ministers the new covenant, Hebrews 8:6.
4) As Aaron was a part of Israel and served as a mediator between God and man, so Christ is part of the human race and serves as the mediator, 1 Timothy 2:5.
h) Moses.
1) Moses and Jesus are both prophets. Deuteronomy 18:15-19.
2) Moses and Jesus are both leaders.
3) Moses and Jesus are both mediators.
4) As children they were both in danger and other infants were murdered.
5) Both were chosen by God to be deliverers. Exodus 3:7-10; Acts 7:25.
6) Both are rejected by their brethren. Exodus 2:11-15; John 1:11; Acts 7:23-28; 18:5-6.
7) During the rejection both are ministered to by Gentiles and secure a Gentile bride. Exodus 16:16-21; 2 Corinthians 11:2; Ephesians 5:25-32.
8) Both returned after this period of rejection to deliver Israel.
9) Both are accepted by Israel when they return. Exodus 4:19-31; Romans 11:24-26; Acts 15:14, 17.
10) Both function as advocates for their people. Exodus 32:31-35; 1 John 2:1, 2.
11) Both act as intercessors. Exodus 17:1-6; Hebrews 7:25.
12) Both are rulers over Israel. Deuteronomy 33:4,5; John 1:49.
13) Both had to die before their people could enter the promised land.
i) Joshua.
1) Their names are related, are cognates. Joshua means YAHWEH saves.
2) Joshua succeeds Moses just as Christ succeeds Moses and the law. John 1:17; Romans 8:2-4; Hebrews 7:18,19; Galatians 3:23-35.
3) Joshua and Christ won victories where Moses failed. Romans 8:3, 4.
4) Both intercede for their own people. Joshua 7:5-9; Luke 22:32; 1 John 2:1; John 17.
j) Boaz.
1) He is a type of Christ because he was a kinsman redeemer [Goel].
2) The Goel. The redeemer, had to be a kinsman. Leviticus 25:48-49. Jesus couldn’t pay the penalty for our sins unless He was human. The redeemer had to be related.
3) The redeemer had to be able to redeem. Because of His impeccability Jesus was able to die as our substitute. Cp. Ruth 4:4-6; John 11:18; 1 Peter 1:18.
4) The redeemer had to be able to pay the redemption price, and Jesus paid pour redemption price on the cross. Leviticus 25:27 cf. Romans 3:24-26; 1 Peter 1:18-19.
Those are ten individuals in the Old Testament who foreshadow in their lives certain elements about the person of Jesus Christ. In every one of them they are
emphasizing something related to His humanity. That tells us that the Messiah had to be truly human.
Events
that typified the person of Jesus Christ
1. The clothing of Adam and Eve when they fall and try to clothe themselves with fig leaves, a picture of our attempts to clothe ourselves with our own works or human good. God then sacrifices an animal and makes clothing for Adam and Eve, a picture of His provision of righteousness to the believer for justification. Job 29:14; Isaiah 61:1; 64:6; Psalm 132:9; Romans 3:22; Revelation 19:8.
2. The ark, representing God’s deliverance of man through judgment. 2 Peter 2:5, exact specifications.
3. The deliverance from Egypt is a picture of Christ delivering us from sin.
4. In the wilderness. As Israel goes through the wilderness it is a picture of the believer
in the Church Age facing testing in the cosmic system, and God provides through manna which typifies Jesus as the bread of life. Exodus 16:4, 35; John 6. In Exodus 17:6 the water from the smitten rock represents Christ’s life that was given. That relates to salvation. Later, to speak to the rock represents provision of the spiritual life.
Typical things
1. The ark of the covenant: a picture propitiation. Inside was Aaron’s rod that budded, the broken ten commandments, each one of which represented some
failure on the part of Israel. It was covered by a lid which was called the mercy seat—again, acacia wood covered with gold. Over the top were two cherubim representing the holiness—righteousness and justice of God, and then the blood of the sacrifice on the day of atonement was placed on the mercy seat, and that pictures that righteousness and justice are satisfied by the sacrifice. It is a picture of the fact that Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross pays the penalty or covers all of our sins. God’s righteousness and justice are completely satisfied.
2. The Lamb: representing Jesus Christ, the gentle submission of Christ to the will of God the Father. Acts 8:32; 1 Peter 2:21-23.
3. The meal offering represents Christ in His perfect humanity tested by suffering. Leviticus 2:1.
4. The peace offering. Through Christ’s work on the cross we have peace with God. Romans 5:13; Leviticus 3:1; Colossians 1:20.
5. The two birds. One was slain which represents Christ in His death. The other is dipped in the blood, representing Christ in resurrection. Leviticus 14:4.
5. The tabernacle. The wood overlaid with gold represented the hypostatic union. The laver represented Christ as the one who cleanses us from sin. The
candlestick represents Christ as the Light of the world. The brass altar (brass is a symbol for judgment) represents Christ as the one who was judged for us. The altar of incense pictures Christ as the one who intercedes for us.
6. The brazen serpent in Numbers 21:5-9 is a picture of salvation. All one had to do was look at the serpent. The very fact that you looked meant that you
believed that what God said was true and were saved. It is a picture of faith alone in Christ alone, John 3:14-16.
In summary, what we have seen to this point is that the Old Testament makes it clear—in prophecies, in overt statements, in symbolism, in terms of the titles
given to the Messiah—that the Messiah would be both fully God and fully man.
Numerous prophecies were given in the Old Testament to prepare the human race for the coming of the Messiah. But, one might ask, when exactly would this occur? We might also ask under what conditions would this occur? And we might even ask why it was that God waited over four thousand years for the incarnation. After all, God had promised a Messiah under the concept of the seed of the woman in Genesis 3:15. The Scripture doesn’t tell us specifically but we get a hint in Galatians 4:4—“But when the fullness of time came, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law.” The term “fullness of time” gives us a clue as to what God was doing; that there was a reason, a purpose, for God waiting 4000 years. The Greek word that is translated “fullness” is PLEROMA [plhrwma], and it has the idea of something that is filled up, something that is in some sense brought to completion, the idea of something being fulfilled. It was the right time. Jesus could not have come prior to the flood, the giving of the Mosaic law, or come a thousand years earlier. The stage was not set, the human race was not properly prepared to receive the Lord Jesus Christ. So what we see in this phrase in Galatians 4:4 is a suggestion that history has a pedagogical purpose—that history has a purpose to it. This is something that comes only from Christianity. It was the first religion/philosophy that contended that history was going somewhere, that God had a plan and reason to the affairs of mankind and was orchestrating all of the different events in human history to bring about His purposes. By pedagogical is meant that it is designed to teach something, it is instructive. So there was a particularly appropriate time for the coming of the Messiah.
In Galatians 4:4 what Paul is speaking about has a primary reference to Israel and God’s plan and purposes in the history of Israel. He set the stage in Israel. But we can also make a broader application to the surrounding pagan Gentile cultures. What God is emphasizing is that man needed to realize the emptiness of human solutions before he would be ready for the divine solution. Furthermore, in terms of the angelic conflict all of the lessons had not yet been learned. God had to demonstrate in history certain things in relationship to the angelic conflict. In the angelic conflict many lessons have to be taught. One has to do with the integrity of God, that a God who is righteous is completely just in sentencing rebellious creatures to the lake of fire. Throughout the Old Testament in different scenarios, in different authority structures, God is demonstrating that the creature must be completely oriented to the authority of God or there will not be success. Furthermore, God was demonstrating through the history of the Gentile nations and their various religious systems that all of their solutions would ultimately be failures. Therefore He is demonstrating that in the angelic system Satan cannot provide any kind of solution to creaturely stability or happiness and that all human solutions will fail. God was demonstrating time and again through every conceivable alternative that the creature must be one hundred per cent dependent on the creator or there would be failure. Finally, God is demonstrating in the Old Testament period that only God can provide perfect justice. So God designed history to teach the impotence of human solutions and to prepare the world for the arrival of the Messiah. What was that preparation?
In the period from the fall to the flood we see a failure in that civilization. They had the presence of God on the earth—Genesis 6:3, the fact that God’s Spirit would not abide with man forever, indicating that God’s presence was still on the earth. His justice was mediated through the cherubs. The cherubs He placed around the garden of Eden carried a flaming sword. The sword in Scripture is always a symbol of the execution of justice. So God directed human history from the garden during that period between the fall and the flood and yet what happened was that man rejected God’s authority, that they were susceptible to demonic influence. After 1600 years between Adam and Noah there were only eight believers left on the earth. The lesson is that even in an environment that was only one step removed from a perfect environment of Eden, in an environment where the supernatural was visible to man, where they could see angels and demons, and had access to God in a direct way as Enoch did; even in that environment man who is a fallen creature is inclined to suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness and rebelled against His authorities. So God wiped out that civilization in a world-wide flood.
A new civilization began after the flood and in the postdiluvian civilization there is failure once again. This failure culminated at the tower of Babel. That civilization which was the descendants of Noah was to scatter over the earth. They failed to scatter, they organized themselves at Babel and under the leadership if Nimrod, and they constructed the tower of Babel as a sort of fortification reaching into the heavens, a way of protecting themselves a God who would be so invasive in human history that He would destroy the human race. This was such a cataclysmic thing in the psychology of those in those early generations that they felt like they had to do something to protect themselves against God who would so destroy the earth. Their frame of reference, again, is rebellion. They were rejecting God and suppressing the truth of God in unrighteousness and so they wanted to assert their own independence and autonomy of God. During that time they developed a worship of nature. There was the worship of the stars and the development of astrology, and so those early religions developed in antagonism to God an involved the worship of nature, fertility, and the heavens.
Although all civilizations started from a simply monotheism they were soon in that Romans chapter one process of suppressing the truth in unrighteousness and in creating their own gods, religion and idols. We see hints of this in the Old Testament where God is warning the Jews not to be influenced by these pagan religious systems, e.g. Deuteronomy 4:19. The emphasis here is that unlike the Gentiles the Jews are not to be seduced by the heavens, astrology, and they are not to worship the elements of the creation instead of the creator. God allowed the Gentile nations after Babel to go their own way, to develop their own religious systems and their own idolatrous worship, and this is again indicated in Isaiah 47:12ff.; Amos 5:26; Acts 14:16ff—God allowed all of these different religions in order to demonstrate that no matter what man came up with it wouldn’t satisfy the human soul. God still had common grace for the Gentiles but He allowed them to develop and follow these false religions. As the Jews are taken out of the land and scattered throughout the nations it appears that Satan has a counter-attack, because once the Jews are scattered the gospel is going to be spread, the Jews are going to be carrying their Scriptures. His counter-attack is the development of all of these different religious systems beginning in the 6th century B.C. As a result of that, from the 6th century to the incarnation, is two basic effects. First, divine discipline will forever change the orientation of the Jews. The problem they had is that they wanted to be like the Gentiles. That’s the problem with most Christians today: they want to be a Christian and have a relationship with God and be sure that they are going to go to heaven, but while they are on earth they want to be able to enjoy life like all of the unbelievers around them. The result is that they are going to go through a lot of misery and a lot of divine discipline, and loss of rewards at the judgment seat of Christ. As a result of divine discipline to the Jews in 586 B.C. they never again had a problem with idolatry. The problem they had after the return from captivity was with legalism. The second effect was that by scattering the Jews throughout the ancient world they took the promise of the coming Messiah throughout the world, and that helped pave the way for the coming of Jesus Christ.
When we talk about the fullness of times and the coming of Messiah there are Gentile nations that contribute the most to the preparation of the world for the coming of Messiah. The first is Greek civilization and the second is Roman. Each has negative as well as positive contributions. Generally the contributions of Greek civilization were in three areas; intellectual (positive and negative), language, and culture. In terms of their culture, though they were later conquered by the Romans militarily, it was Greek culture that conquered Roman civilization, as indicated in the poetry of Horace. Greek philosophy developed, starting about the 6th century B.C., as an attempt to answer the basic questions of human existence on the basis of human reason and experience alone. Philosophy in itself is very similar to theology in that is seeks to answer the same questions: is there some ultimate Being? How do we know? What is right and what is wrong? Also various questions about existence, meaning, purpose, history, etc. It was the Greeks who were responsible for developing philosophy in human history. “The rationalistic premise operative in much of Greek thought and life was at root the belief that unaided human reason is an adequate instrument for understanding and action. Very few Greeks denied the existence of the gods. What the rationalist premise did was to suggest that the operation of these gods was unnecessary for the acquisition of either truth by intellect or good by will.” What they basically said was that God was irrelevant to understanding truth, or right or wrong. One result of Greek philosophy was that as advanced as it became under Aristotle and Plato and others it still failed to answer the spiritual longings of the creature made in the image of God. So one impact of philosophy was that it debunked all of the pagan gods they had worshipped before. They couldn’t rationally believe in those gods, so they were left without their gods which gave meaning but philosophy was also bankrupt, and by the first century people were desperate for understanding the meaning of life. That is what led them to turn to the mystery religions where the emphasis was not on reason, it was on emotion and how one felt. However, there were positive contributions from this. For example, Greek philosophy developed disciplines of logic and thought, and analytical thought that had not been present in human history before. As tools that was going to enable the Church to be able to think through the abstract doctrines such as the Trinity, the hypostatic union, and other elements of theology. Furthermore, there was an emphasis placed on a transcendent world. There was a recognition that this world could not be the source of meaning, value, and absolutes; that had to come from outside, but they had no way of knowing how to get there or what it was that was transcendent. Greek literature also emphasized the virtues and ethics, and this became important in their political development. Negatively it still left a vacuum. A second thing that was the development of language—Koine Greek.
Roman civilization also had positive contributions as well as negative. Negatively, in Rome were all the things from Greek culture already seen, plus the development of substitute religions, counterfeit spirituality. Positively, Roman culture developed six things. First, a concept of universal law. The Roman empire was the largest empire up to that time and united all of the different peoples into one empire. So that taught people a unity despite various differences which would prepare them for a gospel that proclaimed the unity and solidarity of the human race. Furthermore, as they united all these people they developed a concept of law that would be foundational to many of the things taught in the New Testament. Their law began to be developed in the early days of the Republic in the 5th century B.C. It was codified in the twelve tables which every boy in the Romans schools had to memorize. There was an emphasis in Roman culture on justice, on the importance of righteousness. That becomes a frame of reference for understanding the righteousness of God and the doctrines of justification by faith alone and imputation. Roman also contributed the idea of a political entity. It took over the older idea of the Greek concept and took it to a new level. There was an emphasis on political unity and the concept of law. They brought in the Pax Romana. Because of the strength of the Roman army there was a peace, a freedom from threats of highway robbers, from brigands and pirates. People could travel from one part of the empire to another under a peaceful environment where there was a certain amount of safety in travel. That was aided by the development of Roman roads. There was a tremendous highway system which aided in travel. These provided an environment for the expansion of Christianity after the death of Christ where the apostles could take the gospel throughout the empire. Then there was the Roman army, and there were many soldiers that are mentioned in the gospels who were saved. They would transfer and take the gospel to many parts of the empire where they would witness, spreading Christianity. The Roman military conquests also had the effect of destroying people’s faith in their local gods and goddesses. Once again this creates a spiritual vacuum, and the development of a hunger. As a result of the influence of Judaism and the Jews that were around there was an expectation of a coming Messiah. See Tacitus. The man on the street was aware of this Messianic expectation.
So God prepared the world through the Greeks and the Romans, and He prepared the Jews, so by the time Jesus came every solution had been tried. Every conceivable permutation of human autonomy had been tried and failed, and there was a sense among the world’s population that there was a need for a saviour, a deliverer; and it was at that time, the fullness of time, that Jesus Christ became incarnate. So God’s timing was perfect.
How did we end up with a savior who could be both fully God and fully man, undiminished deity and true humanity in one person forever? That took place through the virgin birth, therefore the virgin birth is not merely some secondary doctrine that is somehow just tacked on to Christianity. We have seen that there are indications of the virgin birth in prophecies going back to Genesis 3:15. The phrase “seed of the woman” doesn’t explicitly teach the virgin birth but it certainly is the usual phrase that implied that. Then when we come to Isaiah 7:14 we saw that in the Hebrew it said “the” virgin will conceive, and that it indicates not just any virgin but is a specific reference to the virgin, understood in Judaism as referring to the woman who would give birth to the Messiah, the seed of the woman.
There are ultimately two doctrines related to the person and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ that must we have or we do not have salvation, we do not have a savior. One is the virgin birth, the other is the resurrection. Both of these doctrines entered into the cross hairs of nineteenth century theology and became the focus of it many, many assaults to the end of the nineteenth century and down through the twentieth century.
The
genealogy of Jesus
Matthew chapter one. There is a problem with comparing the genealogy of Matthew with the genealogy of Jesus given in Luke chapter three. The reason the New Testament begins with Matthew and the reason Matthew begins with the genealogy is because it plants the birth of the savior clearly within the context of Old Testament prophecies and promises. Matthew was a Jew and he is writing his gospel to Jews. The purpose of the Gospel of Matthew is specifically to demonstrate to the Jews that Jesus Christ is the promised Messiah of the Old Testament. There are more Old Testament passages quoted in Matthew than any other gospel account. The reason is that Matthew is demonstrating to a Jewish readership that Jesus of Nazareth fits the bill. He fills all of the requirements given in the Old Testament for the Messiah that He is indeed the promised King. So he begins with the genealogy of the King which shows that He is indeed related not only to David but that He also goes back to Abraham, the founder of the Jewish race.
There are different kinds of genealogies. One is linear genealogies which goes through from one generation to the next. There is also segmented genealogies where the genealogy gives a father and then several of the sons of that one father. Then there are open genealogies where there may be gaps. But actually what the text is simply doing is demonstrating a line of inheritance, and the legal line of inheritance in those passages. It is not claiming that X is the literal father of Y but that there is an inheritance line between one generation and maybe two or three generations later. Then there are closed genealogies. This is a genealogy which is also concerned with chronology. In a closed genealogy there is a formulated statement such as person A lived X number of years and gave birth to B, and then lived Y number of years and died. The reason these are called closed genealogies is because the numbers make it impossible to insert other generations, they show direct lineage from father to son. In a closed genealogy there are no gaps but in an open genealogy there will be gaps. Matthew’s genealogy is an open genealogy. So the function of an open genealogy is simply to demonstrate the line of inheritance, and it is Matthew’s purpose to demonstrate the line of inheritance from David to Jesus Christ, that there is a legal line of descent.
Luke’s genealogy starts with Jesus and works its way backward to David. Matthew’s genealogy, on the other hand, starts with Abraham and goes down to Jesus. One of the differences is the identification of Joseph’s father. In the middle of Matthew 1:15 we see that Eleazar begot Matthan, then Matthan begot Jacob. Then, verse 16, Jacob begot Joseph. Then notice the text does not say Joseph begot Jesus, it says “Joseph the husband of Mary, by whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.” So Matthew makes a clear statement there which avoids making Jesus the physical son of Joseph.
Compare Luke 3:23ff. “…being, as was supposed, the son of Joseph, the son of Eli, the son of Matthat, the son of Levi.” According to Matthew’s genealogy Joseph’s father’s name is Jacob. Luke says it is Eli. There appear to be some differences and apparent contradictions between the two genealogies. Matthew begins his Gospel with the genealogy and connects it to the Old Testament, and specifically to God’s plan for Israel and God’s promise to Abraham. Luke, on the other hand, begins his Gospel with the birth of John the Baptist, then the birth of Jesus. The genealogy comes between the baptism of Jesus and the temptation in the wilderness. He is putting his genealogy into his Gospel for a different purpose. He inserts it at that stage, between the baptism and the temptation, because in the baptism it when God the Father announces from heaven that “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” It is at that point that Luke is inserting his genealogy in order to demonstrate who Jesus is. He takes Him back all the way (verse 38) to “the son of Adam, the son of God.” And what did the Father just announce? “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
Another contrast between the two is that Matthew groups his names symmetrically in groups of fourteen, whereas Luke simply lists everyone, all the way back to Jesus. Matthew includes the names of several women, which Luke does not; yet Luke has more about women in his Gospel than in any of the other Gospels. Matthew includes the names of several women but he excludes Mary. That shows that he is tracing a line of inheritance, not the line of physical descent. In contrast to Matthew, Luke will trace Jesus’ lineage back to Adam. Thus Luke is emphasizing the humanity of Jesus, that He is related in His humanity to all mankind and this can die as a substitute for the entire human race. Matthew just traces Jesus back to Abraham because he is emphasizing His being Jewish, and also relating him to David and the claim to the Davidic throne. Matthew is emphasizing Jesus’ Jewishness as a son of Abraham, whereas Luke emphasizes His relationship to all humanity. In the section of the genealogy between Abraham and Jesus, Matthew has forty-one names; Luke has fifty-seven names. So obviously Matthew is leaving out names. In the section between David and Jesus only two names are common in the list: Shealtiel and Zerubbabel. Are they the same people or are those just common names of different people? There is a problem if they are the same people. They are not the same people. Matthew’s genealogy is down through Joseph, demonstrating that there had to be a virgin birth. Jesus, the Messiah, could not have come from Joseph because He would not have been qualified to go to the throne. Luke’s genealogy traces the descent through Mary. If Shealtiel and Zerubbael are the same in both genealogies then there are problems because of the Coniah curse. There are sixty names in Luke’s genealogy that are not in Matthew’s, so it is a much more detailed list. Matthew’s list goes through Solomon; Luke’s list goes through Nathan. That indicates a difference in which the inheritance is cast.
Luke 3:36, 37. In verse 36 is Cainan between Shelah and Arphaxad. This Cainan is not mentioned in the Genesis 11 account. In verse 10, we see numbers. This is a closed genealogy because it has numbers. In verse 12 Arpachshad became the father of Shelah. There is no mention of Cainan. The reason this is important is because this is the only alleged gap in a closed genealogy. Because of this people come along and cast aspersions on the literal numbers in Genesis in being able to date the earth, etc. At the most this tells us we have a 100-year problem. But this should never have been in the text anyway. The original Greek text didn’t have punctuation or spaces between words. What happened in the copying of the Luke passage is that at some point somebody double copied TOU KAINAM, “of Cainan.” So there was an insertion of “of Cainan” twice in the Luke genealogy when it should only be there once, i.e. at the end of verse 37. How do we know that? If we look at the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, that in many copies of the Septuagint there the insertion of Cainan in the Genesis 11 account. What we read in our translation is from the Masoretic text, the standard Hebrew text of Jews and Christians for the Old Testament. It dates back to approximately 900 A.D. The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls was so important because it gave us copies of the Hebrew Old Testament dating back to approximately 2nd century B.C. to the 1st Century A.D., and it was discovered that there were very few changes and therefore a period of 1000 years and no corruption of the text. However, at approximately the same time—2nd century B.C.—Jews who were scattered in the Greek speaking empire had lost the ability to read and understand Hebrew, and the Septuagint was translated. The Hebrew of the Masoretic text has no Cainan, but in the Septuagint text there is the insertion of Cainan. The Septuagint MSS are very late. In other words, they are post-second century A.D. copies. Earlier copies which come from the time of Christ or before do not have Cainan in the Septuagint. When Josephus (who would be getting his evidence from the Septuagint) gave the genealogy of Genesis 11 he does not list Cainan. The same is true of Julius Africanus who puts together an entire world history in the 2nd century A.D. In his chronology which would be based on copies of the Septuagint available to him he has no mention of Cainan. So it is not until after the second century A.D. that, apparently based on a corruption in the transmission of the Greek New Testament, Cainan comes into later Septuagint translations. So Cainan is not listed in most of the Hebrew MSS and only in the later Septuagint MSS. When we come to the New Testament we discover that there is not really much of a textual problem here because the corruption happened so early in the transmission of the text. The point is that there is excellent reason to recognize that the insertion of Cainan in verse 36 is the result of a scribal error where they duplicated. If Cainan is not there then there is no gap anywhere in any closed genealogy.
How do we understand the difference between Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogy? There are basically three approaches to solving this problem. The first two which are often suggested both believe that Luke and Matthew are tracing the genealogy to Joseph; Matthew is dealing with the legal descent and Luke is dealing with the physical descent. The other view reverses that and says that and says that Matthew is dealing with the physical descent and Luke is dealing with the legal descent. Both of these views are based on assuming that Matthan in Matthew and Matthat in Luke are the same person. But if they are not the same person then we have completely different lineages. Just because there is similarity in name doesn’t mean that there is identity in name, and since the surrounding names are different this should be rejected. Furthermore, many scholars recognize that this is a very difficult solution to the problem: it is based on pure conjecture of a leveret marriage, a very complicated way of explaining it, and it is also based on a very odd understanding of the term “begot” used in Matthew. The best solution is one that was first suggested in about 1490 A.D. that was the recognition that the Matthew genealogy reflects Joseph’s physical descent and Luke’s genealogy gives us Mary’s descent. Matthew traces the genealogy through Solomon to Joseph, but this is designed to show that Joseph is disqualified from being Jesus’ father.
Matthew includes his genealogy to prove the necessity of the virgin birth. Look at the structure of Matthew. He gives the genealogy in the first seventeen verses and then tells us of the arrival of the Messiah in verses 18-25. And in verse 23 is a citation of the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 which Matthew quotes to demonstrate the necessity of Jesus being born of a virgin. That had to happen because Joseph could not be involved due to the Coniah curse. Coniah is a shortened form for Jeconiah. Jeconiah was an evil king in the southern kingdom of Judah, and because of his disobedience to God and the corruption and perversion of his reign God announced a curse on his descendents in Jeremiah 22:30—“Write ye this man childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days: for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David, and ruling any more in Judah.” This announcement meant that no one who was a physical descendent of Jeconiah could rule on the throne of David. Jeconiah was in the line of descent from Solomon to Joseph.
Luke 3:23ff—one of the things that happens from this point on in the genealogy with every single name of the sixty-one names in Luke, is that there is an article, a genitive prefix to every single name, except one. There is one name in this genealogy that doesn’t have an article, and that is Joseph. That sets Joseph apart in this genealogy from everyone else in the genealogy.
Quote: “If by Jewish law you could not mention the name of a woman but you wished to trace a woman’s line, how would you go about doing so? The answer is that you would use the name of her husband. That raises a second question. If you were to use the husband’s name how would you know if the genealogy was that of the husband or the wife? In Luke’s Gospel every single name has the Greek article TOU [tou = the]. Joseph’s name does not have the definite article in front of it, while all the other names do. What that would mean to someone reading the original is this: when he saw the definite article missing in front of Joseph’s name while it was present with all the other names it would then mean that this was not really Joseph’s genealogy, but rather it is Mary’s genealogy. But in keeping with Jewish law it was the husband’s name that was used, and there are two examples from the Old Testament where the husband’s name is put in the genealogy in place of a woman’s name, and those passages are Ezra 2:61 and Nehemiah 7:63.”
Why all of this? Because if Jesus isn’t born of a virgin He is not qualified to go to the cross. If Jesus wasn’t born of a virgin He would have inherited a sin nature through His father, and that would have disqualified Him from going to the cross as a perfect, sinless human being, to die on the cross in our place. But this is something that is rejected by many moderns because they reject the necessity of the substitutionary atonement on the cross. There is an agenda underlying the rejection of miracles, the rejection of the virgin birth, and the rejection of the resurrection; and that is the agenda that God does not interfere in human history, we can live our life apart from God, we don’t need God, modern man does not need to be encumbered by the burden of this traditional religion. So the underlying issue is not simply a rejection of the virgin birth, it is a rejection of supernaturalism and the involvement of God in human history. They reject it completely.
Without the virgin birth there is no Christianity; without the virgin birth there is no savior; without the virgin birth there is no salvation. The virgin birth is not optional, the virgin birth is central. The Bible will force you to take a position on the virgin birth: is it true or is it not? Ever since the initial claims that Jesus Christ was actually conceived and born of a virgin there has been the response of unbelief. Truth always generates a hostile reaction in the devil’s world. We see the first indication of this at the time of Christ, the Jewish reaction, in John 8:41, the implied rejection of the virgin birth claim: “We were not born of fornication.”
As we look at what the Bible teaches about the virgin birth there are only two possible responses to this. Either it is true or it is false. If Jesus was not born of a virgin then once again there are only two options. Either His natural father was Joseph, and he and Mary engaged in premarital sex where she became pregnant, and Joseph is the true father but claims he is not, or there is a cover up. Or it is someone else. There is the claim among the Jews from the early first century that Mary had had an affair with a Roman soldier by the name of Pandera or Pantera.
The false claim is either viewed as a contemporary fabrication—that the claim to be born of a virgin was active during His own life. We have seen reference to that in the Jewish response that he was really born as the result of an affair with a Roman soldier—or modern Gentile reaction which claims that it was a later fabrication, that there was no real claim to a virgin conception and birth during the first century. As Jesus grew in stature down through the decades, they say, more and more legendary ideas about His deity were added. Jesus never claimed to be God, they say, this was not part of what took place, it was all added later. That is the view of standard religious liberalism.
The Reformation, known technically as the Protestant reformation because it was a protest against the works-oriented theology of the Roman Catholic church, began in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed 95 debating points [the 95 theses] on the local bulletin board, the door of the church at Whittenberg. The thrust of the Protestant reformation was solar sciptura, in contrast to the Bible plus tradition of Roman Catholic theology, the Bible is our only and ultimate source of authority. At the same time there was a counter taking place known as the era of the new birth, otherwise known as the Renaissance. The Renaissance is the devil’s response to the Reformation. Instead of a return to the Bible it is a return to ancient classic Greek and Roman thought. So in the culture at large there is this reaction to the Reformation which had the Bible as its source. The Renaissance goes back to classic paganism as its source. Classic Greek thought’s contribution to western civilization is the idea that knowledge is possible without any reference to a deity, that you could have knowledge of truth without reference to a deity. Man on his own can come to a knowledge of absolute truth in the realm of creation. This leads to autonomy in the realm of knowledge and this still plagues mankind down to the present. Either the Bible provides a framework for knowledge or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t then it is limited, and taken to a logical conclusion is just another work of man.
The Renaissance led to the next movement which is the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment elevated man’s knowledge and ability to an even higher level and unbelief came out in the open. There are people in the church today who really don’t believe the Bible but they don’t want to come out into the open. Then there is a blend of secularism and Christianity that is known as liberal theology and they don’t really want to come out into the open. This deceives even intelligent, knowledgeable believers. In the Enlightenment people start looking for the “historical Jesus” (which is not the biblical Jesus) because they think that the biblical Jesus has been all covered over by later editions of legends and deification and mythology, etc. They have to “demythologize the Scriptures” and discover the historical Jesus—who didn’t claim to be God, didn’t claim to be the only way to God; He just loved everybody! They have this presupposition that nothing supernatural happened, Jesus couldn’t have been God, therefore there couldn’t possibly be miracles, He couldn’t have made certain statements. The basic assumption is that God doesn’t interact with human history and has never entered into human history, therefore miracles such as the virgin birth, healings, walking on water, feeding the five thousand, didn’t happen. The alternative is that Jesus is the God-Man that Scripture claims Him to be.
Adam could have identified all the trees in the garden. The only way that he could know that there was one tree that was categorically different from the other trees was if God spoke. Only on the basis of divine revelation could he ultimately have an accurate view of the trees in relationship to all of creation. He couldn’t come to a knowledge about spiritual death and the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil on his own on the basis of either empiricism or rationalism. So empiricism and rationalism are limited, and empirical data and rational data must ultimately come under the umbrella of revelation. That is contradictory to modern man. Modern man says, We don’t need God telling us anything, we can figure it all out from either empiricism or rationalism, and revelation is not needed at all. The modernists start from the assumption that scientists know more about nature and man than did the theologians who drew up the creeds and confessions. Therefore a scientist can tell you more about who you are as a person than the Bible. So when you have a problem, go see a psychiatrist or psychologist; let’s not go to the pastor or sit in Bible class or study the Word of God because that only tells us about salvation and our spiritual life. So what is being done is undercutting the authority of Scripture and limiting it. Once you start limiting Scripture to a co-called spiritual realm you might as well run it through a shredder because you have emasculated the authority of Scripture.
Machen: “Christianity and Liberalism.” “The overwhelming majority of those who reject the virgin birth reject also the whole supernatural content of the New Testament. The issue does not concern individual miracles, even so important a miracle as the virgin birth. It really concerns all miracles, and the question concerning all miracles is simply the question of the acceptance or rejection of the savior that the New Testament presents.”
Why does Christianity place
such an emphasis on the importance of the virgin birth?
The first line of evidence for the deity of Christ is the names or titles given to Him in the New Testament
Six observations from this title:
a) He already was, i.e. continuous existence in the beginning. It emphasizes His preexistence. He already was when the beginning began.
b) He was with God, the Greek preposition PROS [proj] meaning face to face with. This emphasizes the fact that he is a distinct person from God the Father.
c) We know from verse one that He was God. That means that all attributes of deity are ascribed to Jesus Christ as the Logos.
d) He is the ultimate revelation of God to man, John 1:18. “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared [explained] him.” The point is that Jesus Christ is the fullest, highest expression of God. He claimed, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” If Jesus Christ is not fully God then we can’t know the Father. If He is not fully God then we haven’t seen the Father, and we have an incomplete understanding of who God is. Because He is fully God we have a full and sufficient (not exhaustive) knowledge of who God is in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. So He is the ultimate revelation of God to man. If He is not God, we don’t know God.
e) He became flesh, verse 14, a human being; therefore He is the God-Man.
f) We learn from verse 3 that all things came into existence through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being—GINOMAI in the aorist tense, and that emphasizes the fact that everything was created by Him. Therefore He is God.
a) Eternality—John 1:1; 8:58; Colossians 1:17; Hebrews 1:11.
b) Immutability. God never changes—Hebrews 13:8; 1:10-12.
c) Self-existence. YAHWEH, I AM the self-existing one. God is not dependent on anything or anyone else for His existence. This is also attributed to the Lord Jesus Christ in John 1:4; 5:26. Life or existence is in Him.
d) Eternal life. This is not a derived life, it is an inherent life-John 1:4; 14:26.
e) The fullness of deity dwells in Him—the use of the noun PLEROMA [plhrwma] which indicates all that is contained in deity. Every attribute of deity is in Jesus, Colossians 2:9.
f) He is attributed holiness—Hebrews 7:26.
g) He has the attribute of sovereignty. He has ultimate authority in the universe—Matthew 28:18; John 5:27; 17:2; Acts 2:36; 1 Corinthians 12:3; Philippians 2:9,10; Colossians 1:18; 1 Peter 3:22; Revelation 19:16.
h) Omnipotence—Luke 8:25; John 10:18; 1 Corinthians 25, 28; Philippians 3:21; Colossians 1:16;17; Revelation 1:8.
i) Omniscience—John 1:48, He saw Nathaniel under the fig tree at a distance. He demonstrates that He knows what is in the hearts of people. John 2:25. Other passages are John 13:1, 11; 16:30; 18:4; 1 Corinthians 4:5; Colossians 2:3; Revelation 2:23; Matthew 11:27—He knows the Father. The Father is omniscient, so Jesus must also be omniscient to know the Father.
j) Omnipresence. Jesus is said to be omnipresent, according to Matthew 18:20; 28:20—“I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Also John 3:13; 14:13, 20, 23.
The attack today is that the deity of Christ was added later on by the church. It is clear from the Old Testament that the Messiah was expected to be divine, and it is clear in the New Testament.
Jesus demonstrates His deity also by the works. He performed the works of deity, works which only deity can perform.
1. Creation. Only God can create; man cannot create. This is the impact of Genesis 1:1. There was nothing, no matter, no energy, no time, no space; and out of a vacuum God created everything that is. This work of creation is attributed to Jesus Christ. John 1:3, “All things came into being through Him; and without Him nothing was made that was made.” Also, Colossians 1:16, 17.
2. Preservation. Colossians 1:17; Hebrews 1:3.
3. He forgives sin. Matthew 9:2; Luke 5:24.
4. He does things that demonstrate that He is God. He sends the Holy Spirit. John 15:26. Only deity has authority of the Holy Spirit. John 16:7.
5. He demonstrates His deity by raising the dead. John 6:40; 11:25ff.
He is the one who executes judgment. He acts as the supreme judge of the universe. Matthew 25:31-46; Acts 17:31; 2 Timothy 4:1; John 5:22, 23; 2 Corinthians 5:10.
The fourth area of evidence of deity is that Jesus accepts worship. Throughout the Scriptures there are a couple of occasion where men attempted to worship
angels who refused to be worshipped. But Jesus does not try to stop worship: Matthew 14:33; John 9:38; 20:28; Philippians 2:10 (the future worship of the Lord); Hebrews 1:6. If He isn’t God He would have been a blasphemer for letting people worship Him, and the writers of the New Testament who were monotheists would have been extremely confused by attributing worship to Jesus.
The fifth line of evidence of deity is that He personally said that he could give eternal life. John 5:28-29; 6:39-40; John 17:2; Philippians 3:28.
The sixth is that Jesus associates Himself equally with the other members of the Trinity. He says he is one with God the Father, John 10:30; 14:23.
He associated Himself with the Holy Spirit. Matthew 28:19, 20.
He associated Himself with the Father. John 10:30.
Divine Claims
1. He claimed that to know Him was the same as knowing God. John 8:19; 14:7. He came to reveal God, and if He isn’t God then all we know is a creature. He also said that to see Him was to see God. John 12:45; 14:9. He said that to receive Him meant to receive the Father. Mark 9:37. To honor Christ is the same as honoring God. John 5:23.
2. Jesus claimed that when He was the object of faith He was the basis for salvation.
3. He had absolute dominion and authority over His followers. That is something that only applies to God. When He was claiming to have all power He was claiming deity. Matthew 10:37-39.
4. He claimed to have sovereignty over the laws and institutions of God. He acted as though He could control them Himself. He claimed sovereignty over the temple of God. Matthew 12:6. He claimed Lordship over the Sabbath. Matthew 12:8. He claimed sovereignty over the kingdom of God. Matthew 16:19. He claimed sovereignty over God’s covenants. Matthew 26:28. By claiming sovereignty over these areas He is claiming to be God.
The point of all of this is that deity isn’t something added by the early church. The deity of Jesus Christ was foretold in the Old Testament, prophesied in the Old
Testament, fulfilled in the virgin birth, demonstrated by the titles give to Jesus, demonstrated through the character qualities attributed to Jesus, demonstrated in the acts He performed, demonstrated in His claims, demonstrated by His associations with the Trinity, and by the fact that He accepted worship. All of these things together give us a clear picture that the New Testament consistently gives a picture of Jesus Christ as being undiminished deity.
In the late nineteenth century Albert Schweitzer wrote a book called “In Search of The Historical Jesus.” He set liberal Christianity on a whole new direction. We still have that today, it is basically a rejection of veracity in the four Gospels in the New Testament and seeking to find the truth about Jesus somewhere else in history.
A recent issue of US News and World Report had on the front cover, “The Real Jesus: Searching for the Truth Between Mel Gibson and the Gospels.” Notice: the truth isn’t in the gospels, but somewhere out there!
“In 1944 in Egypt there was a discovery of Gnostic Gospels, and this lead to the question of the “lost Gospels.” The early texts that never made it into the Bible are suddenly popular. What do they tell us about Christianity today?” So Time Magazine made the lost gospels the cover story.
These Gnostic Gospels are part of the modern attack on the principle of a canon, and in postmodernism one of the key elements is an attack on a canon—any canon, any standardized collection of authoritative texts. Philip Jenkins in his book “The Hidden Gospels,” which has a lot of good information related to the dating, etc. of these Gnostic Gospels writes, “Postmodern thought holds that no text should be privileged or authoritative as each reflects the ideological stance of a particular hegemonic group.” In other words, what modern man is saying is that any time you have a collective authoritative work that is just a work of some exclusive group who is trying to dictate to everybody else. He goes on to say, “From a postmodern view texts in themselves lack authority and have value only insofar as they speak to the reader.” We know that only means their only value is the subjective impact they have, it is a complete rejection of objective truth. He continues, “While postmodern theory dethrones the notion of privileged texts of canons there is a strong preference for works that reflect the experience of the excluded or the traditionally powerless.”
In modern America we know that the most excluded, downtrodden group is women! Right? So now we have in Newsweek, December 8, 2003, “The Women of the Bible.” This was the result of the De Vinci Code, and so the headline reads, “How their story speaks to us today.” The there is an article: “Mary Magdalene Decoding the De Vinci Code.”
All of these postmodern Ideas, elements of modern neo-Gnosticism, have been woven together in an extremely popular work of fiction that sort of intravenously force-feeds all sorts of pseudo scholarship, historical revisionism, and just plain distortion of facts to the every-day reader who just wants to enjoy a good piece of escapist fiction. Enter the De Vinci Code: Gnosticism at a theatre near you!
Why is this important? What justifies spending time on this novel? First of all the De Vinci Code sold more than 6-million copies in the first twelve months, despite an overall six per cent decline in hard-back sales. Remarkable figures. One thing that makes it popular is that it has a heavy anti-Roman Catholic theme, as did his previous novel “Angels and Demons.” This appeals to the non-traditional religious element in our society: feminism, new-age mysticism, and raps it all up in a package that appeals to a postmodern mindset. The basic thesis to the De Vinci Code is an egregious Christological heresy. This book claims that there is a cache of secretly stored documents in the sepulcher of Mary Magdalene which will demonstrate the complete fraud of historic Christianity. According to these documents Jesus was just a man. He was married to Mary Magdalene who represents the principle of the divine goddess, and that the early church witnessed a power struggle between Peter who represented male patriarchal authority and more primitive goddess worship. Of course, those nasty aggressive males won, but only because they brought in a heavy-hitter like emperor Constantine in the Roman empire who basically, according to the author of this book, redefines Christianity, puts together his own canon, calls a church council, makes Jesus divine, and basically uses Christianity to unite a fragmented empire and subjugate women.
The reason this sells is because the mass market audience of Americans are so ignorant of history, especially church history—not talking about pagan non-Christians but Christians in the pew. We are so ignorant of church history that when we read this stuff we don’t know what the answers are. If we are going to interact intelligently with our neighbors, friends and family we need to know something about what is going on in the world around us.
An early church father by the name of Irenaeus who lived toward the end of the second century wrote in his book Against All Heresies, “Error indeed is never set forth in its naked deformity lest being thus exposed it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress so as to in its outward form to make it appear to the inexperienced more true than truth itself.”
The book opens with the curator of the Louvre museum in Paris. His body is laid out, because of the way he forced himself to lie at the point of death, in a rather cryptic stance. A Harvard religious symbologist by the name of Robert Langdon is called in to help solve the mystery. The first hint for any knowledgeable reader that something is amiss is, as Langdon enters the Louvre under the glass pyramid, the author notes that the pyramid is composed of 666 panes of glass!—actually, it is 673 panes of glass—the first foreshadowing of the author’s poor scholarship and restructuring of reality to fit his own reality. The plot then progresses at a rapid pace through many twists and turns, some predictable and some not, with various two-dimensional characters who deepen the suspense and introduce various tension elements into the story.
One of the key mechanics of the advance of the plot is the use of various cryptic clues, usually in the form of riddles and anagrams, to lead the characters in their search for the holy grail—always something that appeals to fiction readers. There is something here for every religious conspiracy nut. There are the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar, the Masons, secret societies, as well as the Vatican as the chief conspirator of all. At any moment one expects to find out who really assassinated JFK, Abraham Lincoln, and all of the other mysteries in history.
As the investigation unfolds the reader discovers in Brown’s new deconstructed concept of the holy grail that it is no longer the chalice from which Jesus drank at the last supper, but it is now the womb of Mary Magdalene. Remember that in Roman Catholic theology what happens to the cup at the Mass is that the wine turns into the blood of Christ, so it is the chalice that holds the blood of Christ. Now it is Mary Magdalene’s womb that holds the blood of Christ in His descendants and heirs. According to Brown they were married and had children. It is in her womb that she passed on the blood of Jesus to her heirs.
It is this secret that is at the core of the novel and is the reason for the murder. On the one hand you have the Vatican seeking to suppress the discovery f the grail and the grave of Mary Magdalene, and is willing to use the talents of an albino assassin who is a monk from this secret sect called Opus Dei; and on the other hand you have the Priory of Zion which is a secret society of goddess worshipers who protected the identity and location of the grail down through the centuries. The denouement of the book leaves the readers somewhat unsatisfied as Langdon discovers the location of the grave but decides to keep it secret and unopened, its contents undisclosed, allowing the deception of Christianity to continue.
There is a woman in the novel, the daughter of the murdered man. Her name, Sophi Nauvue, is a clue to her character—it means new wisdom in French, and, of course, Sophia is one of the emanations of God in Gnosticism! So if you know what you are looking for you see all kinds of heresy being touted in this book.
Embedded in the action are numerous pauses which provide some of the characters opportunities to pontificate on the flaws, failures and lies which undergird Christianity.
How much of this does the author believe? When asked if he is a Christian, he answers: “I am, though perhaps not in the most traditional sense of the word.” So postmodern! So he is going to make up his own meaning!
What are some of the false ideas that are touted in this novel?
a) Early Christianity and Judaism included both male and female deities, including a divine goddess cult.
b) YAHWEH of the Old Testament was the male; Shekinah, the female counterpart of that deity.
c) Mary Magdalene represents this divine goddess cult as the wife of Jesus.
d) Magdalene’s womb which carried Jesus’ children is the legendary holy grail.
e) Jesus was never understood to be divine until He was decreed to be so at Nicea by the emperor Constantine. The date of Nicea was 325.
f) At Nicea the divine goddess cults in the feminine dimension were permanently quashed by Constantine. (If we don’t know what happened at Nicea we are prone to let all of these historically ignorant people bash Christianity)
g) Mary Magdalene fled after the resurrection to France where her children lived in secrecy.
h) Mary Magdalene’s remains, along with secret documents, were discovered on the temple mount by the Knights Templar during the first crusade. (He doesn’t mention how her remains got from France back to Jerusalem)
i) Mary Magdalene’s descendants intermarried with the royal house of France and founded the Merovingian dynasty.
j) The Gospels discovered at Nag hammadi in Egypt tell the true story of early Christianity.
k) The secret truth about Jesus and Mary Magdalene has been protected by a secret society called the Priory of Zion which has been led over the centuries by such notables as De Vinci, Isaac Newton (who incidentally was a Christian who wrote more commentaries on the Bible than he did about science), Victor Hugo, and others.
Needless to say, all of fictional book is taken esoterica mainstream and has provided a host of misinformation, disinformation, lies and fabrication which confuse
and distract many young believers as well as most unbelievers.
In the preface of the book there is a statement: “fact.” There is a claim to historical factuality that the author continues to promote to whomever will listen. He says, for example, the Priory of Zion was European secret society founded in 1099 and is a real organization. It is, but it is a gentleman’s club and it was founded in Paris in 1956! He concludes by saying all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate. But factuality has nothing to do with truth in postmodernism because modern man has rejected the concept of truth.
Why should we care of this work is fiction? Fiction doesn’t mean that everything in the book is false. Often fiction is used as a very effective means to deceive people and to teach all manner of philosophy, simply because the average person who picks up a work of fiction and doesn’t have more than room temperature IQ lowers his thinking grid and let’s everything come in.
What are some of the general errors in the book?
a) The ancient Olympics, he claims, were held to honor Aphrodite the goddess of love (feeding his emphasis on the feminine goddess idea). In reality they honored Zeus (we can’t have some male god!).
b) He claims that the ancient world was dominated by goddess worship, an enlightened spirituality that was later replaced by those awful male-dominated pantheons and eventually the worst of all, that male-Judeo-Christian God. The reality is that if you trace back every world religion, every pantheistic system known throughout all of history, can be traced back to a single supreme male God. It is completely different from the evolutionary religion garbage that has been taught in schools that we went from many gods—animism, primitivism, to many gods, and then ultimately man evolved—to monotheism. The fact is, that as the Bible reports and has been demonstrated in numerous studies that have been rejected by modern anti-Christian scholars, after Noah came off the ark all eight of the survivors worshipped one God. But as their descendents got away from God they started inventing other gods. In Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s book, “In the Wake of the Goddesses, there is scholarly documentation that there never were any dominant female goddesses in any ancient religion. They weren’t that way, they all had dominant male gods. Feminism just wants to redo history to fit their modern notions.
c) There are various cathedrals in the book that he claims were built by the Knights Templar, but the Knights Templar had nothing to do with building cathedrals.
d) He claims that De Vinci painted The Last Supper to include Mary Magdalene. Viewed carefully from the vantage point of the viewer the figure just to the left of Jesus is a young man who has long red hair. He claims that it was actually Mary Magdalene. This theory was clearly rejected by noted Da Vinci scholar Carmen Bomback on the Today Show.
e) He claims that the assassin in the book is a monk in the Opus Dei Catholic conservative organization, but Opus Dei has no monks.
f) He claims that the church during the Middle Ages burned 5-million women as witches, but unfortunately the number of those actually executed in the witch crazes was somewhere between 30 to 40-thousand at the low end and maybe 200-thousand at the high end. But not all were women, not all were witches, and not all were burned. So he continues to change history to fit his paradigm.
g) He also claims that the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in the 1950s. In his statement he says, “Fortunately for historians some of the Gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate [a false statement] managed to survive. The Dead Sea scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert.” First of all, the Dead Sea scrolls found were from the mid-first and second centuries B.C. The big problem with liberals is that they want to late-date the Gospels. Brown has early-date them 200 years before Jesus! There were no Gospels in the Dead Sea scrolls, they are all Old Testament material. And they weren’t found in the 1950s, they were found in 1947 in a cave near Qumran.
h) One of the Nag hammadi Gnostic Gospels was called the Gospel of Thomas. It does not promote feminism or goddess worship in Mary as the book claims. The final verse in the Gospel of Thomas this clear. Jesus is allegedly speaking here and says to Peter, “I myself shall lead her [Mary Magdalene] in order to make her male, for every woman who shall make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.” Now that is a real pro-feminist position!
i) Pebing, who is the Oxford educated historical expert in this work of fiction makes the following claim: “the holy grail’s real documents include tens of thousands of pages of information. Eye-witness accounts of the real treasure is described as being carried in four enormous trunks, and those trunks are reputed to be the purest documents; thousands of pages of unaltered, pre-Christian documents, written by the early followers of Jesus revering Him as a holy human teacher and prophet.” The only problem is, we don’t have thousands, much less tens of thousands, of pages on any historical figure preceding the Middle Ages. It is just pure hyperbole and garbage.
j) Dan Brown also claims that there is nothing new in Christianity, or Christian symbols; it was all stolen from other religions. He gets this from a book called “The Christ Conspiracy”. One of the claims he makes is that the Persian god Mythra was called the son of God and the light of the world, and that Christianity just picked those terms up and applied them to Jesus to justify their position. However, this is false. Mythra scholars all state that the terms “son of God” and “light of the world” never applied to Mythra. It never appears. Dan Brown also claims that Mythra was born on December 25th, and that is where the Christians got that date for Jesus. But Christians who know anything about the Bible know that Jesus was not born on December 25th. Furthermore Brown claims that Mythra died and was buried in a rock tomb and resurrected in three days, so that is where the Christians got that idea for Jesus. But that is not true. There is nothing in Mythraism that would support that claim. In other words, he just throws these claims out with no historical justification, and they deceive and distract those who are ignorant of history and of other religions.
k) The albino assassin in the book doesn’t seem to suffer from the eye-sight problems that plague most albinos.
l) He has Clement II in Rome. But Clement II was not in Rome.
m) The Priory of Zion is an actual organization, a gentleman’s club founded in Paris in 1956.
Those are just some of the non-theological errors in the book. He can’t get history right; he can’t get his facts on Christianity right.
His assault on Christianity.
He starts with an attack on biblical authority. This is foundational and why we have to understand the whole doctrine of canonicity and the history of the Bible,
and how the canon came together. Very few people teach on this. Brown attacks the legitimacy of the people and the New Testament canon: “The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven, the Bible is the product of man, my dear, not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds, man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times and it has evolved through countless translations, editions and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.”
First of all this is a straw man argument because it is based on a false view of inspiration. But unfortunately most Christians aren’t educated enough to realize that. The Bible wasn’t dictated. The Bible, according to our definition of inspiration, was God-breathed, written through the apostles and associates, and God the Holy Spirit superintends or governs the process so that the writers of Scriptures, utilizing their own style, their own personality, write the Scriptures. But God overrules or governs it so that what they wrote in the original manuscripts was without error. Brown is assuming a false view of inspiration which he attacks.
He then says that man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times. That is just blatantly false. It is not a historical record, it is a theological interpretation of history from God’s perspective. It hasn’t evolved through translation, that’s how ignorant people talk. Translations technically don’t change things, they just translate from one language to another. So no matter how many translations you have, as long as you have the original, it doesn’t change anything. And there were not additions or revisions. Furthermore, he claims that history has never had a definitive version of the book, and that is false; it has.
What does he get wrong?
a) What did the early church fathers have to say about the canon of Scripture? Papias, 60-130 A.D. He overlaps the apostles, in fact he was a student of the apostle John. In His writings he was the first to mention each of the four Gospels, but no more. By 150 A.D. Justin Martyr identifies and limits the present four Gospels. So we don’t have this development and changing New Testament.
b) Brown claims that during Jesus’ lifetime He inspired millions to live better lives. Unfortunately, millions didn’t know about Jesus during His lifetime; very few did.
c) He claims that there were more than eighty Gospels from which four were chosen to be in the New Testament. He says: “Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen. Understandably his life was recorded by thousands of followers across the land. More than eighty Gospels were considered for the New Testament and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them. [Among them?] The Bible as we know it today was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”
First, Jesus was virtually unknown outside of Palestine. Thousands didn’t write about Him, hardly anyone did; in fact, among His contemporaries only Josephus and Pliny mention Him, and they barely do by name obliquely. Jesus wasn’t influential during His lifetime or subsequently. He didn’t become influential in terms of being a staggering influence until well into the fifth or sixth century A.D. Brown also claims that there were more than eighty Gospels written. That is false. At the most, including the Nag hammadi Gnostic Gospels, which were all written over 100 to 150 years after the canonical Gospels, including the heretical ones, there were fifteen to twenty. Papias mentions the four canonical Gospels two hundred and twenty-five years before Constantine. By 150 Justin Martyr identified and limited the present four-fold Gospel canon. In other words, there are just four. By 170 A.D. Tatian compiles a harmony of the Gospels—he has the four, and no more. Irenaeus writes about 170 A.D., “It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are.” And he used the analogy of the four winds. Origen who writes in the early part of the third century (185-254) writes, according to Eusebius: “Origen wrote, ‘I accept the traditional view [this is about 225 A.D.] of the four Gospels. [So about 120 years after John wrote the Gospel of John the early church fathers are saying that the four Gospels are the traditional view]. And it these four Gospels alone which are undeniably authentic in the church of God on earth.’” Origen also wrote: “I know a certain Gospel which is called the Gospel according to Thomas and a Gospel according to Matthias. And many other have we read lest we should be considered ignorant. Nevertheless, among all these we have approved solely what the church has recognized, which is that only the four Gospels should be accepted.
So the testimony of the church fathers, to a man, is that before Constantine there were only the four Gospels. Part of the problem is that many Christians don’t understand the process of canonicity. They think there was some church council that put its stamp of approval on the 27 books of the New Testament, and that is not how it happened. There were about five or six canons of inclusion, or rules, things that they were looking for. These are: a) to see if the writings recognized the essential contribution of the Old Testament and was consistent with what was taught in the Old Testament; b) whether this book that was possibly to be included and considered to be authoritative in the local church, was consistent with what was clearly known to be the teaching of the apostles. c) There would be the recognition of its inspiration. This was not something that was simply handed down, but it resonates, it has the self-authenticating view of God and the Scriptures. d) There was a widespread use and recognition, that this was what was accepted in the churches. It wasn’t just that one church accepted it but that they were accepted throughout the church. Some were disputed at the beginning. With a couple of exceptions there were no other books than these 27 that were seriously considered by the church as a whole. From at least 120 A.D. on all canonical Gospels were accepted. Nothing that was not canonical was ever given a consideration.
d) The Nag hammadi Gospels were Gnostic and were denying the humanity of Jesus, so how could they speak of Him “in human terms” as Brown claims. So there s a contradiction of terms there.
e) He claims that Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdaline is a matter of historical record. His claim was the in the Aramaic of the Gospel of Philip the statement is that Mary was Jesus’ companion. The word “companion” is the word for spouse in the Aramaic. The Gospel of Philip was written in Greek!
f) He claims that Constantine invented the deity of Jesus and forced it on the church at the Council of Nicea. He says, “At the Council of Nicea many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon—the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of sacraments, and the divinity of Jesus. Until that moment in history Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet—a very powerful man but a man nonetheless.” Clement of Rome who was contemporaneous with the last of the apostles, wrote: “The scepter of the majesty of God, even our Lord Jesus Christ.” Right there he equates deity with the Lord Jesus Christ. Of course, the Bible claims Jesus was God. Ignatius in his epistle to Smyrna, said: “For if these things were done by our Lord in semblance then I am also a prisoner in semblance.” So he rejects this whole concept of Docetism. He also wrote in his epistle to the Ephesians the following: “We have also as a physician the Lord our God, Jesus the Christ, the only-begotten Son and Word, before time began, but who afterwards became also man of Mary the virgin.” Irenaeus, about 175-196 A.D. states: “The church, though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith. She believes in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and the sea and all things that are in them, and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation.” This was 150 years before Constantine. It is a clear statement of the deity of Christ.
g) Brown claims that the vote at Nicea was very close, that they just barely passed the vote to make Jesus divine. There were over three hundred bishops at Nicea. Only two didn’t signed the creed. Three hundred to two. That’s close!
h) He claims Constantine imposed the four Gospels and the modern canon on the church—page 232, “Constantine’s canon.” As has been pointed out, that is false. Constantine wasn’t even at Nicea. He had simply called the church because he wanted peace instead of the doctrinal controversy. He did not impose anything.
i) Brown claims that Constantine coined the word “heretic” but it is found in several places in the New Testament, and it is clearly used in the sense of a schismatic group of false teachers by the time of Iranaeus in 170.
j) Brown claims the Shekinah was the female consort of Jehovah, which he claims is a word that combines the masculine JA and the pre-Hebraic name of Eve KAVAH. But in JEHOVAH the second letter, H, is called in Hebrew a He. The first letter in Eve is a different letter. Furthermore, the term Jehovah is an English invention that came up in the 16th century A.D., as a compound of the consonants in YAHWEH and the vowels from ADONAI because the Jews would not say the name of God. They usually referred to Him as HASHEM, the name. But what they did in the Hebrew Bible what they did was, under the four letters of the sacred tetragrammaton, YHWH, they inserted the vowel points for the Hebrew word ADONAI. What the English translators did in the 16th century was to take the consonants from one word with the vowels of another word and invent a whole new name for God—JEHOVAH. So Brown doesn’t understand history and he is filled with error.
k) Then he claims that Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath as Saturday, but Constantine was the one who shifted it to Sunday to coincide with the pagans’ veneration day of the sun. In fact, he claims that Constantine wasn’t even a believer. However this runs counter to much of church history. Ignatius who was the bishop of Antioch around 110 A.D. said: “If then those who walk in the ancient practices attain to newness of hope, no longer observing the Sabbath, but fashion their lives after the Lord’s day”—Sunday, the first day of the week—“on which our life also arose through Him.” The first day of the week, the day of the resurrection. Even in the Bible, in Acts, the Christians were meeting on Sunday. But historical records all indicate that the church was meeting on the Lord’s own day.
l) In Brown’s novel is the remark: “Every faith in the word is based on fabrication. This is the definition of faith: acceptance of what we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove.”
The book is completely false and it is a theological novel. As believers it is part of our responsibility not only witness but to witness intelligently. 1 Peter 3:15: “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” You can’t just sit there and bite your tongue because you don’t know the answers to somebody who is saying something false. You are required as a member of the royal family of God to give an answer, to defend the gospel, to state the truth.
Evidences
for Jesus’ humanity
a) Emotions and the experience of emotions are not in themselves sinful.
b) Human emotions are part of the physiologically based response mechanism God has built into each one of us.
c) Human emotions are often the barometer of what is going on in the soul.
d) It’s not somehow less Christian or an indication of a poor spiritual life to have genuine sorrow, distress or despair over some things in life. It’s all part of being human.
e) It is not experiencing emotion that is wrong, it is what you do with it. You can generate emotional sins that keep you out of fellowship but it is not experiencing the emotion that is wrong.
laid him?”
10. Jesus physically suffered and died—John 19:30, 34; Hebrews 2:14.
The
hypostatic union
Definition: hypostatic union is based on the Greek word HUPOSTASIS [u(postasij]which has the idea of substantial nature, essence, actual being, or reality. So what we are talking about when we mention hypostatic union is a union of HUPOSTASES in Christ—a union of natures, a union of essences, as it were. An essence is the conglomeration, compilation of a group of attributes that make a thing what it is. So when we talk about this hypostatic union, a union of nature or essence of deity with the nature of man we are talking about everything that makes God God is there and everything that makes a human a human being is there. That won’t include the sin nature because that is not inherent in what it means to be a human. God did not create us with the sin nature. It is not because we are human that we fail, it is because we are a sinner that we fail. So there is a combination of two essences, the deity and the humanity of Christ. So our definition: The hypostatic union describes the union of two natures, divine and human in the one person of Jesus Christ. The divine nature is everything that makes up deity—all of the essence of God. And what makes a human is there—a human body, a human soul, a human spirit. Jesus Christ had all of the attributes of humanity and He demonstrated the various characteristics of humanity. Jesus Christ is fully God and undiminished deity, and He is fully man, true humanity (not fallen humanity).
We have to understand how these two natures fit together. How were they united? These natures are inseparably united without loss or mixture of separate identity. These natures can’t be separated. You can’t go in and take them apart, and they will never be taken apart again. This is an eternal union. The divine nature is still the divine nature. It does not lose its identity and it is not mixed into humanity. The human attributes do not leak over into the deity. It is without loss of properties or attributes. The union is personal and eternal. There is one person, even though there are two natures (two natures, not two persons).
Conclusion: Jesus is undiminished deity and true humanity in one person forever. Key passages in Scripture: Philippians 2:6-11; John 1:1-14; Romans 1:2-5; 1 Timothy 3:16; Hebrews 2:14; 1 John 1:1-3.
Implications: It teaches us about sanctification. Sanctification is the Christian life. It is how we grow—how we get from being a spiritual baby to being a spiritual adult. It is grounded on an understanding of Jesus and His person and the relationship of deity to humanity. So the implication is central to understanding the whole concept of our spiritual life and how we are going to grow up. If we look at the context of Philippians 2:1-11 we are seeing an emphasis on a key element in the process of spiritual growth. Apparently in this congregation at Philippi there is a problem with some kind of conflict which has divided the congregation. So there is a very practical exhortation here. Verse 2, have unity, be like-minded. When Paul starts talking about down-to-earth practical things he always goes back to some sort of ultimate reality in the Godhead to show why it is true. In other words, Paul’s approach is to teach them how to think about practical application. He doesn’t just say, “Oh you need to have unity because it is good”! That is how pagans think. Here Paul talks about why there are personal conflicts—people are sinners. How do we get past this? There has to be humility. We have to think a certain way, we have to exchange the garbage that is in the mind, flush it, and replace it with divine viewpoint. How do we get there? “Let this thinking (verse 5) be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” We can’t get there unless we are thinking the same way Jesus Christ thought. Christ is the exemplar of what genuine humility is all about.
Verse 6—“who, although He existed in the form of God.” This is the Greek word MORPHE [morfh] and it has to do with the essence of God. That means He is fully God, undiminished deity. “He existed”—past tense, dealing with the fact that in eternity past He had a certain existence; “did not regard equality with God something to be grasped”—this is a reference to Adam in the garden. Adam was tempted to eat the fruit and be like God. In contrast to Adam, who wasn’t God but wanted to be like God, Jesus who is God doesn’t hold on to it, in the sense that He is not asserting His privilege to utilize all of the attributes of His deity.
Verse 7—“but emptied Himself” KENAO [kenaw]. This doesn’t mean that He gave up His deity. It means that He relinquishes the utilization of His deity in order to solve the problems He faces in life, in His humanity. Sometimes this is defined as the restriction of the independent use of His attributes, but He never used them independently of the Father. He had access to all of His divine attributes but He restricted access to those attributes willingly so that He handled human problems through those same resources that God has given us to handle our problems, and to demonstrate that we can do it.
“taking the form of a servant [MORPHE=essence]”—In Jesus’ life He came not to be served but to serve and to give His life a ransom for many.”
Verse 8—He “became in the likeness of man, and was found in appearance as a man”—true humanity; “He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death”—present active participle of GINOMAI [ginomai], indicating a process. He became obedient, referring to His humanity. In His humanity Jesus Christ had to become obedient. This is what the writer of Hebrews is talking about in 2:10—“perfect the author of their salvation through sufferings.” “Perfect” is TELEIOO [teleiow] which means to bring to maturity. The implication of this is that in order for us to reach spiritual maturity and to prepare us for eternity in terms of capacity for functioning there our Lord Jesus Christ had to go through a process of spiritual growth that entailed surmounting sufferings. He couldn’t do it by relying on His deity. In His humanity He depended upon the same resources that God has given us. The consequence of Philippians 2:8 is that Jesus Christ received a reward: personal exaltation, verse 9, “God highly exalted Him…” This is the same for all of us, that if we go through this same process and follow Him as He pioneered the spiritual life, then the result is that we, too, will be rewarded. Philippians 2:9-11 focuses on reward, that Jesus Christ ascended to heaven, is now seated at the right hand of God the Father where He is running the universe. He has been elevated above the angels, all of the principalities and powers, He reigns over all things, and eventually all things will recognize His authority and His sovereignty, and willingly or unwillingly every knee will bow at the name of Jesus.
So what does the hypostatic
union mean?
a) He was always eternally undiminished deity. Jesus Christ has always been God from all eternity. John 1:1.
b) In the hypostatic union He is also fully human. He was born of a virgin, He is not something other than a human.
c) His undiminished deity and full humanity were united into one person forever. That occurred at the virgin birth.
d) The product of this person becomes the unique person in all of human history. He is the unique person of the universe, the theanthropic person, fully God and fully man, the God-Man.
e) Colossians 2:2-3, God was fully God and fully man. “The knowledge of the mystery of God”—we can know this, understand this, though not exhaustively.
The
ramifications of the hypostatic union
There are some passages which speak about the whole person who has both natures. It was His humanity which bore our sins on the cross because humanity had to be a substitute for humanity. Deity could not substitute for humanity. But deity is on the cross, it doesn’t just vacate for a while. Furthermore, some statements contain statements that are true only of one person. For example, when Jesus is changing the water into wine that is His deity. He is demonstrating that He is the creator. When Jesus stilled the storm over the Sea of Galilee He is demonstrating that He has power over creation, and that is coming from His deity but it is the one person who does that. In John 5:58, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” Who is the “I” there? That is clearly speaking only of His deity, His humanity didn’t exist until the virgin birth. Jesus in His deity is eternal but He says “I” the person: “I AM.” Here it is clearly true of the deity but the whole person, “I”, is the subject. On the other hand, there are passages that are true only of His humanity but the whole person is the subject. When He was on the cross (John 19:28) He said, “I thirst.” His physical humanity is thirsty, deity doesn’t thirst, but it is true of the one person. That is evidence of His humanity but His whole person is thirsty. Furthermore, we can say that as a person He can be described according to His divine nature but what we are talking about relates to the human nature. E.g. Revelation 1:12-18 we are told that Christ is in the glory and His deity is evidence. But when it talks about the fact that He is dead and risen again that can only be true of His humanity. The glory is the evidence of His deity but the statement that He was dead can’t be true of His deity.
We talk about the fact that there is a communion of attributes. A communion of attributes means that there is a sharing of attributes. This doesn’t mean that one nature is participating in the attributes of the other, it means that one person partakes of both sets of attributes. There is the one person who is sharing in the attributes of both natures. Jesus Christ in His deity is omniscient but in His humanity He doesn’t know certain things. To explain that: In His deity Jesus has decided during the incarnation He is going to limit His access to His divine attributes. It doesn’t mean they are not there. They are veiled but He is limiting access.
What is true of either nature is true of the one person. So when He thirsts, indicating He is human, the whole person thirsts. That is the sharing of these attributes. Jesus is both mortal and He is immortal. In His humanity He is mortal but in His deity He is immortal. He is finite in His humanity but He is infinite in His deity. How do you join the infinite to the finite? There is a sharing of these attributes, they are both true of the one person. This, then, becomes the basis for how we can clearly interpret Scripture where passages talk about things that relate to one nature or the other nature but are applied to the whole person.
The acts of Christ
a) All the acts are the acts of one person. They are not the acts of His humanity, they are not the acts of His deity; they are the acts of the one person, Jesus Christ.
b) Some acts are purely divine, such as creation, preservation, calming the seas; others are purely human. Some are human—eating, drinking and sleeping. Some involve both natures, e.g. redemption. Only God could redeem mankind but only a man could pay the price. So in redemption both deity and humanity participate. This is why there had to be a divine savior.
c) The Man, Jesus Christ, is the object of worship. Normally it would be a sin to worship a creature, a man, but we worship the man, Christ Jesus, because He is also fully God.
d) Christ can sympathize with His people. He can understand what we are going through because He went through the same kinds of tests, the same category of tests. He was tested in all points as we are, yet without sin. So He is able to go through all of those circumstances in life, and as He was able to handle them by relying on God the Holy Spirit, claiming promises, and applying the principles of Scripture, that gives us a standard for living the Christian life.
e) The eternal priesthood of Christ. This involves both His humanity and His deity. As to His humanity He is a human priest and He is sympathetic, or He can identify with us. As to His deity He has an everlasting priesthood and the Father will hear Him.
f) The absence of the sin nature. This is one of the most difficult things for us to handle because the sin nature isn’t germane to humanity. Think about how much of your personality is shaped by your sin nature. In the process of maturity the factor of the sin nature becomes less and less a factor in terms of our personality. We don’t think of personality in terms of how it was originally created because our experience with humanity is experienced with corrupt, fallen humanity. So when we talk about Jesus being true humanity He is as Adam was created without a sin nature—true humanity.
g) Today it is the God-Man at the right hand of God the Father. It is the God-Man who ascended. It is a human being who has been elevated above the angels. In His deity He always was in authority over the angels. Now there is a man at the right hand of the Father, there is a man who sits at the helm of the universe.
The early church asked two questions: a) What was Jesus before He came? b) What was Jesus when he came? In the first question they came to the
conclusion that Christ must be distinct from the Father. In answering the second question they came to understand that Christ is not subordinate in His essence but He is subordinate in His role or function.
What was Jesus before He came? The first answer that they came up with was what is called modalism. What they learned about modalism is that the claim of modalism is that Son is not distinct from the Father. That was the claim of modalism. That is, God appears in history as the Father. Later on God appears in history as the Son. Then after Pentecost God appears in history as the Holy Spirit. They look at the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as different manifestations of God. For a while He puts on the Father mask. He takes that off and puts on the Son mask. Then He takes that off and puts on the Holy Spirit mask. The problem with this idea is that the Son isn’t distinct from the Father, they are really the same person and the same essence; and the Holy Spirit isn’t distinct from the Father. So in modalism they were saying that God is one in essence and one in person, He just manifests Himself in different ways. This is actually called modalistic monarchianism. The reason they use the term monarchianism is because you just have one God as the monarch. There are two forms of maonarchiansm and they are both basically Unitarianism. Remember that the biblical definition of the Trinity is that there are three persons in one essence. So if there is only one person, then who was God loving or associating with in eternity past? He would have to create something to have something to love. That makes Him dependent, so there are some real problems with this view. The problem with this view is that you would end up putting the Father on the cross. And if you have a modalistic God, who is Jesus talking to when He prays?
So they eventually realized that the Son had to be a distinct person from the Father. Then they slipped into the next problem which is called adoptionism, where the Son is subordinate to the Father in essence. He is not identical in essence. You have something like this. You have eternity past and eternity future, and in between is time. In strict adoptionism God is eternal but He sort of invests Jesus with deity at some point in His ministry. This is something along the lines of liberal theology today—Jesus becomes divine at the baptism when John the Baptist baptizes Him, and at that point He is adopted because of Hs good life. Notice the emphasis on good works! Because of His good works God gives Him deity. But it is a secondary deity, He is not eternal, not omniscient, etc.; He is not identical in essence to God. If Jesus isn’t fully God, can you know God by knowing Jesus? No, you cannot.
They realized that this was wrong, so in the context of this they were beginning to develop and understanding of how to articulate the Trinity; that He is one in essence and three in person. In adoptionism, also called dynamic monarchianism, there is an emphasis on the oneness, the unity of God. It denies the deity of Christ, it affirms His humanity, and the Holy Spirit just becomes this “power.” That is what you have in liberal theology. The modalistic view was also called Sabellianism or patropassionism (the Father was on the cross; if you don’t have different persons then it is the same person on the cross). They emphasized the unity of God, the oneness of God, but in modalism it affirms the deity of Christ—Christ is God—but they deny His humanity, and the Holy Spirit just becomes another mode of God’s existence. The problem is that the unity of God breaks down. It can’t properly express the data of Scripture.
Then comes Arius. He has a modified adoptionism. Christ, instead of being born a human is eternal but He is a creature. Arius taught that there was a time when Christ was not. But if all He is is a creature He can’t die on the cross for our sins. The redeemer has to be God as well as man; He has to be equal with God.
The result of this was the Nicene Creed, a doctrinal statement. They were encapsulating in this statement what Scripture teaches. They are not inventing doctrine, that is the charge of the De Vinci Code and almost every liberal that comes along.
What was Jesus when He came? The early church had problems with this as well. How do you put together undiminished deity and true humanity? The first to try to explain this was Apollinarius. In Apollinarianism he diminishes the true humanity of Christ. He said that Jesus had a human body but His soul was really divine, and that He has a human spirit but it is only partly human. The result of this is that Jesus isn’t fully God. He is certainly not fully man because He doesn’t have a human soul or human spirit. So what you have with Apollinarius’ construction is a Christ who may be divine but He is not fully human. But that doesn’t properly express what the Scripture says, that Jesus is truly human. So after several decades of debate the early church dismissed this.
Then came Nestorius. His problem was that he so separated Christ that instead of having one person with two natures you end up with two people and two natures, so you have almost a multiple personality. Nestorianism was rejected because it divided Christ too much.
Next came Eutyches, and in his system, Eutychianism, he unites Christ, he reacts to that division in Nestorianism unites Christ so that there is a divine nature that is united with a human nature with the result that the two natures blend together and you really have a third nature. So this, again, destroys the person of Jesus Christ.
In 451 A.D. the early church fathers met together to decide how the best way was to express what the Scripture teaches. This was written in what was called the Chalcedonian Creed because they met in a village in Turkey called Chalcedon. There they wrote the classic definition for understanding the person of Christ: “We all teach that we apprehend this one and only Christ Son, Lord, only begotten, in two natures, and we do this without confusing the two natures, without transmuting one nature into the other, without dividing them into two separate categories, without contrasting them according to area or function, the distinctiveness of each nature is not nullified by the union. Instead, the properties of each nature are conserved, and both natures concur in one person and into one essence. They are not divided and cut into two persons but are together the one and only begotten logos of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus have the prophets of old testified; thus the Lord Jesus Christ Himself taught us.”
That helps us to understand the hypostatic union. An understanding of this has changed civilization. It has crucial implications, not just for our spiritual life and spiritual growth but for any relationship you are involved with—social, marriage.
Philippians 2:5—“Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus.” The Greek verb here is PHRONEO [fronew], present active imperative. A present imperative means that this is to be a standard operating procedure in the life of a Christian. This is a habit pattern, something that should characterize the life day in and day out. The word means to think, to reason, to have a certain mental attitude. If we get to thinking right then all of the others areas will take care of themselves. The pattern is Jesus Christ. How is He the pattern?
Verse 6 – “who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.” The first phrase, “who,” refers to Jesus Christ; “although He existed,” present active participle, an anartharous participle, which means it is a concessive adverbial participle. What that means is that it is setting up an exception: although Jesus Christ existed in the form of God, despite the fact that He is fully God, He did something. Where we are going with this is, Jesus Christ in His humanity lived His life dealing with all the problems, all the difficulties and temptations that we go through. From the day He grew up He had to face every kind of situation that we have to face, and every moment He had to make a decision as to how He was going to handle that situation. Was He going to do it on the basis of divine viewpoint, the Word of God, and obey God, or was he going to try to handle the problem independently of God on His own resources, on His own humanity? He couldn’t do that relying on His deity. What this is talking about is what He is doing in His humanity. Despite the fact that He is God and has all the attributes of God that is not how He handled life’s problems. He did not rely on His deity to do so.
He existed “in the form of God,” the Greek noun MORPHE [morfh] which means form, it can mean outward appearance, shape or expression, but it was also used to express the essence of something. So then we would translate this, “Who, although He existed in the essence of God.” Jesus Christ possessed all of the attributes of deity.
“He did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped.” The verb for “regard” is HEGEOMAI [e(geomai], the same verb found in James 1:2, “Count/consider it all joy.” It is another word for thinking. It means to engage in an intellectual process, to think about something, to consider something, to regard it. He did not think equality with God was something to be held on to. If we are exhorted to have this kind of mental attitude, is this think part of His deity or part of His humanity? In His humanity Christ was living out His life on a day to day basis. The word for “grasp” is HARPAGMOS [a(rpagmoj]. This has two different ideas. One is the violent seizure of property, or robbery. The second makes it equivalent to a cognate noun, HARPAGMA, which is something that one can claim or assert title to by gripping it or grasping it. The latter is the idea here. It is in contrast to Adam. Adam and Eve are in the garden and the serpent comes along and says that God didn’t really tell them the whole story about this fruit, and that if they eat of the fruit you’ll die but they would be like God. So they wanted that, they grasped it, seized it; they wanted to be just like God. In contrast, Jesus Christ who is called the second Adam, is fully God. He has all of the attributes of deity but He doesn’t hold on to that lie Adam did. He is willing to relinquish the use of those attributes. Often we hear that this is a relinquishing of the independent use of these attributes. When we think about this a little more precisely there is a problem with the use of the word “independent.” That is because the second person of the Trinity never acted independently of the first person of the Trinity. So we have a problem there, but what we are trying to get at is the idea that Jesus Christ never tried to solve the problems He faced in His humanity by relying on His deity. God’s plan for Him was to rely on the Holy Spirit and He was never going to operate independently of that. He was to live His spiritual life in dependence on the Holy Spirit. He was willing to live as a creature with creaturely limitations in order to demonstrate to the creature how to live his life.
Verse 7 – in contrast to grasping after deity: “but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondservant, and being made in the likeness of men.” This begins with ALLA [a)lla] which is a strong adversative conjunction. So there is a strong contrast between the ideas of asserting His rights to deity and “empties Himself” which is the Greek verb KENAO [kenaw]. It is an aorist active indicative, an action in past time with reference to its beginning, duration and completion. What does it mean to empty Himself? What we are really getting at here is that Jesus Christ as a creature is going to live as a creature was intended to live, independence upon God. He is not going to access His deity in order to do it, because then we would not have a model. The text explains this. The first verb is the aorist active participle of LAMBANO [lambanw], and it doesn’t have an article so that means it is adverbial of means. It is expressing how He emptied Himself: by means of taking on something, by receiving something. So emptying Himself isn’t really the idea of giving up, it is the idea of adding something to. His deity takes on humanity. He empties Himself by taking the form of a bondservant, and there we have that same word again: MORPHE. It is used in the Greek referring to internal essence. He is eternal God, the ultimate authority in the universe but He takes on to Himself the essence of a servant or a slave. “He emptied Himself by taking the form [essence] of a servant.” The second participle is GINOMAI [ginomai] which has to do with something coming into existence: “by coming into existence in the physical form of man.” That is the essence of what happens at the hypostatic union.
Verse 8 – this is where we are headed. The point is to understand what it means to have humility. “And being found” is the aorist passive participle of HEURISKO [e(uriskw]. He is seen in the incarnation; “in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself.” The word “appearance” has to do with the word SCHEMA [sxhma], the generally recognized state or form, outward appearance, shape of something. He is found or discovered to be in the physical shape of man. He is truly man. The word “humbles” is the Greek TAPEINOO [tapeinow]. This is an interesting concept in the Greek. This means someone who is not going to assert their rights to something. Here is someone who has every right to something but is not going to assert it. So humility doesn’t have to do with self-degradation, it has to do with placing yourself under the proper authority, to see yourself in proper relationship to reality. So Jesus humbles Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death. Every time He made a decision He chose to do it God’s way. He chose to use His humanity by relying on God the Holy Spirit in leading His life and by applying Scripture—even to the extremity of physical death. The death of the cross was the most humiliating death possible. Nothing was more shameful or degrading than the death on a cross. So the concept of Kenosis is that Jesus limits the use of His deity in living out His humanity.
The
Kenosis
How does Jesus “empty Himself”? This is the finite verb. In verse 7 and verse 8 there are two finite verbs: “made Himself of no reputation” in the KJV” or “emptied Himself” in the NASB. The verb is KENAO which literally means to make empty. This word is found in several places in the New Testament. In Romans 4:14 it is translated to be “made void”. In 1 Corinthians 1:17 it is “was made void/emptied”. In 1 Corinthians 9:15, “empty.” This is the idea. So in some sense Jesus empties Himself. That doesn’t mean that something disappears but that something is restricted. How does he do that? The emptying is further defined by three participles in the Greek. A participle functions like an adverb and these are what is called adverbial participle of means. That tells us that the emptying was by means of doing three things. The first clause of verse eight in the Greek is really the last clause of verse seven. The next sentence is: “He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” So the way this should look is this: “He emptied Himself by taking the form [essence] of a servant.” He added to Himself. He empties Himself, not by getting rid of deity but by adding to His deity the nature or essence of a servant, rather than holding on to His divine prerogatives to be worshipped and to lead. And secondly, by “coming into existence in the appearance of mankind”—corrected translation. He was like every other human being, but there was something different. He had no sin nature. Then the third participle is at the beginning of verse 8 and really belongs in verse 7: “And being found – HEURISKO [e(uriskw] – in appearance as a man.” Here we have the noun SCHEMA [sxhma] indicating physical form as a human being. So He empties Himself in three ways: by adding to Himself the nature of being a servant; He comes into existence in the appearance of humanity—a true human being but lacking a sin nature; He is found in the physical form/body of a human being.
Then comes the next sentence: “He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” That is the mentality we are to imitate, the humility He exemplified as he grew and matured in His spiritual life.
This concept of the Kenosis has been a little difficult to understand over the years. It has been said that He emptied Himself by the independent use of His attributes. Think about this. When did He empty Himself and take on the essence of a servant, take on the appearance of a man, and the body of a man? That happened at the instant of the incarnation. That took place at a point of time in history when the God-Man added to Himself humanity. But, “He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” took place from the incarnation to the cross. That sentence summarizes His spiritual progress and growth during the incarnation. So the Kenosis itself has to do with what happened at the incarnation. How did God empty Himself and become man? Did He empty Himself by giving up the independent use of His attributes? There the use of the word “independent” is challenged because at the incarnation we are talking about the second person of the Trinity, without humanity, giving up His independent use. Has the second person of the Trinity ever functioned independently of the Father? No. The word “empty” means that He restricted the use of His deity to solve the problems that he would face in His new human body.
He handled life as a man so that He could show us how to do that. Examples of the restriction of His deity: We have some examples of His finite knowledge.
We know that in His deity Jesus is omniscient, He knows all the knowable and never increases or diminishes in His knowledge. Yet in His humanity He clearly expresses finite knowledge. Matthew 24:36, relating to His return, “…of that day no one knows…nor the Son…but the Father alone.” Cf. Mark 5:9, in His humanity He didn’t know the name of the demon. He learned the same way we do—Isaiah 50:4-11, a prophecy related to the Messiah. Other passages indicate that Jesus clearly used the divine omniscience on occasion. For example, John 2:24, we are told that “Jesus was not entrusting Himself to them for He knew all men.” John 1:45-48, He knew Nathaniel before He had met him. This was demonstrating who He was in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. John 16:30, “you know all things”—His omniscience was evident to the disciples and as a result of that they realized that He came from God and He was God. Other passages indicate His omnipotence. Matthew 4 at the beginning of the temptation narrative, Satan knew that Jesus could have turned the stones into bread out of His omnipotence, but He solves the temptation problem by relying on promises in His soul from the Word of God. Matthew 12:28, on some occasions He cast out demons by means of the Spirit of God, not from His deity but from His humanity. Luke 4:14, “in the power of the Spirit.” He is relying upon the power of the Holy Spirit, illustrating His own limited ability. Luke 4:18, when speaking in the synagogue in Nazareth: “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” He is not speaking from His omnipotence but from the power of the Holy Spirit. Other passages such as Matthew 26:36-46, when He is in the garden of Gethsemane and does not rely upon His omnipotence to solve the problem of the cross and His arrest. So there were times when there was limited power. There are other times when He clearly utilizes His own omnipotence. In Matthew 8:26, 27 He stills the storm. It doesn’t say that He did this from the Spirit, He did this from His own authority as the one who controls the world. John 3:5, 6 He turns the water into wine. He thus demonstrates that he doesn’t give up these attributes, He just voluntarily restricts the use of these attributes so that He does not rely upon them in His humanity to solve temptation, testing or personal problems.
When we look at Kenosis we see that Christ’s preincarnate glory is clearly veiled. But it is revealed at times. For example, on the Mount of Transfiguration. At the time of His arrest there was a brief flashing forth of His glory and all of the Roman troops were knocked down as a result.
What
is the purpose of the Kenosis?
There are three implications of Kenosis that lay a foundation for tremendous application in the Christian life. The first implication has to do with the basic virtue
in the Christian life, i.e. humility. How do you understand humility? It is not being a doormat, letting people take advantage of you, walking around with some kind of pseudo humility or self-effacement. That has nothing to do with humility. If we look at the passage in Philippians chapter two the point is, He humbles Himself by being obedient. Humility has to do with being under authority and obeying that authority. True humility leads to teachability, and submission to a pastor-teacher’s teaching authority, you don’t know it all. You have to completely revamp your thinking, so you have to submit yourself to the authority of a pastor-teacher and the Word of God and be willing to rethink all of your cherished opinions about life. That is humility; that is teachability. Then it is submission to the Father’s authority. “I know what the Father says. I want to do this, but instead I am going to do what the Father says to do.” This is what Jesus is demonstrating. In all the pressure He went through in the garden of Gethsemane He said, “Father, let this cup pass from me if be thy will.” But the Father doesn’t, so Jesus Christ goes to the cross. No matter what it may cost us personally, professionally, we are willing to relinquish it in order to fulfill the Father’s plan and purpose, and to live in obedience to the Word of God. Once we get past those that develops a personal love for God the Father. As we develop those our love for God the Father is increasing and that becomes our motivation in spiritual maturity. A this love for God the Father increases, then we have a foundation for impersonal love for all mankind. You can’t have impersonal love for all mankind unless you understand grace because the issue is that we are to deal with others just as God for Christ’s sake has dealt with us. So what we learn here is that the first and primary virtue in the Christian life is humility.
The second thing that we learn here is that submission or subordination to authority does not imply that the person who is submitting is inferior or less significant than the one in authority. 1 Corinthians 15:27, 28—“But He [God the Father] has put all things in subjection under His [Jesus Christ’s] feet … it is evident that He is excepted who put all things in subjection to Him…and when all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself will be subjected to the one who subjected all things to Him, that God may be all in all.” At the time that all things are in subjection to the Son, the Son Himself is also under subjection to the Father. This is in the future, He is always under the Father’s authority. That doesn’t mean He is less than God. The implication is brought out by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:3—“But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.” The word translated “head” is the word for authority. The idea of submission has nothing to do with inequality. It is a sign of humility to recognize that you are under someone’s authority and to submit—even when they are wrong, even when they are not very talented, not very bright, and even when you know they are making a mistake. It is so important for parents to drill authority orientation into children, otherwise they will be failures when they grow into adults.
The third implication is that this gives us a unique judge, because Jesus Christ as a judge, in His priesthood, has gone through the same things we have. The implication comes from the priesthood passages in Hebrews 4:14, 15—“Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession. For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tested like as we are, yet without sin.” So what qualifies Him to be our high priest is that He has gone through it in the same way we have. But this also qualifies Him as a judge—John 5:22. The Father doesn’t judge us or evaluate us in terms of our Christian life, the Father “hasn’t been there,” as it were. But the Son has, and He is the one who evaluates us. In the face of all our excuses He can say, “Oh no, I’ve been there. I’ve done that the way it should have been done. I’ve applied the Word.” You can’t make excuses, you can’t blame your parents, you can blame your environment, etc. It is volition.
The
impeccability of Christ
Hebrews 4:14, 15—“Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession. For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted [PEIRAZO, peirazw] like as we are, yet without sin.”
Jesus was not inwardly attracted to sin because He did not have the sin nature but, the text says, He has been tested in all things, i.e. in every category of temptation as we are, yet without sin. That doesn’t mean that He had every detailed temptation that we have. What this is saying is that in every category Jesus Christ was tested, yet without sin. This is the doctrine of impeccability: Jesus Christ did not sin.
In His nature Jesus Christ was fully man; He is fully God. As such He is living His life as a human being. Jesus Christ in His person is not accessing His deity in order to solve the problems of testing and temptation that He experiences in life. For example, in Matthew chapter four when Satan tests Him in the wilderness He does not rely on His deity to resist the temptation. What He does is to model for us the standard. He quotes Scripture; He applies the Word of God to the situation. This implies that he has learned Scripture, has memorized Scripture. What the doctrine of impeccability shows us is that Jesus in His humanity is impeccable, sinless; not simply because He is attached to His deity. The doctrine is crucial for two reasons: first, because of His impeccability Jesus Christ is qualified to go to the cross and pay for our sins. He is the Lamb of God as without spot or blemish; second, He demonstrated the spiritual life for the Church Age. We live in the Church Age and our spiritual life is based on the twin dynamics of the filling of the Holy Spirit and application of the Word of God. As we apply the Word of God then God the Holy Spirit uses that to produce spiritual growth in our life. This is the same type of thing that happened in the life of Christ. As a baby He had to mature as a human infant. He has to learn right and wrong. He matured through the same processes we go through, yet He did not sin. He did not have a sin nature with a propensity to sin.
Impeccability of the doctrine of Christology which recognizes that in the course of Christ’s life He never sinned in His humanity. The Scriptures affirm this consistently. Luke 1:35—“And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy child [set apart unto God] which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.” Cf. John 8:46; Romans 8:3; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 4:15; 7:26; 1 Peter 1:19; 1 John 3:5.
But the picture we have from the Scriptures is something different from what we might portray as sinless. To take into account a picture of who Jesus is we have to remember that He doesn’t behave according to the standards of what we might think of as politically correct behavior. Jesus went around and called His opponents serpents and hypocrites, adulterers, children of hell, children of the devil and whitewashed sepulchers. In Matthew 5:22 He said, “Do not call people fools,” and yet in Matthew 23:17, 19 He addressed His opponents as fools. In Mark 11:13, 14 He curses a defenseless fig tree. In Matthew 15:26 He called a Gentile Roman a dog. He is abrupt with His mother at the wedding at Cana. In Matthew 8:21 He expresses a harshness towards traditional family loyalties. In John 2:15 He goes into the temple and throws out the businessmen. This isn’t our culturally-accepted view of a nice man or a good person. But He is righteous; He is perfect. So we have to factor all these aspects into who Jesus Christ is.
As humanity He was called the son of Adam because He was to be the second Adam in order to fulfill and to accomplish what Adam failed in the garden. In the garden of Eden Adam is both temptable and peccable; temptable and able to sin. He doesn’t have a sin nature. He is tempted in the sense that there is an overt test in the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and he can sin, which he obviously does. Jesus is temptable but He doesn’t sin. Adam didn’t have a sin nature originally; Jesus didn’t have a sin nature, and so he is going to live His life moment by moment just as Adam did before the fall. But Jesus is never going to sin.
The way this doctrine is normally expresses is through two Latin phrases that have come down through history. The first is applied to the deity of the Lord: non posse pecarri, not able to sin. Deity cannot sin. In His humanity He was posse non pecarri, which means He was able not to sin. His humanity is what is important here, the impeccability of His humanity. In His incarnation Jesus was going to be born sinless so that He can duplicate the tests of both Satan in the original fall and specifically Adam at his fall in order to demonstrate that true humanity can resist temptation and be sinless. By so doing He is not only qualifying Himself for the cross but also for the spiritual life. In essence what happens and makes this clear is that Jesus Christ is born what we would call “in fellowship” and filled with the Spirit.
This takes us back to Galatians 5:16: “Walk by means of the Spirit and it will be impossible to fulfill the lusts of the flesh.” This is made clear in the Greek. Jesus Christ was born walking by the Spirit. Walking by the Spirit is a volitional decision of dependency. For the believer, when you are walking by the Spirit you have your eyes on the Word and focus upon the Spirit. Jesus Christ never made a choice to take His eyes off the Spirit. That is why He remained sinless in His humanity.