Throughout human history, there have been those who claimed to bring salvation, but only Jesus really could. The truth is that Jesus Christ is not fully man and fully God. We have no true Christianity. We have no gospel.
What the New Testament says about him and all the other things would be suspect, right? His atoning death, his resurrection, his ascension, his return, they all stand together, those doctrines, or they all fall together. Merry Christmas. Today we celebrate Jesus, who is fully God and fully man. If you're a true Christian, you know this to be true. You know that salvation isn't possible without believing in Jesus. But we need to recognize that Satan also knows this. That's why throughout the ages, Satan has presented the world with phonies. He offers the world counterfeits and legends of false salvation. This is wisdom for the heart. And today, Stephen Davey is going to remind you that there is no salvation apart from Jesus Christ.
The lesson you're about to hear is called more than the legend of Zeus. Philip Yancey once contrasted in one of his books, The Humility of Christ Coming to Earth, the trip abroad by the Queen of England. When the royal family travels someplace to make an appearance, they're shown, of course, with their jewelry and everything just seems perfect and a lot of fanfare surrounded by retinue of paparazzi. And he recorded that when Queen Elizabeth visited the United States sometime ago, that there were so many details and preparations. She traveled with 4,000 pounds of luggage. Her luggage contained two outfits for every conceivable occasion, including one outfit in case somebody died and she needed to attend the funeral. She brought along her own hairdresser, two valets, dozens of personal attendants.
Now notice this, carefully preserved within her luggage were 40 pints of plasma in case of a medical emergency. Even a brief visit of the queen to a foreign country can cost her government upwards of $20 million. Having been over there recently and toured a number of the royal residences this past summer, they have a custom of flying the flag whenever the queen is in residence. You see the flag flying somewhere high on a castle, you know the queen is in.
And I can't help but think as we rehearse this story of our majesty, the king of kings. He has arrived. He has traveled to earth without personal attendance.
In fact, he's laid, as you know, in a borrowed feed trough. It seems the animals were willing to loan it to their creator. And this Christmas, like every other Christmas, we have the announcement again worldwide the king has arrived. For those of us who believe in him beyond December 25th, we believe in him and his flag flies in and from the castle of our hearts.
It is the flag of redemption. Jesus did not come to earth with spare blood packed away in case of an emergency. He came to give his blood away because there was an emergency.
There was already. The wages of sin facing us is death, but the gift of God through Jesus Christ is eternal life. But what an incredible mystery, God, the Redeemer coming to put on the street clothes of ordinary humanity, the eternal second person of the triune God becoming confined in time, the omnipresent son being bound in a spirit fertilized egg in a virgin's womb. Talk about a mystery.
None of us really can fathom it. And yet our gospel depends upon it entirely. This is an optional truth. This is foundational doctrine that he is fully God and fully man. No wonder the enemy launched and still launches severe attacks against this truth. Even before the end of the apostle John's life, the last living apostle, there were attacks on this doctrine of Christ. An early view probably existing during the remaining days of John's life was called docetism. It said that Jesus wasn't really flesh. And John I think countered this specifically in his second letter. He writes, for many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh.
This is the deceiver and the antichrist. The truth is if Jesus Christ is not fully man and fully God, we have no true Christianity. We have no gospel. The essence as one author wrote and the power of the gospel is that God became man and that by being both holy God and holy man, he was able to reconcile sinners to God. If it isn't true, then of course what the New Testament says about him and all the other things would be suspect, right? If the gospel writers misrepresented the truth of his birth, how do we know they're telling the truth about anything else about him? His virgin birth, his atoning death, his resurrection, his ascension, his return?
Literally they all stand together, those doctrines or they all fall together. No wonder the attacks are so vociferous against this truth of Christ, holy God and holy man. It wasn't long after John the apostle died that other views reared their heretical heads. Another view known as monophysitism taught that Christ had only one nature, sort of a fusion of divine and human. He was at least 50% God and he was 50% human. The attacks on Christ's nature have not gone away. There's still great theological debate and battle about this second person of the Godhead. One British author wrote not too long ago that Jesus would have been horrified to think of a church, let alone people worshipping him as if he were divine. Jesus would have been horrified at the thought of that, surprised. Another wrote that Jesus was just a magician who had people under his sway. Another wrote Jesus was a great rabbi who had no intention of starting a movement.
He was just a good teacher. Listen, if this is true, then Christ cannot truly represent us as man and he can't really redeem us as God, can he? Another way Satan attacks the authenticity of Christ's nature is not just by denying it or making it sound silly, but by counterfeiting it, by promoting other views to dilute the uniqueness of the virgin birth, counterfeiting the message. You study the religions of the world and you will be exposed to story after story after story of virgin born sons. The Romans believed that Zeus impregnated Simele without contact with her and that she conceived Dionysus, the Lord of the earth, who was the virgin born son.
This view was held by many as Paul walked in that empire teaching the truth of who Christ was. The ancient Sumerians, even earlier inscribed on a wall thousands of years before the birth of Christ, how their emperor was created in the womb of his mother by their gods. He was a virgin born son. 600 years before the birth of Christ, it was claimed that the goddess of procreation brought about the conception of King Sennacherib in his mother's womb. He also was a son of God.
The Chinese have their own goddess, Xingmu, holding her baby. You can take all of these stories of all of the world religions and you can interpret them one of two ways. One, you could arrive at the conclusion that all these virgin conception stories means Christianity simply borrowed the idea from other religions and sort of came up with its own version. Or you can understand it as the enemy's strategy to predate Christianity with similar versions of the gospel so that when the events of the gospel are unfolded, people can say, that's nice, but that's old stuff. Did Satan know at the beginning of human history that God had in mind a virgin born son so that he could counterfeit it and develop it and manipulate it? Well, you go all the way back to Genesis chapter 3 verse 15, when God said to Satan, the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent.
You remember that? That's the first gospel, the proto evangelism or the proto evangelium. This is the first message of the gospel foretold by God. The seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. Every other time in the Bible you read about seed, literally sperm or offspring. It's a reference to the sperm of man. But here in Genesis 3.15, you find the phrase, in fact, the only time in the Bible you read about the seed of a woman. There's no seed of a woman. Why is it mentioned here this way, the only time in the Bible?
Because she conceives without a man. Her offspring, which is uniquely independent of the seed of man, will crush and defeat the serpent. This is a reference to the Messiah defeating Satan. At the very outset of human history, Satan knew what was going to happen. Add to that another text that Satan was fully aware of. The prophet Isaiah said a virgin is going to conceive, right, and bear a son. And the name of that son is Immanuel. God with us.
It's going to be the conception within the womb of a virgin by means of God. And Satan knows all about this. He happens to be fairly bright. He's not entirely bright because he refuses to surrender.
How dumb is that? He's read the rest of the book. He knows revelation, but he is fairly bright. And he knows and so he dispenses and originates and manipulates and encourages and facilitates the development of pagan thought to incorporate the idea of virgin birth. So you have a mother who one day sees a great white elephant come into her womb and she bears a virgin born son named Buddha.
You have the reincarnation of Vishnu as a fish, a tortoise, a boar, a lion, eventually descending into the womb of a woman and is born to her as Krishna. And you have Hinduism even during the days of Christ. The legend persisted that Alexander the Great was virgin born by the power of Zeus through a snake, a serpent that impregnated his mother, Olympias. He too was a son of God, born of a virgin. Imagine all the world religions, the major world philosophies claim a son born as the offspring of their God. So Christ is born of a virgin. Truly the world of Christ can easily say, well, we've heard that story before. Christianity just has its own version. Your philosophy professor at college might have told you that.
Christianity is just borrowed. That's what he believes. He believes it and he will go to hell unless hell turns out to just be another myth that we've concocted, which he depends upon.
Hopefully that one isn't true either. Why would Satan spend so much energy and time and effort to deny and attack and dilute and counterfeit the message of God's son, the virgin born Messiah? In fact, if you study the gospel and then you study world religions, it's amazing to me how much of the truth of the gospel is counterfeited. It's already in a sense taken. The terms are already arrested by Satan. The concepts of the gospel. You've got the virgin birth, you have the resurrection, you even have baptism. You even have the thought of being born again. That wasn't new when Jesus came along.
That was already well-worn. The mystery religions had initiations where the initiate would be bathed in blood and afterwards he would be considered born again. In fact, one mystery religion would take its initiate through blood dripping upon them and then having declared him born again, they'd give him a cup of milk to drink, assuming he was a newborn baby. Did Jesus Christ and his church borrow these ideas? No, Satan has already been at work through the teachers and world religions to counterfeit the claims of Christ and the virgin birth is one of those key doctrines which he seeks to undermine.
Why? Because he knows, he knows fully well that without the virgin birth, without a Messiah who is fully God and fully man, the world is without a Savior. We either have a good man or some tainted deity who is unable to save. Ravi Zacharias, whom God is using tremendously these days, I don't know if you've watched the news, but just recently he spoke in the Mormon Tabernacle, invited there to declare the Christian's truth related to the deity of Jesus Christ and he preached to a packed house. He once, in one of his recent works, talked about Larry King, the talk show host. Larry King was asked the question, if you could select one person in all of human history to interview, who would it be? And he said, Jesus Christ. Larry King said, I'd love to interview Jesus Christ. And the questioner followed with, and what would you like to ask him? And Larry King replied, I would like to ask him if he was indeed virgin born.
The answer to that question would define history for me. Ladies and gentlemen, if the story of Christ's virgin birth is just another legend, just another story, then so is what the rest of the Bible says about him. But if he is indeed fully God and fully man, it does in fact define your history and mine.
That's the question. Who is Jesus? No wonder that one of the most often attacked verses and denied would be in Matthew's Gospel, chapter 1, verse 18. I'm going to give you a few verses.
You might turn there. I don't ever want you to come here without opening your Bible. Matthew 1, verse 18, here's how simple it is, but it can only be believed by faith. Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows.
Here's how it happened. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, that is engaged, considered by Jewish law to be married as it were, but a year would be separating them between the betrothal or the official announcement and consummation. During this year, before they came together, she was found, she was discovered to be with child by the Holy Spirit. You have 17 verses explaining his human lineage and one verse explaining his divine because all we need is one verse to know we can't understand any more than that.
What a mystery. If you want to turn over to Luke, Luke's Gospel, his account in chapter 1, a little bit more explanation is given by Luke and I'm so grateful probably because Luke was a doctor, a medical doctor. God used him to give many details of things related to his birth. Luke chapter 1, verse 31, and behold, the angel's telling Mary, look now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the son of the Most High and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David.
That is, he is the rightful heir to the throne of David and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and his kingdom will have no end. And Mary said to the angel the same thing we would say, how can this be since I am a virgin? And the angel answered and said to her, here's the explanation, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. And for that reason, the holy offspring shall be called the son of God. There it is. The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Overshadow is a Greek word that literally refers to a cloud that covers over some area. There's your explanation. Mary, you're going to be overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit. Do we understand it? No.
Do we understand how God could fertilize an egg by, as it were, touching an egg within her body? No. No more that we can understand so much of what we believe. Do you understand how God's going to collect your dust one day and bring it together and then reunite it with your spirit that's already been celebrating with him in heaven and he's going to give you a glorified body and he's going to take it to be with him forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever? No.
Not that either. Only God can understand his ways and we're not God. It would do us good to get up in the morning, sometimes look in the mirror and say, I don't know who you think you are, but you are not God.
Comb your hair and go eat breakfast. The Apostle Paul said, beyond any doubt, the mystery is great. God appeared in a body. He was really human.
He wasn't pretending to learn how to walk. I got to fool these people into thinking I'm a human. God sent forth his son born of a woman. Galatians 4.
Why must Jesus Christ be fully human? Let me give you three reasons. There are a lot of them. I'm going to whittle them down to three. If you want to get more than three, Wayne Gruden has an excellent systematic theology.
You can go there and get the others I've left out. Number one, so that he would in fact be a representative of the human race in his obedience. So that he would be a representative of the human race in his obedience. The Redeemer had to be a man.
He couldn't be faking or pretending. He had to be man, fully man. The Bible says, as one man's sin led to condemnation for all men, so one man's act of righteousness leads to life. For as by one man's disobedience, many were made sinners, so by one man's obedience, many will be made righteous. You have the first Adam and you have the last Adam. You have one that begins the human race. You have the second or last, which begins a new race, a new people, a new possession of God, a holy priesthood that we might declare the praises of him who has called us out of darkness into everlasting light.
Now let me insert very quickly here this important truth. Jesus was fully human and could be because he had a human parent, a human parent. From Mary he received his human nature so that he was a member of Adam's race. But while Jesus received from Mary his human nature, he did not receive from Joseph the transmission of Adamic sin nature, which is very important. What orthodox theologians call inherited guilt, which comes by way of Adam's seed. Follow me carefully. The only way Jesus could be fully human and not corrupted with the legal and moral guilt of Adam would be to be born apart from the seed of Adam.
There's only one way that could happen. Fully human because he was given flesh and blood and nature from Mary and yet there was no seed of Adam and why he was virgin born. So he could in fact be a representative of the human race in his perfect life and obedience. Secondly, Jesus had to be a man so that he could be a substitute for the human race and his sacrifice. If Jesus had not been a man, he could not have been able to be in our place and pay the penalty due to the human race.
Listen to how Hebrews puts it in chapter 2 verse 17. He had to be made like his brethren. He had to be made like his brethren in all things that he might be an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the people, which leads me to the third reason. He had to be a man so that he could experience the penalty of the human race with his death. Paul wrote to the Philippians, Christ was 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. So Jesus fully man could bear the penalty of God by becoming sin, our sin bearer for us.
He had to be a man in order to be a representative, a substitute and experience the penalty. You need to understand ladies and gentlemen, there isn't any salvation in his birth. There isn't any salvation in his teaching. There isn't any salvation in his sinless life.
Those are all important, but even those alone could not save us. Somebody had to die. Somebody had to bear the wrath of God. Somebody had to become our sin bearer. So Jesus was born so that he could die and then come back to glorified resurrected life. The scriptures say he brought himself back to life. He's more than fully human.
He's got to be more than that then, right? He is fully God and he must be fully God to be the satisfaction for our sins and not our sins only, 1 John 2, 2 writes, but also for those of the whole world. Only one who was fully God could bear the penalty of the sin of the whole world. How do you bear the sin of the whole world? We couldn't pay the penalty of our own load of sin and guilt because our load of sin and guilt is against an infinite God.
It will take an infinite amount of time to pay the penalty and that will never end. So how do you bear the weight of sin against an infinite God in a moment of time? You must be fully God, not just fully man. He bore in his body on the tree your weight of sin. He was pierced, the prophet said, for your transgression.
He was crushed for your iniquities. This is the wage of your sin and it is death and he paid the penalty and he died. Because he was God he is capable of paying the full penalty of all of your guilt and he rose and now offers to you, not sinless people, not good people, not perfect people, but sinners, he offers salvation freely and those who receive his penalty paying, sacrifice on their behalf become one with him and are forgiven. So the question is who is Jesus Christ?
Who he is then defines what he's able to do for you. Fully God, fully man and he has the ability to fully be able to die. He is fully able to redeem.
He is fully able to forgive. He is fully able to return again and just as his first coming which we celebrate happened with prophetic precision, his second coming will also literally take place fulfilling precisely the prophet's words. But back to the question, who is he to you? Who is he to you? Is he just a baby in a manger?
Is he a seasonal interruption? Is he a warm feeling of temporary sanctification? Is he a nice man who is treated very cruelly by Roman soldiers and put on a cross that he didn't deserve? You happen to be in the midst if you're here as an unbeliever, people who've come by God's grace to place their faith in this one who carried the weight of sin, paid the full penalty and rose again. He is more to us than a baby. He is our living ascended Lord and we invite you today to trust to place your faith in the scriptures who point us to the one who can redeem alone.
This virgin born fully man, fully God, Savior. Well I hope that this reminder that salvation lies in Jesus Christ alone has blessed you on this Christmas day. This is Wisdom for the Heart and we're the Bible teaching ministry of Stephen Davey. I'm Scott Wiley and on behalf of Stephen and the entire Wisdom team, I wish you a Merry Christmas.
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