Sermon Tone Analysis

TEXT: John 1:1; 3:16

TOPIC:  Jesus, God the Son

Baptist Faith and Message Sermon 3, *Written by Calvin Wittman*

May 11, 2009

 

Introduction: There are many religions in the world and if you were to research them all, no doubt you could find some good moral teachings, some element of truth in many of them.

In fact, one of the things which attract many to false religions is the apparent external morality of those who adhere to their teachings.

And living in the day and culture that we do, when people live more according to how they feel than what they know, it is easy to understand why so many are deceived by the feel good philosophies of our day.

I got a call just yesterday from a fellow pastor who was concerned about one of his church members who was being led astray by a false teacher.

No doubt each of you may know or know of someone who has been led astray by false teachings.

* *

It is to this end that God’s word is clear; we are not to live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds forth from the mouth of God.

That is, we are not to live by that which simply seems to satisfy our physical desires, but we are to live according to the truth God has given us in His word.

We are not called to live according to our fallen sense of need, or by our fallen sense of right and wrong.

The Christian, the one who has been transformed by the renewing of their mind, and who has been made a new creation in Christ Jesus, will see the world differently than the non-Christian.

They will have a different outlook than they did before, they will possess a different worldview.

As those who are indwelt by the Spirit of God Himself, we are called first and foremost to think biblically and then to filter our feelings through that truth.

Within the theological realm there is a word which you will hear tossed around quite a bit, the word, “orthodox.”

In the Greek language it is a compound word, the first part being “ortho,” which literally means straight.

You see it in the word, “Orthopedic,” which describes a doctor who sets bones straight.

The second word comes to us from the root word “dokeo,” which primarily means to believe or think.

So literally, orthodox means to think or believe straight.

We use it to describe straight thinking or sound doctrine, as opposed to twisted or unsound doctrine.

That is the reason we are focusing our attention during these weeks on the foundational doctrines of our faith.

We need to think right if we are going to live right.

So far in our study we have considered the doctrine of the inspiration of scripture and we have looked at the nature of God Himself.

This morning, as we continue our series entitled The Foundations of our Faith, we are going to take a look at what the Biblical record reveals to us about the person of Jesus.

We’ll start by examining His nature, then take a look at His work here and finally consider how that impacts your life and mine.

The doctrine of Christ is known as Christology.

*I.

The Nature of Jesus*

 

The one thing which sets orthodox Christianity apart from all other religions and cults in the world; the one thing which determines whether or not we are really Christians or not; the one thing which is essential to our salvation is the unwavering belief that Jesus, a carpenter from Galilee, is also the only begotten Son of God and is therefore Jesus the Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah, the second Person of the triune God.

Our confessional statement, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, puts it this way.

“Christ is the Eternal Son of God.

In His incarnation as Jesus Christ He was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.

Jesus perfectly revealed and did the will of God, taking upon Himself Human nature with its demands and necessities and identifying Himself completely with mankind yet without sin.

He honored the divine law by His personal obedience, and in His substitutionary death on the cross He made provision for the redemption of men from sin.

He was raised from the dead with a glorified body and appeared to His disciples as the person who was with them before His crucifixion.

He ascended into heaven and is now exalted at the right hand of God where He is the One Mediator, fully God, fully man, in whose Person is effected the reconciliation between God and man.

He will return in power and glory to judge the world and to consummate His redemptive mission.

He now dwells in all believers as the living and present Lord.”

This teaching about the nature of Christ is so very important because if Jesus is not both God and man; If He is not Who He says He is then He could not do what He said He could do.

And if He could not do what He said He could do, we cannot become who He said we can become.

During the fourth and fifth centuries, the controversies surrounding the person of Christ seemed to crop up like weeds in a garden.

Across the Roman Empire, which by this time had embraced Christianity, different teachers were teaching different doctrines about Who Jesus was.

There were the Docetists , as we have seen, from the Greek word dokeo, which means “to think” but can also mean “to seem.”

Thus they thought that Jesus merely seemed to be in the flesh.

They affirmed the Divinity of Christ, but denied His humanity.

They said His human body was nothing more than a phantasm, or ghost, and that His sufferings and death were mere appearance.

Their creed was, “If he suffered he was not God; and if he was God he did not suffer.”

Very close to them in their belief about the person of Christ, and probably the most dangerous of all early heresies, was Gnosticism.

Gnostics’ beliefs were rooted in a dualism that said all things spiritual were good, and all material things were evil.

Thus they denied the incarnation, reasoning that if flesh was evil and Jesus was perfect and good, He could not have had a physical body.

There was Nestorianism, which taught that Jesus was sort of schizophrenic, that is that He was two different persons living in one body.

The early church fathers rejected this teaching because it does not correspond to the biblical revelation.

The scripture presents Jesus as a whole person possessing both a human and a divine nature.

Another errant belief was called Monophysitism, (Mono fist ti cizm) or Eutychianism (U tie key anism).

It was propagated by Eutyches, who led a monastery near modern day Istanbul in the early part of the fifth century.

He taught that the two natures were somehow mixed together and both of them being altered produced a hybrid nature of sorts.

Of course the church rejected this belief because it diluted the truth that Jesus was 100% God and 100% man.

\\   \\ Then there was Modalism, also called Sabellianism.

Modalists denied the trinity and said that God simply took on different modes at different times, but that there was no uniqueness between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

In our day Unitarianism continues to teach this heresy about the person of Christ.

Then of course there was the widespread heresy of the Arians.

Arius was a teacher and preacher who lived in the third and forth centuries and was a pastor in Alexandria.

He claimed that Christ was a created being.

The ramifications of such a belief are profound.

If Christ is a created being, then He is not God, if He is not God then He was not who He claimed to be and could not do what He claimed He came to do.

If He was not 100% God and 100% man, then He could not be the sacrifice for our sins.

The problem with the Arians, and with others who claim that Christ is a created being, is in their mistranslation of the word “Only Begotten,” from John 3:16.

They took it to mean that Jesus had a place and time of origin.

But literally translated the word means, “Unique or Only one of His Kind.”

It carries with it the idea of the singular uniqueness of Jesus, of his being the “only Beloved one.”

It is used to speak of his prominence with God the Father, not his origin.

This is the sense given to us by the HCSB translation which says, “His One and Only Son…”

 

These teachings continue to have their influence today.

We have but to look around us and we see cults whose heresies are rooted in these ancient errors.

For instance, the Mormons, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, deny the uniqueness of Christ’s divinity.

While they will say that Jesus is a son of God, they would go on to say that he was simply one of many sons, including themselves, teaching that they are sons of God, just like Jesus was.

This leads to their false teaching that all of us can become gods just like Jesus.

The Jehovah’s witnesses also deny the Deity of Christ, claiming that Jesus was a created being and nothing more than the manifestation of the archangel Michael in human form.

And the Christian Scientists will teach about His divinity but deny His humanity.

Seems the devil is telling the same old lies, he’s just put them in new packages.

As Solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun.

While the mystery of His two natures is beyond our full comprehension it does not change the reality that this is clearly what the scripture teaches.

He is not, as some would say, half God and half man.

He is fully God and fully man.

Jesus has two natures, one divine and one human, and yet, He is one Person.

According to the John 1:1, Jesus is the Word who was God and was with God and was made flesh (vs.12).

This means that in the single person of Jesus Christ these two natures both existed.

It is important to recognize that the divine nature was not changed.

It was not altered.

He is not merely a man who "had God within Him" nor is he a man who "manifested divine qualities."

He is God, second person of the Trinity.

Hebrews 1:3 puts it this way, “He is the radiance of His (God’s) glory, the exact expression of His nature, and He sustains all things by His powerful word.”

Jesus' two natures are not "mixed together," nor are they combined into a new God-man nature, as Eutychianism taught.

They are separate yet act as a unit in the one person of Jesus.

To correct the errant doctrines surrounding the person of Christ, the church gathered in Chalcedon, a city near modern day Istanbul, in 451 to define the exact nature of Christ.

At the end of the day the early Christians decided that Jesus was of the same essence as God and was recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division or separation.

When the Council of Chalcedon defined the nature of Christ they said that the two natures of Christ occur in one person and one “subsistence.”

The Greed word translated “Subsistence” is the word Hypostasis, that’s why you’ll sometimes hear the union of both divine and human natures in Jesus called the Hypostatic Union.

This is one of the foundational doctrines of our faith.