Jesus, Divine Son of God. November 18, 19, & 22, 2007
Jesus Who?
Video clips – Bono & others
Jesus was all the things we said; He was a teacher, rabbi, guru, revolutionary, friend, healer, messiah…
Was he the God-man: was he the divine Son of God?
The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith. --Fyodor Dostoevski
From the earliest days, the Christians thought so.
Church historian Jaroslav Pelkan has pointed out that the oldest Christian sermon, the oldest account of a Christian Martyr, the oldest pagan report of the church, and the oldest liturgical prayer all refer to Jesus as Lord and God. Pelikan said, “Clearly, it was the message of what the church believed and taught that ‘God’ was an appropriate name for Jesus Christ.”
All through the letters written to the church, Jesus is described as divine. Here are some important samplings:
Colossians 1:15-20
15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 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.
Philippians 2:5-11
In your relationships with one another, have the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had:
6 Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a human being,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Galatians 4:4-5
4 But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.
The thing that amazes me about this is that all the writers of the New Testament are Jewish – most of them were very religious Jews. At least once a day they would repeat the Shema found in Deuteronomy 6:4-5
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.
Love the LORD your God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your strength.
It was a powerful statement against the polytheists that surrounded them – God is one! It was a Subversive statement against the polytheists who held power over them and their land – God is one!
You might ask, how these devout Jews could believe that the One God could have a son or how He could come and dwell among us as a man? But they did.
Paul, likely the most devout Jew, takes the Shema and includes Jesus!
1 Corinthians 8:6 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.
How could these monotheists include Jesus in the most powerful statements of their One God?
It is not surprising that people who have an understanding of God as the “Prime Mover” – the one who wound the clock, or hit the cue ball in the mechanistic view of the universe that we looked at two weeks ago - would have a problem with the idea of God becoming human. Their god is very distant, he/she/it is the creator, but stays outside of his creation – to intervene would be against his character and like cheating. But this is not the God of the Bible, nor is it the God that Jesus and his contemporaries believed in. God in the Bible is not distant, but very present with his people He is the one who walked in the Garden in the cool of the evening with Adam and Eve, he his the one who came to visit Abraham as three travelers, he is the one who stood in the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego
The framing story for the Jewish faith and for the whole Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) is the story of the Exodus. God is the creator of all that is, yes, but first in people’s minds is that God is the rescuer of the nation. And in this framing story, what is God like? He is not the distant enlightenment God, he is directly involved with the people. He is the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire at night. He is in constant conversation with Moses. His glory, or Shekinah fills the tabernacle, or tent that was a portable temple for Israel. His presence shakes the mountains. He travels with his people through the desert into the promise land. The idea of God visiting his people was not foreign to the first century Jews who followed Jesus, their Bible was full of stories of God visiting. The difference was that they believed that God was present in Jesus like never before.
As you can see from Paul restating of the Shema, The early Christians included Jesus in God, but they did not believe in a polytheism where Jesus is a god; or a pantheism where God is in everyone and everything, but Jesus was able to source his divine nature better than the rest of us. These ideas are completely foreign to the Bible. They were still Jewish, they were still monotheists, but included in this God who is One is Jesus.
Is this what Jesus believed?
Some people will say that Jesus never stood up and said, “I am God.” But he said a lot of disturbing things if he isn’t God.
His teaching was noticeably centered on himself, unlike other rabbis, instead of pointing only to God, he pointed to himself. He said that if you wanted to have a relationship with God, you needed to come to him (John 14:6). He said that to receive him was to receive God (Matthew 10:40) and to have seen him was to have seen God (John 14:9)
One of Jesus most direct claims to divinity was in his forgiveness of people’s sins. For the people of the day, this was sheer blasphemy – only God can forgive sins, and yet Jesus is doing it all over the place.
This is what C.S. Lewis says about this:
One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mean the claim to forgive sins: any sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. You tread on my toes and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.
Not only does he offer forgiveness, In Matthew 25 he claims that at the end of the age, he will be the one to judge the nations. Now if I started a message by saying “When I come in my glory and all the angels with me, I will sit on my glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before me and I will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” you would likely start to think of excuses why you need to be in a different place, and start to leave, trying not to make eye contact with the crazy man at the front.
There are other places where other people accuse Jesus of claiming to be God, and he doesn’t correct them: In one story, the people try to stone Jesus, and Jesus asks “why are you stoning me?” They reply “Because you, a mere man, claim to be God” (John 10:33).
When Thomas kneels before Jesus and says “My Lord and my God,” Jesus doesn’t tell him to get up and not say such things, he says, “ Because you have seen me, you believe; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
In the stories of the book of Acts (the early history book of the church) the apostles are often called gods because of their miraculous powers: they always correct people: Jesus does not. Jesus may have never said “I am God” but he didn’t stop others from saying it.
The problem with Jesus is he thinks he is God.
So, back to Bono, is Jesus God, or is he Charles Manson?
Or to quote C.S. Lewis again: “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
But we have been looking at this man for the past 10 weeks: Did he ever appear mentally unstable or evil to you?
I have heard a number of times in this pub from people who believe in Jesus’ divinity and those who do not that Jesus is someone they want to follow, someone they want to model their life after. I’ve worked with mentally unstable people – no one wants to follow them anywhere. And I’ve seen that when it comes to evil people the truth usually comes out. We have had 2,000 years to hear dirt on Jesus, and nothing but goodness has come up.
We have heard his fantastic teaching – even when it is hard it has a power that transforms people.
Bernard Ramm writes of Jesus teaching: “They are read more, quoted more, believed more, and translated more because they are the greatest words ever spoken… Their greatness lies in the pure lucid spirituality in dealing clearly, definitively, and authoritatively with the greatest problems that throb in the human breast… No other man’s words have the appeal of Jesus’ words because no other man can answer these fundamental questions as Jesus answered them. They are the kind of words and the kind of answers we would expect God to give.”
Works – As we looked at how Jesus touched the poor, the contagious, the outcasts of society, his compassion on the crowds and individuals alike, his deep friendships and his deep emotions, this is not a picture of a evil person or a mentally unstable person we have painted.
Character – over and over I am compelled with the strength of Jesus’ character – that he remains silent before his accusers, that he is tempted in every way, but doesn’t give in, that love is his modus oporendi, Jesus is not evil, and he is the clearest thinking/feeling person I have ever met.
“We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form.”
Challenge - The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith. --Fyodor Dostoevski
Questions for Groups
1. To argue with C.S. Lewis, could Jesus have been a truly moral, righteous teacher, and nothing more?
2. To you, what is the most compelling argument that Jesus is Divine (God)?
3. What touches you about God revealing Himself in such a way - through the God/Man, Jesus?
