In His Own Words -- Introduction

I'm working on a new book called Jesus in His Own Words: The Testimony of Jesus regarding Himself. In order to keep my nose to the grindstone, I plan to post one chapter per week. The chapters and the book will be fairly short. I invite you to submit corrections, questions, and suggestions. When it is all done, I plan to self-publish it. Here goes with the Introduction.

Why This Book?

“Jesus never said He was the Son of God,” claimed my professor. It was the winter of 1966, and I was a freshman at the University of California, San Diego. I didn’t know any better at the time. Neither did the young lady in our church who heard exactly the same claim a couple of years ago in her college religion class.

However, Jesus clearly called Himself the Son of God in John 5:17-30, and He acknowledged that He had said, “I am the Son of God” in John 10:36. Moreover, when Simon Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16:16-17). At His Jewish trial, when the high priest asked Jesus, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the blessed One?” the Lord answered, “I am” (Mark 14:61-62).

Even more outrageous is the notion, popularized by Dan Brown, that Jesus was not regarded as divine until the Council of Nicea in AD 325. The truth is that both orthodox Christians and those deemed heretics taught the divinity of Jesus. Even the Gnostics, whom Brown claims to have read, regarded Jesus as divine. The issue at Nicea was the precise sense in which Jesus divine. Only the invincibly ignorant will say about such a well-documented historical fact, “Well, that’s just your opinion.” That popular retort—I’ve heard it—is a fool’s way of protecting his own ignorance.

Then there are the cultists who go two by two throughout your neighborhood. They claim that the Bible does not teach the doctrine of the Trinity. It is true, of course, that the word “Trinity,” never occurs in the Bible. However, the truths summarized by “Trinity” are clearly taught throughout the Scriptures.[1] Perhaps you have attempted to show the visitors at your door John 1:1, which says that “the Word [Christ] was God.” If you did, they certainly trotted out their corrupt translation, which says, “the word was a god.”

At this point, many Christians do not know what to say. Probably neither they, nor the cultists know Greek, so all each side can do is repeat, “My Bible says….” When cult members go on to insist that Jesus cannot be God because He said, “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28), all the average believer can do is to shut the door in their faces. I deal with these cult objections to the deity of Christ in Appendix A, but for now I want to introduce the primary focus of this book.

Our belief in the deity of Christ does not depend on two or three well-known verses. Jesus constantly said things that would be blasphemous on the lips of anyone but God. You may have read C. S. Lewis’s famous trilemma about Christ. After referring to some of the outrageous claims of Jesus, he concluded,

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to (Mere Christianity, Book ii, chap. 3).

My goal in the following pages is to compare the claims of Christ with what the Old Testament teaches us about the one, true, and living God. On page after page of the gospels Jesus applies to Himself privileges and titles that only God can claim. Since the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) frequently receive less emphasis in discussions of Christ’s deity than the gospel of John does, I will initially focus more attention on their testimony before turning to the fourth gospel.

---

[1] See my book Practical Bible Doctrine for a basic explanation of the Trinity. Chapter 10 of my book The Beauty of God for a Broken World contains a more extended treatment based on the insights of Jonathan Edwards.

Untangling Romans 7

-->

I have some thoughts to contribute to the interminable discussion of Romans 7:14-25. Of course, I would like to bring it to a satisfactory termination, but that would be naïve. Anyway, here goes. I think many commentators are asking the wrong questions: Is Paul describing a saved man or an unsaved man who is merely convicted by the law? If he is describing a saved man, is this the normal, life-long condition of a Christian, or should Christians experience a second work of grace that moves them out of the struggles of Romans 7 into the freedom of Romans 8? Let’s set those questions aside and look at the text.

The passage is not describing a conflict between the flesh and the Holy Spirit, such as we see in Galatians 5:16-17 or in Romans 8:5-13. In Romans 7:14-25, the conflict is between “my flesh” on the one hand, and the “inner man” or “the law of my mind” on the other. The wretched “I” is caught between these two forces. It is unhelpful to describe these two forces as “two natures” when “nature” is not adequately identified, so I won’t use those terms.

Though Paul uses the term “flesh” in several different ways, here he seems to mean our uncontrolled, but natural human desires, the things people want because of the way God made us—things like food, sex, approval from others, and the enjoyment of beauty. When those desires are not properly controlled, they become demanding. All they can say is “I want! I want! I want!” As Augustine noted, all sin is a twisting or distortion of legitimate desires. The flesh is human desire out of control—coveting things that are good in themselves, but wanting them in the wrong way, in the wrong measure, or in the wrong time.

What is the “law of my mind” or the “inner man”? I suggest that these phrases describe the conscience, the inner law which God has implanted in all men.

For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them (Romans 2:14-15).

As Jonathan Edwards clearly demonstrates in The Nature of True Virtue, unsaved people can genuinely approve of the whole law of God. Conscience and a sense of the secondary beauty of justice are sufficient for this. Therefore, an unsaved man can “joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man” (Romans 7:22), as he contemplates how fitting and right God’s law is. However, since the unsaved man does not love God for the beauty of His holiness, his natural approval of the law of God is not truly virtuous. Ultimately, in its rebellion against God, the flesh is hostile to God. The flesh says, “I want! I want! I want!” and God answers, “Thou shalt not.”

   If the unsaved man can approve of God’s law, then, even more can the saved man joyfully concur with it. Therefore, the inner conflict of Romans 7 is heightened for the man whose conscience has been further enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Still, the conflict of Romans 7 is not directly between the flesh and the Spirit, but between the flesh and the more sensitive conscience of the man in Christ.

So, what is Paul saying in Romans 7? He is saying that the inner law, the conscience, is not strong enough to subdue the unruly desires of the flesh. This is true both for the Christian man and for the unsaved man whose conscience approves of God’s law. The unsaved man has no further resources above his conscience. Those who belong to Christ, however, have the indwelling Holy Spirit. By the Spirit they are able progressively to put to death the deeds of the body (Romans 8:13). (The words “putting to death” are a progressive present.)

Perhaps it will help if I paraphrase Romans 7:14-24 in Freudian terms. The flesh is the id with its demanding desires. The “law of my mind” is the super ego. The “I” is the ego caught between the urgent demands of the id and the finger-wagging disapproval of the super-ego. There is no escape from this tension apart from the gospel of Christ. Those who are justified by faith no longer need to fear condemnation (Romans 8:1). In addition, they are now able to obey the law in a new way as the walk according to the Spirit (Romans 8:4). The ego cannot win its battle with the id by strengthening the super-ego, but only by turning to and relying on the Holy Spirit.

What is the bottom line? To the unsaved man who is torn apart by his guilt and his moral weakness, Romans 7 says, “O wretched man, you cannot win this battle on your own. You are trapped between your distorted, sinful desires and the law of God, which you know is right and just. Come to Christ! He will remove your condemnation, and He will give you His Holy Spirit to help and strengthen you.”

To the pastor this passage says, “Do not think you can make your congregation holy by pounding them down with the law, hoping to strengthen their guilty consciences. Most of them already feel guilty enough and a guilty conscience cannot subdue the flesh. Point them to their freedom from guilt in Christ and to the power of the indwelling Spirit. Teach them to walk in the Spirit and you (and they) will do well.”

To the struggling Christian this passage says, “Do not think of your inner conflict as a struggle between your old nature and your new nature. (Those terms are vague and are not found in the Greek New Testament.) Think of your inner conflict as warfare between your twisted human desires and your conscience, which has been enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Then turn to the Holy Spirit and ask Him to help you put to death the deeds of the body which come from these distorted desires.”

Jesus, the Son of God

At Christmas, we celebrate the birth of the Son of God. What does the Bible mean when it refers to Him by that title? In ancient times, and still today some have given “Son of God” a meaning never taught by any major branch of the Christian church.

The Bible does not teach that Jesus was an ordinary man who was adopted by God; nor that He was merely a man in whom the Christ-Spirit dwelt; nor that God the Father, in an immortal physical body, had sex with Mary; nor that the Son came into existence from the Father at some time in the distant past; nor that He is the preeminent Son among many similar sons of God.

All of these aberrations have been firmly denied by the Eastern Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and all the major Protestant churches. Only when clergy depart from the founding documents of their faith do they forsake the common confession of the universal Church.

When the Bible and the creeds call Jesus the Son of God, they are confessing that He is fully God, equal in power, wisdom, love, holiness, and glory to God the Father. He is God, the Son, who has an eternal relationship with the Father that is the pattern for our time-bound relationship with our earthly fathers.

The Bible says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1-2, 14).

The eternal Word was God, and was with God, and remained God when He took on our humanity in the womb of Mary. All of His DNA was human, and it came from Mary. There was no divine DNA as we see in the demi-gods of Greek mythology. The Holy Spirit fashioned the humanity of Jesus in the womb of Mary, from the stuff of Mary, for the eternal Son of God to inhabit. When Mary asked how she, a virgin, could have a baby, “The angel answered and said to her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy Child shall be called the Son of God’” (Luke 1:35).

The whole Trinity was active in the miracle of the incarnation—the Father exerting His power, the Holy Spirit preparing the body of Jesus, and the Son joining Himself to the human embryo growing in Mary’s womb. (By the way, the Trinity, though mysterious, is not a contradictory doctrine when properly stated, but that would entail another essay.)

Why is it important that Jesus was (and is) fully God and fully human? The answer is simple. If He were not a genuine human being, He could not have died to save human beings. He stood in our place and took our punishment. An ox could not have done that nor even an angel.

On the other hand, if He had only been a man, He might have died for the sins of one other man, but not for a multitude of sinners. If He had been a mere man, He would have been crushed by our sins, never to rise again. As the infinite God, He was able to bear up under the load of our sins and then to rise up again in glory. As a man, He could die for us. As God, He can lift us up to God. This is the meaning of Christmas.