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Last week we spoke about grace, and it’s intimate connection with faith.
Today we are going to deal with the last two Solas, but also two of the biggest issues in Christianity.
Namely,
Sin - Just about everybody knows how we should act.
That’s our problem.
Our problem is we lack the power to do it.
The Westminster Confession - “Man, by his fall…made himself uncapable of life by [the covenant of works].”
(Westminster Confession VII.III.
We spoke about this a bit last week in our discussion of grace.
We fail in our efforts to do the good we ought to do (remember ?)
“But God did not abandon us [in our sin].
Instead, the Confession tells us, He introduced a new covenant.
We failed to do what the old covenant (the covenant of works) required, so God introduced a covenant of grace.
But we must be careful to define our terms here.
When we speak of a covenant of grace, many people think it means God has given up on expecting us to do what we ought to do.
He has decided to be gracious and “let us off the hook.”
But God’s Word makes it quite clear that He does not intend only to forgive us and overlook our sins.
Rather the goal of this new covenant, the covenant of grace, is a people whoa re both willing and able to believe and to obey.
God has no intenton of accepting failure and leaving the shards of His broken creation scattered across the landscape.
He intends to make all things new!”
The key to this whole shabang is the person whom God has named as the mediator that guarantees its success.
“What distinguishes Christianity from any other religion or philosophy at any time or place in history is the person of Jesus Christ!
The unique role of Jesus Christ gives Christianity its distinctive power and makes it the only approach to life that can ultimately succeed.”
~ Smith, Paul.
The Westminster Confession: Enjoying God Forever
Luther used his christological understanding of the whole Christian Bible, not as a formal principle, but as an authority which he derived from the living presence of God who was present in the text.
The Bible was not a story about Jesus, but the very source of Christ’s actual presence.
Central to the reformation and to Reformed theology is the issue of Christ.
SOLUS CHRISTUS
God has given the ultimate revelation of himself to us by sending Jesus Christ, .
Only through God’s gracious self-revelation in Jesus do we come to a saving and transforming knowledge of God.
.
Because God is holy and all humans are sinful and sinners,  .
Neither religious rituals nor good works mediate between us and God.  by which a person can be saved other than the name of Jesus.
, and his sacrificial death alone can atone for sin.
Col 1:15-18
1
Hebrews
SOLI DEO GLORIA
Glory belongs to God alone.
God’s glory is the central motivation for salvation, not improving the lives of people—though that is a wonderful by product.
God is not a means to an end—he is the means and the end.
The goal of all of life is to give glory to God alone: “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” ().
As The Westminster Catechism says, the chief purpose of human life is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
The TRINITY
The Trinity is a difficult concept, but not near as difficult when we begin to understand who Jesus is and his relation to and with God.
Christianity is founded on the person of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is unique in that He is fully God and fully man.
He is the only person in history about whom this claim can be made.
Other religions have gods and great men or women, but
In Christ we combine “two whole perfect and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood…inseparable joined together in one person.”
(Westminster Confession VIII.II).
Jesus Christ is fully God.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
~
The Gospel begins by introducing us to the concept of the “Word”, the fundamental principle of order and rationality in the universe.
That Word, we are told, already was “in the beginning”; in other words, it is eternal.
and the Word was with God - this implies that the Word is distinct from God in some way.
Nevertheless the Word was God.
What John is saying is that the Word can be completely identified with God.
It shares in some way the very essence of the original being.
At this point John enters a personal pronoun - He is introduced.
John 1:2
HE was with God in the beginning, this word is more than a force or an idea, it is a person, and we are told that he participated in creation itself and ultimately invested that creation with life.
In the climax of this passage we read:
John 1:10
Or in the Message translation
“The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood...” The Message
Helpful verses:
Understanding the Trinity
To understand the Trinity, we need to understand two basic terms that are regularly used to describe it.
nature and person.
Christianity consistently describes God as “one God in three persons.”
that is, one divine nature, but three individual persons all of whom share that nature.
The Three persons are Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The totally unique thing about Jesus Christ is that though he was by nature God, sharing the entire essence of God, he nevertheless took upon Himself as well the nature of a human.
Notice it does not say that he quit being God when He became man.
Jesus was not God disguised as a man - as a sort of costume.
Jesus did not become two persons.
Now He is fully God and fully man at one and the same time.
The princess and the Frog.
We’re all familiar with these kinds of stories.
Through some kind of spell a human prince is turned into a Frog.
Now we know that he is still the prince in his person, but now he is only able to act through the nature of the frog.
To be true to his frog nature he has to eat flies, hop, ribbit.
The trick for him is ow to accomplish whatever task is necessary to end the curse all while living according to his frog nature.
Jesus and the curse that doomed the human race.
This works as a great picture of the challenge that Jesus faced, retaining His divine nature and His distinct personhood, while taking on the far more limited human nature in order to deal with the curse that lies upon the whole human race.
Three aspects of this curse need to be addressed:
Satan, who was our primary tempter.
Sin, which had left us with true guilt and separated us from a holy God.
Death, which was the natural and eternal consequence of our sin.
Jesus death is intended to release us from the bondage to Satan, sin, and death.
That is His whole purpose.
Satan uses the fear of death and our desire for security to tempt us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to seek personal pleasure while it is at hand and ignore the call of God to higher things.
Sin becomes for us an addiction.
But Jesus, according to the unfolding story becomes for us a High Priest.
You may remember that in the OT the High Priest always brought the sacrifice for sin to the holy place, where he interceded on behalf of the people.
He would plead for God’s mercy in spit fo the fact that the people had sinned.
Jesus, as wholly God and wholly man, became our unique mediator.
Jesus took all our sins upon himself and offerend himself as a sacrifice to pay the penalty of death incurred by our guilt.
As a man, Jesus could identify with our sins and offer the penalty required of a human being, namely death.
As God, that penalty could be multiplied infinitely to cover the sins of the whole human race.
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