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October 31, 2004
Jesus, Only Son of God
Jesus, Only Son of God
Daniel 7: 9-14 / Matthew 3: 13-17
NT: Matthew 3: 13-17
October 31st, 2004
Today is Reformation Sunday. Reformation Sunday doesn’t celebrate an event in Jesus’ life. It remembers a reform within a movement that began with Jesus and grew in ways beyond the wildest imagination of the Apostle Paul.
The Church began as what is often referred to as “a Galilean affair.” It was a few men who left everything to literally walk with Jesus along the dusty roads of Palestine toward a goal they didn’t understand. Then Jesus was crucified. Three days later as they were numbly contemplating their loss Jesus came back to life. They realized that God had introduced something different and new to life. It did not end with death. Furthermore, God dealt with the fundamental flaw in humanity, sin. How? He provided a way to be forgiven, through trust in this Jesus who died and came alive again.
Fifty days after Jesus was crucified something happened in Jerusalem that catapulted this Good News worldwide. This took place at the Jewish feast of Pentecost. Word about the purpose of Jesus’ death and resurrection infiltrated many sectors of the known world as devout Jews in Jerusalem heard the Gospel, believed it, were baptized, and took the word back home when the Pentecost celebration was over.
The long story of this thing Jesus began is mind-boggling. It got involved with the Roman government in the fourth century after a Roman emperor became a Christian. It grew into a culture transforming movement, but in the process culture transformed the Christian faith as well. Wealth and power came to the Church, and its best-known struggles during the heart of the Middle Ages were with kings over the question, “who’s the boss.” The simple Gospel got lost.
On Reformation Sunday we remember the recovery of the great truth that became lost in the shuffle of Church history. We are approved by God only because of His grace displayed to us in Jesus Christ. Grace is favor God gives without regard to the merit of those who receive it.
This morning I ask you to think with me about this Jesus who brought this grace to us. He is the focus of the Gospel, the Good News of God’s grace. The Scriptures teach us this Jesus Christ was both Son of God and son of man.
I suspect not many of us have thought about the implications of how God poured out this favor through Someone who was both Son of God and son of man. Perhaps it’s not necessary to think about it. What’s important is simply that it is true. I heard on the radio this past week that the Red Sox out-fielder whose home runs were a great factor in their World Series success said that they played better when they didn’t think about it. They just played the game. Perhaps we would do better not to think too much about the mysteries of our faith, about how God did things, and just live it.
But when we read the Bible we see things written there that we do think about, and should think about. Otherwise, why were they written? The Bible tells us Jesus was Son of God and son of man.
The Nicene Creed affirms that the one Lord, Jesus Christ was the only-begotten Son of God. The version of the Creed in our Hymn Book reads, “only Son of God.” But the Greek in which it was first written says monogenes, “only born;” not just “only.” And the Latin into which it was first translated says unigenitus, “Only born,” rather than simply “only” (unicus).
This was to distinguish between Jesus Christ as Son of God and what the Old Testament refers to in a few places as sons of God. In Genesis 6 and Job 2, and elsewhere, we read the term “sons of God,” bene elohim. But none of these sons of God were born. They were angelic beings God created; none of them were born. I don’t know how angels multiply, or even if they do. The Creed refers to One who was uniquely Son of God, capital S, who also was born to a human mother.
When we say Son of God we refer to Jesus’ identity as God, as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. When we say “son of man,” we affirm that He was really a flesh and blood human being—just the same as you and me.
I want to speak of these two titles, Son of God and son of man, in a way I hope you find of use not only in understanding your faith, but also in living your faith. Christianity is essentially a life to be lived.
Perhaps you have seen the recent CNN broadcast on Christianity in America. Conservative Evangelical Christianity, that largely holds to the heritage given to us by Jesus’ apostles and the earliest Christians, has become a massive cultural force in our country. The great ideas at the heart of Evangelical Christianity are the truths I believe. But I feel a sense of dread when great truths are popularized and merge with a cultural movement. The influence passes both ways, from culture to faith, and from faith to culture. If you and I want to live out the kind of life that responds to the grace of God we must stop and think about what’s going on around us.
Jesus warned about a broad way that leads to destruction. He didn’t thereby blow a cloud of suspicion over all popular movements that draw masses of people. Indeed, He invited a lot of people to Himself when He said, “Come to me ALL you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” But He also informed us that this business of coming to Him requires walking after Him carrying something heavy and cross-shaped on our back. You have a cross to carry, and so do I. Those who are caught up in movements must still face themselves in the quiet moments and ask themselves, “am I walking, carrying my cross behind Jesus or just following the crowd that says ‘Jesus’ a lot?”
“Jesus walked this lonesome valley. He had to walk it by Himself. Nobody else could walk it form Him. He had to walk it by Himself.” And you and I need to be aware that it is a lonesome valley for us too when we really walk the Jesus way.
When we think of Jesus as son of man we see One like ourselves. Son of man was an apocalyptic title used, as we shall see, in the Old Testament. Apocalyptic terms referred to times yet to come when mysterious purposes of God would burst on the world. Often they referred to what the seers and prophets believed were the end times, when the world as we know it would be destroyed. But the prophets who used the term “son of man,” specifically had in mind a real person and not some angelic being as the term “sons of God” suggested.
We read from the prophet Daniel this mysterious vision that ends with the coming of “one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.”
This comes after a mysterious description of a little horn that came up from the midst of ten horns on a fearful beast. As you may suppose, very different spins are put on this little horn. This little horn had eyes like the eyes of a man and a mouth speaking great things. Some early Protestant Christians who were hostile to the Catholic Church thought it referred to the Catholic Church. I think it may refer to a Greek king in the second century before Christ that tried to destroy the Jews. His name was Antiochus Epiphanes. He thought he was an appearance of God, which is what “Epiphanes” means. This little horn comes up from the midst of ten horns on the fearful beast that tried to stamp out the people and the family line into which God’s promised Messiah would be born.
The vision moves from topic to topic quickly, but then introduces us to “one that was ancient of days [whose] raiment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool . . . a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him . . . and the books were opened.”
We read of one “like a son of man [coming] to the Ancient of Days [to whom was given] dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him . . . an everlasting kingdom which shall not pass away.”
How similar this picture is to the picture John describes in the first chapter of the Book of Revelation. He heard a voice behind him, a loud voice like a trumpet. When he turned to see the source of the voice he saw seven gold lamp-stands—that stood for seven churches in Asia Minor. In the midst of these lamp-stands he saw “one like a son of man . . . his head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow, his eyes were like a flame of fire.” And we know that John is seeing a vision of Jesus Christ in an exalted state because this son of man says to him, “I died, and behold I am alive for ever more.”
These two mysterious visions connect directly with what we read of Jesus when He was baptized by His cousin John, just before beginning the three years of work before His suffering and death. A voice boomed loud from the heavens as Jesus emerged from the water, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Jesus spoke of Himself when He said, “the foxes have dens and the birds of the air have nests but the Son of man has nowhere to lay His head.”
The grand purposes of God come together from three angles. First, there is the foretelling of a son of man, a unique human being to come, by an Old Testament prophet. Second, there is the event when God the Father speaks of this unique One, who called Himself, “son of man,” saying, “This is my beloved Son.” Third, there is the vision by the Apostle John when he sees the heavenly image of this beloved Son receiving the worship described in the Book of Daniel.
When the Creed leads us to see that the One Lord, Jesus Christ was God’s only Son, it points us to see this connection between the prophet’s vision of the “son of man” and the man of whom the voice said, “This is my beloved son,” and then this glorious and exalted Being who stands up from the midst of the seven churches.
Why did the early Church leaders describe Jesus as “the only-begotten Son of God?” In coming weeks we’ll see how they described Jesus in even more precise detail. But here they referred to His being born because there were some Christian teachers who said Jesus only seemed to be a man. They represented a distinct strain in early Christian thinking about Jesus. One fellow taught that Jesus came through the Virgin Mary as water comes through a pipe, without being affected by His mother’s nature at all (Tatian). Another man proposed that Jesus was plunked down on earth as a man at the time of His baptism, and wasn’t even born at all (Marcion).
In fact, the tendency among devout Christians is to minimize the man-ness of Jesus and accentuate His God-ness. We feel irreverent in thinking too much about Jesus as a man. We scarcely dare thinking of how fully Jesus knew the limitations we have as people. Could He really be tempted to sin? Did He know as little about the future as we do? In Paul’s letter to the Philippians we read, “He emptied Himself.” Emptied Himself of what, we wonder? And it’s healthy to wonder these things. Undoubtedly we’re often wrong in our ideas, but we do no wrong to try to understand things the Bible doesn’t explain.
But we are to understand that despite what we can’t understand, we are to know for sure that the Jesus Christ our Lord was born to a human mother just as we all were. And so He can understand fully the joys and sorrows of life that pull and tug at us.
But there was an even greater reason why Jesus was born as we are. Jesus, who was fully human, but never sinned, was able to give us the remarkable gift of taking on Himself the complete sum of all our sin because He was a man.
If each of us owed the bank a debt way beyond what we could pay and someone came along and signed his name to our debt, so that we were debt-free, we would appreciate that person, don’t you think? This Jesus did for us.
If the Son of God had not become man, He would have had a category problem in caring for the debt-load of sin. It took a person to take on Himself the sins of people. Presumably an angel could absorb the sins of angels. But it took a human being to do this for us human beings. Jesus, who freely chose never to sin, lovingly chose to accept the blame for the sins we freely choose to commit. This is the benefit to us of Jesus being “son of man.” He could absorb our debt.
But He was also Son of God, which means that we see how fully committed God was to this plan to rescue our troubled world. We think of God as transcendent, as standing apart from this world, even though we feel His influence within it. But the Gospel teaches us that God did not stand aloof, but entered human history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
When you and I look up at a night sky and realize that our planet is a very tiny spot in our solar system, and that there is so much vastness beyond, it can seem ridiculous to think the Creator of all this was interested in such a tiny thing as our planet. But this is just what we do believe. And believing this, rather than moving us to pride at our importance, moves us to gratitude. This moves me to want to live deliberately and thankfully, trying to follow the ways of the son of man, who was the Son of God.
I can relate to Jesus as a fellow human being. Jesus’ life is worthy of the closest inspection. He lived as it is best and wisest to live. But He is more than an example—I could never emulate fully. In accepting the blame for my sin and yours, He gave us a gift that only God could give, free and complete forgiveness of our sin. And with this forgiveness God gives us hope. And where there’s hope, there’s life.
This is why it is useful to realize that this Jesus about whom we hear so much was born as we were. And that He was Deity as well as humanity. Why all this? Because we are precious to God. I hope you have responded to this great love of God, and thankfully trusted in Jesus as your Savior and Lord—and then deliberately set out on the life-long business of patterning your life after the life of Jesus.
Let us pray: O Lord, our God, thank You for Jesus Christ, Your only begotten Son, whom we thankfully trust, and desire to follow in the way we live. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at October 31, 2004 09:30 AM