Affirming the Apostles ’ Creed (7 page)
Also, the title
Christ
expresses the claim that Jesus fulfilled all three ministries for which men were anointed in Old Testament times, being
prophet
(a messenger from God) and
priest
(one who mediates with God for us by sacrifice) as well as being
king
.
The glory of this conjunction of roles is only seen when we relate it to our actual needs. What do we sinners need for a right and good relationship with God? First, we are ignorant of him and need instruction, for no satisfying relationship is possible with a person about whom you know little or nothing. Second, we are estranged from him and need reconciliation—otherwise we shall end up unaccepted, unforgiven, and unblessed, strangers to his fatherly love and exiles from the inheritance that is in store for those who are his children. Third, we are weak, blind, and foolish when it comes to the business of living for God, and we need someone to guide, protect, and strengthen us, which is how the regal role was understood in Old Testament Israel. Now in the person and ministry of the one man, Jesus Christ, this threefold need is completely and perfectly met! Hallelujah!
Great Prophet of my God!
My tongue would bless thy name;
By thee the joyful news
Of our salvation came;
The joyful news of sins forgiven,
Of hell subdued, and peace with heaven.
Jesus, my great High Priest,
Offered his blood and died;
My guilty conscience seeks
No sacrifice beside;
His powerful blood did once atone,
And now it pleads before the throne.
My dear Almighty Lord,
My conqueror and my King,
Thy sceptre, and thy sword,
Thy reigning grace I sing.
Thine is the power; behold, I sit
In willing bonds before thy feet.
T
HE
D
IVINE
L
ORD
Jesus, who is the Christ (says the Creed), is God’s
only Son
. This identifies Mary’s boy as the second person of the eternal Trinity, the Word who was the Father’s agent in making the world and sustaining it right up to the present (John 1:1-4;Colossians 1:13-20; Hebrews 1:1-3). Staggering? Yes, certainly, but this identification is the heart of Christianity. “The word of God became a human being and lived among us” (John 1:14,
Phillips
).
If Jesus is God the Son, our co-creator, and
is also Christ, the anointed savior-king, now
risen from death and reigning in the place of
authority and power, then he has a right to rule
us, and we have no right to resist his claim.
“Our Lord” follows straight from this. If Jesus is God the Son, our co-creator, and is also Christ, the anointed savior-king, now risen from death and reigning (sitting, as the Creed puts it, “on the right hand of God the Father almighty,” in the place of authority and power), then he has a right to rule us, and we have no right to resist his claim. As he invaded space and time in Palestine nearly two thousand years ago, so he invades our personal space and time today, with the same purpose of love that first brought him to earth. “Come, follow me” was his word then, and it is so still.
Is he, then, your Lord? For all who say the Creed, this question is inescapable; for how can you say “our Lord” in church until you have first said “my Lord” in your heart?
F
URTHER
B
IBLE
S
TUDY
Jesus—God and man:
Hebrews 1:1—3:6
Q
UESTIONS FOR
T
HOUGHT AND
D
ISCUSSION
Jesus
?
Christ
have meant to a waiting Jewish nation? What should it mean to us?
A voice from the cloud said,
“This is my beloved Son, with whom
I am well pleased; listen to him.”
MATHEW 17: 5
His Only Son
W
hen you hear a young man introduced as “my only son,” you know he is the apple of his father’s eye. The words reveal affection. When the Creed calls Jesus God’s “only Son” (echoing “only begotten” in John 1:18; 3:16, 18, kjv), the implication is the same. Jesus, as God’s only Son, enjoys his Father’s dearest love. God said so himself when speaking from heaven to identify Jesus at his baptism and transfigura-tion: “This is my beloved Son...” (Matthew 3:17; 17:5).
F
ULLY
G
OD
Moreover, this phrase of the Creed is a bulwark against such lowering and denial of Jesus’ deity as one finds in Unitarianism and the cults. Jesus was not just a God-inspired good man. Nor was he a super-angel, first and finest of all creatures, called “god” by courtesy because he is far above men (which is what Arians said in the fourth century and Jehovah’s Witnesses say today). Jesus was, and remains, God’s only Son, as truly and fully God as his Father is. God’s will, said Jesus, is “that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father” (John 5:23), a statement that knocks Unitarianism flat.
Jesus was not just a God-inspired good man.
Nor was he a super-angel, first and finest of all
creatures, called “god” by courtesy because he is
far above men. Jesus was, and remains, God’s only
Son, as truly and fully God as his Father is.
But is it not mere mythology to talk of a Father-Son relationship within the Godhead? No, for Jesus himself talked this way. He called God “my Father” and himself not “
a
” but “
the
Son.” He spoke of a unique and eternal Father-Son relation, into which he had come to bring others. “No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matthew 11:27).
B
EGOTTEN
“Begotten of his Father before all worlds... begotten, not made,” says the Nicene Creed. This is the language of fourth-century debate. The point of it is that though the Son lives his life in dependence on the Father, because that is his nature (“I live because of the Father,” John 6:57), he is in himself divine and eternal and is not a created being. The phrase is not suggesting that the Son originated after the Father or is in himself less than the Father.
“Begotten” in John’s phrase “only begotten” cannot signify an event in God’s past that is not also part of his present, since it is only for us creatures who live in time that momentary events exist. Time as we know it is part of creation, and its Maker is not subject to its limitations, any more than he is subject to the limitations of created space. For us, life is a sequence of moments, and future and past events (begettings or any other) are both out of reach; but to God (so we must suppose, though we cannot imagine it) all events are constantly present in an eternal Now.
So the pre-mundane “begetting” of the Son (as distinct from the temporal and metaphorical “begetting” of the king in Psalm 2:7, which is applied to Christ in Acts 13:33 and Hebrews 1:5; 5:5, and which means simply bringing him to the throne) must be thought of not as a momentary event whereby God, after being singular, became plural, but as an eternal relationship whereby the first person is always Father to the Son and the second is always Son to the Father. In the third century Origen happily expressed this thought by speaking of the “eternal generation” of the Son. This is part of the unique glory of the triune God.
M
YSTERY
Formulae for the Incarnation—the Council of Chalcedon’s “one person in two natures, fully God and fully man” or Karl Barth’s “God for man, and man for God”—sound simple, but the thing itself is unfathomable. It is easy to shoot down the ancient heresies that the Son took a human body without a human soul or that he was always two persons under one skin, and with them the modern heresy that the “enfleshing” of the Son was merely a special case of the indwelling of the Spirit, so that Jesus was not God but merely a God-filled man. But to grasp what the Incarnation was in positive terms is beyond us. Don’t worry, though; you do not need to know how God became man in order to know Christ! Understand it or not, the fact remains that “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14); that was the supreme, mind-blowing miracle. Love prompted it; and our part is not to speculate about it and scale it down but to wonder and adore and love and exalt “Jesus Christ... the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).
