He didn't cease to be God, even hanging on the cross, even in the moments when He was under the judgment of God His Father, even when He was bearing the weight of sin and the wrath of God against that sin, He did not for a millisecond cease to be the mighty God Himself. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. In a museum, ten people can look at the same painting or sculpture and see it ten different ways. But when it comes to understanding the identity of Christ, is that also a matter of personal opinion? Well, today John MacArthur will show you that Jesus' nature is not open to multiple interpretations, and neither is your source of knowing about Him.
The title of John's current study, Who is Jesus Anyway? But before we move ahead in that study, it's appropriate to step back for a moment and mention some people who deserve our attention. Of course, John, I'm talking about the men and women who not only study along with us on radio, but those who take a hands-on role in our broadcast. By hands-on role, you mean they support us financially. What would we be without that? We don't have any other means of support than the faithful giving of the folks who are blessed by this ministry. It's been that way since we started the ministry. In fact, many years ago we decided to give away material. We didn't want to be dependent on selling things. We wanted to make everything freely available. We opened the vault for all the sermons. That's been, what, maybe 15 years ago now?
Yeah, it was 2008. So we wanted to make that ministry free to everyone if we could do that, and that's exactly what the Lord has allowed us to do. But in order to pull that off, we have to have support.
So many precious people have stepped up to grant the support that we need. Grace Tia has been on radio for, what, over 40 years? Right, since 1978.
So 45 years. And God has sustained us this entire time. And we know why. It's because we preach His Word, and God always honors His Word.
It never returns void. And He supports the proclamation of His divine truth. So thank you for supporting us. Thank you for caring enough to make this available for people all over the world, because without friends like you, we would not be able to do it.
It's that simple. And there are many of you who haven't supported us, maybe like to think about that, maybe talk to the Lord about whether He would have you invest. We know many of you are not only supporting us today on some regular basis, but you've invested with us in the future through an estate plan. I can't thank you enough for that kind of dramatic, extensive support that leads us into the future. So thanks for strengthening us in reaching souls all over the world with verse-by-verse teaching of God's transformative, powerful truth.
PHIL HARRIS Yes, friend, thank you for your support. It's because of friends like you that we are able to broadcast God's truth in communities like yours. And now to help you focus on critical truth about the person and work of Christ, here is John with today's lesson. JOHN KASTOR Philippians chapter 2, and I want to read the text of Scripture to you.
This is the Word of the living God, the inspired Word of God written down by the Apostle Paul, but every word from God so that it is the truth as God desired it to be communicated. And in this wonderful second chapter, we read the name Christ Jesus at the end of verse 5. Verse 5 ends with Christ Jesus.
And with that name the next important section is launched. Christ Jesus, then it goes on to describe Him in these words, who although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondservant and being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore also God highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
That is one of the great portraits of Christ in the Scripture. Jesus asked the question one day of His own followers. He said, who do men say that I am?
And the question who is Jesus Christ is the most important question to be answered. Who do men say that I am? And they responded, some say you're Elijah, or Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. But who do you say I am? And on behalf of the Apostles, Peter answers, you're the Christ, the Son of the living God.
That, of course, was the right answer. And Jesus said to him, flesh and blood didn't reveal that to you, that didn't come from a human source, but My Father who is in heaven revealed that to you. And that is the great revelation of Christianity, that Jesus is God in human flesh, not just a good man and not just a prophet, not even a great prophet, not the reincarnation of a prophet, or the resurrection of a prophet like Jeremiah, or even Isaiah, or any other prophet, but that this Jesus Christ is none other than God the Son.
That is to say the eternal God become a man. This is the central miracle of Christianity. This is the defining reality of our faith. It is about the incarnation. It is the most grand and the wondrous...most wondrous of all miracles, that's why it is the high point miracle in C.S.
Lewis' book on miracles. It is the theme of the text that I just read to you. This text is about the descent of God the Son, the second member of the triune God, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.
It is about the descent of God the Son. And it's a very straightforward portion of Scripture and I want to just walk you through it one phrase at a time to help you understand the heart and soul of Christian truth. Let's look at verse 5, the end of the verse, Christ Jesus who although He existed in the form of God...let's stop there.
This is a profound statement. He existed in the form of God. Now I want to take you a little bit into the language here. The Bible is written in two languages, two ancient languages, the Old Testament originally written in Hebrew, the New Testament originally written in Greek. And so to get back sort of under the surface of our English vocabulary, we need to consider what the Greek words meant for they are the original words for the New Testament. The word existed, He existed, huparkon. This is a word that was used to express the continuance of a state or condition. In fact, one could say if I can stretch your vocabulary a little bit, it was used to express the continuance of an antecedent state, of something that already was and still is and always will be.
It is not the common Greek word for being. It describes the very essence of a person. That which is true of a person and it can't be changed.
That which a person possesses inalienably and in such a manner that it can never be taken away from him. To say he existed is to touch his essential nature. It describes that part of a man, says one writer, which in spite of all the chances and the changes of life and all the circumstances remains the same.
It touches on inalterable nature. Paul is saying that he existed as to the essential unchangeable nature in the form of God. So when you ask the question, who is Jesus Christ? The first thing you have to confront is the statement of Scripture that His essential being, His unchanging, unaltering nature is in the form of God. Now that brings up the issue of what does form mean?
This is also crucial to our understanding. It's the word morphe, morphe, morph meaning form, even in English. But morphe in the Greek language always signifies...listen...a form which truly and fully expresses the being which underlies it. That is to say, it is a form true to the essential nature. It is a form true to the essential nature. And here it is applied to God. Whatever the morphe of God, whatever the form that God takes, it is a reflection of His deepest being, what He is in Himself. It is the essential nature and character of God visible, manifest, revealed.
Let me help you with that a little bit. Two Greek words for form, one is morphe, the word used here, and the other is schema, from which the English word scheme comes, schematic. In the Greek they both mean form. But they mean two different kinds of form, whereas in English we only have one word to translate both morphe and schema, so we translate them form, and that doesn't help us. Morphe is the essential form of something, that which is true to its nature and cannot be altered. Schema is the outward shape that changes. How can I illustrate that to you? I can illustrate it to you by saying the morphe of a man.
Like me. The morphe is my manhood, my male humanity. That's the morphe. That's the essential being. That is attached to the nature of what I am. And that has never changed. I have always been a male human being.
However, the schema has been changing constantly. I started out as a baby and then I became a child, and then I became a boy, and then a young man, and then a middle-aged man. And you can conclude the rest, but I've never stopped being a man. And God, as to His manifest schema, may appear as shining light in the garden known as the Shekinah glory. He may appear as fire.
He may appear as a cloud. He may manifest Himself in a number of ways. God the Son even manifested Himself in the Old Testament as an angel called the angel of the Lord, taking on a visible form. But in this case, the schema was the schema of a man, but the essential form was the unchanging morphe of God. The first thing we learn about Jesus Christ, and this is essential to Christian theology, is that Jesus is in the essential form of God. That is to say He is an unalterably God. His essence, His unchangeable being is divine. He never has been and never will be any other than God. He didn't become God.
He doesn't cease to be God. His outward schema, like mine, changed. He was a fetus in a womb. He was an infant born. He was a baby. He was a child. He was a youth. He was a young man. He was an adult.
His schema changed as morphe never changed. Paul is saying here, Christ Jesus exists as to His nature in the unchanging character of God. He possesses the being and nature of God unalterably. This is to say, unambiguously that He is God. He has equality with God because He is God. And so He can say, I and the Father are one.
Or He can say, if you've seen Me, you've seen the Father. You have all these people trying to figure out who Jesus is and here it's crystal clear who He is. Colossians 1 15, He is the image of the invisible God.
That's where you start. When you ask the question, who is Jesus Christ? The first answer is, He permanently exists as God. Secondly, if you go back to verse 6 from that glorious presentation of the deity of Christ, the Apostle Paul begins to track the incarnation.
He establishes that He is God, as Scripture clearly says in many places. And now he says, even though He is God, although He is God in true nature and essence, He secondly says He did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped. He did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped.
Regard is the word to consider, to think. Equality with God literally means being equal with God. And it uses the word isis, exactly equal in number, or size, or quality. So what it's saying is, although He exists in the form of God and is therefore exactly equal with God, so here again you have this second statement essentially reiterating the first point. He is equal to God, the being equal with God, isis.
We use the word isis, you use it in ways you don't even know. You ever heard the word isomer, isomorph, isometric? How about an isosceles triangle?
Anybody remember that? An isomer is a chemical molecule having a slightly different structure from another molecule, but being identical with it in terms of its chemical elements and weight. An isomer has the exact same chemical composition as another molecule. Isomorph means to have the same form. Isometric means to be in equal measure. An isosceles triangle means to have two equal angles. Jesus is isis with God, He is equal to God.
The language here is so very important. He, possessing the very nature of God, is isomorph, the same as God, equal to God. But He did not regard that equality with God a thing to be grasped.
And here you begin to see the condescension take place. Grasped means just that. It started out as a word meaning robbery. And the robber runs in, grabs and runs, clutching his stolen treasure.
It came to mean something clung to, something clutched, something held tightly because it starts out with the robber who is hanging tightly to whatever it is that he has stolen. Jesus in the very being of God, in every sense equal with God, refuses to cling, refuses to cling to that equality, refuses to cling to the privileges and the rights that go along with that equality, refuses to grasp and clutch those wonderful heavenly glories. The incarnation then begins with unselfishness. It begins with Jesus being willing to let go of the glory that He had with the Father before the world began, which is the way He expresses it in His prayer in John 17.
When it's almost over He says, I want to come back and I want to have the glory I had with you before this all began. He is unselfish. And in His unselfishness, you come to the third statement, verse 7, He emptied Himself. Rather than clinging to His heavenly glory, rather than clinging to His heavenly privileges, He divested Himself of them.
This is a profound statement. And it's introduced by a Greek word, the word but, alla, a-l-l-a, which means not this but this. The being equal with God did not lead Him to fill Himself up with those privileges, but to empty Himself. And in the Greek it's Himself to empty, which puts the emphasis on Himself. The verb to empty is kanao, from which we get this great theological term, the kinosos. We say the incarnation is the kinosos, the self-emptying of Christ.
It's a graphic term. He emptied Himself of the privileges and the prerogatives and the rights that were His by His divine nature in an act of self-renunciation and a refusal to cling to what rightfully was His. He refused to hold it to His own advantage, but emptied Himself in order to advantage others. Now please understand, when it says He emptied Himself, it does not mean that He emptied Himself of His deity. He didn't say to anybody, I used to be God but I'm not anymore. He did not empty Himself of His deity, He would have ceased to exist.
That is His nature and that is unchanging. He is and always has been and always will be God and since God cannot die and God is eternal, He is eternally God and never less than God, even when He was on earth. Matthew 17, Luke 9 records that He took His disciples up to a mountain and on one occasion He pulled back His human flesh and the shining glory, the blazing light of God was manifest.
Peter, James and John were there and they fell over in a coma, traumatized by what they saw. He put His doxology, His glory on display. He never did exchange deity for humanity. He didn't cease to be God, even hanging on the cross, in the midst of His suffering, even in the moments when He was under the judgment of God His Father, even when He was bearing the weight of sin and the wrath of God against that sin, He did not for a millisecond cease to be the mighty God Himself hanging on that cross. The issue is, not that He divested Himself of deity, but that He did not demand His rights as deity. He set aside His prerogatives, His privileges, His rights.
In John 17 He says He set aside His heavenly glory to come to this sin-stained planet. In John 5 He says He set aside His independent authority and He acted only according to the will of the Father. He set aside His prerogatives when He said that I have the right, I have the power, I have the authority to do things which I do not do because of my humiliation. Because He had willingly humbled Himself, He set aside things that He was entitled to.
For example, He says of the day and the hour when He will come again, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the sun. He set aside the prerogative of omniscience on occasion. And then other times He knew what was in the heart of man because He was omniscient. He self-limited His omniscience. He self-limited His omnipotence, His great power. If He wanted to, He could have called a legion of angels to rescue Him from the crucifixion, right?
But He didn't do that. It was not that He ceased to be God, it was that He set aside the prerogatives of deity. In heaven He was rich, but for our sakes He became poor. He divested Himself of the riches of heaven. He divested Himself of the constant company of holy angels and came down where He was constantly beset by demons. He even came all the way down to endure an unfavorable relationship with the Father and all He had ever known was an eternal and divine love. That's why He cried, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Yet in all the things that He set aside, He was always God.
Jesus, fully God from eternity past, humbled Himself for the sake of sinners by becoming fully man. Profound truth from John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, the title of his current series here on Grace to You, Who is Jesus Anyway? A friend, if you've benefited from the Bible teaching ministry of Grace to You, would you let us know?
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That's gty.org. And now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Watch Grace to You television this Sunday on DirecTV, channel 378, and then be back tomorrow when John equips you to explain who Jesus is, what He accomplished for sinners, and the cost of rejecting Him. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace to You.
