Second London Baptist Confession of Faith 8.2
Truth for Life • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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-Robert Louis Stevenson’s book, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, tells the story of a man who had found a way to have two different personalities and natures separate from one another, completely opposed to one another, and yet found in the same man. It was hard for the characters to wrap their minds around the fact that the one and same person could have such disparate natures.
-Christianity holds a somewhat similar mystery. It is something that we hold dearly to and proclaim loudly, and yet when we try to examine it or explain it or understand it, we sometimes are at a loss of words. It is a mystery that Scripture no doubt testifies, but does not necessarily define further for us because our mortal minds are hard-pressed to come to grasp the glory and wonder of it. The mystery I am talking about is that Jesus Christ is both God and man in the fullness of both natures. We know the concept. We accept it. And yet when we try to get to the nuts and bolts of it, we have difficulty explaining that one person has such different natures within Himself. And yet that is the testimony of Scripture.
-We have been looking at doctrine through the various creeds and confessions, and last week I spoke about how Jesus Christ is the mediator between God and man. In order to fulfill this function for eternity, Jesus had to be both God and man in order to represent the interests of both. But as we study this, we walk carefully lest, like the danger of trying to explain the Trinity, we walk into heretical territory that makes Christ less than who He really is. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith explains Christ and His natures this way:
Confessing the Faith: The 1689 Baptist Confession for the 21st Century (VIII. Christ the Mediator)
The Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, is truly and eternally God. He is the brightness of the Father’s glory, the same in substance and equal with Him. He made the world and sustains and governs everything He has made. When the fullness of time came, He took upon Himself human nature, with all the essential properties and common weaknesses of it but without sin. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary. The Holy Spirit came down upon her, and the power of the Most High overshadowed her. Thus, He was born of a woman from the tribe of Judah, a descendant of Abraham and David in fulfillment of the Scriptures. Two whole, perfect, and distinct natures were inseparably joined together in one person, without converting one into the other or mixing them together to produce a different or blended nature. This person is truly God and truly man, yet one Christ, the only mediator between God and humanity.
-The truth of Christ’s two natures is as beautiful as it is headache-inducing as you try to peel through the layers of this truth. But to know Christ, we must trust this fact—Jesus is God and man. And not just that, Jesus is fully God and fully human.
-The confession begins by explaining that Jesus is the Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, and is truly and eternally God. We know that we are told:
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was fully God.
2 The Word was with God in the beginning.
-It is said of Jesus:
8 but of the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, and a righteous scepter is the scepter of your kingdom.
-Jesus is 100% God, meaning that His divine nature is completely that of God. He has all the characteristics and existence of the Godhead, lacking in nothing that makes God God. Through His divine nature He makes God known—He is the ultimate revelation of God. We are told that through Him:
3 The Son is the radiance of his glory and the representation of his essence, and he sustains all things by his powerful word, and so when he had accomplished cleansing for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.
-With this:
3 All things were created by him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created.
-We can know God through Jesus because Jesus is God. He created the universe and He sustains the universe. Everything that we can say about the Godhead we can say of Jesus. But God the Son is unique in that He took on a human nature as well. When the time came in history for this step in His plan of redemption, Jesus took on the human nature. As Paul says:
4 But when the appropriate time had come, God sent out his Son, born of a woman, born under the law,
14 Now the Word became flesh and took up residence among us. We saw his glory—the glory of the one and only, full of grace and truth, who came from the Father.
-Everything that makes a human a human, God the Son took upon Himself—meaning He has a human body, He has a human soul, and He has human emotions. Jesus is as human as the rest of us except in one area—Jesus was not born with sin.
15 For we do not have a high priest incapable of sympathizing with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way just as we are, yet without sin.
-How in the world could this be? We might not know the fullness of the how, but we have as it was explained to Mary:
35 The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God.
-The Holy Spirit conceived the child in the womb of Mary. The divine took on humanity. And through His humanity He is a descendant of Adam, Abraham, Judah, and David. I have worked for years on my genealogy and I’m descended from lots of different people in Europe. And just like I have a human ancestry, Jesus has a human ancestry. We have His genealogies in Matthew and Luke. If Jesus were to be the Savior of the world, He needed to be completely human just like us.
14 Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, he likewise shared in their humanity, so that through death he could destroy the one who holds the power of death (that is, the devil),
15 and set free those who were held in slavery all their lives by their fear of death.
16 For surely his concern is not for angels, but he is concerned for Abraham’s descendants.
17 Therefore he had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he could become a merciful and faithful high priest in things relating to God, to make atonement for the sins of the people.
-Jesus had to be God and had to be human to be the Savior and Mediator of those who believe. And as the confession states, that means that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures were inseparably joined together in one person. 100% God and 100% man together in the one.
9 For in him all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form,
-But the confession had to fight against certain heresies that crept up in church history that conflated the truth of Jesus’ natures. The confession says that these two natures are joined together without converting one into the other or mixing them together to produce a different or blended nature. When the Son of God took on humanity, the divine nature did not lose anything in order take on the human nature, nor was there anything missing in the human nature in order to accommodate the divine nature.
-It wasn’t a matter of taking some pieces of divine nature and some pieces of human nature in order to put together a mixture of the two in some cosmic jigsaw puzzle. The two natures remain unique and distinct without losing anything, and yet coming together in the one person.
-There was a heresy in early church history by a monk named Eutychus where he said that Christ’s natures were so thoroughly combined–in a sense scrambled together–that the result was that Christ was not really truly able to relate to us as humans. The problem is that this implies that Jesus was not truly God nor man. Therefore, He would be unable to act as a mediator and unable to truly atone for our sins.
-There was another heresy called Monophysitism that states that Jesus’ two natures are combined into one new one. Meaning there is no longer a divine nature and no longer a human nature, but some third type of hybrid was formed. The problem here is that neither God nor man was represented in Christ but a new third thing that doesn’t represent anything that exists – it is the new creation of the godman nature, that is neither purely God nor purely man. So again, He could not be Mediator or Savior.
-But then you had another heresy that went to the other extreme. Nestorianism stated that the divine and human natures of Christ were so separated from each other that they were “not in contact.” Again, that wouldn’t do anybody and good, and human Jesus would have been blasphemous for accepting worship as God as He often did in the Scriptures.
-The theological term that is used to describe the orthodox belief of the existence of Jesus Christ is called the Hypostatic Union. The word hypostasis is the Greek word for subsistence or individual existence. By calling it the Hypostatic Union what theologians are saying is that there is one, individual existence—one person. But within the existence of that one person is the union of two natures—a divine nature and a human nature. It is not that 50% divine nature met up with 50% human nature to all of a sudden create this person we call Jesus. Rather, 100% divine nature met up with 100% human nature within the one person who is Jesus Christ. The math might not add up, but the theology does.
-How the two natures in His person came across during His earthly ministry is explained in:
6 who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped,
7 but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave, by looking like other men, and by sharing in human nature.
-Now, we have to be careful of how we take that term “emptied himself” in v. 7, because a lot of false teachers will try to say that this means that Jesus somehow removed Himself from His divine nature or removed Himself of access to His divine nature. But that’s not what it is saying. I think it is better to describe it as Jesus veiling His divine nature and at times He willing limited Himself in some ways, but at no time did He lose the divine nature. In fact, if you consider the Mount of Transfiguration, we could say that the veil was briefly lifted as the divine was revealed with the human.
-And something we have to consider is that Jesus is going to be the God-Man for eternity. He will forever be God and Man because He will forever act as our Mediator. And we have something to look forward to—fellowship with the God who became man to save us. And if you ever question if Jesus loves you, just remember, He willingly stepped out of heaven, took on humanity, suffered and died so that you would be His prized possession for all of eternity. So, no matter what is going on, you can rest in that love.