A recent Newsweek poll found that “84 percent of American adults consider themselves Christians, and 82 percent see Jesus as God or the son of God. Seventy-nine percent say they believe in the virgin birth, and 67 percent think the Christmas story — from the angels’ appearance to the Star of Bethlehem — is historically accurate.” These are amazing statistics, and at first blush they may seem encouraging, but it is one thing to believe those things and quite another to integrate them into life. Many people believe the right things, but keep these beliefs separate from large sections of their every day lives.
John Howard Yoder talks about the person of Christ and his lordship over all our lives when he writes: “Christians begin to deny their Lord when they admit that there are certain realms of life in which it would be inappropriate to bring Christ’s rule to bear. Of course, non-Christians will insist that we should keep our religion out of the way of their politics. But the reason for that is not that Jesus has nothing to do with the public realm, it is that they want nothing to do with Jesus as Lord. . . . What we believe about Christ must apply to all our behavior, no matter how many of our neighbors remain unconvinced.”
This is an important statement, because we have for too long bifurcated life into the sacred and secular, and failed to recognize that Jesus Christ is Lord of all — he must reign over every area of our personal lives and every area of the public arena as well. If this is true, it changes everything. Whether anyone wants to recognize it or not, he is the One who created the heavens and the earth. This world belongs to God. It was built on his laws, and the world continues to exist only because it is ordered by those laws, which we call the “laws of nature.” There are also moral laws which are built into the universe which are every bit as much a part of the structure and design of life as the law of gravity. Jesus Christ is the author of those laws, and we are all accountable to him and called to obey those laws — whether we like them, or agree with them, or not.
Jesus Christ was the agent of creation. The Bible says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men” (John 1:1-4). Paul wrote: “Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live” (1 Corinthians 8:6). Elsewhere, Paul says, “For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him” (Colossians 1:16). The writer of Hebrews says, “In these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe” (Hebrews 1:2).
Too often the world merely sees Jesus as a spiritual leader and confine him to the religious arena of life, believing they can take him off the shelf when they wish, and keep him on the shelf when they so desire. They believe Jesus exists in the spiritual realm and the other realms of life are ours to do with as we please. We have made him out to be a religious spinner of tales, and failed to acknowledge that he is the Lord of all of life. All the world was created by him, and all the world is accountable to him. In the end he will judge the whole earth, for in speaking of Christ, the Bible says, “He is the one whom God appointed as judge of the living and the dead” (Acts 10:42). Paul tells us: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10).
Who is this awesome being whom we call Jesus Christ? He is the Creator and Designer of the universe. He is the Judge of all the earth. He is the Savior and Lord of all mankind. He is Lord of all. In particular, I want us to look at three areas of his being which reveal who he is. The first is: Jesus Christ is God. There are many who do not understand this. They believe that Jesus is the founder of Christianity, but not that he is, in fact, divine — the God of the universe. But as Christians we talk about the “incarnation,” which means that God came “in the flesh.” The book of John says, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). In Christ, God came to earth in human form. This is why we use the name Immanuel — God with us. This is why we talk about the Trinity, that is, God the three in One — Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The book of Colossians says, “He is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15).
Is this something that we have imagined, or tradition has created over time, or did Jesus understand himself to be God — the visible expression of the invisible God? Did Jesus really claim to be divine? He most certainly did in the clearest of terms. In Jesus’ great prayer in John 17, just before he was to give himself in an atoning death for us, he said: “And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began” (John 17:5). When a Samaritan woman said to him, “I know that Messiah (called Christ) is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us;” Jesus declared, “I who speak to you am he” (John 4:25-26). John’s Gospel also tells us of a conversation between Jesus and his disciples as they were struggling to place their faith in him. Here is how the story goes, “Philip said, ‘Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.’ Jesus answered: ‘Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (John 14:8-9).
The religious leaders of Jesus’ day understood that he was claiming to be God, because the Bible tells us, “For this reason the Jews tried all the harder to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18). Jesus identified himself with the Father. He said, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). He said to his disciples, “If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him” (John 14:6-7). So the record is clear, Jesus not only claimed to be God, but that is exactly what those who heard him understood him to say.
But where in the Bible, other than the words of Jesus, does it say that he is God? Paul wrote to the Colossians saying, “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:19-20). He wrote: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9). In writing to the Philippians, Paul spoke of Christ saying: “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (Philippians 2:6-7). The Gospel of John makes one of the clearest statements, when speaking of Jesus, when it says, “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). So we may decide not to accept the fact that Jesus is God, but one thing we cannot deny is that the Bible clearly makes the claim that Jesus is divine.
But if we stop here we will not understand the whole truth about Jesus. Jesus Christ is not only divine, he is also fully human. And this is the second point: Jesus Christ is one of us. Jesus was not 50% divine and 50% human; he is 100% God and 100% man. He was born of the virgin Mary. It was important that Mary was a virgin because it was important that God was his father. It was important that Mary was his mother, because it was necessary for him to have a completely normal human body and nature. Over the years, Jesus’ human nature has proven just as difficult for some to accept as his divinity. Many could accept his divine nature, but balked when it came to the human side of Jesus. These people believed that Jesus only appeared to have a body, and since flesh is evil, he could not have had a body like ours. They said that when he walked on the grass the blades of grass did not bend over, because his body was merely spiritual. He did not feel pain or passion, because that would have been beneath him. They said he was not even born in the normal way, but merely “passed through” Mary as a phantom. They claim his physical death on the cross was more symbolic than real.
But even today it is difficult for some to see Jesus as really human. A few years ago a controversy erupted over a postage stamp — one that featured the Baby Jesus at Christmas. The controversy was not about whether to put an image of Jesus on a stamp, but whether it was acceptable to show the Son of God. . . well, without swaddling clothes. The stamp reproduced part of a 1712 painting by Italian artist Paolo de Matteis. In the painting was Mary with a blue robe looking down at the Christ child kicking his legs on her lap. Columnist Peter Rexford said in the Washington Times that the painting was “too anatomically explicit.” Rexford writes that, “with a few strokes of an airbrush,” a postal service “artist transformed the child into an asexual being.” But after much discussion, the stamp was released, as someone quipped, “with the baby’s manhood, so to speak, restored.” Compare this year’s stamp which has the Christ child not only in swaddling clothes, but in a full robe. Someone said about the first stamp: “The artistic purpose of showing the baby naked was to emphasize His full humanity. Mary looks lovingly down on her infant, as mothers throughout the ages do. It’s a moving, human scene. . . . His tiny arms are outstretched in the position of the crucifixion. Mary is wrapping Him in a cloth, an image that anticipates the day she would wrap the body of her crucified Son for burial. The message of the painting is clear: The baby is God in the flesh . . . a divine Child destined one day to die for our sins.”
What is the purpose of Jesus coming to earth in human form? There are several reasons. God needed to show us that he understood what it was like to be human. He has shared in the human condition, and experienced the pain and passion of all that it means to be human. The biblical writer says, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). He goes on to explain: “For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people” (Hebrews 2:17).
This is the other reason for God to become a man — he became the representative of the human race when he died to take our sins away. The human race as a whole could never do enough to take away the sins of the world, but Jesus, the perfect man and perfect Son of God, died in our place. He took upon himself the death that we should have died. Jesus said, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). The apostle Peter explains: “For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit” (1 Peter 3:18). John says, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10).
Finally, the third point is: Jesus Christ is Lord of all. This Jesus, who is both God and man, can be nothing less than Lord of all. He was not just a man who happened to live 2000 years ago. He was not just a religious teacher or spiritual prophet. He was not just a good and wise man who talked about God. He was God who came as one of us, to us, to die for us and open the door of heaven for us. He created the world, he came to the world and he is coming again to the world to claim that which is his own. He is constantly referred to in Scripture as the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Bible describes Christ in this way: “And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross ” But there is more The passage concludes by saying, “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:8-11). The day will come when every believing and unbelieving heart will bow the knee to Christ and acknowledge the truth of his lordship which was proclaimed by the writers of Scripture.
Officials from India were concerned about the aboriginal tribes which inhabited the islands off the coast of Myanmar after the Tsunami disaster. They feared that as many as 6,000 of these primitive people may have been killed — perhaps even wiping out some of the smaller tribes. So they sent helicopters to look for them, and deliver food and supplies. But the helicopters were met by a hail of arrows and thrown rocks from these fiercely independent people. The reason they survived is that they live mainly in caves up in the hills, even though they rely on fishing for their living. According to an AP news story carried by CNN and others, the Mokkien held to a belief handed down by the elders that “if the water recedes fast it will reappear in the same quantity in which it disappeared.” By the time the first great wave of the tsunami arrived, “the entire population of the Mokkien fishing village had fled to a temple in the mountains of South Surin Island,” Hataway said. The article concludes by saying, “It’s good to listen to one’s elders.”
The Scriptures are full of truth handed down by our elders, and these truths are important for our life and survival. As John said, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched — this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). We say with Job: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:2). It is good to listen, to follow and to worship.
Rodney J. Buchanan
January 9, 2005
Mulberry St. UMC
Mount Vernon, OH
www.MulberryUMC.org
Rod.Buchanan@MulberryUMC.org
Who Is This Jesus?
(Questions for January 9, 2005)
1. What would many people today say if asked who Christ is?
2. Read John 1:1-4 & Colossians 1:16. What does this say about Jesus and the creation of the world? What does it say about who Jesus is?
3. Read John 17:5. How long has Jesus existed? Was he always as he appeared during New Testament times?
4. Read John 14:6-9 & John 10:30. How does this affect your understanding of who Jesus is? Who did Jesus understand himself to be?
5. Read John 1:18; Colossians 1:19-20; 2:9. What does the Bible have to say about who Jesus was?
6. Read Philippians 2:5-11. At this point we have the choice of not accepting the Lordship of Christ. Will this always be the case?
7. Read Hebrews 2:17 & 4:15. Why did God become a man?
8. Read 1 John 4:10. What was another purpose in Christ coming to earth as a man?
9. Read 2 Corinthians 5:10. What will be the end of every person in relation to Christ?
10. How does this affect the way we live?
