Who is Jesus? Is He God? Is He human?
Is He both? That's a debate that's been going on since before the Church was established. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explores what the Bible reveals about the authentic Jesus as we continue our study of the basics of the Christian faith. I invite you to take your Bibles. You may want to open them again to Matthew 16, which Tom read for us earlier.
But we'll be moving around tonight, as on all these evenings. And with our Bibles open, let's pause for a moment of prayer together. Just where you're seated tonight, ask God to speak to you, no matter what age you are or where you're from or background, that you might know that God is real and speaks to us through his Word. Ask for strength of mind where we're tired, for a real seeking heart where we may suffer from disinterest. Let's ask God together that we might know that it's the power of his Word which takes root in our lives and changes us. And those who have the privilege of proclaiming it are merely the mouthpieces that one day will be set aside, but the message never changes. Lord, speak to us tonight, we pray, and may we be zealous in seeking after you, and may we lay hold upon the truth of your Word and live it out in the days of our lives that yet await us, for Jesus' sake. Amen.
Every now and then I come across an advertisement in a newspaper or a magazine—and I'm sure you do also—which reads something like this. Born in poverty, lived only thirty-three years, spent most of his life in obscurity, never wrote a book, never had any position in public life, was crucified with two thieves, and yet two thousand years later, millions still follow him. It's not the whole story in the advert, but it is a significant part of it. And there is no getting away from the fact, whether we come tonight as convinced in our faith or questioning in our agnosticism, no getting away from the fact that this carpenter from an obscure province in a remote country in the Middle East has left an indelible mark on human history. And the question of his identity needs to be considered thoughtfully and certainly humbly. God has not pledged himself to respond to our intellectual arrogance, but he is committed to responding to our intellectual quest for truth, providing we would seek with a genuine and a humble heart. You would note from Matthew 16, as it was read earlier, that there was great confusion surrounding the identity of Jesus in the region of Caesarea Philippi when he asked the question, Who do men people say that the Son of Man is?
And the variety of responses received then can be more than matched today. Men and women are further confused, as is the whole area of seeking to understand the authenticity of Christ, by the fact that individuals choose to use correct or orthodox language in an incorrect or unorthodox way, so that people will say things about Christ that is actually untrue but using terminology which is factual, thereby confusing themselves and all their listeners. They may seek to identify themselves within the mainstream of historic Christianity. They may seek to portray themselves as those who are orthodox within the confines of biblical theology while at the same time choosing to believe that Jesus is just one of a number of routes up the mountainside of man's search for God. And whether man seeks along the route of the person of Christ or should seek to make the ascent by another journey, nevertheless, they will all meet in the one place in the end. And so people will say, Well, I am orthodox in my faith, while seeking to hold to such an unbiblical position. And so part of my purpose this evening is to show us that such an approach is untenable. It really enshrines the views of those who sought to piggyback on the teaching of Christ while denying great portions of it.
Now, our study this evening is largely devoid of poems, anecdotes, and illustrations. I say that just to increase your sense of anticipation. I don't have hardly anything here, save the bare bones of biblical truth. Good.
For that is what we need. And we're struck, as the portion was read tonight, by the statement of Jesus in a way that I haven't been struck by it before, when Jesus replies to Simon Peter, who makes his great statement of faith in Christ, saying, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And remember Jesus' reply. He said, Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man. I underlined it in my Bible and wrote this. Proclamation is my part. Revelation is God's part. So my responsibility this evening is to proclaim to you these truths, your responsibility is to pin back your ears and listen, and God's part is to unstop our ears, unblind our eyes, and reveal to us the verity of what is proclaimed.
That removes any sense of burden and responsibility from the one who speaks and places it where God says it should be with him alone. There are four factors that I'd like for us to consider tonight. They're straightforward.
I'll give them to you, and we'll work through them. Concerning the authentic Jesus, we look first at his humanity, secondly, at his deity, thirdly, at his unity, and finally, at his authority. The authentic Jesus, first of all, is a human Jesus. Irrespectors of the supernatural nature of his conception, to which we'll come under his deity, the birth of Jesus Christ was normal. He came down a normal birth canal. He was born in the natural way in which any other human being was born. He entered life as a baby who needed to be changed of his nappies or oblique diapers, as you would say. He needed to be taught how to make the stages from crawling to walking, to be taught how to speak, to be trained in the details of his daily routine, and such was the responsibility given to Joseph and Mary. Kierkegaard, that great philosopher, said of Jesus, his life ran like ours from womb to tomb. From womb to tomb. And the Jesus that we find given to us in Scripture is a human Jesus.
And let me give to you one or two references. You can read in Luke chapter 2 and verse 40 and following of Jesus growing up. As you go through the gospel records, you piece together a very human Christ, a Jesus who knew what it was to be tired.
Not a fake tired, a real tired. You remember in John chapter 4, he was there with the woman at the well, and why did he stay by the well and bid his disciples go on for food? Because he was tired. We read of him in Matthew chapter 21 as being hungry.
And I want to turn just to one or two of these to reinforce them in the reading of them. Matthew 21 and verse 18. Early in the morning, as Jesus was on his way back to the city, he was hungry.
Just a little detail recorded by Matthew. He was hungry. If he'd lived in the 20th century, he would have been looking for a Burger King or for a McDonald's. He would have looked around for something to eat, because in his humanity, he was just plain hungry. He knew what it was to be thirsty.
That's why the Pharisees were so annoyed with him, because in his thirst, he used to go and eat with publicans and sinners, and he used to eat and drink there. And Jesus was glad to do so. Not only did he know these things, but he knew human pain. He knew the actuality of agony.
In Mark chapter 14, recording the scene in the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus takes Peter, James, and John along with him, we're told he began to be deeply distressed and troubled, and his soul was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. And in the agony of that human experience, he displays his humanity. Now, this is important to underscore, because we do not show Jesus to be God by seeking to display him as any less a man. Any attempt to show that Jesus is God by diminishing his humanity is to introduce us to an unauthentic Jesus.
So we need not do that. He has revealed himself plainly in that way. He experienced the gamut of human emotions. He knew what it was to be joyful. A great verse—you'll find it in Luke chapter 10 and verse 21.
If you want to turn to it, you'll find it there. The seventy-two you read in verse 17 is the context. The seventy-two had returned, we're told, with joy. And they come and they tell Jesus, Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name. And he replied, I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven, and I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy.
Nothing will harm you. And then he said, however, do not rejoice that the Spirit submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven. Says, you want something to get really excited about? You want to have something to take into this week that will be the source of your joy? Rejoice in this, that in the logbooks of heaven your name is there in Christ. And then the very next verse, it says, at that time, Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, I praise you, Lord and Father. So within his humanity there rose up within him on that day the experience of a very natural and yet supernatural joy. He knew what it was to be sorrowful. Matthew 26.
He knew what it was to love. John chapter 11. The reference in a verse in Matthew 26 is verse 37. John chapter 11 and verse 5.
It says, Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. He was, if you like, that kind of man. He was capable of that kind of empathy. He was not some creature, an alien from another place.
He could not be thought of in those terms. He was able to sit and empathize with men and women in their thirst, in their hunger, in their joy, in their sorrow, in their love, in their pain. And he knew what it was to experience that great depth of human conviction in his soul concerning compassion. Matthew chapter 9 and verse 36. And when he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. He was a natural man who went to worship on the Sabbath.
Luke chapter 4 verse 16. It says there that he went as was his custom on the Sabbath. In other words, in his humanity, he prioritized his life. And he said, On this day I will worship. And no matter come what may, he fulfilled that holy obligation. This is a priority for me, says Jesus. I will be present in worship. He was in his humanity one who meditated upon the Scriptures, and he was in the reality of his manhood one who faced temptation.
Hebrews chapter 4 verse 15 speaks of Christ suffering temptation, and Luke records for us the details of his forty days and forty nights. Now, when you begin to put all those pieces of the puzzle together, they are clear and obvious references to the fact that Jesus lived and breathed within a context of natural human history. So straightforward is it that we might assume that there has never been a question concerning the humanity of Jesus Christ.
And there we would be wrong. For in the early centuries, there arose a teaching which went under the name of docetism, or docetism. D-o-c-e-t-i-s-m.
It comes from the Greek word dokio, the verb to appear. And the teaching went like this. Since in the minds of these people—and it was part of the Gnostic heresy—since matter, body, is evil, and spirit is good, there is no possibility that a good God could have clothed himself in human matter which is, of course, evil. Therefore, God could not have taken on himself a real human body, and therefore, whatever the incarnation was or is, it is merely appearances. So he wasn't a real human being.
He looked like one, he sounded like one, but according to the docutists, he was not one. And when John, answering that in the context of the first century, wrote his first letter, I'm sure he had it in mind, where he makes this great and straightforward statement—that 1 John 1, that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at, and which our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the word of life. The life appeared. We have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you may also have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.
We write this to make our joy complete. First thing, then, concerning the authentic Jesus is his humanity, a real human being. Secondly, his deity. Having faced the fact that he was a real man who said and did certain things within the context of history, we must immediately go on to affirm that it is only in light of the fact of his divinity that we can understand his humanity. In other words, it is impossible to explain Christ simply in terms of the fact that he was a human being.
C. S. Lewis, in probably one of the most quoted apologetic statements concerning this, arrived at this conviction himself along the line of agnosticism. He said, A man who was merely a man, and said the things that Jesus said, would either be on the level with someone claiming to be a poached egg, or else he would be a demon or something worse. And so he says, You can … write him off as a lunatic. You can spit at him as a demon. Or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But do not come to him with any patronizing nonsense about his having been a great moral teacher. He did not leave the option open to us.
He never intended to. And so all that nonsense again in the plain dealer, which has got up the back of my neck this weekend, about, Wow, we've got a little piece of Jesus over here, and this is our Jesus, a kind of demystified Jesus, a kind of non-biblical Jesus, is not Jesus. It's an unauthentic Jesus.
I covet his name. I deny it to those people. They do not know my Jesus. Their names should not be in the church notices. They're not a church. For Christ, the authentic Christ, is the head of the church.
And if I had the time and the patience, I would mount a crusade to get all of that other garbage taken out of those church notices. So as to make it clear, what is the church? Who is the Christ? It is not a matter of triviality. It is a matter of reality.
It is vital in our syncretistic days. And this same Jesus, whom we discover here, is not merely human and real, but he is divine and true. This is the great staggering truth of Christianity—that Christ became a human fetus, that Christ, the God-man, was nurtured in a womb, that he who had always existed became a part of this scheme of things in God's economy. And in the biblical teaching, we discover again and again that Jesus, while true man, is also true God. Now, how would you respond to this statement? The New Testament nowhere states that Jesus is God. Okay? You're talking with somebody, and they say to you sometime this week, Well, you know, I read the New Testament, and I never found a place where it says that Jesus is God. What's your answer to that?
This was a class. I put you through it. You should be fortunate that I'm four feet away from you here.
You should be glad. All right, there's one. John 5. Good. All the I Am's. Okay.
Any more? Philippians 2 5–11. Good.
All right. In many and various ways, God spoke of all by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us in his Son. That's what we would do.
We would first of all say, You know something? You're right to one degree. You're right in this extent, that there's nowhere in the New Testament that you will find a statement made by Jesus with these three words, I am God.
You're right. He never said it. But he said it in other ways. And then we would turn to those portions of Scripture. We would turn also to Romans chapter 9 verse 5, where Paul says, Christ, who is God overall, is forever praised.
No distinction. Christ, who is God overall. Hebrews chapter 1, as has been mentioned, the prologue of John's Gospel. Titus chapter 2 verse 13, where it refers to the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ appeared as God and Savior. We would turn to John's statement in the twentieth chapter to Peter's introduction to his second letter. And in doing this, we would drive home to our hearers a number of facts to consider.
Fact 1. The Bible's statement concerning the virgin birth. Luke's record of it. The angel comes and says, You know, you're gonna have a son. He'll be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever.
His kingdom will never end. Now, the response of Mary is intriguing, is it not? It's a far-out thought to her that she is going to have a son who is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, but what is equally far out is that she's going to have a son at all.
Because, she said, how will this be, since I am still a virgin? Answer, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. And then, as it were, the veil of mystery is pulled across this tremendous truth, with which Scripture is perfectly clear. You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg.
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