Believer’s Basics #1 – Jesus Christ (Part B)

One thing unique about Christ, and distinct, is the virgin birth, prophesied by Isaiah. Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign.

Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son. I shall call his name. God is with us. See, that's how I would say it to an unbeliever. Christ. And he said his name will be God is with us.

Well, you know, it says Emmanuel, but it's trans- the meaning of Emmanuel is God is with us. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through his series called The Believer's Basics. Please stay with us after today's message.

To hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio. Specifically, how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Today, Pastor Rick will continue his message called Jesus Christ in John chapter 16. John 16, 30.

And we are sure that you know all things, said the disciples to him, and have no need that anyone should question you. By this we believe that you came forth from God. Not begot- not created, but begotten. And that begotten means that he came forth from the Father where he always was when he prays in John 17. He says, Lord, Father, return me to that place we had long before all of these things began.

His eternal state, eternity past. There's more to Jesus Christ than what we read in the scripture. We're not to think that everything in- that the scripture tells us everything there is to know about God. There is more.

There is much more. But we have enough to do our duty to make the Savior of the world known to those who have no Savior because either they've gotten a dose of bad Christianity or no Christianity or they've just been in a place of sin and they've just been in a state of rebellion. And then God may use us to introduce them to this Jesus as he used Andrew. He is eternal, this Jesus Christ whom we worship. We know this verse. John 1-1, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God, beginning of eternity past.

He has no date. He is holy. That is pure, sinless, incapable of evil. Acts chapter 3 verse 14, Peter preaching, Would you deny the Holy One and the just? Now that cannot be said by a Jew to anybody less than God.

You denied the Holy One and the just and asked for a murderer to be granted to you. And I left that part of the verse in there because we're going to consider Barabbas briefly when we get towards considering his cross, the cross of Christ that is. He is the Creator, Christ Jesus is. Colossians 1 verse 16, For by him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible.

That covers, that covers everything. He continues, where the thrones and dominions or principalities or powers, we mentioned his omniscience, there it shows up again. All things were created through him and for him and he is before all things and in him all things consist. There is deity, there is godhood, there is Jesus Christ, the glorious one. In the New Testament, Jesus is understood as making it clear to those that listen to him speak, whether they were friend or foe, that he indeed claimed to be God the Son. Hebrews 1 verse 8, But to the Son, he's quoting the Psalms, But to the Son he says, Your throne, O God, is forever and ever. A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of your kingdom.

The question is the Son. He is referred to here as God having a throne, the throne of God. That's just the doctrinal statement that backs up what Jesus did during the days that he walked the earth. Thomas said, we all know this, My Lord and my God.

He was not making an exclamation. He wasn't saying, Oh my God, I can't believe that you're risen, as some foolish person might say. He was calling Jesus God. He was directing his words to the Christ, My Lord and my God.

Thomas got it. He understood it, just like the writer of Hebrews got it, understood it, connected it to the prophecies of the Old Testament. And then there's John 10. In addition to the text we read when we stood momentarily ago in John chapter 5, but John 10 verse 29, My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father's hand.

I and My Father are one. So in one moment he says, he presents himself in his humanity, in honor of his Father. In the next breath he presents himself in his deity. He says, I and My Father are one. We're inseparable.

We're the same thing. Then the Jews took up stones again to stone Him. Jesus answered many good works.

I have shown you from My Father. Which of those works do you stone Me? The Jews answered Him, saying, For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy, because You, being a man, make Yourself God. You see, they could not understand his humanity, that God came in human form to reach humans, that He would be numbered with sinners, though separate from them. So Jesus came to earth not to behave as God, though He is God and never stopped being God, but to behave as man because of sin, to rescue man.

He came to behave as a man because He loves the sinner, not the sin, His distinction. And that which makes Him unique flies off the pages to we who believe when we read the Scripture. It is supposed to, but unbelievers won't come to the Scripture.

Some will, but most won't. They're dependent on us to share what the Scripture says even though they don't know it. We have this advantage to share the Scripture, quote Scripture, but in the language they understand. If you say Jesus is the Son of God, they may not get that. You have to break it down for them.

If you understand it, it won't be a problem. That's what makes you a witness. One thing unique about Christ and distinct is the virgin birth, prophesied by Isaiah. Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call His name. God is with us. You see, that's how I would say it to an unbeliever. Isaiah wrote over 700 years before the birth of Christ, and he said His name will be God is with us. Well, you know it says Immanuel, but the meaning of Immanuel is God is with us.

And that is the idea. There was a veil concerning the coming of Christ. That veil is lifted away for those who genuinely want to see behind it, but it stays for those who are false, who have no genuine interest. This was the case with the Pharisees. They didn't want to know He was the Christ, except men like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. So this distinction from the very beginning was so exact that he would not be confused with anyone else at any time. No one has this claim.

And the life to back it up, it's not just the claim. There's so much more that goes into establishing what we believe than simple declarations. When I say simple, I don't mean that they are weak.

I mean that they are clear, that anyone can understand them. They're not complex. They can be if you want to make them so. They go as deep as you want to go.

You'll never get to their bottom, or you can take them right off the surface and enjoy them there. The truths of the scripture. Unique, that is, to be without equal.

To be one that is separated from the others. The virgin birth, the sinless life, his death, his resurrection and his return. All of these are unlike anyone else in history. So Micah rings in and says, and Micah wrote at the time of Isaiah also, some 700 years before the birth, You Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to me the one, the one to be ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from old, from everlasting.

You can't say that about anybody else. When Jesus said, who do men say that I am? Do you know Isaiah would never have asked that question to his followers.

Elijah would never have said, Moses would never have said that. Everybody knew. We know who you are. You're a servant of God, a man just like us.

But Jesus was getting at something deeper and Peter got it. You are the one from God, the anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ. You are the one to be ruler in Israel.

We know to be ruler of the planet earth, of all creation, visible and invisible. Most unique about him, I think, is that sinless life. Being a sinner, knowing how difficult it is to pull that one off.

Well, I couldn't pull off the virgin birth either, but this one I can identify with more than all the others, I think. Hebrews 4, verse 14. Seeing then that we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. We do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weakness, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Now, if I told you Simon Peter was nine feet tall, you would rightfully scoff at that and reject that and say, you're messing with the scripture by adding such a ridiculous thing.

Because a feature that outstanding would not be omitted from the text. That's why it tells us about how big Goliath was. Being sinless is even more critical. If there was anybody else sinless, especially living at the time of Christ, God would have been wrong to leave out that feature about that person. But he's not wrong because there was only one sinless. Mary is not sinless. If she were, the scripture would have said it, just as though I used that example about Simon Peter being, well, what if Simon Peter was 15 feet tall? Do you think that would be left out of the scripture?

It is that unique, it would have been that unique where the logic would have demanded that it be placed there. Well, so it is with the sinlessness of Christ which is even a greater, a greater and more remarkable characteristic of any human being is unique in his death. Isaiah 52 verse 14, just as many were astonished at you, so his visage was marred more than any man and his form more than the sons of men. Not relative to the flesh, relative to his purity. You see, there have been other human beings who have been physically marred worse than our Lord on the cross.

There are those that have survived horrible fires and forever marred physically, visually. But not when it comes to the purity, not when it comes to Christ having to take on our sin on him. Now you're in a whole other league, a whole other area of life becomes critical which it will not be to the unbeliever unless we help him get there. I would encourage you that when you go to the workplace or wherever you find yourself around unbelievers that you turn the radar on.

That you begin scanning for anyone that has any movement in the direction towards you concerning righteous things. Now I wasn't going to mention this but I'm going to mention it. I'm sorry to put you through that, I'm having a conversation with myself.

No you're not, yes you are, no you're not. So this happened last week and I've shared it with a couple of you because it's very exciting. Years ago when I worked in the construction industry, you know you'd go down to the Union Hall, it's in New York City, and they'd send you out on a job if they had one come up. A contractor would call and say I need 10 guys that can do this and they'd look on their list and say okay you, you and you, sometimes it would be one guy. Well this particular morning it was me for one guy.

We'd go down to the shipyard in Brooklyn and you'll see the shanty and sign up and go to work. So as I'm getting out of my car and walking towards where I'm supposed to start work, I see some men in the distance unloading a truck and I say to the Lord, who do you have for me here this morning Lord? And as I walked up closer, one of the men on the truck was someone I had witnessed to on other jobs at other times. And he says I was praying to the Lord that you'd show up. Now I hope he remembers the story as I remember it.

My version is always right, but I'm telling it. Anyway, of course, we had fellowship, we worked that horrible job, I hated it. But anyway, we haven't seen him in oh 25 years, haven't heard from him often. I wonder about some of these men that I witnessed, there's so many of them, and I wonder where's this one.

Sometimes he was one, he is one that crossed my mind more than almost all of them, if not all of them. And the other day he sends in a note on Facebook asking for me to give him a call after all these years. So I call him and I first question, are you still walking with the Lord?

Yes, yes. And he wants to think we're going to retire in a year or so and move this way hopefully, we'll wait to see what God has to do. My point that I'm going at with this, taking the opportunity to share from my experience is, we should always be scanning. We should always be looking for an opportunity to serve this Jesus Christ who I'm talking this morning to you about. Even on the most hateful jobs and the worst moods, the radar was on.

Scanning for anything incoming from the Holy Spirit by way of sending someone to me. It is what life is all about for us, everything else is secondary. That doesn't mean it is the other things are not important, they are very important. You got to eat for example, something is simple, you got to breathe. But the reason why we do those things is so that we can preach the faith.

And it's going to take as much as we can muster to do it. Satan, he trips us up, he gets our attention going in other places and we've got to be mindful of that. Right now I'm talking to you about the uniqueness of our Lord and Savior. That He was marred more than any other man because of us, His vicarious death, His death on the cross in our place. 1 Peter 3, For Christ also suffered once for sinners, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive by the Spirit. And as I'm reading the verse, I'm thinking of other verses that say more things that I want to say that time won't allow. John saying for example, it is a reasonable service to serve Him. He became sin and was separated from the Father, this sense of the cross, for the first and the only time for us. Matthew 27 46, About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? In 2 Corinthians chapter 5, For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us. He put it on Him for us.

We got that. In other words, on the cross, He died as me, for me, so that I could live eternally. And so He says, continuing that verse in Corinthians, that we might become the righteousness of God.

What does that mean? Well, it means we're acceptable to God too. Yes, but the righteousness of God would flow through us. One of my favorite authors, Bible teachers, a pastor from long ago, said apart from the cross of Christ, You will never persuade me that God loves me. You want to show me that God loves me?

Take me to Calvary. Romans 5 8, But God demonstrates His own love towards us in that while we were still sinners, before we repented and came to Christ and were made righteous, Christ died for us. Everyone is redeemed, but not everyone is saved. In other words, the price has been paid, but not everybody will come and receive what has been paid for. It's sort of like if you win the lottery, if you don't go take the ticket and cash it in, you don't get it, even though you've won. Well, Christ has won for us, for humanity.

You've got to come get it. Unique in the resurrection, getting up from the dead, on his own no less, not just being resuscitated. The resurrection is not resuscitation. Lazarus was resuscitated in that sense.

He did not receive his glorified body, couldn't walk through walls. Christ could when he was resurrected, just to make that distinction clear. You know, incidentally, the resurrection cannot be disproved. I'm just saying. I mean, someone says, well, you can't prove it. You can't disprove it. The biblical record of the resurrection, Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, John 20 and 21, Acts 9, Acts 1. Those are historians.

Why can't their record be received? Five hundred people witnessed Christ resurrected, 1 Corinthians 15, 16. After that, he was seen by over five hundred brethren at once. One of our subjects through the Believer's Basics, two sessions are set for it at least, is the Word of God. Because if I can't trust the Word of God, quoting Scripture is useless. But if the Word of God is indeed the Word of God, then that settles everything. 1 Corinthians 5, 17 reminds us all that our faith rests on the resurrection. And if Christ is not risen, Paul writes, your faith is futile and you're still in your sins. But I'm not in my sins because the resurrection is real and it needs to be shared with unbelievers when God opens the door. It's OK to ask an unbeliever, what do you think about the resurrection of Jesus Christ?

Who do you say Jesus Christ is? These are good starting points if they will engage. This is basic stuff and I'm giving you the verses in case you don't have them. You can have difficulty finding such texts to support what we believe.

I'm helping you out, I hope. His life was a qualified life. Not anybody could say, well you know what, I'm going to die for sinners too.

They weren't worthy. Luke chapter 9 verse 35, and a voice came from the clouds saying, this is my beloved son, hear him, this is the one. No one else had that distinction. He is the only true mediator between God and man, not Mary. Mary is not co-redemptrix. We're not picking on Mary at all. She is blessed among women. She's a saint, just as beautiful and special as all the others. But we are picking on the idea that someone would dare put any human being on the level of Christ.

We're not only picking on it, we are attacking it with as much ferocity as we can muster, as kindly, as kind as possible, but with a fierce determination to not give an inch to the side that would dare to make any human being a co-redeemer, as the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church has it written down. 1 Timothy 2.5, because we choose to believe the scripture, not the popes, not the cardinals, not the bishops or anybody else that disagrees with the scripture. There's one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ.

You do not have to be a genius to understand what the word one means. It's the only way to the Father, as we all know from John 14.6. Have you been with me so long, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father. That's another way of saying, I am equal with God.

Imagine you saying that. Well, have you seen me? You've seen God. You see, this is what makes the absurdity of Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons who reject the deity of Christ. They say he is not God. He is not equal with God. Well, that's your view. Fine. For you, because you're going to hell with that view, according to the scriptures, for rejecting what the clear scripture says. And so I am encouraging you. I would say to one, trapped in that darkness, come out, come out from them.

Be separate, lest you perish. Jesus alone is the Savior of sinners. From what? What is he saving us from? The wrath of God. I think sometime we don't think enough about the wrath of God. Just type in wrath of God in your concordance and see what pops up. And you'll understand God has something to say about his wrath. That he's not looking for us to lose sight of it. We shouldn't be terrified by this.

We should be motivated, kindled or stoked. Romans 1 18, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. You say, well, I'm not perfect. I'm a sinner. Well, there's now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.

But if you are outside of Christ Jesus and suppressing the truth concerning Christ Jesus, then the wrath of God is on you. Thanks for joining us for today's teaching on Cross Reference Radio, the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. We hope you've been blessed by this believers basic series exploring the fundamentals of what it means to follow Christ. If you'd like to listen to more of this series or share it with someone you know, please visit Cross Reference Radio dot com. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast, too, so you'll never miss another edition. Just visit Cross Reference Radio dot com and follow the links under radio. Again, that's Cross Reference Radio dot com. That's all for today. We hope you'll tune in next time to continue studying the word of God right here on Cross Reference Radio.