Project: Your Statement of Faith - Lesson 4

Dr. Bill Mounce
Project: Your Statement of Faith
TH099-04
Article Three: God the Son
Lesson Transcript

[00:00:01] The next article of faith has to do with God, The Son and the technical name for this is Christology. What do we believe about Christ Christology? So here it is. God. The son is fully God, his full divinity, and he's fully human, his full humanity and the incarnation. And we'll come back and talk about that. Without confusion or mixture has to do with the incarnation. He's the unique and only son he existed before time. The pre existence of Christ. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born to the Virgin Mary. He was the Son of God, not the son of Joseph. He lived a sinless life. He died on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins. The atonement will come back was physically raised from the dead, as prophesied. Ascended into heaven. The ascension and is now exalted. Sitting at the right hand of God. The Father interceding for the saints as the sole mediator. He will return to Earth, and ultimately every knee shall bone every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Okay, let's look at some of these phrases. God, the son is fully God. The full divinity of Christ. In the last century, when liberalism was really attacking the church, this is what they attacked. They did not believe that Jesus was fully God. And yet we asserted as one of the fundamental doctrines, in order to be an evangelical Christian, that you have to believe in the divinity of Christ, that he is dead, that he is God. And at the same time, we believe that he was fully human. That he was as human as he was God. And then we added the phrase without confusion or mixture. Here's what we're getting at with that phrase. Just like the Trinity is difficult to explain.

[00:01:57] It's impossible to explain. So also the incarnation, the fact that God was made flesh incarnation is ultimately you can't describe it and you can't describe it because there's no analogy to it. You can't say it's like this or it's like that. I had a friend who was blind from birth and I used to try to describe colors to him. And of course it was futile. And I remember one day I said, No, what you're seeing is black. And my friend said, You don't understand, Bill. I have no frame of reference. I don't know anything else. So I don't know. What I'm looking at is black. I'm told I have black hair. I'm told that coal is black. I don't think I like having coal for hair. I mean, it was he just didn't have anything to compare it to. And so the Trinity and the Incarnation are the same way. We don't believe that Jesus was God inside and a man outside we don't believe is like 5050. We don't believe he kind of became this and became that. It's we assert in the evangelical church that Jesus in the Incarnation was 100% God and 100% human being. Now, it's not on the statement of faith, but what the theologies do with that is they say that when Jesus lived his life on Earth, he did so independent of his divine attributes. In other words, he didn't do anything because he was God. He was able to set that aside in everything that he did. He did as a human being, living under the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. And so we set aside the independent exercise of his divinity is how we see it. And lived out his life as a human being. Remember that verse and early on, on the Gospels where Jesus was going and he says he could not do many miracles there because of the lack of faith and ego.

[00:03:50] What do you mean? He couldn't do a lot of miracles. He's God. Well, evidently in the Incarnation, while he stayed fully God, he decided his father decided to set aside the independent use of his divinity and live as a human being by the power of the spirit, so that he truly would be a human being who was sacrificed for human sin. Now you're going to get a headache if you try to figure that out and you can't. Let me tell you a quick story. My nephew, David Goodluck is now 28. 29 is a pastor at a church in Southern California. David is one of those guys that even when he was a little kid, he wanted to understand He's very bright and he just he wanted to understand. And I went to seminary pretty close to where my sister lives. And I would come there for weekends and a lot and a lot anyway, and then hang around. And because I really wanted to know my nephews. And Davey came to me once, and I think he was about four, maybe five at the oldest. And Davey walks up to me, says, Uncle Bill, Now, Jesus was God, right? And I'm sitting here as a seminary student thinking, I know where this is going. How do I explain this to Davy? But I said, yes, he's fully got. And Davey said anybody was really a man, wasn't he? And I go, Yes, Davey. He was a really a man at the same time. And Davey tensed every muscle in his body and started stomping his feet and throwing a temper tantrum. Because it can be. And I for. How do you explain to a five year old the Incarnation? Well, I've got one stopping his feet here in front of me.

[00:05:35] They had a dog named Benji. And I said, David has been she understands some things about you. Dave goes, Yeah. Well, like what, Davey? Uncle Bill. He knows I bring him his food. He knows I bring him his water. He. He knows it is to do what I tell him to do. So I had David go through and tell me all those things that Benjy, the dog, knew about Davey. The boy. And when Davey was done, I said, Davey, does Benjy know everything about you? Frank. Well, of course not. I'll go, Bill. He is a dog, and I'm a. And I can still remember the word boy frozen on his lips because he got it. And Davey finish the discussion. He goes, I shouldn't be able to understand everything about God, should I? No, Davy, we can't. God has in His grace and his love and his mercy has said, Let me tell you some things about myself. But there's many things that we don't understand. And as created limited human beings, we're comfortable not knowing everything there is to know about God. Now, what I just described applies in quite a few places in Scripture. At the heart of much of what we believe is an apparent contradiction, or there's just a gap and we can't get our minds around it. And as Scripture clearly teaches a and a Scripture clearly teaches B, then we believe A and B, even if we can't quite put them together when we get to heaven, all those things will most likely come together or they won't matter one of the two. So anyway, we believe in the incarnation that God, that Jesus is fully God. He's with fully human and without confusion or mixture. He was 100% both.

[00:07:26] A couple of other things in this statement I want to talk about. You said he died on the cross as the sacrifice for our sins. This is the doctrine of the atonement that on the cross something actually happened. And we decided in the statement of faith to not go into a whole lot of more detail about specifically what that means. But it does have it does mean something at a minimum, and that is that sin is real and God's wrath against sin is real. And something has to be done about our very real sin. There are movements in the church today that deny the necessity of the atonement that Oh, God is a God of love, and he can just kind of overlook sin and it doesn't really matter. And that is simply not a biblical position. And so we want to assert that we believe that the cross was real, that Jesus had to die remembering his ceremony. Jesus says to his father, If this cup can pass for me, if it's possible for this cup, my coming death to pass for me, then let it pass. And the answer was, it's not possible that if I, the father, am going to forgive human sins. You must die. Sin Israel. Necessity of Christ. Death is real. God's holiness and hatred of sin is real. So we believe in the necessity of the atonement that it had to happen as one of the basic tenets of evangelical thought. Two of the phrases I wanted to explain. One was this phrase Physically, you may have kind of twitched a little when I read it. The Jesus was physically raised from the dead. I'm not sure it's the best word, but it's the word that the creeds tend to use.

[00:09:10] You remember that for a current when Jesus appeared to his disciples after his resurrection and they thought He was a ghost, and he said, you know, give me something, I'll eat it here, you can touch me. Spirits don't have. Flesh and bones. Now, I don't know how God has flesh and bones. I don't understand it, but the word physical is in there to make it be absolutely clear that Jesus is resurrection wasn't some spiritual or mystical thing in the churches. There's been heretical elements of the church that have gone that direction as well. He didn't really get out of the grave. It's his spirit. Rose And that kind of foolishness by including the word physical we have, we have the verse that makes me comfortable or at least able to use the word physical. But it's our way of saying it wasn't. It's not just some spiritual resurrection where he was raised in our hearts. Jesus's body got out of the tomb. It was united with the rest of him and it descended into heaven. It was a real historical event. It really happened. So that's why the word physical is in there. I need to back up just a bit. You'll notice on the first line it says that he is the unique and only son. We live, at least in America, in a wildly pluralistic society where people will say that all roads lead to God. It doesn't really matter whether it's Buddha or Mary Baker Eddy or, you know, Shirley MacLaine or Jesus. It doesn't matter. I mean, eventually all roads lead to heaven. And Christians have long been accused of being arrogant because no, we believe that only Jesus is the way. Only Jesus is the truth. Only Jesus is the life.

[00:10:59] And of course, that's what Jesus said about himself. But the reason that we insist on that is that we believe that Jesus is unique. That he's the only son of God. He's the only one who could do anything about sin and no one else could. So the uniqueness of Christ, as opposed to the pluralism of our society, is a very important thing to make sure that you understand. No one comes to the Father but through Jesus Christ. And the other thing I wanted to mention is at the end, which says that Jesus is the sole mediator for us. There's no one else that stands before the throne for you and for me. Not any saint, not anyone. The Reformation doctrine that we believe the priesthood of all believers is that the ground is the level at the foot of the cross. And we don't have to go through a priest to get to God. We're all on the same level, whether you're a preacher or a Sunday school teacher or someone sitting in the congregation. It doesn't matter what your gifts are, your abilities are, your involvement are. We all are at the same level playing field. And there's only one person who gives us access to God, the Father. We only have one mediator, and that is Jesus Christ. So that's our statement of Faith on God, the Son or Christology.