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November 21, 2004
Jesus Christ—True God from True God
Jesus Christ—True God from True God
Psalm 103: 1-6 / Psalm 86: 1-10/ Acts 17: 22-32
November 21st, 2004
I think some of you who patiently listen to my preaching these days may wonder why I keep on with the Nicene Creed, a very old statement of faith, when the world is in such turmoil. My own conscience tells me I should be explaining how to trust God in spite of all the problems.
Perhaps you are thinking, as you sit out there so patiently week after week, “Give me an idea of how to think when a selfless relief worker who gave twenty years of her life to helping people in Iraq is shot in the head in a cold-blooded act of murder. Explain to me how God is good when nineteen-year-old daughters and sons from our country are being killed in Iraq.” Visions of what’s happening in the Sudan, the violence, the poverty, make you numb. “Remind me of the goodness of God with good illustrations, images that will stand up against the terrible things I’m seeing on the TV news.”
For some reason I’ve found myself drawn to things people were writing back during the days of the First World War. It was one of the cruelest, most senseless wars. Barbara Tuchman proposed that World War I was a result of what she called fin de siecle, an end of the century sickness. The world fell apart at the seams when the nineteenth century passed and the twentieth century arrived. The cruelest icon of this falling apart at the seams was when millions of young men charged at each other in brave nineteenth-century warfare, only to be mown down like grass by twentieth-century machine gun bullets.
I look around me today and often feel the world is falling apart at the seams, too. Even that wonderful diversion of sports is demeaned with violence. Self-control is hostage to unfettered self-expression in the arenas that seem to hold our country in thrall—sports, money, and sex.
Maybe it’s the arrival of the twenty-first century that is to blame. Not only the world, but also the Church is falling apart. The cover story of the most recent issue of Commonweal, a thoughtful Roman Catholic journal, addressed the question whether the Catholic Church could survive the sexual scandals that have cost it far more than the money to pay lawsuits. Trust is evaporating from devout Roman Catholic people.
People are fleeing our denomination that preserves a rich heritage, like rats from a sinking ship. The PCUSA has such a rich history that I refuse to give up on it.
The word “relevant” has replaced “obedience” in our idea of worship. New denominations and independent churches with powerful personalities in the pulpit are springing up. People are flocking to these churches hoping to hear a word from God, having given up on the traditional denominations that faithfully handed down the Gospel for centuries. Good theology is leaking out of the mainline denominations in many places.
But the divorce rate in the Bible belt is the highest in our country even where this new fashion of worship thrives. You’d think that where the Bible is preached most fervently Christian life would reach its peak. Not so. More than 75% of the sexual immorality charges among pastors come from churches most conservative in theology. What bothers me the most is that the most vocal followers of the Prince of Peace are not the most avid in longing for peace.
In days such as this, when the heart is really weary, I find my thoughts burrowing down deeply into the bedrock of our faith. What I really need to hear is a reminder of the Great Truth. “Jesus Christ the same, yesterday, today and forever.” I find the words of a great old hymn going through my mind, “My faith has found a resting place not in device nor creed. I trust the ever-living One, His wounds for me shall plead.”
In times like these, to focus again on the Nicene Creed is to be reminded of what is most basic to our faith. Who was this “ever-living One” whose wounds on the cross are the basis for our hope?
The second part of this ancient statement of faith addresses that question. Our forebears in the faith wrote, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-born Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” It seems an over-statement. Wasn’t it enough to say of Jesus Christ that He was God made flesh, as the Gospel of John tells us? Why not just quote the Gospel’s statements about Jesus and leave it at that?
Detailed statements like these that seem over-kill, respond to drifts of thinking that watered down or changed the Gospel’s simple statements about Jesus. Heresy, a word that today conjures up images of raving fanatics pointing fingers at those who disagree with them, once referred to ideas that undercut the very foundation of Christian identity. If thoughtful people had accepted with awe and reverence the words the Gospels use to describe Jesus, we all would have had a heritage of wonder, of speechless wonder as we thought of “the glory of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” How do you go about defining “glory?” How can anyone define the content of God’s grace and truth impersonated in Jesus?
There were two kinds of thinking about Jesus Christ that, if they had prevailed would have stripped the heart out of the Christian faith. There were those who said Jesus wasn’t really a man, but only seemed to be a man. Then there were those who said Jesus was only a man, an extraordinary man to be sure, but just a man. The Christian faith hinges on the trust that Jesus was both God and man.
Briefly put, this conviction comes from reading in the Gospels that Jesus really was a human being—He was born as we all are. He ate food. He wept when He was sad. He had flesh that bled when He was beaten and crucified at the end.
It was also clear that the Gospels taught unmistakably that Jesus was God. He wasn’t just “divine,” that is, a person inspired as the prophets were. When Peter said to Jesus, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus became very excited because He realized that at least for a moment, someone in this pivotal little group of people who were so important to human destiny really understood who He was.
“Son of God” was a new idea relating Jesus Christ to God the Father generically. Father and Son were in the same category of Being, different from anyone else who could say, with reverence, “God is my heavenly Father.”
Jesus said of Himself, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” “The Father” was the way the Jewish people knew to refer to God. The Creator of heaven and earth was personal to them. He was “our Father in heaven.” Either Jesus was a lunatic with hallucinations, or He was telling the most basic information about Himself.
When those who knew Jesus best watched Him closely, echoes from their Bible, the Old Testament came strangely to mind. I wonder who read the 86th Psalm, that we read this morning, and found themselves thinking, “That sure describes Jesus?” They read, “Thou, O Lord, art good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call on thee.” As they watched Jesus tenderly forgive the woman accused by self-righteous men of adultery, did they realize that here was on exhibit the love of God, good and forgiving to this woman who lay in the dust before Him, waiting to be stoned by her accusers? “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more,” Jesus said.
As the disciples were packed in the room where Jesus was teaching in Capernaum, and saw a man lowered on a stretcher through the ceiling, debris falling over them, they heard Jesus say to the paralyzed man on the stretcher, “I forgive your sins.” And they too wondered, “Who besides God can forgive sins?” But they had never seen a God, a real God before. You can’t see God, after all. The words of the Psalm echoed in their minds, “There is none like thee among the gods, O Lord, nor are there any works like thine . . . For thou art great and doest wondrous things, thou alone art God.”
And so the followers of Jesus slowly came to see that this Jesus of Nazareth, though a man, was no mere man. Something new walked with them, ate with them, slept next to them, laughed and cried with them. This something new was God in human form. He was no less God for being man, no less man for being God. Only God could do what He did. To think of Him as anything less than God just didn’t fit. To think of Him as not really a man didn’t fit either.
At the Council of Nicea in AD 325, the thoughtful men who gathered from many places in the Roman empire faced the challenge of a very persuasive man from Alexandria, Egypt, who was convincing people of what seemed more naturally plausible about Jesus, that He was just a man, however remarkable a man he might be. This is the view of much popular theology today. It doesn’t work. Christianity is not Christianity if Jesus was just another great human being.
Each of these phrases that seem to go beyond necessity in making the point about the identity of Jesus Christ, answers a particular challenge to His identity as both God and man.
“God from God” answers the challenge that the God Jesus was, came from some curious thoughts about God that made God seem less than God. Maybe this idea of God was some lower celestial being responsible for creating the earth, a place full of evil. No. Jesus Christ was the only God, who was with and who was the One who created all things, things seen and unseen—all of which were good.
“Light from light” answered the view that Jesus Christ was a light that shined as the result of God turning on some light that did not exist before He turned it on. You hold a flashlight in your hand as you walk a path at night. Until you turn on the flashlight, it produces no light. But when you turn it on, you can shine it on the ground as you walk. The light comes from the flashlight. But Jesus Christ was light, not from some heavenly flashlight, but He was the Source of the light as well as the light that shined.
The first thing God did in creating the world was to invoke His light into visibility. When God said, “Let there be light,” it meant “let there be light in the world.” Till then, all was darkness in the created order. The light that God shined in the world was from the True Light that existed before there was any world at all. The Creed says of Jesus Christ, that He was “Light from light.”
Then, “true God from true God.” This was to clarify that in calling Jesus the “only-born Son of God,” it didn’t mean He came into being in terms of time in the way that a human child comes to life from her parents. “Son of God” and “true God from true God” were equally correct in describing Jesus Christ.
Now, whenever I try to understand these things I wonder why I should do this. Isn’t it true that God will be God no matter what any of us thinks about God? God does not need us to define Him in order to feel good about Himself. You and I might like to hear flattering comments said about us. “Joe is a very intelligent, creative man,” feels good to hear for Joe. “Sandra is a very bright, kind person” makes Sandra feel good to hear it. Particularly if the ones making these complimentary remarks are people of high standing, the compliment feels good. A Nobel Prize seems good to get because everyone thinks the prize comes from a source that makes valid judgments of worth in people.
But what advantage can the Creator possibly get from our saying nice things about Him? It is for our sakes that it is important to think rightly about God. It is important for us to preserve the refined perception the Gospels give us about Jesus for two reasons at least.
First, because ideas tend to get watered down with time and much familiarity. After a while the most sublime ideas can lose their punch, reducing to ordinary platitudes. The closely defined words of the Creed preserve for us what is truly extraordinary.
Second, our hope in God, the confidence we have that sustains us in troubled times, rests on the truth of what Scripture teaches us about Jesus Christ. If Jesus was not really a man, how can He possibly understand the predicament of my humanity? If Jesus was not really God, what did He have to offer me beyond a good example -- that I can’t hope to follow?
Jesus Christ showed you and me the heart of God. Jesus wept over Jerusalem. Jesus wept at the death of his friend, Lazarus. Jesus reached out to outcasts, to people judged unredeemable sinners by people who classed themselves as uniquely good in God’s eyes. In all this profound compassion, Jesus Christ showed you and me the heart of God. So I can trust Him with my life, and so can you.
When we think of God we naturally think of a Being wholly other than we are, beyond us, our Creator, but how in the world can we think of Him as friend? Jesus showed us how friendly God is. All that Jesus was to people, because He is eternal God, He still is to you and me.
In a way, this is just a lofty idea, you might say. But it is a well-founded lofty idea. And lofty ideas are the ideas that move us, that shape our thinking and our behavior. We live in a very troubled world, but so did Jesus. In fact, His world was even more troubled than ours in some ways. There was no anesthesia before surgery in His day. Today we are aghast when we learn of torture taking place in prisons—as well we should be. But in Jesus’ day, men and women were crucified by the thousands. Jesus shined into that dark day, and He still shines into our dark day.
He shines, but you and I have to open our eyes to see Him. I hope that your eyes see more than the surrounding darkness of our day. This Jesus of whom you hear so much, is alive because it was a property of His life not to die. He was not just divine, a great man, but God from God. He was not just a source of radiance, but Light from light. He did not just come from God. He was true God from true God. These things we cannot understand, but we can accept them—knowing there is very much we cannot understand.
And then, trusting in Jesus Christ, we can live out our pilgrimage in this life in hope no matter how life seems to be coming apart at the seams. I pray that we all will turn our eyes Jesus’ way, and remember who this One is, in order to rightly and successfully find and enjoy His healing, His salvation.
Let us pray: O God, we bless You for being present with us in Jesus Christ, our Savior and our God. Amen.
Stuart Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at November 21, 2004 09:30 AM