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Pastor Jeremy M. Thomas
Fredericksburg Bible Church
107 East Austin
Fredericksburg, Texas 78624
830-997-8834
[email protected]
B1029 – July 18, 2010 – Implication Of Hypostatic Union
Let’s be reminded of what we’re doing here. This course takes a three-fold
approach. Proverbs says a three cord strand is not quickly broken and that’s
been the approach of the course. One of the strands, (I gave an acronym for this,
HIS curriculum, not that this is the only approach, but it worked nicely) the H,
stands for history. We emphasize the historical event and that’s what we’ve
been doing in looking at the hypostatic union, we’ve been going through a little
church history. It’s kind of funny how Christians are, it’s sort of like, yeah, we
have OT history, and we have NT history and then time stops. Most Christians
know very little about the last 2,000 years of history. And yet it’s still God’s
history and God rules the last 2,000 years of history providentially just as He
did the prior 4,000. Church History tells you where we’ve come from and what
people have believed, the origin of various doctrines; et. al. Then we have the
second strand, this is the Interrelatedness of Scripture; it’s not pieces and I’ve
related the hypostatic union to the Creator-creature distinction, the two streams
of OT revelation and other doctrines that bring a coherence to Scripture that
you don’t get in most studies, so we’ve emphasized it. Third strand is the
Strategy, the apologetic strategy. We’re following the presuppositional
approach and if your unfamiliar with that term it just means one’s ultimate
commitment, not a prior idea or assumption but what is pre-eminent in your
thinking, what you’re ultimately committed to on the deepest level. And that’s
what we’ve been looking at; each of these heresies, on the deepest level, was
committed to one of the underlined words on the chart below. That right column
is dedicated to errors early believers made on the presuppositional level that led
to confusion about the person of Christ.
The event we’re studying is the Birth of the King and the doctrine associated
with that birth, the hypostatic union. Next week we’ll be on an even more
difficult subject, the Trinity, but there’s a connection. I don’t want to leave the
God-ness and the human-ness of Christ without going to the Trinity because
historically this is where the Trinity debate arose in connection with the person
of Christ. On the chart you see six recurring heresies.
If there’s one lesson in this, please learn something about history; that in the
flow of history there are very, very few basic ideas. The tragedy in a lot of our
education is we get everybody focused on details, details, details, and nobody
backs off and says now wait a minute, what’s the big picture of what’s going on.
In this case, we have six different heresies that have recycled again and again in
church history. They don’t just come and go; they keep coming back again
primarily because people forget that they were refuted. And the Church has to
go through the whole thing all over again refuting it. Usually when you run into
a doctrinal issue if you go back in church history you’ll find that this came up
before, it was discussed, people studied the Scriptures and so we want to have a
little humility in that the Holy Spirit has taught people before we came along.
And if He did, we might possibly learn something from those people. That’s the
great thing about studying church history. Church history gives lesson after
lesson after lesson.
The chart reminds us that in all that we’ve studied about the person of Jesus
Christ, the error came up because they started with the wrong presupposition
about God, they didn’t have a biblical God concept, they thought it was biblical,
but when they went to fit the NT data about Jesus into their God concept it
didn’t work. It didn’t work because their basic presupposition was wrong to
begin with. For five centuries the church argued about the person of Jesus
Christ. We said at times the heretics controlled the Church. Several times the
orthodox people held the minority position. We can thank the Holy Spirit for
finally bringing it to the majority position. That’s the first thing we want to
remember.
The second thing, as we get set up for the Trinity, we said that there were three
categories of evidences for the deity of Christ, and in all the 400 years of debate
these evidences came up again and again. One category of evidences is that
there are two streams of OT revelation. In the OT preparatory to the
incarnation of the Son of God there were two themes. One was the God stream that God’s home is with man. He wants to dwell with us. This is the Immanuel
stream. The other one was the man stream, that the world is destined to be
ruled by a perfect human king. He’s a full human being with the genes of David.
So the God stream and the man stream. And the third kind of OT passage
shows these two streams converging in one person. We said that Ps 110 shows
how close they get, they don’t touch exactly, but they do approach one another;
they point to a convergence. Somehow the two are going to come together in one
person. So we can see that the two OT streams of revelation are a set up for the
unique person of Christ. The person of Christ is not some kind of a brand new
thing in the NT. Centuries and centuries of revelation were setting us up for the
person of Christ.
Then we said his deity is shown by a second category of evidences. These are the
NT Christ for YHWH substitutions. This is undeniable and powerful. When the
NT authors cite OT passages that refer to YHWH, they cite them as applying to
Jesus Christ, clearly identifying Jesus of the NT with YHWH of the OT. If that
isn’t a claim to deity, tell me what is. You can’t have it any stronger than that.
These are monotheistic Jews quoting the OT in a monotheistic environment,
daring to identify Jesus Christ with the YHWH of the OT. If you want to deny
this proves the deity of Christ the only thing you can do logically is say that the
NT is blasphemous idolatry.
Then you had the third category of evidences that Jesus is full deity is that
works in the OT that are done by God alone are by the NT authors attributed to
Jesus Christ. We said things like Creation. In the OT God alone is the Creator.
In the NT Jesus Christ is the Creator. If that’s not a claim to deity I don’t know
what is. In the OT God alone is the one who forgives sins. In the NT Christ said
I forgive your sins, not I pronounce forgiveness of your sin in the name of God. A
priest would pronounce forgiveness of sin in the name of God, but a priest
couldn’t say I forgive your sins. Only the person you’ve sinned against can
forgive you. So if Jesus is forgiving people’s sins then He must be the One that
they sinned against. We went on and showed they shared the same attributes,
we showed what no one dares believe the NT shows - direct texts that state
Jesus is God, we went through all of that. Three very powerful evidences for the
deity of Christ. The two streams of evidence, the NT Christ for YHWH
substitutions, and the role switch between Christ and YHWH are powerful,
powerful evidences.
Then we studied how the arguments went for 500 years, and we said one set of
arguments is this: Jesus Christ has got to be “undiminished deity” because if
He’s not then when we worship Jesus we’re worshiping an idol, because we’re
worshiping a mere human Jesus. The illustration of the point is that whenever
angels are accidentally worshiped in the NT, (John the apostle falls down), and
the correction is always whoa, hey, we’re creatures like you, don’t worship us. So
every time there’s an accidental worship of an angel it's cut off immediately by
the angel. The question is, why didn’t Jesus cut if off? Why, when people
worshiped Him did He receive the worship? That was one of the arguments that
won the day in the Church. If Jesus Christ is not undiminished deity, and yet
we worship Jesus Christ, then we’re worshiping something less than God and
we’re idolaters.
Another argument that went on during that time was that if Jesus Christ isn’t
undiminished deity and I claim to have a personal relationship with God
through Jesus Christ then I don’t really have a personal relationship with God
because Christ isn’t God, so I’m not saved, I’m still cut off. That’s why
Athanasius got up in his day and he said to the Church, look, if Jesus Christ is
not undiminished deity then we are not saved, period. That was the argument
that won the day.
The second category of these arguments was that if Jesus Christ wasn’t true
humanity, if He wasn’t complete and genuine humanity, then there’s no
substitutionary death and again no salvation. Angels can’t die for us. There has
to be a genuine member of the human race die for us. So if you compromise the
humanity of Christ you wind up with a meaningless cross. And you wind up
doing something else in the process. You wind up destroying the priesthood of
the Lord Jesus Christ, because in the NT it says we have a high priest that can
sympathize with our weaknesses. In other words, when we go to the throne of
grace with our prayers and petitions if Jesus isn’t a true human then we have a
deaf ear up there. We’ve got a guy who has no idea what we go through. So if
you deny the true humanity of Christ you wipe out the crucifixion and you wipe
out His priesthood. So there are some very, very serious consequences if you go
any of those routes.
Finally we came to the Council of Chalcedon, AD451. It shows you how long it
took the Church to settle this issue, 400 years. Why? Because it’s tough stuff.
Jesus Christ isn’t easy. The Council of Chalcedon is the final word of the church
on the basic NT picture of Jesus Christ. We encapsulate what they said by
saying Jesus Christ is “undiminished deity united with true humanity without
confusion in one person forever.” What does that boot out on the chart? Let’s
look at it, “undiminished deity,” that gets rid of three errors; Modal
Monarchianism, Dynamic Monarchianism and Arianism, all three started with
the concept of a Pure Solitary God, if that’s the case then Jesus is less than God.
That won’t work. Then we have the expression, “united with true humanity,”
true humanity boots out what? Docetism, the idea that Jesus body or his spirit
or his soul was just an illusion, that idea was brought in by Greek Philosophy,
the thought of the Pure Ideal which meant Jesus could never materialize. So,
undiminished deity united with true humanity without confusion,” what’s the
error there? Monophysitism, blending Christ’s two natures into one nature.
What happens when you do that? You violate the Creator-creature distinction.
Finally we have the phrase, “in one person forever,” what does that exclude?
Nestorianism. Nestorianism had Christ’s two natures so separated that
Christ turned into two people. So the church went through almost 500 years of
discussion. There were fights, there were arguments but in the end these are
the words that won the day. So that’s the expression you want to memorize for
the doctrine of the hypostatic union, Jesus Christ is the Creator and the
creature in one person, in hypostasis. We summarize it by saying “undiminished
deity united with true humanity without confusion in one person forever.” that
is orthodoxy. There are five elements there; undiminished deity, #1; united in
one person, #2; true humanity, #3; without confusion, #4; forever, #5. You have
got to have all five of those parts or something breaks down, the cross goes
away, the priesthood goes away, salvation goes away, something else goes away.
To be fully nourished by the Lord Jesus Christ we have to have all five of those
things together.
Today we want to deal with the four implications of the hypostatic union
doctrine. We want to draw out “so what?” What do we derive by stating the
doctrine this way? There are four things, there may be a lot more, we’re just
taking four. The first one is that the Creator-creature distinction is eternally
fundamental. What separates the Bible from every other system of thought?
What is the one thing that separates it? The Creator-creature distinction. All
pagan thought smears that difference and makes God, angels, men, supermen,
rocks, molecules, dogs, cats, the cows, all part of one great Continuity of Being,
we’re all part of this universe thing, God’s inside the universe, part of it. It’s
either one system of thought or it’s the other system of thought and nobody has
ever come up with a third position. There’s no third, middle ground here. It’s
either this or that! You can separate every thought system, every philosopher,
and he sits on one side of the fence or the other.
Notice in the Creator-creature distinction we say everlasting distinctions, they
don’t go away. Let’s see if we can think about the Creator-creature distinction in
terms of our Christian life and make some practical applications. God has His
attributes, He is sovereign, He is righteous, He is just, He is loving, He is
omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, He is immutable and eternal. He is all
these things and more. As human beings we have corresponding attributes. Why
is that? Because we’re made in God’s image. Apes don’t have this, only human
beings. We have corresponding attributes. God has sovereignty, we have
volition, our chooser, it’s not identical to God’s sovereignty, it’s a finite analog of
it. God is righteous and just, what corresponds to that in us? Our conscience, a
desire for evil to be taken care of once for all. God has infinite love, we have
finite love. God has omniscience, which is all-knowledge, we have some
knowledge.
Keep these analogs in mind and let’s go to some verses, some Scripture that
deals with practical, every day problems and see if we don’t get some insight
this way. Turn to Isaiah 40, the prophet Isaiah wrote this in a time of crisis. The
nation was falling apart, people were wandering around trying to get a
foundation for something in their lives, they were in danger of being sucked up
into a pagan culture, their land was about to be militarily defeated. It’s a sad
day when a nation disintegrates, and the generation to whom Isaiah wrote saw
their homeland disintegrate. It disintegrated not because of external military
power, though God sent those, it really disintegrated because spiritually they
rebelled against the King of the nation. The King of the nation said you don’t
want to be in My kingdom, don’t be in My kingdom, go ahead; you like paganism
go take a vacation, 70 years in the heart of paganism, see how you like it. That
was the generation that was told these words. You can see the Holy Spirit
working through the prophet Isaiah trying to get these people, who are going to
shortly face a catastrophe in their lives, many of them are not going to survive
that catastrophe, they’re going to be killed, they’re going to be raped, they’re
going to be beaten, they’re going to see their children killed before their eyes. So
he’s saying guys, before the crisis comes get something straight, put your trust
where it belongs.
God is speaking here and He says in Isaiah 40:21, “Do you not know? Have you
not heard? Has it not been declared to you from the beginning? Have you not
understood from the foundations of the earth?” He goes on and on and on,
talking about Himself, who is God and what is He like. Then we come to verse
25 and here’s the challenge. Remember they lived in an idolatrous generation.
God asks the question, a challenge in verse 25, “‘To whom then will you liken
Me, that I should be his equal?’ says the Holy One.” What did we say that’s
always true of pagan thought? We said that in pagan thought you have a
smearing of the nature of God and man, so people begin to put God and man on
a scale. What causes that? Sin causes that, it screws up intellectually how we
think about God and man. The nation is screwed up so what does God say here?
He says, “‘To whom then will you liken Me, that I should be his equal?’” I’m not
equal to anything, I’m over everything, I am the Creator and there are only two
levels of being, the Creator and the creature. I’m not on the same level as Baal,
and your little priests. Then He says, and this is a challenge to look at God’s
attributes so watch it as we read verses 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30. Count how many
attributes you personally observe in the text. Verse 26, “Lift up your eyes on
high and see who has created these stars,” go ahead, go out at night and look up,
“The One who leads forth their host by number He calls them all by name;
Because of the greatness of His might and the strength of His power not one of
them is missing.” Two attributes at least there, what are they? Omnipotence
because He created the stars. Omniscience because He knows everything, He
calls them all by name. So you’ve got omniscience and omnipotence in verse 26.
See what God is doing, He’s saying just take a look at Me folks, get your eyes on
Me He says.
Verse 27, “Why do you say, O Jacob, and assert, O Israel, My way is hidden from
the LORD and the justice due me escapes the notice of my God? 28Do you not
know? Have you not heard? The everlasting God” attribute? Eternality. “The
everlasting God, the LORD, the creator of the ends of the earth does not become
weary or tired.” Attribute: Omnipotence, He’s never tired. “His understanding is
inscrutable” and this is where we want to look critically today. His understanding is what? It’s inscrutable, it’s incomprehensible.” Attribute? Omniscience.
God is omniscient, so His understanding is inscrutable. He can tell us a lot of
things that are on His mind, but this attribute of omniscience is never to be
confused with our attribute of knowledge. Our attribute of knowledge is a finite
version of that, but we can never grasp God’s viewpoint exhaustively. We can
have pieces of it, a piece here, a piece there, a piece somewhere else. That’s true
even in eternity; we’re not going to become omniscient in eternity. What would
we have to become to be omniscient in eternity? God. We’re not going to morph
into God, that’s Mormonism, another cult that violates the Creator-creature
distinction. We’ll never have any of God’s attributes. So don’t worry, heaven
won’t be boring, the portrayal we get of sitting on a cloud strumming a harp,
what a bore, but heaven in the Scriptures is an eternal learning experience.
Every day something new to learn about God, forever and ever and ever because
He’s an infinite being and therefore an infinite abyss of discovery forever and
ever and ever. We’ll never come to the end of God.
Verse 29, “He gives strength to the weary, and to him who lacks might He
increases power.” There is what He’s saying, He’s saying I give strength to you,
your human strength is weak but My power, I’m never tired, I have all power
and I give might to them… it’s a great promise, personal promise here. Verse 30,
“Though youths grow weary and tired, and vigorous young men stumble badly.
31Yet those who wait for the LORD will gain new strength,” there’s the element
of trust. “Those who wait for the Lord will gain strength; They will mount up
with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not
become faint.” Not because they become God. Verse 31 is not teaching that those
who trust the Lord become omnipotent. It says they can run this way because as
they trust God supplies energy to them, He helps them, He reaches down and
He helps us.
That’s the Christian understanding of this interplay between God’s nature and
human nature. In His humanity what did the Lord Jesus do here? Think. Did
He perfectly trust the Father? Yes, He did. Let’s apply this to Christ, verse 29,
“He gives strength to the weary, and to him who lacks might He increases
power.” Remember the temptations of Jesus in Matt 4. See how Christ utilized
this OT principle. He used faith resting in the God who was His Creator. Verse
29 “Though youths grow weary and tired, and vigorous young men stumble.
30Yet those who wait for the LORD will gain new strength; They will mount up
with wings like eagles,” a wonderful, wonderful promise here. It’s a great one to
memorize, a moving, inspiring promise.
Let’s go to the NT and watch the NT after the incarnation say exactly the same
thing as Isaiah 40. Turn to Phil 4:6-7, let’s look at the attributes; train and
discipline your self to observe the text. In Phil 4:6 a great promise, “Be anxious
for nothing,” how many times have I had to have that knocked through my
head, “Be anxious for nothing,” at least two or three times a day I need that. “Be
anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with
thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” As far as you’ve read so
far, verse 6 is an admonition, it’s an imperative, don’t do this, do this instead.
By the way, when you read imperatives in the NT, that’s another thing to
observe that’s helped me a lot over the years, when the Bible it hits you with a
negative it doesn’t leave you there, there’s always a positive. He never says
“don’t do that!” without saying “do this instead.” And you’ll find if you “do this”
you get the power to “not do that.” But if you sit and get a fixation on don’t do
this, don’t do that then you can’t do the something else, you get resentful,
“Christianity and the Bible don’t work for me” and all the foolish things we come
up with. You missed the point. The Bible, when it tells us don’t do this, always
tells us, but do this instead, and it gives a motive, it’s not a mere elimination of
something, it’s a substitution with a reason why. And here’s an example, instead
of being anxious, we’re supposed to be praying. We’re not supposed to just lie
down and do nothing. You can’t stop being anxious by trying to stop being
anxious, it doesn’t work, we all know that. If you worry about something,
something’s on your mind, you don’t sleep, it keeps going around in your mind,
you can be gardening and it comes to mind, you can be eating and it comes to
mind, you can’t keep it out of your mind. God knows that so that’s why He says
replace being anxious with being prayerful. It tells you exactly how to cope with
the anxiety. It’s all free; it doesn’t have a $75.00 an hour counseling fee.
“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with
thanksgiving,” with thanksgiving, which means you can’t really get there if
you’re not trusting that God is working this out for the good, “let your requests
be made known to God.” Now watch verse 7, here come the attributes. “And the
peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, shall protect your hearts and
your minds in Christ Jesus.” The result of the praying is that the peace of God
comes, but the peace that comes is omniscience. Let’s take that apart, let’s
unravel this a little bit. Why do you suppose Paul says the peace of God is
incomprehensible? How does an incomprehensible “peace of God” help me when
I’m worrying about something? Here’s how it works. When I’m worrying about
something and I’m trying to hit it from all sides with my solutions the problem
we all wind up with is that our solutions don’t work. So then we try to plug in
another solution, doesn’t work, and another solution, doesn’t work, doesn’t work,
doesn’t work, so we try another solution. We just beat ourselves to death trying
to do this thing. But then when we pray to the Lord the right way, in verse 6, He
gives us this inner assurance that He’s in charge, everything’s going to turn out
okay, so relax. Has He given us more information? Has He shared with us how
it’s all going to turn out? No. We don’t have any more information. What do we
have? Assurance that He has all the information and He knows how it’s going to
turn out. We have assurance of His love, we know He loves us and He has a plan
for us. I know He has given me promises and He’s going to keep His promises, so
I start to remember these things. It’s not new information, we already knew it;
He just brings it to mind. Once that assurance comes there’s a transfer that goes
from an autonomous mind trying to solve the problem and require that God
show me the solution to I’m not going to get it all together, whatever God is
doing here is too grand for me. And I trust Him, He’s got the solution, He’s
sovereign, He’s in charge and He knows. Do I know what He’s going to do in this
situation? Probably not. But what do I know? I know that He’s good. He’s got my
best interest in mind. I know He’s righteous. He’s going to do the right thing.
And that brings peace, the peace of God which transcends my capacity to think
it all through. I don’t turn my head off, but yet I know I don’t have a total
solution and that it doesn’t depend on Jeremy Thomas figuring it all out because
He’s already figured it out and He’s already working it together for good.
So there’s an example of the eternal distinction between the Creator and the
creature, and it doesn’t change in the person of Christ. In His humanity the
Lord Jesus Christ operated this way. That’s what we’re going to see in the next
chapter, that Jesus Christ was the test pilot. The Lord Jesus Christ, throughout
His humanity and during His life operated just like this. It was the first time in
history that Satan ever saw a human being walk in the middle of his domain
and pull it off perfectly, first time in history. Here was a perfect man who
operated by faith. Satan said nobody can do that. Well, somebody did do that
and nobody from that point on, after Christ finished His life, not one of us can
argue it can’t be done, because it’s been done. It’s an irrefutable fact of history.
Jesus Christ trusted the Father continually, at every moment. He gave a living
test demonstration of what a human being can do when filled with the Holy
Spirit. So the eternal distinction is important, otherwise you erase the whole
issue of the life of Christ. The life of Christ can’t be applied to us if we don’t
maintain the fact that during His humanity He had all the same constraints,
humanly speaking, that you and I have and He operated by faith trusting the
Father and His abilities.
Now we come to the second implication:the Creator, God, can never meet us
more fully than He has in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the zenith
of God’s revelation of Himself to man. We can think of this in terms of great
religious leaders. What this means is that Joseph Smith, Mohammed,
Confucius, all the religious gurus in the world, have never given us a better look
into the face of God than Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is THE final and most
complete revelation, period. No need for any more prophets. No need for any
more religions. People that get an itch for a new religion have basically turned
their back on the person of Jesus Christ and the God of the universe.
Another way we can look at this is to say that God most fully reveals Himself as
a man. God isn’t going to reveal Himself some day as an alien. Why not? Who is
made in God’s image? Aliens, intergalactic organisms? No, man. So Jesus Christ
came as a man, He didn’t come as an alien from Galaxy M53. He is a human
being from planet earth and He represents the most complete picture of God
that is possible in the entire universe. This carries implications for the
centrality of planet earth and the history of planet earth. We talk about SETI,
the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and we’re listening to the
universe, it’s actually turning back on the most phenomenal planet… I mean, if
there were creatures out there, do you know what they’d be doing if they knew
God? We want to find out about planet earth, He visited there, He never visited
out here, what’s the matter with those idiots on planet earth, they think we’ve
got the news; they’ve got the news, what the heck did they do with it?
Suppressed it. Yeah, real great job.
So the second implication of the hypostatic union is that when God chose to
incarnate Himself He didn’t incarnate Himself as an animal, zoologically, He
didn’t incarnate Himself as an alien, extra-terrestrially, He incarnated Himself
humanly. The human form is the greatest vehicle to communicate the nature of
God.
The third implication is that history has eternal ramifications. History, and we
can bring that down to the personal level, your life, my life, goes on the record
forever. That’s a scary thought. Every one of us is writing a record that we can’t
ever change, every thought, every word, every deed is being recorded. In one
sense we are writing our history, nobody twists our arms, we’ve done what we’ve
done, can’t blame anyone else. In the Bible let’s look at Christ’s personal history.
Jesus Christ in His personal life generated righteousness, perfect righteousness.
And part of His personal righteousness, His absolute righteousness, includes the
work that He did on the cross and the work that Jesus Christ did on the cross
earned Him scars on His body.
Turn to John 20:27, this is His resurrection body that He will live in forever and
ever. The Lord Jesus Christ has the body in John 20 that He has when you and
I will meet Him. Notice that that body has marks. “Then He said to Thomas,
‘Reach here your finger, and see My hands; and reach here you hand, and put it
into My side; and stop unbelieving, but start believing.” You notice that this is
not His mortal body, this is His resurrection body; the resurrection body carries
the marks of the cross. While Jesus Christ produced in His personal history
absolute righteousness He carries the scars of becoming sin for you and me. And
He carries those scars forever and ever and ever. That’s why in Revelation it
says and we looked at the throne and what did we see on the throne? A Lamb
like it had been slain. The marks are still there.
So what does that mean? Here’s what it means about history. It means that
history is very real, it’s not a dream. Eastern religions think of history as a
dream; in our bad moments we wish it were a dream. Sometimes Christians get
so depressed they want to kill themselves and end it because we want to do
away with this painful history. But the history has already been written; if we
go ahead and kill ourselves, that’s part of our history then. This is why Paul
says something in 2 Cor 5 and he builds on this idea that history is so very, very
important. We do things with our lives, some of it we wish we didn’t, but we’ve
done it, and its all there in the record.
Now we have to go back and think through something. Remember we talked
about good and evil. Our history is full of good and evil. The pagan idea, their
problem is they’ve got good and evil forever and ever; they can never get rid of
it. They can reincarnate and reincarnate and reincarnate and reincarnate and
come back as a bug, a cow, a human being or whatever, and they’re still living in
a good and evil world. But the Christian says that we go through history, good
and evil, our lives are good and evil, but the problem is that this good and evil is
not sufficient to dwell forever with the good God; God is perfectly good, He is
righteous, He is holy. He cannot tolerate evil and will not tolerate it, therefore
eternal history cannot have evil in it. Well then how, if we have personal
history, is our personal history corrected, the evil sifted out away from it so that
we can enjoy fellowship with God forever and ever? It doesn’t happen
automatically. There’s something yet to come in our lives, and that thing is
called judgment. And it’s that judgment we all have to face.
In 2 Cor 5:10-11, this is Christians; we’re not talking about a judgment for
salvation but a judgment to separate the good and evil. “For we must all appear
before the judgment seat of Christ,” please notice, not the judgment seat of the
Father. It doesn’t say the judgment seat of the Holy Spirit, it says the
“judgment seat of Christ.” Now let’s think about it, hypostatic union, why is the
word “Christ” used there. God and man, why is the judgment committed to the
Second Person of the Trinity not the third or the first? What is true of the
Second Person of the Trinity that we just learned? He became man, and in
becoming man He lived a personal history. He has become in judicial terms
what? A trial by our peers. So it’s the Lord Jesus Christ who is the judge, not
the Father, because it is a judgment by a fellow human being.
“For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ that each one may
be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done,
whether good or bad. 11Therefore,” Paul says, he’s talking to Christians here,
“Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are made
manifest to God; and I hope that we are made manifest also in your
consciences.” So it’s a warning to Christians. We find it in 1 Cor 3 and other
passages. This is a judgment of believers before the Lord Jesus Christ. Why is it
necessary? So that the bad parts of our human history will be acknowledged as
bad, we don’t know the half of it, we get so prideful; I’m a good believer, but the
depths of our hearts we know not. This is what Paul says, he didn’t even know
all the things that are evil in his life. He knew some of them and the things
which God and the Holy Spirit bring to our mind we confess those and we move
on. But somewhere in eternity we want a true perspective on who we were, what
we were all about in our historical moment? And we don’t want to smell garbage
all the time. So the judgment takes care of this and somehow the Lord deals
with that which is bad, purges it aside so that which is good, done faithfully as
unto the Lord, not unto men but unto the Lord, that remains, and that’s what
doesn’t get burned up, 1 Cor 3. So the third implication is that history has
eternal consequences, it’s not a dream.
Finally, let’s conclude by turning to Col 2:8, it’s basically an introduction to the
doctrine of the Trinity which we’ll start next week. Paul says, he warns
believers, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty
deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary
principles of the world, rather than according to Christ.” What he’s saying here,
and now we can appreciate verse 8 better, how many years did it take to get the
Council of Chalcedon? What was the date of the Council of Chalcedon? AD451.
Five hundred years. What was the Church doing for 500 years? What were they
re-examining? The basic categories of thought itself… basic categories, and what
Paul says here, do not be philosophically deceived, do not construct your basic
categories and then try to fit the Bible with them. Do away with the basic
categories of human thought; derive your basic categories from God’s word.
Completely reverse it. It took 500 years for the Church to reverse it. Part of the
reversal was the realization that God is three and God is one. This is a difficult,
difficult idea. Next week we’ll get more into the Trinity. But I hope, those of you
who have struggled with some of these questions, I think a light will turn on.
We’re going to deal with the two primary tools of man, language and logic. I’m
only going to touch on the ideas of logic and language, which people say oh, the
Trinity is a logical contradiction, what we’re going to show is exactly the
opposite. If you don’t have the Triune God you can’t have any logic whatsoever.
And you can’t even speak. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a believer or not, the
basis of logic and language is the Trinitarian God of Scripture. First comes the
Trinity, then, out of that comes language and logic. We get it backwards, we
think in terms of language and logic and then we’ll see if the trinity meets our
logic test. We’ll reverse that; we’ll show that the test can’t even be set up
without the Trinity. So it’s a powerful realization, but it’s all derived from when
the Church did its work on the Trinity.
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