The Man Who Is God (Part 4 of 4)

celebrities or royalty often have a protective detail surrounding them.

Bodyguards. Jesus walked among ordinary people. Why would the incarnate God immerse himself in a crowd of sinners? We'll find out today on Truth for Life as Alistair Begg concludes our study in the book of Luke. His teaching from the closing verses of Luke chapter 2. Now, in the pilgrimage to that point, we have a real humanity, we have a real psychology, we have a human mind and real emotions, and he engaged in real affection. He expresses in all of his earthly pilgrimage the need for and the enjoyment of human relationships. Now, again, you see, if we make Christ less than human, we've got the impression that somehow or another he just wanders through his life, just going places. It doesn't matter if he knows anyone or doesn't know anyone, because after all, he is in direct communion with the other members of the Trinity, and he somehow or another is on a totally different plane, and all of that kind of stuff is irrelevant to him. No, you see, that's because we created a Jesus of our own imagination. Mark, in the third chapter, about the fourteenth verse, it says that when Jesus called the twelve—and the phrase has always struck me—it says, And he chose twelve to be with him.

Did you ever notice that? Mark 3.14. Why did he choose twelve? He chose the twelve, first of all, to be with him, then to go for him.

But they didn't go for him until they'd been with him. And why did he want them to be with him? Because he wanted their company. Because he liked hanging out with them.

Because he knew he had a job to do, and he was glad of their companionship. And even in the midst of the twelve, he picked within the twelve. And he picked Peter, James, and John with regularity. They got to go places that the other nine didn't get to go. Into the garden of Gethsemane he goes, and who does he take? He takes Peter, he takes James, and he takes John.

And why would he do so? Someone to talk to, in the face of the great challenge. You ever go to a great challenge on your own?

Probably not. Just the very fact of their presence made all the difference, and Jesus in his humanity identifies with that perfectly. Isn't it fair to say that when we look at this, that in the life of Jesus he was closer to some than to others? That he felt more at home, more relaxed in the company of some, more at ease with them, drew more upon them? Dare we say it that he liked some a little more than he liked others, humanly speaking? Yet we tend to feel ashamed when we acknowledge that in ourselves. Don't you like some people more than others?

Let's be totally brutally honest, right? So this trip that tells us you like everybody the same, you love everybody the same, we're all cozy-dosey, and all that kind of stuff, that we hold out to one another, sends everybody home feeling horribly guilty. The fact of the matter is that we are called to manifest love, to care for one another, and exhort one another, and do all those things. But when push comes to shove, the fact of the matter is, there are certain people in whose company it's far easier to be at home, it's far easier to take your shoes off, it's far easier to sit down and hang out. And I think the Gospels make clear that Jesus understood that.

And so he called twelve to be with him, and he picked three as his companions. And this sense of affection makes a person vulnerable. Because if you open yourself up to somebody and say, I want to be your friend, do you want to be my friend?

The chances are they're going to say, No. And in John chapter 6—again, we daren't make this into something that it isn't—in John chapter 6, where John tells that after Jesus' discourse on the nature of the bread of life, a great crowd of people began to turn back—John chapter 6 verse 66—from this time, many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. And so Jesus says, Well, who cares, you know? What do I care? Let him go. Let the whole lot of you go. What do I care? Go on!

Take off! He turns to the twelve and he says, You're not planning on going as well, are you? See, when you think about that in terms of human affection, it reads totally differently. When you think about it in terms of his humanity, here is Christ who has come bearing this great news and proclaiming this wonderful salvation. And the crowds have begun to follow in his wake, and he fed the five thousand, and he recognizes that some are there for the wrong reasons.

And so he turns and he says, Listen, folks, let's pause for a moment and let me explain to you what this is all about. And as a result of that, they begin to leave in droves. Now, how would you feel if you were an evangelist and your whole thing was to introduce as many people as possible to the kingdom, and when you told them what the kingdom was really all about, instead of them all coming, they were all going? Don't you think you'd go to your core group and say, Hey, I just want to check, you know?

You're not going to go as well, are you? Why? Because he loved them. Because he cared for them. Because he was affectionate towards them. And because they were affectionate towards him. Was it not affection that had him weep over Jerusalem? Was it not human affection that says that when the rich young ruler came to him and he fell down on his knees and he says, Good Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life? The Gospel writer records, and Jesus looked on him and loved him, that it drew an emotional response from Christ, and instantaneously there was a surge of affection towards this young man. Now, again, I say to you that if we have a Christ who is somewhere a way up here and doesn't actually walk the earth, then we will just fly by all this stuff. And that's why, when you think about him taking those three characters into the Garden of Gethsemane and basically giving them a very simple assignment—now, I'd like you to stay here and just stay awake and pray a little bit, would you? You're my main man now. Peter, James, John, I brought you in.

I'm going over here. You stay there. And then he comes back, and they're sound asleep. Now, again, you see, if we denude the humanity of Jesus, we say, Well, he's God, you know. It doesn't really affect him, you know. He's immutable in these circumstances. It's not a concern.

Of course it's a concern. Guys, can you watch? Couldn't you just watch? I mean, I didn't ask you to come with me. I didn't ask you to suffer with me. I didn't ask you to go on the cross with me. I just asked you to stay here with me. You see, when you sweat great drops of blood, unless you're a Docetist, and this is only a phantom Christ, you understand the immensity of what is taking place.

So—and I must hasten to a conclusion—at least we can say this. Jesus provides us with absolutely no basis for a detached, non-relational Christianity. He provides us with no basis for a detached, non-relational Christianity—the kind that fears involvement and that fears vulnerability. He builds his church upon a rock. He does not build his church with rocks.

There is no legitimacy in the notion that we are the frozen chosen, that we simply are isolated and removed and distanced. And don't worry, we can handle it all. The fact is, we are not to be isolated, we are not to be distanced, and if we're honest, we can't handle hardly anything at all. Any husband knows this. He spends his whole life going, Honey, could you help me with this? The poor girl's doing all her stuff and doing all his stuff, and just—but that's it. Now, he may stay outside and give the impression that he's got it all under control.

But when he's in the house, his constant refrain is, Honey, could you help me with this? Do you know that there are people around you in this church that will open the floodgates of their lives if you would just go up and say, Hey, dear one, could you help me with this? The people sitting out in the pews, waiting for the pastoral team to organize a strategy to be implemented for the church so that everyone is now involved in full mobilization. And that is something, apparently, that we are supposed to do.

I never read that in the Bible. I read that what we are supposed to do is to prepare God's people so that they can engage in works of ministry—not to contrive the works of ministry for them, not to make the little spaces for them and then put them in it, just to teach the Bible in such a way that they will then become willing to serve, vulnerable in service, and open. That's your part. I'm doing my part. If you think that I'm supposed to spend the rest of the week trying to figure out for you how to apply the stuff I just taught you, I'm sorry.

I'm not going to do it. I have a bad enough time trying to figure out how I'm supposed to apply it in my own life without trying to figure out with my colleagues how everybody else in the church is supposed to apply it. So you got someone around you who's in need? Go to them in their need. You got someone who's crying? Go and answer the cry. You got a cry in your own heart? Go and share it with somebody. You got an idea?

Share it with somebody. The person says, That's a dumb idea. That's okay. That's why we need one another. Well, that's the fifth dumb idea that I've heard from you in a week.

That's okay. But if you're sitting there waiting to be mobilized, you'll be a hundred and ten and still stuck to your pew. Now, lastly, what is all this teaching us? It's teaching us that Jesus took his place where we are.

That's incarnation, right? And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. As surely as Jesus in the temple courts was in the middle of these guys, breathing their air, rubbing their shoulders, gazing into their eyes, so in his coming he has taken his place right among humanity. He did not simply take our nature and then live in a sanitized, spiritual environment. He did not live in a big palace somewhere that only a few people could get into, and that once they had gone through the process, they got in to see the great Messiah, and he gave information and then sent it back out, and he remained removed from all of his creation. I suppose theoretically he could have chosen to do that.

But he didn't. He came to first-century Nazareth. He came to Jewishness.

He came to the home of a carpenter. The point is simply this—that his life was not one of detachment, but it was one of involvement. He lived in the absolute middle of human sin, where he would hear the curses of men, where he would wince at their blasphemy.

The same place that you men live your lives. In the midst of those business discussions, in the after-business discussions discussions, in the filthy talk and the spurious nonsense that is part of humanity, that's where Jesus came. And that's why religious orthodoxy despised him, because they said if he was really God, if he was really Messiah, then he would be sanitized, he would be removed, he would be enrobed, he would be separate.

He wouldn't be hanging with these people. And Jesus had to say again and again, you don't get it, you do not understand that I must be about my Father's business. Oh yes, they said, we understand the Father's business. We're involved in the company as well, you know.

We are the main proponents of it all. That's why we're doing all the things we're doing. That's why we're dressed the way we're dressed. That's why we do the prayers when we do them.

That's why we wash our hands all these times every day. Jesus said, You're full of it. You're like gravestones. You're white on the outside. You're dead men's bones on the inside. You are like snakes, he says.

You are twice blind. If you really meant that, you'd come here with me, and you wouldn't chastise me for going into the home of Zacchaeus. Because remember, they were muttering. Because he went to the home of Zacchaeus.

Why? Because Zacchaeus was doing everybody. He was fiddling the books.

That's where he was, with the book fiddlers. He's talking with the woman of the well. Could I have a drink of water?

Five husbands and a live-in lover. And Jesus is the guy saying, Hey, can you give me a drink of water, please? Oh, that's okay, I can drink out the same glass. It's not a problem. It's all right.

That's fine. I can drink it. Not a sanitized Christianity. Not a, No, of course, I'll have to have a special glass, because if I tell you who I am, you'll understand perfectly, and so on.

No, none of that at all. His impact was directly related to coming alongside people, sharing their environment, and facing their problems. Now, doesn't that make sense of his prayer in John 17? When he prays to his father, and he says, My prayer, Father, is not that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. John 17 15. My prayer, Father, is that as you have sent me into the world, you will send them into the world.

Into. That you will incarnate yourself in your people. That when I leave, Father, and go to heaven, that as surely as I have been with the prostitutes, the woman at the well, the tax dodgers, and the scum of the earth, Father, I ask you that you will send your people to those people. How can we effectively minister to a world that is lost if we're not in the world? How can we be salt and light in the darkened ghettos of our cities if we have no effective contacts and no relationships with the people who live in those darkened corridors? And how, let me ask you, are you planning to reach a non-Christian society when you don't have any non-Christian friends?

How? Not the Jesus way. Us four, no more, shut the door, is an invention of a sanitized form of Christianity. The retraction from the culture, the removal from the world of education, the removal from the world of the arts, the removal from all that is creative and magnificent has put us in the position in which we find ourselves, shouting the odds about politics, totally uninvolved in the culture, and most of us with very little chance to share Christ with a friend who doesn't know him because we haven't cultivated any friendships with non-Christian people. Now, that, it seems to me, is the principle that we discover in Luke chapter 2, in the boyhood of Christ, an incarnational mission established by Christ himself, and to be carried on by us. There are radical implications for this, loved ones. If we're prepared to take this on board as individuals and as families, it's gonna mean actually sitting down and targeting the way in which we are planning to go into the world. Not simply inviting the world to come into us, but actually going into that world—to where people are, and as a church, too. What a tragedy that in a relatively short period of time, as we've said before, places that began as lifeboat rescue houses became marinas for people to ride around in their craft with their own little friends, playing their own kind of music, talking their own little jargon, and talking themselves into oblivion. If you want to take seriously the challenge that is contained in this tonight, I'll go with you anywhere, anytime, to the ends of the earth.

If we are not prepared to take the challenge, then let me tell you what you can anticipate. A man, a movement, and a monument. Where people stand outside and say, do you remember those days? Evangelize or fossilize? Jesus didn't come and deliver to us a set of instructions for how to serve God, serve others, and share the gospel.

He showed us how to do those things. You're listening to Truth for Life. That is Alistair Begg pointing out how Jesus comes alongside us in our need wherever we are. Everybody needs to hear God's word. That's the reason we teach the Bible every day here on Truth for Life.

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Thank you for this wonderful picture of such a real individual, with a real mind and real emotions and real affections. Forgive us, Lord, when in seeking to ensure his deity we diminish his humanity, when in seeking to make sure that everybody understands that he was God, that we forget that he was man and God, that when we are making much of his majesty we forget his meekness, that when we are extolling his deity we forget his manhood. So thank you today for reminding us about the man who is God. And we pray that you will write your Word in our hearts and minds, that you will transform us by the power of the Spirit. As we thank you for all that we've known of your goodness and kindness as a church family, we recognize that we are surrounded by literally hundreds and thousands of people who need the Lord. Our neighbors die on our street, and we don't even know they've gone.

That's my street, Lord, never mind anybody else's street. Help us then, we pray, for your glory and for the edifying of your people, for the building up of your church, that you love to the point of death. And in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening today. The Bible is clear that being a Christian won't spare you from failure or from suffering. So what do we do when we find ourselves in challenging circumstances? Join us tomorrow for an encouraging message for discouraged people. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the learning of the Bible is taught by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.