God and man? Can that be true? The man, Jesus, is God? Yes! This is the confession of the Christian Church. Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man in one person.
The Church confesses that “Our only comfort in life and death” is not found simply in God. God the Almighty, the Omnipotent, the Holy One in His existence as deity, is no comfort to us. If we turn directly to Him with no mediator, what we find is not comfort, but wrath; not justification, but condemnation; not peace, but terror.
Neither can we find comfort in man alone. No man could ever atone even for his own sins, let alone for the sins of others. Even a perfect man could do us no good as far as our relationship to God is concerned. What sinners need, and what God has provided in Christ, is a mediator who is truly man but much more than a man—a man who is at the same time the true God.
It is good for us to be aware of what has gone on in the history of the church with respect to this article of our confession. Some of the fiercest battles within the church have taken place over the question of whether Jesus is really God. Already in the first century after Christ a sect arose which denied the deity of Christ. Called Ebionites, they were Jewish Christians who held that, on account of his strict obedience to the law, Christ was the Messiah, yes, but he was not divine.
In the second century the bishop of the city of Antioch, a man whose name was Paul, gained followers by teaching that the power of the Godhead progressively penetrated the humanity of the man Jesus so that he was, in a sense, deified; the same process, Bishop Paul taught, though in a lesser degree, must occur in all of us. But Jesus, he claimed, was not God.
In the early 300’s the controversy became even more sharp. The whole church was in turmoil as a bishop named Arius gained many followers by teaching that the pre-existent Christ was not really God, but was, instead, the first being that God created. Though not eternal, he was the Logos; he created the world, and he became incarnate as the man Jesus. But this Jesus, Arius taught, was not truly God. The Council of Nicea, in 320 AD (or CE, Common Era), the first of the seven ecumenical councils in the early church, condemned this view, but the controversy raged on for many years after that.
In the next century the controversy took another form. The issue bacame the relationship between the deity of Christ and the humanity of Christ. Is Christ really two persons—a divine person and a human person? The then-bishop of Antioch, a man named Nestorius, said so. The man Jesus is not God, he taught, but in Jesus Christ the man Jesus and God work so closely together that their work can be called one. But Jesus himself was not God.
In the year 451 AD the Council of Chalcedon, the fourth great ecumenical council, adopted the now professed canon which asserts both the true deity and the true humanity of Jesus Christ and the unity of His person. This famous declaration of faith states, “We...teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and also truly man…, begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseperably, the distinction of nature being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, the only-begotten God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Orthodoxy has continued to defend this confession—that Jesus Christ is one person, but He has two distinct natures, divine and human--in spite of controversies that continued until about 700 AD when the whole church eventually came to accept the true and full deity of Christ without any questions. During the next nine centuries, however, the church became so embroiled in political battles between popes and emperors that it sank deeper and deeper into worldliness and corruption, foreshadowing the need for a reformation.
And then, in 1517, came the break with Rome. The Roman Catholic Church continued to confess the true deity of Christ, and so did most of the Reformation; the Calvinists certainly did, and so did the Lutherans, the Anglicans, and the Anabaptists. One group, however, the Socinians, denied the deity of Christ. They were the forerunners of the liberalsm, or “modernism,” that became widespread in the 19th century. Liberalism taught that Jesus was essentially just an ideal man who was closer to God than any other, or who had a higher degree of the divine spark in him than the rest of us do, so that we do well to learn from him, but inherently all men are good, and are getting better all the time.
It was World War I that shattered this essentially naive view of man and of Jesus, followed by the Great Depression, and then World War II and its terrible massacre of the Jews. These events left little room for that kind of optomistic liberalism to survive.
Today we can ask ourselves, however, is the doctrine of the deity of Christ just philosophical speculation? Is this belief a fabrication made by the early church? The Bible itself, after all, never tries to explain the person of Christ in terms of two natures existing in one person. As rational people, we have good reason to doubt this tenet of the Christian faith. How can you claim, for example, that one and the same person knows everything and yet is ignorant of some things? How can you explain, rationally, that the same person can be all-powerful and yet die in fear and weakness? How can our minds grasp that Jesus is everywhere present and yet limited to one place at a time? We, by nature, want to make our mind, our own reason, the standard of faith, and human reason cannot grasp how such opposite natures could exist in one person. The mystery of the incarnation—God manifest in the flesh--is a mystery that the human mind cannot comprehend. It is a mystery which we can only confess in faith.
Belief in the deity of Christ, according to the Scriptures, is not a theory or a rational explanation of anything. It is rather a confession which arises spontaneously from the hearts of those who were drawn to Christ through faith. Those who know Christ are simply led to exclaim with Peter, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God!” (Matthew 16:16). Confronted by the nail-pierced hands of the risen Christ, their hearts are moved to cry out in adoration with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). With Paul they are led to speak of Jesus Christ in words of praise as one “who is God over all, blessed forever” (Romans 9:5). This is the language of confession, the language of praise and doxology. It is the language of faith, a faith in One whom the heart knows is our only God and Savior. Eyes illumined by divine revelation are enabled to “behold his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
This is a confession which arises out of meeting the Christ as He speaks in the Scriptures. In the gospel of John (5:26) we read, “as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.” None of us has life in ourselves. We had nothing to say about when we were born, nor when we will die. Only God, the Lord of life, has life in himself. But this man, Jesus, claims that He, too, has been given this power; He, too, has life in Himself and therefore can say, “I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (John 10:17-18). To the Pharisees He says, “Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him” (John 5:23). To Philip He says, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Again and again we hear Christ telling who He is: “I am the light of the world,...I am the good shepherd….the true vine….the way, the truth, and the life….the door….the light of the world….the bread of life.”
But in John 8:58 He says something very unusual and remarkable. He says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” This “I am” recalls the way the Lord God, Jehovah, speaks of Himself in the story of Moses’ calling to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt. Recall that when Moses wanted to know who was calling and sending him, the answer was “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14). And now Jesus repeats these unique words, applying them to Himself as revealing who He is. It is in this light that Jesus commissions His disciples to go out and baptize—in the name of the Father, to be sure, and in the name of the Holy Spirit, but also in the name of the Son, His own name (Matthew 28:19).
Little children often wonder and ask where they were before they were born. That was not a question for Jesus. The Jews thought they knew the answer. “We know this man’s family,” they said (Mark 6). “Isn’t this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” (John 6:42). But, to them He replied, “I know where I came from and where I am going” (John 8:14). When they continued to argue with him, he proclaimed, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), and, “the Father is in me and I am in the Father” (John 10:38). And later, as He anticipated His suffering and death, surrounded by His disciples, He prayed, “and now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory which I had with you before the world began” (John 17:5).
The Jews who contended with Jesus did not miss the force of the claims He made for Himself. More than once they threatened to stone Him. “It is not for a good work that we stone you but for blasphemy,” they declared, “because you, being a man, make yourself God.” At His trial before the high priest, Caiphas, when Jesus is commanded to tell the Council whether He is the Christ, the Son of God, He answers simply, “Thou hast said.” But then He adds, “But I say to all of you: From now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” (Matthew 26:24)
That claim was unmistakable. It called for a decision, and the decision came quickly; the high priest tore his clothes and said, “He has spoken blasphemy! Why do we need any more witnesses? Look, now you have heard the blasphemy!” (Matthew 26:65). To the high priest’s question to the crowd, “What is your judgement?” they replied, “He deserves death!” This charge of blasphemy pursued Jesus all the way to the cross; as He hung there taunts of “If you are the Son of God, come down from the Cross” are thrown at Him. “For He said,” His taunters explained, “’I am the Son of God.’”
You know the rest of the story. You know how he gave up his life, how Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus prepared His body for burial and laid it to rest in a new nearby tomb, how Peter and John came to the tomb on the third day and found it empty, how Mary Magdalene encountered the resurrected Jesus in the garden, how He appeared to his disciples where they were hiding behind closed doors, how He encountered his disciples at the seaside and prepared breakfast for them, how He met friends on their way to Emmaus and explained the Scriptures to them, and how, according to St. John, “there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25).
The Christian Church has fought hard, through many centuries, to maintain the confession that Jesus, the Christ, is both God and man, for it lies at the heart of the gospel. The Good News of the Gospel is that “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Jesus, the man, experienced the excruciating physical death of one nailed to a cross and left to die. Jesus, Son of God and God Himself, willingly paid this ultimate price to show us the depth and breadth of God’s love. And we, then, in the assurance of that great love, are free “to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory” (I Thessalonians 2:12). As Jesus often said after freeing someone from sickness or trajedy, “Go, and sin no more” (John 8:11).
