2-22 The Divine Side Of Jesus
In many discussions with Trinitarians, I came to observe how very
often, a verse I would quote supporting the humanity of Jesus would be
found very near passages which speak of His Divine side. For example,
most 'proof texts' for both the 'Jesus=God' position and the 'Jesus was
human' position- are all from the same Gospel of John. Instead of just
trading proof texts, e.g. 'I and my father are one' verses 'the Father
is greater than I', we need to understand them as speaking of one and
the same Jesus. So many 'debates' about the nature of Jesus miss this
point; the sheer wonder of this man, this more than man, was that He
was so genuinely human, and yet perfectly manifested God. This was and
is the compelling wonder of this Man. These two aspects of the Lord,
the exaltation and the humanity, are spoken of together in the Old
Testament too. A classic example would be Ps. 45:6,7: “Thy throne, O
God, is for ever [this is quoted in the New Testament about Jesus]…God,
thy God, hath anointed thee [made you Christ]”.
The
juxtaposition of the Lord’s humanity and His exaltation is what is so
unique about Him. And it’s what is so hard for people to accept,
because it demands so much faith in a man, that He could be really so
God-like. The juxtaposition of ideas is seen in Hebrews so powerfully.
Here alone in the New Testament is His simple, human name “Jesus” used
so baldly- not ‘Jesus Christ’, ‘the Lord Jesus’, just plain ‘Jesus’
(Heb. 2:9; 3:1; 4:14; 6:20; 7:22; 10:19; 12:2,24; 13:12). And yet it’s
Hebrews that emphasizes how He can be called ‘God’, and is the full and
express image of God Himself. I observe that in each of the ten places
where Hebrews uses the name ‘Jesus’, it is as it were used as a climax
of adoration and respect. For example: “… whither the forerunner is for
us entered, even Jesus” (Heb. 6:20). “But you are come unto… unto… to…
to… to… to… and to Jesus the mediator” (Heb. 12:22-24). The bald title
‘Jesus’, one of the most common male names in first century Palestine,
as common as Dave or Steve or John in the UK today, speaking as it did
of the Lord’s utter humanity, is therefore used as a climax of honour
for Him. The honour due to Him is exactly due to the fact of His
humanity. John’s Gospel uses exalted language to describe the person of
Jesus- but actually, if one looks out for it, John uses the very same
terms about all of humanity. Here are some examples:
About Jesus |
About humanity generally or other human beings |
Came into the world (9:39; 12:46; 16:28; 18:37) |
1:9 [of “every man”]; 6:14. ‘Came into the world’ means ‘to be born’ in 16:21; 18:37 |
Sent from God (1:6; 3:28) |
3:2,28; 8:29; 15:10 |
A man of God (9:16,33) |
9:17,31 |
‘What I saw in my Father’s presence’ (8:38) |
The work of ‘a man who told you the truth as I heard it from God’ (8:40) |
God was His Father |
8:41 |
He who has come from God (8:42) |
8:47 |
The Father was in Him, and He was in the Father (10:37) |
15:5-10; 17:21-23,26 |
Son of God (1:13) |
All believers are ‘the offspring of God Himself’ (1:13; 1 Jn. 2:29-3:2,9; 4:7; 5:1-3,8) |
Consecrated and sent into the world (17:17-19) |
20:21 |
Jesus
had to listen to the Father and be taught by Him (7:16; 8:26,28,40;
12:49; 14:10; 15:15; 17:8) |
All God’s children are the same (6:45) |
Saw the Father (6:46) |
The Jews should have been able to do this (5:37) |
Not born of the flesh or will of a man, but the offspring of God Himself |
True of all believers (1:13) |
Juxtaposition
Hebrews
1 can be a passage which appears to provide perhaps the strongest
support for both the ‘Jesus is God’ and ‘Jesus is not God’ schools.
Meditating upon this one morning, I suddenly grasped what was going on.
The writer is in fact purposefully juxtaposing the language of Christ’s
humanity and subjection to the Father, with statements and quotations
which apply the language of God to Jesus. But the emphasis is so
repeatedly upon the fact that God did this to Jesus. God gave Jesus all
this glory. Consider the evidence: It is God who begat Jesus (Heb.
1:5), God who told the Angels to worship Jesus (Heb. 1:6), it was “God,
even your God” who anointed Jesus, i.e. made Him Christ, the anointed
one (Heb. 1:9); it was God who made Jesus sit at His right hand, and
makes the enemies of His Son come into subjection (Heb. 1:13); it was
God who made / created Jesus, God who crowned Jesus, God who set Jesus
over creation (Heb. 2:7), God who put all in subjection under Jesus
(Heb. 2:8). And yet interspersed between all this emphasis- for that’s
what it is- upon the superiority of the Father over the Son… we find
Jesus addressed as “God” (Heb. 1:8), and having Old Testament passages
about God applied to Him (Heb. 1:5,6). The juxtaposition is purposeful.
It is to bring out how the highly exalted position of Jesus was in fact
granted to Him by ‘his God’, the Father, who remains the single source
and giver of all exaltation, and who, to use the Lord’s very own words,
“is greater than [Christ]” (Jn. 14:28).
This
juxtaposition of the Lord’s humanity and His exaltation is found all
through Bible teaching about His death. It’s been observed that the ‘I
am’ sayings of Jesus, with their obvious allusion to the Divine Name,
are in fact all found in contexts which speak of the subordination of
Jesus to God(1). He was ‘lifted up’ in crucifixion and shame; and yet
‘lifted up’ in ‘glory’ in God’s eyes through that act. We read in Is.
52:14 that His face was more marred, more brutally transmogrified, than
that of any man. And yet reflecting upon 2 Cor. 4:4,6, we find that His
face was the face of God; His glory was and is the Father’s glory: “The
glory of Christ, who is the image of God… the glory of God in the face
of Jesus Christ”. Who is the one who redeems His people? Isaiah calls
him “the arm of the Lord”: “to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” (53:1; compare 52:10). Then he continues: “He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground” (v. 2). So, the arm of the LORD
is a person -- a divine person! He is God’s “right arm,” His
“right-hand Man”! He is also human: He grows up out of the earth like a
root out of dry ground. The same sort of juxtaposition is to be found
in the way the Lord healed the widow’s son. He touched the coffin- so
that the crowd would have gasped at how unclean Jesus was, and how He
had identified Himself with the unclean to the point of Himself
appearing unclean. It was surely shock that made the pallbearers stop
in their tracks. But then the Lord raised the dead man- and the people
perceived His greatness, convinced that in the person of Jesus “God
hath visited His people” (Lk. 7:14-16). His humanity and yet His
greatness, His Divinity if you like, were artlessly juxtaposed
together. Hence prophetic visions of the exalted Jesus in Daniel call
Him “the Son of man”.
The mixture of the Divine and
human in the Lord Jesus is what makes Him so compelling and
motivational. He was like us in that He had our nature and temptations;
and yet despite that, He was different from us in that He didn't sin.
Phil. 2 explains how on the cross, the Lord Jesus was so supremely "in
the likeness of men"; and yet the same 'suffering servant' prophecy
which Phil. 2 alludes to also makes the point that on the cross, "his
appearance was so unlike the sons of Adam" (Is. 52:14). There was
something both human and non-human in His manifestation of the Father
upon the cross. Never before nor since has such supreme God-likeness,
'Divinity' , if you like, been displayed in such an extremely human
form- a naked, weak, mortal man in His final death throes.
Even
after His resurrection, in His moment of glory and triumph, the Lord
appeared in very ordinary working clothes, so that He appeared as a
gardener. The disciples who met Him on the Emmaus road asked whether He
‘lived alone’ and therefore was ignorant of the news of the city about
the death of Jesus (Lk. 24:18 RV). The only people who lived alone,
outside of the extended family, were drop outs or weirdos. It was
almost a rude thing for them to ask a stranger. The fact was, the Lord
appeared so very ordinary, even like a lower class social outcast type.
And this was the exalted Son of God. We gasp at His humility, but also
at His earnest passion to remind His followers of their common bond
with Him, even in His exaltation.
The Lord Jesus often
stressed that He was the only way to the Father; that only through
knowing and seeing / perceiving Him can men come to know God. And yet
in Jn. 6:45 He puts it the other way around: “Every man therefore that
hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me”. And He
says that only the Father can bring men to the Son (Jn. 6:44). Yet it
is equally true that only the Son of God can lead men to God the
Father. In this we see something exquisitely beautiful about these two
persons, if I may use that word about the Father and Son. The more we
know the Son, the more we come to know the Father; and the more we know
the Father, the more we know the Son. This is how close they are to
each other. And yet they are quite evidently distinctly different
persons. But like any father and son, getting to know one leads us to
know more of the other, which in turn reveals yet more to us about the
other, which leads to more insight again into the other… and so the
wondrous spiral of knowing the Father and Son continues. If Father and
Son were one and the same person, the surpassing beauty of this is lost
and spoilt and becomes impossible. The experience of any true
Christian, one who has come to ‘see’ and know the Father and Son, will
bear out this truth. Which is why correct understanding about their
nature and relationship is vital to knowing them. The wonder of it all
is that the Son didn’t automatically reflect the Father to us, as if He
were just a piece of theological machinery; He made a supreme effort to
do so, culminating in the cross. He explains that He didn’t do His will, but that of the Father; He didn’t do the works He wanted
to do, but those which the Father wanted. He had many things to say and
judge of the Jewish world, He could have given them ‘a piece of His
mind’, but instead He commented: “But… I speak to the world
those things which I have heard of [the Father]” (Jn. 8:26). I submit
that this sort of language is impossible to adequately understand
within the trinitarian paradigm. Yet the wonder of it all goes yet
further. The Father is spoken of as ‘getting to know’ [note aorist
tense] the Son, as the Son gets to know the Father; and the same verb
form is used about the Good Shepherd ‘getting to know’ us His sheep.
This wonderful, dynamic family relationship is what “the fellowship of
the Holy Spirit”, true walking and living with the Father and Son, is
all about. It is into this family and wonderful nexus of relationships
that trinitarians apparently choose not to enter.
The Path To Glory
The
Lord’s path to glory culminated in the Father ‘making known unto Him
the ways of life’ (Acts 2:28). That statement, incidentally, is a major
nail in the coffin of trinitarianism. But more significantly for us
personally, in this the Lord was our pattern, as we likewise walk in
the way to life (Mt. 7:14), seeking to ‘know’ the life eternal (Jn.
17:3). In being our realistic role model in this, we can comment with
John: “The Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that
we may know… the eternal life” (1 Jn. 5:20).
Notes
(1) P.B. Harner, The ‘I Am’ Of The Fourth Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970) pp. 39,51.
The Father And Son
The Wrath Of God
I want to look at the relationship between the Father and Son by
considering some of the Father’s characteristics, and how His
articulation of them has been affected by His experience of His Son.
God
can be provoked to anger (Dt. 9:7; Ezra 5:12), His wrath ‘arises’
because of sinful behaviour (2 Chron. 36:16). He drove Israel into
captivity in anger and fury (Jer. 32:37). The wrath of God ‘waxes hot’
against sinful men, and Moses begged God to ‘turn’ from that wrath (Ex.
32:11,12). The whole intercession of Moses with God gives the
impression of God changing His mind because of the intercession of a
mere man. Admittedly the idea of anger flaring up in God’s face and
then Him ‘turning’ from that wrath is some sort of anthropomorphism.
The very same words are used about Esau’s wrath ‘turning away’, i.e.
being pacified, as are used about the pacification of God’s wrath (Gen.
27:45). But all the same, this language must be telling us something.
The wrath of God did come upon Israel in the wilderness (Ps. 78:31; Ez.
22:31), but Moses ‘turned’ God from executing it as He planned (Ps.
106:23). Many times He turned away from the full extent of His wrath
(Ps. 78:38). It is by righteous behaviour and repentance that the wrath
of God turns away (Dt. 13:17; 2 Chron. 12:12; 29:10; 30:8). Ezra 10:14
speaks of God’s wrath turning away because those who had married
Gentile women divorced them. God’s wrath is also turned away by the
death of the sinner- the heads of the sinners in Num. 25:4 were to be
‘hung up’ before the Lord so that His wrath would turn away. A similar
example is to be found in Josh. 7:26. Jeremiah often comments that
God’s wrath is turned away by the execution of judgment upon the sinner
(e.g. Jer. 30:24). In this sense His anger and wrath are poured out or
‘accomplished’, i.e. they are no more because they have been poured out
(Lam. 4:11).
Turning Away Wrath
The fact that men such as Moses and Jeremiah (Jer. 18:20) turned away
God’s wrath without these things happening , or simply by prayer (Dan.
9:16) therefore means that God accepted the intercession of those men
and counted their righteousness to those from whom His wrath turned
away. We shouldn’t assume that these righteous men merely waved away
God’s wrath. That wrath was real, and required immense pleading and
personal dedication on their behalf. Thus we read in 2 Kings 23:26 that
despite Josiah’s righteousness, the wrath of God against Manasseh was
still not turned away. Truly „wise men turn away wrath” (Prov. 29:8).
And they evidently pointed forward to the work of the Lord Jesus-
perhaps, like the sacrifices, those men only achieved what they did on
account of the way they pointed forward to the Lord Jesus. He delivered
us from God’s coming wrath (1 Thess. 1:10)- the wrath of God is
frequently spoken of in the New Testament as being poured out with
devastating physical effects in the last days. All those not reconciled
to God through the Lord Jesus are „by nature the children of wrath”
(Eph. 2:3). The very existence of the law of God creates His wrath,
because we break that law (Rom. 4:15). Romans has much to say about the
wrath of God; and the letter begins with the reminder that we are all
sinners, and the wrath of God will be revealed against all forms of sin
(Rom. 1:18). It is only through the death and resurrection of the Lord
Jesus that we are saved from this wrath and ‘reconciled’ to God (Rom.
5:8-10). The wrath of God abides on all who don’t accept Christ (Jn.
3:36)- confirming the truth of Paul’s statements that all of us before
our conversion were „by nature the children of wrath”. God isn’t
unrighteous because He will take vengeance- this is how He will judge
the world in the last day (Rom. 3:5).
The Other Side Of God
But... and it’s a big but. There’s another side to this apparently
angry God. He is a God of untold love, who is almost unbelievably slow
to His anger. The whole Old Testament exemplifies this in His dealings
with Israel. This is the God who presents Himself to us as appointing
our sympathetic Lord Jesus as both our judge and our advocate. The God
who will almost compromise, apparently, His own statements in order to
save us, whose grace in Christ finds a way around the law that sin
leads to death, freeing us from that principle (Rom. 8:2), the God who
revealed Himself through the senseless love of Hosea for the worthless
Gomer. The harder side of God is there, undoubtedly. But it is there in
order to give depth and meaning to His amazing grace and desire to save
us. Without the reality of God as a God of wrath and judgment of sin,
His grace in saving us would be far cheaper to our eyes, and far harder
to deeply appreciate.
Beyond Mechanics
So the question arises, how could the death of the Lord Jesus as a
perfect man turn away God’s wrath from us, just because we place
ourselves ‘in’ Him? It is far too primitive to suggest that the sight
of the red blood of Jesus somehow appeased an angry God. For starters,
God isn’t an angry God. He is a God of love who delights to show mercy
and grace. But on the other hand, as Old Testament men turned away the
wrath of God, so the Lord Jesus turned away that wrath from us; He
saved us from it. That is the Biblical position. But how and why was
this possible? What was so special about Jesus? The standard answer
would be along the lines that the Lord Jesus shared our nature, was our
representative, and yet was perfect, dying for us to show how we
deserve death, but rising again because it wasn’t possible that a
perfect man could remain dead, and if we are ‘in Him’ then we are
counted as being ‘Him’, and thereby our sins are overlooked and we will
share the resurrection and eternal life now enjoyed by Him personally.
And I stand by all that. But it only throws the essential question a
stage further back. Why and how is this so? Why would God operate like
that, given the part of His character that exacts judgment for sin, and
experiences the emotion of wrath against sinners? Why go through that
process of atonement that required the death of His Son to achieve it-
when He could have achieved our salvation in any way He liked? Maybe I
have too restless a mind. But a valid explanation of what happened
doesn’t explain to me ultimately why it had to be the way it was; and
what was it about the death of Jesus that so uniquely moved the Father
for all time to forgive us our sins and save us.
Perhaps
our problem is that we are inclined to see the tragedy in Eden as a
‘problem’ for God, which He had to devise a very clever means of
getting around, whilst leaving His essential principles uncompromised.
The fact that the Lord Jesus in a sense was slain from the foundation
of the world, the ‘word’ / logos of Jesus was in the very beginning
with God, surely indicates that God didn’t in any sense think up some
plan to save us when faced by Adam’s sin. To me, we’re coming at this
the wrong way around, assuming that God had a problem which He needed
to solve. Not at all. God’s basic principles don’t change, but He also
reveals Himself as a loving Father who has all the emotions of a human
father- again, the manifestation of God in Hosea exemplifies all this,
with God presented as having the feelings of the wounded lover, the
anger mixed with senseless love and acceptance of the betrayed husband,
the God who makes statements in His fury and then by His grace and love
doesn’t carry them out (1). It is this passionate and emotional side of
the Father which is our salvation.
But back to our
question. In what sense did the life and death of His Son somehow turn
God’s wrath away from us, and why did it all work out the way that it
did? For me, dry atonement theory doesn’t provide any ultimate
explanation. It describes a mechanism. But the questions of why and how
remain- for me at least. My explanation of what happened due to the
life and death of God’s Son is best initially illustrated by a human
explanation.
Father And Son
My
father is in his 70s as I write this. Recently we had literally the
conversation of a lifetime, one of those en passant chats which turns
into a profound interchange. He explained to me how I had influenced
him. How his basic life and faith principles had never changed, but
what he had seen of himself in me, in failure and success, had led him
to act and feel very differently towards others; and thus he had
changed from being a legalistic defender of the faith to being a far
more gracious individual. Not so much because of any grace or otherwise
I showed; but because he saw himself played out through me, through my
failures and successes, triumphs and failures. He shared with me how
well he knew my mother; but it was only by seeing her in me, again, in
both triumph and failure, in good and bad, that he came to more deeply
understand and appreciate her. That conversation remains an abiding
memory. And I am thankful to God that we both lived long enough in this
lonely world to be able to have it.
My
point of course from all this is that God’s having a son influenced
Him. God isn’t static. I’m pinned down under the tyranny of words here,
but something like ‘growth’, ‘deeper experience’ (or whatever word we
find appropriate) surely is a facet of His nature, as it is of us who
are made in His image. And there’s no doubt that God can be influenced
to change His mind. Both Moses and Jonah demonstrated that clearly.
God’s experience in Christ led Him to a deeper insight into the nature
of His creation, just as my very existence gave my father greater
understanding of my mother. I’m not saying that God somehow changed
between the Old Testament and the New Testament. But the life and death
of His Son, the way His Son gave His life for us His brethren,
influenced God. It saved us from His wrath- not in that the sight of
the red blood appeased an angry God, but in that He perceived again
ever more forcibly how in His own personality, grace outweighs
judgment, and thus He became committed to hearing our desperate pleas
for that grace. The wrath of God simply couldn’t be against those who
chose to be in this wonderful Son of His, who voluntarily identified
themselves with Him, who believed in and were baptized into that death
and seek to share in it by their own feeble lives of self-crucifixion.
Such behaviour from God isn’t unexpected- because in Old Testament
times He had been ‘turned from’ His wrath by men far beneath the status
of the Lord Jesus. It was their lives and their prayerful intercession
which affected Him. But it’s been pointed out that their ‘intercession’
was a mediating of God’s principles and blessings to men, rather than
‘mediation’ in the sense of settling a quarrel between two parties (2).
How, then, did their manifestation of God to men so influence God
Himself? Surely because as He saw e.g. Moses telling Israel of Him,
pleading with them to repent, He saw Himself in Moses. And Moses was
also Israel’s representative. And so He was moved to turn from His
wrath. When it came to the ‘intercession’ of His own Son, the effect
was even the more powerful. Not just Israel but any from all nations
would be saved; and the Son of God ever lives to make this kind of
intercession both for and to us. Moses died, but the Lord Jesus lives
for evermore in God’s presence, the example of His life, the nature of
His very being, having ‘persuaded’ the Father to turn away from His
wrath, to not stir up all His anger [to use an Old Testament figure],
and exercise to the full extent the wonderfully gracious aspect of His
character towards us. God is presented to us in the Old Testament as a
person, and a person with a struggle within them. He speaks in Hosea of
how His heart is kindled in ‘repentings’, in changes of mind, over
whether to reject or redeem His wayward people; how His very soul is
grieved to decide. It seems to me that the Father’s experience of His
Son leads Him to resolve this struggle, to come down on the side of
goodness / grace rather than severity, with those of us who are
idenitified with His Son.
Admittedly we have trodden
upon ground which Scripture doesn’t explicitly open up to us. But there
is some Biblical indication of the nature of the Son’s influence upon
the Father, and His relationship with Him. Remember that whilst Father
and Son were one in purpose, the will of the Father wasn’t always that
of the Son. The agony in Gethsemane was proof enough of that. In the
parable of Lk. 13:7,8, the servant [=Jesus] is commanded by his master
[= God] to cut down the fig tree. Not only does the servant take a lot
of initiative in saying that no, he will dig around it and try
desperately to get it to give fruit; but, he says, if even that fails,
then you, the Master, will have to cut it down… when he, the servant,
had been ordered to do it by his master! This servant [the Lord Jesus]
obviously has a most unusual relationship with the Master. He suggests
things on his own initiative, and even passes the job of cutting off
Israel back to God, as if He would rather not do it. In the parable of
Lk. 14:22, the servant [= Jesus] reports to the master [= God] that the
invited guests wouldn’t come to the supper [cp. God’s Kingdom]. The
master tells the slave to go out into the streets and invite the poor.
And then we’re hit with an incredible unreality, especially to 1st
century ears: “The servant said, Lord, it is done as thou hast
commanded, and yet there is room”. No slave would take it upon himself
to draw up the invitation list, or take the initiative to invite poor
beggars into his master’s supper. But this servant did! He not only had
the unusual relationship with his master that allowed this huge
exercise of his own initiative- but he somehow knew his master so well
that he guessed in advance what the master would say, and he went and
did it without being asked. In all this we have a wonderful insight
into the relationship between the Father and Son, especially in the
area of inviting people to His supper [cp. salvation]. The point of all
this is to demonstrate how the Lord Jesus has His influence upon the
Father, and can at times change His stated purpose [e.g. with regard to
the rejection of Israel- just as Moses did]. And this is the same
Father and Son with whom we have to do, and whose matchless
relationship is the basis and reason of our salvation.
Real Relationship
The
parable of the fig tree appears to show the Lord Jesus as more gracious
and patient than His Father- the owner of the vineyard (God) tells the
dresser (Jesus) to cut it down, but the dresser asks for another year’s
grace to be shown to the miserable fig tree, and then, he says, the
owner [God] Himself would have to cut it down (Lk. 13:7-9). But in Jn.
6:37-39 we seem to have the Lord’s recognition that the Father was more
gracious to some than He would naturally be; for He says that He
Himself will not cast any out, exactly because it was the Father’s will
that He should lose nothing but achieve a resurrection to life eternal
for all given to Him. And the Lord observed, both here and elsewhere,
that He was not going to do His own will, but rather the will of the
Father. Now this is exactly the sort of thing we would expect in a
truly dynamic relationship- on some points the Father is more generous
than the Son, and in other cases- vice versa. And yet Father and Son
were, are and will be joined together in the same judgment and will,
despite Father and Son having differing wills from one viewpoint. But
this is the result of process, of differing perspectives coming
together, of a mutuality we can scarcely enter into comprehending, of
some sort of learning together, of a Son struggling to do the will of a
superior Father rather than His own will, of conclusions jointly
reached through experience, time and process- rather than an automatic,
robot-like imposition of the Father’s will and judgment upon the Son.
And the awesome thing is, that the Lord invites us to know the Father,
in the same way as He knows the Father. His relationship with the
Father is a pattern for ours too.
Notes
(1) See http://www.aletheiacollege.net/ww/4-5-1extent_of_grace.htm
(2) John Launchbury, 'The Present Work Of Christ' , Tidings Vol. 69 No. 1, Jan. 2006 pp. 8-18.
