Tuesday, June 24, 2014

College Study #78: "Very God of Very God"




‘Behold, the Lamb of God’

ide o amnos tou theou

College Study

78th teaching

6.16.2014

 

“Very God of Very God”

 

          Review:

                    Alright so tonight is a continuation of our thoughts from last week’s study. We finished the first section of Christology, called “the Identity of Christ”. What is the second part of Christology, which we’ve just moved into, called? What was our topic last week? What are the two approaches to Christology? What is Christology from above? What is Christology from Below? What passage did we read for our group exercise last week? Do you remember any references to the Deity of Christ you may have discovered in that chapter?

          End of Review

 

          Last week we considered John 1, the apostle John’s prologue or introduction to his gospel, and all the various direct and indirect references to the deity of Christ there. This week, turn to another prologue: Hebrews 1. We’ll pick up our topic from last time by considering the introduction to another great book, and the other angle by which this writer comes at the deity of Christ.

          1:1-2, Remember that we had read last time in John1:3, “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made” speaking of the Word that became flesh, Jesus Christ. Here, the writer of Hebrews expresses the same thought, that God made the worlds through the Son. Jesus was the agent through which the worlds were made.

          1:3, I just love the imagery of this verse.

          There are two thoughts here that point to the deity of Christ. Firstly, that He is the “brightness of His glory”. Secondly, that He is the “express image of His person”. Those are great word pictures to illustrate the relationship of Jesus to the Father.

          The brightness of His glory; the word brightness there can mean radiance, brilliance, literally “off-flashing” as some translate it from the Greek. It is a verb that means to beam forth, to radiate, to shine. Think in terms of the relationship between the actual Sun and sunlight. They’re different (the Sun is not the same thing as sunlight, and sunlight is not the same as the Sun) and yet they’re inseparable. The Sun is the source of the sunlight and the sunlight is merely the shining forth, the beaming, the radiating, the “off-flashing” of the sun.

          So too with Jesus and the Father. Again we’re reminded of John’s prologue: “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it… That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known.”

          With your naked eye, there’s some difficulty in perceiving the actual Sun, looking directly at the Sun itself, just as God the Father is unseen. But sunlight is different. Sunlight is something we perceive and it radiates from the Sun and makes the Sun known. On a bright, hot day, you know that the Sun is out.

          And with Jesus and the Father, Christ radiates the unseen glory of God, like sunlight from its source. He is the brightness of His glory.

          He is also the express image of His person. Other translations say “the exact imprint of His nature” or “exact representation [or likeness] of His being”. God in His invisible essence, again, cannot be seen. But one of the many precious things about Jesus Christ is that He does what no other person on earth could ever do: reveal the nature, the invisible substance, the unseen person of God in heaven.

          Colossians 1:15, Paul agrees and writes: “He [Jesus] is the image of the invisible God…”

          The word used in Greek is character, from which we obviously get our English character, is the word for the phrase express image. It meant an engraving, a stamped figure or copy. The clearest idea in ancient Greek culture would be the magnificent sculptures they produced: likenesses, representations or charakters of other people, copies of flesh in stone.

          Thus for Jesus, He is the express image of God, a visible copy of what is invisible, the likeness of the unseen substance that is God’s nature. He is a kind of visible sculpture in flesh of the great unseen Spirit of God. He is also the radiance of His glory. Both these phrases express the idea that Jesus is a representation and revealer of the Father to mankind in a way that we can perceive and understand Him.

          1:4-5, you understand that the writer of Hebrews is contrasting angels and Jesus. Apparently, there were some in the early church who had perhaps confused the nature of Jesus with the nature of angels. Perhaps they considered that Jesus was no more than an angel Himself, and not God at all. But the writer’s purpose now is to show the difference between the One that God calls His Son and the angelic beings.

          Which of the angels God ever called His Son?

          1:6-7, angels were instructed by God to worship the Son, whereas angels themselves did not accept worship but they were ministers or servants of fire.

          As a small side note, this is another reason why this is one of my favorite passages, because it shuts down the whole fat baby cherub-faced image for angels. It says rather that angelic beings are made a flame of fire. Elsewhere in Scripture, angels are depicted not as cuddly toddlers but as fearsome warriors with faces like lightning. I just think that’s awesome.

          We know so little about angelic life, but what the Bible does reveal about them is far removed from the fairy tale imagery we’re familiar with.

          1:8-9, this is a quote from Psalm 45 and it’s a rare glimpse of God talking to God, that is, the Father talking to the Son. Notice that God calls the Son “God”.

          1:10-14.

          As we’re still talking about the deity of Christ, tonight’s study is entitled: “Very God of Very God”.

          That’s a quote from one of the oldest creeds, or statements of faith, in Christianity: the Nicene Creed, the statement formed at the Council of Nicea seventeen-hundred years ago to combat the growing heresy of Arius which denied the deity of Christ.

          It reads: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God…” The emphasis of the phrase is upon the deity of Christ and His equality of substance, co-substantial with the Father, and equal with the Father.

          Even older than the Nicene Creed, this is exactly how Jesus’ original audience interpreted the words of Christ to them. John 10:33, the Jews, about to stone Jesus, said: “For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy, and because You, being a Man, make Yourself God.” Though He did not say “very God of very God”, that’s how they interpreted Christ’s words: as a claim to be equal with the Father’s deity, co-substantial, co-eternal, co-equal, one in essence, sharing the same nature. For Jesus said to them: “I and My Father are one.”

          So here are our points from last time:

1.   What is Christology from Above?

2.   Discovering the Deity of Christ

          And that was where we left off. Tonight we’ll finish off by addressing:

3.   The Claims of Christ

4.   The Attributes of God

5.   The Deity of Self

          3. The Claims of Christ

          I think all of us realize how frustrating it is to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s even more frustrating if you’re arguing with someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, someone who is pretending, consciously or unconsciously, to know what it is they’re talking about. We’ve all met people who are un-researched experts in topics they know nothing about. And there’s few topics that somehow attract such false-experts as the Bible. People pretend to know all kinds of things about the Bible. People talk like they’re experts of the Bible, as if they’ve read it backwards and forwards thousands of times, as if the claims they’re making are obvious and common-knowledge, even though it is pretty clear they’ve hardly even read it at all.

          So what you hear from the “experts” is the common declaration that people often give: “Jesus never claimed to be God.” Have you ever heard someone say that?

          They’re saying, essentially, “How can you believe Jesus is God? That’s not even in the Bible. Don’t you know that Jesus never once claimed to be God? Jesus didn’t consider Himself to be God. That’s something the Christians made up, but it’s not in the Bible.” Man, catch those people on their ignorance. You can’t go around making truth-claims that are so easily falsifiable and proven wrong. Tonight I hope we can see how easy it is to show that Jesus did indeed claim to be God.

          We already saw one such reference. Christ said “I and My Father are One.” The Jews immediately interpreted that not as “oh, He’s claiming to be a really nice guy” or “oh, He’s claiming to be a moral teacher”. No, they interpreted His claim literally as “Oh! You’re saying that you are equal to God!”

          So while Jesus never put these three words together: “I Am God”… we have to realize that that’s not the only way to make such a claim. Anyone who reads the gospels will recognize that Jesus never talked in such a blatant way. He spoke with subtlety and profundity. He never said “I am your King. Come and worship me.” Rather He spoke in parables, stories, and often made implicit claims so that those who were listening, and not merely hearing, would realize what He was saying.

          Jesus did claim to be God several times, enough times for His public to condemn Him for blasphemy, enough times to rouse the suspicions and wrath of the religious authorities, enough times to cause His disciples to rethink their assessment of Him and launch a fateful mission to convert the world which eventually resulted most of their deaths.

          Clearly, Jesus would have had less impact had He never claimed to be God. But it was this claim which places Him right at the center of history, controversy and at the heart of the world’s largest and most historically influential religion. The footprint that Jesus left upon this earth is so dramatic and effective simply because He claimed and demonstrated Himself to be God.

          So let’s examine a couple of these claims. And guys, commit one or two of them to memory. You can easily remember that Jesus said “I and my Father are One”, and it takes a few seconds to look up the reference online through any device you might own. The information age has made it super-easy to look up what exactly the Bible says.

          Let’s take that claim as Claim #1: “I and My Father are One”. That’s found in John 10:30.

          Claim #2: “Son of Man”

          One of Christ’s favorite titles for Himself was “Son of Man”. He referred to Himself many times as the Son of Man. Certainly He was also called the Son of God, and we might interpret these titles at face value as “Son of Man” referring to His humanity and His title “Son of God” as referring to His deity. And that’s true.

          However these titles aren’t strictly for referencing humanity and for deity. For example, Luke 3:38 identifies Adam as “the son of God”. Adam wasn’t God, but the first human creation of God, a “son” then in a metaphoric sense of a father bringing a son into the world. John 1:12 says “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become sons [or better children] of God.” But the way in which Adam was the son of God, and the way in which Christians are the adopted sons and daughters of God, is fundamentally different than the way Jesus is referenced as “the Son of God”, since He is the only begotten Son, the only Son of God who shares in the same nature of God, the co-substantial Son of God. There’s greater depth, then, to the title “Son of God”, which definitely points to Christ’s Deity, but isn’t strictly a term used for deities, since it’s used of Adam and of believers.

          But then there’s also the title “Son of Man”, Jesus’ favorite title that He called Himself by most often. At first glance, it seems merely as if He’s referencing the fact that He’s human. And that is true enough. Jesus is both God and Man, both divine and human, both deity and humanity. Two natures, one person is the theological expression.

          “Son of Man” though, takes us back to a scene in Daniel 7. In that chapter, the prophet has a vision of heaven, where the Ancient of Days, a title for God, is sitting on a throne of judgment, being served by thousands and thousands. But a character appears in Daniel’s vision which the prophet describes as “One like the Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven!” to whom dominion and glory and an everlasting kingdom would be given.

          Many commentators and Bible students believe that this is the reference that Jesus is taking us back to whenever He calls Himself the “Son of Man”, this mysterious, Messianic figure out of Daniel 7 who appears in heaven and who receives dominion, glory and an everlasting kingdom.

          Jesus in fact links His self-adopted title “Son of Man” to acts reserved for no ordinary man. Daniel said “One like the Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven” and Jesus said of Himself “…And they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (Matthew 24:30), He said of Himself when asked “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Living God?” He answered: “I am, and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62). Same idea as the figure in Daniel’s vision.

          So we find that “Son of Man”, far from being a mere expression of humanity only, also harkens back to a messianic title used by the prophet Daniel, which Jesus applied to Himself, using the same imagery of coming in the clouds. The title “Son of Man” links Jesus to the heavenly figure in Daniel’s vision, the agent of God’s rule on earth. It’s a title that in many ways points to Jesus’ deity.

          Claim #3: “I AM”

          Turn to John 8:31-59. Jesus is in an argument with the Jews and during the back and forth, they come to the topic of lineage, who who’s father was and so on. The Jews accuse Jesus of being an illegitimate child, a nasty rumor that probably circulated from His miraculous virgin birth. People were probably saying “Virgin birth? Yeah, tell me another one.” But rather than answering the accusation, Jesus says that their father was not Abraham, otherwise they would do as Abraham did: believe and be accounted righteous. Rather they were doing what their father, the devil, the father of lies, was doing: obscuring the truth, deceiving themselves and others, and refusing to believe.

          But at the end of the argument, they think they’ve got him. “You’ve got to be crazy! You must be demon-possessed! You’re saying, Jesus of Nazareth, you carpenter’s son, that Abraham, who has been dead for centuries, saw your day and was glad? How have you seen Abraham?”

          And Jesus responds: “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.” Not “I was”. Not “I was around before Abraham”. But “before Abraham was, I AM”. What a peculiar way to speak to someone! What a strange thing to say! Did Jesus have a momentary lapse of grammar? No! And the Jews knew it. In fact, they knew exactly what He was referencing, since they were going to kill Him immediately for saying what He said.

          You probably remember back in the book of Exodus when Moses was talking to the LORD, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Israel’s covenant God, there at the burning bush and Moses asks for God’s name. Exodus 3:13-14 reads: “ Then Moses said to God, ‘Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘the God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they say to me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?’ And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.’ And He said, ‘Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you’.

          Deeply ingrained in the Jewish faith was this name of God, represented by the words I AM. This was God’s name, four-letters in the original language, known as the tetragrammaton: YHWH, the vowel-less, un-pronounceable, forbidden name of God. The Jews never spoke it but substituted the word Lord for it in the Scriptures. Sometimes it has been rendered as Yahweh or Yahveh, sometimes as Jehovah God. The name of God basically comes from a verb that means “to be, to exist”, thus it is translated as “I AM”.

          Back to Jesus. In Him saying “before Abraham was, I AM,” He’s adopted and applying this very ancient name of God from Exodus to Himself! Clearly, that’s a claim to be the same as God. If I were to claim somebody else’s name as my own, you’d recognize that I’m claiming to be that person. Identity theft! But for Jesus, this wasn’t identity theft, this was simply revealing His actual identity, and it is a claim to be the same as the God of Israel.

          *There’s a few solid references to Jesus claiming to be God. He said “I and my Father are One”. He adopted the messianic and heavenly title “Son of Man”. And He applied to Himself the name of the God of Israel “I AM”.

          Christian apologist Josh McDowell wrote: “Buddha did not claim to be God; Moses never said that he was Yahweh; Mohammed did not identify himself as Allah; and nowhere will you find Zoroaster claiming to be Ahura Mazda. Yet Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth, said that he who has seen Him has seen the Father.”

          If someone wants to claim that Jesus never claimed to be God, they can say that, but they’ll say it mistakenly. And you needn’t sit down for such nonsense. Anyone who says Jesus never made such claims is a person who has clearly never read and inspected the Bible for themselves. Jesus made such claims, the most audacious claim that any man could ever make “He who has seen me has seen the Father”.

          4. The Attributes of God

          Colossians 2:9 says of Christ: “For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily…” All the fullness of deity, of God’s nature, dwells in Christ. That means we should expect Christ to act and speak like God acts and speaks, in fact to possess the same characteristics or attributes as God Himself possesses.

          What a benefit that we’ve recently concluded a study of God’s attributes! Now we remember that there were a few ways to categorize God’s list of attributes. How might we categorize them?

          We can list them as metaphysical attributes, moral attributes and non-moral attributes. Or we can list them as communicable and non-communicable attributes, that is: qualities of God which He can communicate to or share with humans, and qualities which He cannot communicate to or share with humans. Some examples of communicable attributes would be love, jealousy, wrath, mercy, grace, holiness; these are qualities which human beings made in the image of God can share with God. But some examples of non-communicable attributes are timelessness, invisibility, light, omniscience and so on. These are attributes that we in our fallen humanity cannot share with God.

          Jesus demonstrated love and wrath, mercy and grace, jealousy when He cleansed His Father’s House of thieves. But these are moral and communicable attributes found in regular humans, although in Jesus in a perfect state. Thus especially if we find non-communicable attributes of God in Jesus, attributes which no human being shares with God, then that’s strong implication to the deity of Christ.

          Now, I know we’re all a bit out of the habit, but did anyone find any verses for Project Scriptura? You were supposed to find one verse that showed Jesus demonstrating an attribute of God.

         

         

          Here is a list of a few others:

          Omniscience. Jesus demonstrated a paradox of both an absence of knowledge and learning in His humanity, but also He demonstrated perfect, supernatural knowledge in His deity, knowledge of events that He was not physically present for, things He could not have known or seen except supernaturally. So in His humanity, He learned and grew in wisdom (Luke 2:52), but as we saw that last week in John 1:48, Jesus says He saw Nathanael under the fig tree before Philip called him to come and see Christ. Jesus demonstrated omniscience by knowing the thoughts of His audience: “But Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, ‘Why do you think evil in your hearts?” (Matthew 9:4).

          Omnipresence. John 3:13 is a great passage that shows Jesus’ omnipresence. It reads: “And no man has ascended up to heaven, but He that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man who is in heaven.” Not who was in heaven, but who is in heaven, even while He was on earth talking to people. Jesus was at that moment both present in heaven and on earth. Wrap your mind around that.

          Light. One of God’s metaphysical attributes is that God is light, supernatural luminescence, intrinsic glory. Remember when Jesus went up to the Mount of Transfiguration? In Matthew 17, Jesus’ appearance on the mountain was changed before the three disciples He brought with Him: “His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light.” Aside from smoke and mirrors, I can’t do that. Neither can you. As human beings, we aren’t light. But God is. So is Jesus. And the light was seen in that moment when it shone through the veil of His flesh.

          Eternality or timelessness. We saw that when Jesus said “before Abraham was, I AM” taking on a name that expresses pure existence, pure actuality without any change as an eternal and timeless being.

          Impassibility. Jesus expressed unchanging emotions that were always angry toward sin and always glad towards good. Jesus was never angry with the repentant sinners, but He always opposed the proud.

          Immaterial. More apparent after His resurrection, Jesus appears to His disciples twice in John 20, specifically when the doors of the room they were in were shut. Yet He appeared before them.

          Sovereignty. Jesus said in Matthew 25:31, “When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory.”  John 5:22, “For the Father judges no man, but has committed all judgment to the Son.” Jesus clearly believed that He would exercise sovereignty in judgment over the earth at the end of the age.

          *You could spend a whole lot of time re-reading the gospels and looking specifically for the attributes of God in Jesus. It’d be interesting to try to find each one. But we’ll have to content ourselves with these references for now.

          5. The Deity of Self

          We’ve recently discussed how the Christian life involves a process of becoming more like Christ. But it seems like the more we learn about Him, the greater our realization of the immeasurable gap, the vast chasm between us and Him. And nowhere is that clearer than when we come to talk about His deity. He is God, literally, in-the-flesh. He is humanity perfected in union with the nature of the Father. Whereas we are mere flesh and bones, battling with our carnal desires, He is the embodiment of glorious perfection and deity in human-form.

          But while we know and see this thing that separates us from Him, classifies us far below Him, that doesn’t stop our flesh from its own aspirations. See, basically we all want to be little gods and goddesses. We all want a piece of the divine pie. In some cults, that’s the primary draw: that you can become like God and create your own worlds and so on. For Satan, that too was the main lust that drove him, to be like the Most High God.

          And for the little fleshly tyrants that we have been since we were babies, we want the universe to revolve around us. We want to cry and have our desires sated. We want to command it and have it done for us. The flesh in us would have us seated on a throne and ruling over the rest. Is that not exactly what little babies demonstrate when they don’t get their way? They become fussy, tyrannical monsters.

          We realize that our inherent selfishness is the greatest foe of Christ’s deity, the anti-doctrine to His divinity. For while we talk of His divinity, our flesh within us wants to be worshiped like it was divine, wants to have its desires met, its lusts satisfied, its commands obeyed. We have to watch out for this.

          God isn’t building a pantheon. He’s building a church. God isn’t setting up idols. He’s raising up servants. Ooooh! How my flesh hates that word! It would sooner have all humanity serve me than put myself in the service of others. But, guys, this is where the rubber meets the road.

          There are two Gods in your life. One with a capital G. And the other with a small g. Try to guess which of the two you are. I’ll tell you, you’re not the capital G, although your flesh would back you up in an instant if you wanted to believe that you were God.

          But we, Christians, can no longer worship ourselves. We can no longer bow before the Deity of Self, not when the One True God stands before us in all His glory, sees our hearts, perceives our thoughts, and earns our love through His love for us. So how can I motivate you?

          That’s something I’ve been thinking about recently: How can I motivate you to serve the Lord? How can I motivate you to tear down the altar the flesh sets up to itself? What can I say to you? What kind of eloquence will it take? I ask myself what kind of words will it take to help? What do I need to demonstrate in order to get you into the playing field?

          Friends, there are needs everywhere. And I can’t coerce you. I can’t force you. I don’t even want to guilt trip you into service. That’s not how God Himself does things, I believe. God rather asks for our affection and service because He first loved us and came to be the Servant of all. But what can I do to meet the vision that we shared with you at the start of this year?

          In January, our vision was for this college group to come alongside our church, to support it, to serve in it, to be the flame that ignites the whole of it. I would see everyone here placed into the service of the Lord, demonstrating His Lordship by our service to Him, in some capacity or another. I’m not going to dictate what capacity to you, nor again coerce you or guilt-trip you into service. I would rather plead to you that this life is the only chance you’ve got to do what God would call you to do with it, and in some decades, a mere handful, it will be over, and  as the late Chuck Smith said: “Only what’s done for Christ will last”.

          Just step out and do it, man! “Where?” I don’t know. But think about it. Pray about it. There are needs in children’s ministry, as ushers, in the sound booth, everywhere. Team of Christians, let’s stop warming the bench and get in the game. I won’t say it’s the most glamorous or exciting thing. Sometimes ministry has been a tedious experience to me. But we can’t let that keep us away from it, just because our own feelings toward it fluctuate. We’re got a calling to fulfill.

          Let me conclude with this. I hope you take inspiration from it. One of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had in recent memory was A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. It was such a beautiful book and it moved me with its conclusion. At the end of the story, Sydney Carton takes the place of Charles Darnay, a man condemned for treason and is headed for La Guillotine to be executed. In one of the greatest speeches in fiction, Dickens gives you an insight into Mr. Carton’s final thoughts on the way to his death:

          “I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.

          “I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years’ time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward.

          “I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honored and held sacred in the other’s soul, than I was in the souls of both.

          “I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honored men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place—then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement—and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.

          I think the gist of these words filled the mind of Christ in some way as He too marched to His own unjust death in substitution for others: “I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy”. So great a love ought to inspire us to love. Let us honor the name of Christ. Let us make His name illustrious, as He Himself said “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”
 
 

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