Who Does God Say Jesus Is?

Today, on Renewing Your Mind… When Jesus walked the earth, people referred to Him as a prophet and a good teacher. Some even referred to Him as the Messiah, the Son of God. But have you ever thought about how God the Father identified His Son?

Here's Dr. R.C. Sproul from his series, Your Christ is Too Small. What I want to do in this segment is ask the question, how did God look at Jesus? When I look at that and see how complex our doctrinal statements tend to be, it amazes me when I go back to the primitive church, to the first century Christian church, and realize that the very first confession of faith of the Christian church was extremely brief. It was one simple statement, Jesus is Lord. Before theology developed and the church had to think through its position on many, many issues, it was enough at the beginning to make that confession with your lips, Jesus is Lord. Then I asked the question, why, if they're going to reduce the confession of faith to the smallest common denominator, why did they choose the title Lord? Why wasn't the first Christian confession, Jesus is Messiah, or Jesus is the Son of Man? Instead, the church chose the title Lord.

Now, there was a reason for that. Now, before I explain that reason, let me ask a question from those of you who are here. What Old Testament passage is quoted more often in the New Testament than any other Old Testament passage? That's what I would think, Isaiah 53, where the suffering servant goes to the cross. The cross is so central to the New Testament and that description of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 sounds like a blow-by-blow description of the passion of Jesus, doesn't it? Well, certainly Isaiah 53 is quoted and quoted frequently in the New Testament, but not as often as this other text. The Old Testament passage that is quoted more often than any other in the New Testament is Psalm 110.

It starts like this, the Lord said to my Lord, sit thou at my right hand. And it goes on, till I make your enemies your footstools, the Lord shall send the rod of your strength out of Zion, and so on. But it's that first portion of Psalm 110, the Lord said to my Lord.

Now, there's something very unusual and puzzling about this text. First thing, if you have your Bibles open and look at Psalm 110 in the first verse, you'll see something unusual in the way the verse is printed. It goes, the Lord, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, said to my Lord, capital L, little o, little r, little d. Now, what the translator is doing for us here is telling us that even though he's using the same word, Lord, in this text, there are two distinct Hebrew terms in the original languages. Behind this text, both of these words are being translated by the English word Lord. And whenever you see Lord, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, that usually indicates that the translators are taking the Hebrew word Yahweh and rendering it into the word Lord. And Yahweh, of course, is the name of God.

It's the name God used to reveal himself to Moses at the burning bush, I am who I am, the sacred name of God, Yahweh. And so what we read here is that Yahweh is speaking. Yahweh says to my, capital L, little o, little r, little d. And the word there in the text is Adonai. So Yahweh is speaking to the Psalmist's Adonai. Well, now all we need to do is figure out what the word Adonai means. In the Old Testament, the term Adonai is the supreme title in all of Israel given to Yahweh. Adonai means the sovereign one, the one who has absolute authority over heaven and earth and over our lives.

And in this sense, it was used exclusively for God. Now we mentioned before that in the case of Jesus, we call Jesus, Jesus Christ. Jesus is his name. Christ is his title. In Israel, it was Yahweh Adonai.

The word will turn it around, the Lord God. Adonai is the title. Yahweh is the name. Alright, so that's one problem.

We've resolved that, the problem with the text. But do you see something even more difficult in this particular verse? Always Yahweh is Adonai. But in this text, Yahweh is talking to someone else who is called Adonai so that the Lord God is speaking to someone else and using that title that is normally reserved for God for this other person. Not only is Adonai now somebody other than Yahweh, but Adonai is the psalmist's Adonai, the psalmist's Lord. And who is the psalmist?

David. David, and he is the king of Israel. So the king writes, and incidentally this psalm is usually seen as an enthronement psalm, a psalm that would be used in the celebration and festival to celebrate the enthronement of the king in Israel. And so the king in all of his glory and all of his splendor comes up and he says, Yahweh speaks to my sovereign. Put in simpler terms, the king is saying, God is talking to my king and saying to my king, sit at my right hand. Now you're beginning to get a feel already for why that verse would be super important in the New Testament. Here we have a hint in the Old Testament of Yahweh speaking of someone other than himself who has now designated the Lord.

Now for us to capture the significance of that, we've got to take a few minutes to examine the meaning. I've already told you the meaning of Adonai in Hebrew. When we go into the New Testament, the Greek word to translate Lord is the word kurios.

Now I know you've heard that word in its anglicized form. There is a word in your vocabulary that I know everybody in this room has heard that takes this word kurios into their life. It's the word church.

It doesn't sound like kurios, does it? Do we have any Scottish people in here? What do they call the church in Scotland? The kirk. Okay, so you've got the word church, c-h-u-r-c-h. The Scots call it the kirk. Any Dutchmen in here? The Dutch call it the kirk, k-i-r-k. Any Germans? What do they call the church in Germany? Kirke, k-i-r-c-h-e.

Right? Now, do you notice any similarity in those? All that's changing is the consonant and then a vowel here and there, but it's the same basic sound. And all these words for church in the German language, in the Dutch language, and in the English language all go back to the Greek word kuriake, which means those who belong to a kurios. So that the church literally means those who are the possessions of a kurios, of a Lord, one who has sovereignty and authority over people.

Now there's another problem with this. In the Greek world, this word kurios was used in more than one way, the word Lord. In its widest use, in its simplest use, all the term kurios meant was sir, like a formal way of saying mister. If a man says something to me here in this room, I'll say, what did you say, sir? Or, sir, would you do this?

Or, sir, would I? That's just a normal way of speaking where we're trying to show courtesy and respect to people. But in the English language, we also have a sense in which we use that title, sir, in a more elevated way, isn't it? How about Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Galahad, or so on? Now, we're not just talking about anybody called mister.

Now we're talking about somebody who's up another notch in the social register. They have been granted peerage. They have been made knights of the kingdom, and they are in a special elite group now that they're called sir in that degree. Well, that's what's going on with this title, kurios. There is the normal sense in which kurios was simply a form of polite address, and that's difficult for us when we read the New Testament because Jesus will meet a stranger for the first time. And they'll say to him, Lord, would you come to our house for dinner? And you scratch your head and you say, how does that person know that Jesus is Lord? I mean, they've never met him before. Well, in all probability, they didn't know that Jesus was Lord in the way we speak of Jesus as Lord, but the writer is just being faithful to the formal way of addressing people.

It's just like he said, sir, would you come home with me? And there was a second way in which the title kurios was used in biblical days, and it was as a title for someone who owned slaves, a slave owner. A slave was called a doulos.

Plural was doulois. So in order to be a kurios in the sense of a slave owner, you had to own slaves. And usually when that word is meant in the New Testament, the writers will translate it master. You know how sometimes the Bible people will call Jesus master?

And Paul identifies himself, for example, how Paul, a servant or a slave of Jesus Christ. Or they'll say that we are not our own, but we have been bought with a price. We belong to Jesus. He is our master. We are his servants. So that secondary meaning of the term Lord is sprinkled throughout the New Testament to show our relationship to Jesus.

Now here's where it gets a little complicated. In addition to the normal sir, that second level of slave owner, there is what we call the imperial use of the title kurios in biblical days. And here in its imperial sense, it is used only for one who is deemed to be the supreme sovereign, the supreme ruler. And it's that imperial use of kurios that corresponds to the Hebrew concept of Adonai that we read here in Psalm 110. And so a Greek would look at that and he would say, God says to my imperial Lord, sit thou at my right hand. Now we've all heard about how the early Christians were martyred in bunches. They fed to the lions. They were killed by gladiators. They became human torches in the gardens of Nero. They were placed as cannon fodder in the Circus Maximus.

And you wonder why all those Christians were getting killed all over the place. Well, they were considered traitors to the Roman Empire because what developed in Rome was an emperor cult where the view began to be popular that the emperor was a god. So to be a loyal Roman citizen, you had to demonstrate that you were willing to worship the emperor, and Christians wouldn't do that. And so there developed in the end of the first century and into the second century a loyalty oath in Rome where a person could show that he was a good citizen, a law-abiding person, faithful to the empire. All that person had to say publicly in order to be accepted as a loyalist to Rome was to say these two words, Kaiser curios, Caesar is Lord.

And the Christians were, they were in deep trouble because they would say, look, we want to pay our taxes. We want to be respectable citizens. We'll drive our chariots within the speed limit. We'll bend over backwards to be model citizens in the empire.

We'll do all those things that you want us to do. But please, we can't say Kaiser curios because Kaiser may be great, but Kaiser is not curios because our belief is Jesus ho curios. Jesus is Lord, not Caesar.

And they would not compromise. And it was at that point that they were put to death. Well, the next question I want to look at is this. Where does Jesus get this title? Who gives it to him?

Where does it come from? Do you remember how Jesus in his ministry says, I speak nothing on my own authority but only what the Father reveals to me? But then elsewhere he says in a very bold and dramatic way, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Now that's a radical claim. What would you think of me if I walked in here and I said, look, now you listen to what I say and you can evaluate it and you can say this guy knows what he's talking about or doesn't know what he's talking about, no moral obligation whatsoever to submit to what I say just because I said it. But what if I came in here and I said, look, you better listen to what I say because I'm speaking with authority. How much authority? A PhD?

Nah. I'm speaking to you with all authority on heaven and earth. I have the ability to bind your conscience, to impose moral obligations upon you so that if you don't listen to what I say, you're in deep weeds. Well, you'd think I was crazy if I made a statement like that, but that's what Jesus did. He said, I have all the authority in heaven and on earth because the Father gave it to me. Three times in the New Testament, the voice of God the Father is heard audibly and in two out of three occasions it's the same message. This is my beloved Son. On the one occasion, this is my beloved Son in whom I'm well pleased.

And on the other occasion, even more emphatic, this is my beloved Son, hear Him. So how does God look at Jesus? As the one to whom He has given all authority and the one whom God commands that we hear and that we listen to. And we see this most graphically in what is called the kenotic hymn of Paul's letter to the Philippians, which we find in the second chapter of Paul's letter to the Philippians, where Paul says this, and this is where he's talking about humility, about our humility. He says, let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus. In other words, he's saying, think about Jesus' humility, who being in the form of God did not consider it robbery to be equal with God. That's an awkward way of translating it. Another way of translating it is to have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who though He was in the form of God, took His equality with God, not a thing to be grasped.

That is not a prerogative or a privilege to be held onto jealously or tenaciously. But Jesus, who had this supreme dignity, who has this supreme authority, willingly and voluntarily emptied Himself. The apostle says, He emptied Himself, making Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a servant, and came in the likeness of flesh. And being found in the appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient even to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Now you've heard that hymn, right? Where Jesus, who has all this dignity, willingly lays it aside and takes upon Himself the form of a servant.

Now the question is, what is God's reaction to that? Paul continues, Therefore, this is the conclusion, Therefore God has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee would bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Now every Christian has heard that, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. What does that mean, that every knee should bow? That means that at the name of Jesus every human being should prostrate himself, should acquiesce to His authority, to recognize His sovereignty, to be on our knees before Him, and to open our mouths and confess, Jesus Christ is Lord. What Paul is saying here is that because of Christ's humiliation, His voluntary humiliation, God has bestowed upon Jesus the name that is above every knee. That is, God has given to Jesus the highest title that can be given to Jesus. Now I know there are folks who read this text and I'll say to them, What is the highest name that anybody can ever have?

And they'll say, Jesus. That's not what Paul is saying here. The title that Paul is speaking of that is the highest name, the name that is above every name, is the title Lord. It's the title Curios, so that the name of Jesus, he's not saying the name Jesus is the highest name, but at the very name of Jesus your mouth is supposed to open up and say, Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Here's what the Unitarian doesn't understand. There are people who feel that if we worship Christ, if we adore Christ, if we confess the deity of Christ, that somehow we cast a shadow on the character of God the Father. But it's God the Father who takes His name, Adonai, and gives it to His Son. It is God the Father who gives all authority of His sovereignty to God the Son.

It is God the Father who demands and commands that all men everywhere kiss the Son and honor and adore Him. It is God the Father who calls Him Curios, gives Him that name. And that's why the early church saw in that name such exaltation and wanted to preserve that title for Jesus, because they didn't want to have any lesser view of Jesus than Jesus' Father had of Jesus. And so it is the duty of the Christian to call Jesus what God calls Jesus, not that Jesus is the Father's Lord, I don't mean that, but the name that the Father gives to the Son is the name Curios. And He's not just any Lord, is He? What we find later on in the New Testament is that Jesus is Lord not only in the imperial sense, but in the superlative sense, in the ultimate sense. And the way the Jew described that was by calling Him the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings.

You read that in the Greek, it's Curios Curion, Lord of the Lords, not just any Lord, but Lord of all of the Lords. And He shall reign forever and ever and ever and then what? And ever? And then what?

And then what do you say? Hallelujah. He is Lord. That's the confession of the church, because that's the declaration of the Father. God the Father declares Jesus to be Lord of Lords.

To think of Him as anything less is to have an inaccurate view of who Jesus really is. That's the focus of our series this week here on Renewing Your Mind. It's titled Your Christ is Too Small.

Dr. R.C. Sproul taught these messages back in 1986. That was just two years after the ministry moved from its study center there in western Pennsylvania to our current location here in Florida.

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