Call His Name Jesus

Call His Name Jesus

Matthew 1:18–25 (ESV)

18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19 And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. 20 But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: 23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us). 24 When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, 25 but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.

Main Idea: Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, and He has come to save His people from their sins.[1]

Introduction

Here is the unique thing about the Christian message. There’s nothing else really like this. Christianity is not a tradition; it’s not a code of ethics. It’s not a philosophy or a political system.

It has something to say to all of these and more.

The core of the Christian faith is Jesus Christ. “He Himself shall save His people from their sin.” He is the fixed point. He is the polestar in our lives, those of us who are Christians.

What we proclaim, our message, is not “Ten Things for You to do to Find Yourself or to Achieve God-consciousness.” We don’t have any counsel for self-help.

There are no mantras for you to chant,

no set phrases for you to repeat.

We have Jesus. God, come down. He is the Lord our salvation, He Himself.

I have no interest in inviting you to become just a touch more religious this Christmas, but I desperately want you to come and meet this Jesus for yourself.

Joseph’s Obedience

When Joseph got up from sleeping, he did as the Lord’s angel had commanded him.

He married Mary but did not know her intimately until she gave birth to a son. And he named Him Jesus.”

Joseph obeyed without questioning God or laying down conditions.

He didn’t ask for another night’s sleep to see if anything changed; he obeyed.

And when it says that he “did not know her intimately,” in verse 25, Scripture is telling us that Joseph did not have physical relations with Mary. Matthew ends the chapter by telling us that Joseph called the child “Jesus,” just as the angel had said.

This is how the King of creation came into the world. [2]

1. Why did Joseph Obey?

How Jesus Came

· Jesus was born to a virgin mother. This is a shocking pair of words

—a “virgin mother” is naturally impossible,

which points us to the supernatural aspect of Jesus’ birth.

Physically, Jesus is Mary’s son.

· The text is careful not to call Joseph the father of Jesus.

Instead, it points out that Jesus was biologically the son of Mary.

The fact that Matthew never explicitly refers to Joseph as Jesus’ father reminds us that

Jesus was born to an adoptive father.

After being named and taken into the family by Joseph, legally, Jesus is Joseph’s son.

And being Joseph’s son means that this adoption ties Jesus to the line of David as a royal son. [3]

· All of these things happened amidst a fallen world.

Jesus came to a world of sin in need of salvation, which is why it is crucial to see that

Ultimately, Jesus is God’s Son.

The problem of sin needed a divine solution.

· Salvation does not come from man but from God.

Salvation is wholly the work of a supernatural God, not the work of natural man. There is nothing we can do to save ourselves from our sins, which is evident even in the way in which Jesus entered the world. This baby born in Bethlehem was and is the center of all history.[4]

Who Jesus Is

The Foundation

The story of the virgin birth in Matthew 1 forms the foundation for everything we know about who Jesus is.

This truth is foundational for why we worship Him,

why we follow Him,

and why we proclaim Him to the nations.

With so much at stake in this one doctrine, we need to think carefully about how we understand this baby born in Bethlehem. The truth here is multifaceted.

· As the Son of man, Jesus is fully human.

He was born of a woman, so just like any other child, He came as a crying, cooing, bed-wetting baby boy.

Don’t let yourself picture Jesus apart from His true humanity.

It was a holy night, but it wasn’t silent. After all, whoever heard of a child coming out of the womb and staying quiet?

Jesus wasn’t born with a glowing halo around His head and a smile on His face; He was born like us.

· Jesus is fully human. He possesses a full range of human characteristics.

o Jesus is like us physically in that He possesses a human body.

and as Matthew will later show us, this body grew tired at points (8:24).

The Sovereign of the universe took on the human limitation of being dependent on sleep!

Not only did Jesus grow weary,

but He also became hungry (4:2).

This was a baby that needed to be fed and nursed and nurtured. He had a body just like ours.

Matthew 4:2 (ESV)

2 And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.

o Jesus was fully human mentally.

He possessed a human mind that Luke says, “increased in wisdom” (2:52).

He learned in the same way that other children do.

Sometimes we get the idea that Jesus came out of the womb using words like “kingdom,” “righteousness,” “substitution,” and “propitiation,” but that’s not the case.

Jesus had to learn to say the first-century Jewish equivalent of “Ma-ma” and “Da-da.”

He possessed a human mind.

o Jesus was also like us emotionally.

In Matthew’s Gospel we see the full range of human emotions: for example,

Jesus’ soul was troubled and overwhelmed,

such that He wept with loud cries and tears (26:36–39).

It also seems reasonable to conclude from Scripture that Jesus laughed and smiled; He was not boring.

Finally, after seeing that Jesus was like us physically, mentally, and emotionally, Matthew also says that

· Jesus was like us outwardly. Or, to put it another way,

Jesus’ humanity was plain for all to see. For example, when Jesus taught in the synagogue in His own hometown, the people were amazed, saying,

How did this wisdom and these miracles come to Him? Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?

Isn’t His mother called Mary, and His brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?

And His sisters, aren’t they all with us? So where does He get all these things? (13:54–56)

The people who were closest to Jesus for much of His life—His own brothers and the people in His own hometown—recognized Him as merely a man, just like everyone else.

He was fully human. (Grudem, Systematic Theology, 534–35).

2. Why is this important? Why emphasize Jesus’ humanity?

We must affirm Jesus’ full humanity, because it means that Jesus is fully able to identify with us.

He is not unlike us, trying to do something for us. No, Jesus is truly representative of us.

Application

If you are a follower of Christ you have a Savior familiar with your struggles—physically, mentally, and emotionally. He is familiar with your sorrow.

(Heb 2:18). This is why it’s comforting to affirm that Jesus was born of a woman, as the Son of Man.

He is familiar with your suffering

Hebrews 2:18 (ESV)

18 For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

As the Son of God, Jesus is fully divine.

He possesses the full range of divine characteristics.

o Jesus has power over disease.

He is able to cleanse lepers, give sight to the blind, and cause the lame to walk, all by simply speaking healing into reality.

At strategic points, Matthew talks about how Jesus went about healing every disease and every affliction among the people (4:23–24; 9:35).

He graciously exercises His power over the whole range of human infirmities. implications you will never go into eternity with the human infirmities of this life.

o He has command over nature.

In Matthew 8 Jesus rebukes the storm and it immediately calms down, to which the disciples respond, “What kind of man is this?—even the winds and the sea obey Him!” (8:27).

Only God possesses this kind of power over nature.

o Jesus has authority over sin.

That is, He is able to forgive sins, something Matthew tells us explicitly in Jesus’ healing of the paralytic (9:1–6).

o Jesus has control over death.

Jesus not only brings others to life (9:23–25), but He even raises Himself from the dead (John 10:17–18).

These claims may sound extravagant, yet this is precisely the portrait Matthew gives us of Jesus.

Jesus is fully able to identify with us, and as God, Jesus is fully able to identify with God.

When you put these truths concerning Jesus’ nature together, you begin to realize that the incarnation,

The doctrine of Jesus’ full humanity and full deity, is the most extraordinary miracle in the whole Bible.

And if this miracle is true, then everything else in this Gospel account makes total sense.

After all, is it strange to see Jesus walking on the water if He’s the God who created the very water He’s walking on?

Is it strange to see Him feeding 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish if He’s the One who created their stomachs?

Furthermore, if what Scripture says is true, is it even strange to see Jesus rise from the dead?

No, not if He’s God.

The strange thing, the real miracle, is that Jesus died in the first place.

The doctrine of the incarnation and Christ’s identity as fully human and fully divine is the fundamental point where Muslims, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and countless others disagree with Christianity.

It is the ultimate stumbling block.

Furthermore, if we’re honest, this important doctrine contains some mystery even for those who hold firmly to the biblical witness.

So how do we even begin to understand it?

There are some things we must keep in mind if we are to uphold the truth of the incarnation.

Jesus’ human nature and divine nature are different, that is, they are to be distinguished in certain ways.

One of the heresies that had to be rejected in the early centuries of the church’s life was the idea that the human nature of Christ was absorbed into His divine nature, with the result that a third nature was formed, a nature that was neither God nor man. Such a view undermines Jesus’ role as our mediator (Grudem, Systematic Theology, 556). Consider how

Scripture holds together the separate truths of Christ’s human and divine natures:

• He was born a baby, and He sustains the universe.

• He was 30 years old, and He exists eternally.

• He was tired and omnipotent.

• He died, and He conquered death.

• He has returned to heaven, and He is present with us.

While we have to maintain a distinction between His natures, we must affirm that Jesus’ human nature and divine nature are unified.

He is one person, so we don’t have to specify in every instance whether Jesus performed a certain action in His divine nature, or whether it was His human nature that did it.

The Gospel writers don’t say that Jesus was “born in His human nature” or that “in His human nature he died.”

No, He acts as a unified person, even if His two natures contributed in different ways.

Scripture simply says, “Jesus was born” or “Jesus died.”

One theologian gives the following analogy to illustrate this point: If I were to write a letter, though my toes had nothing to do with the writing process, I would still say, “I wrote the letter,” not “My fingers wrote the letter, but my toes had nothing to do with it.” I simply say that I wrote the letter, and the meaning is understood (Grudem, Systematic Theology, 562).

Similarly, everything that is done by Jesus is unified in such a way that we don’t need to distinguish between His two natures when we speak of Him.3 It does not matter whether His divine or His human nature is specifically in view, because they are always working in perfect unity.

The Incarnation is the most profound mystery in the whole universe.

This mystery is encapsulated in what Matthew writes about the virgin birth of Jesus.

There are, after all, other ways Jesus could have come into the world. On the one hand,

· If He had come without any human parent, then it would have been hard for us to imagine or believe that He could really identify with us.

· If He had come through two human parents—a biological mother and a biological father—then it would be hard to imagine how He could be fully God since His origin would have been exactly the same as ours.

· God, in His perfect wisdom and creative sovereignty, ordained a virgin birth to be the avenue through which Christ would come into the world (Grudem, Systematic Theology, 530).

Dwelling in Darkness

Here in the second week of Advent 2023, it’s good to know that the real Christmas doesn’t require everything to be calm and bright.

Emphatically, all was not calm, and all was not bright, that first Christmas.

And have we not come to learn, in our own lives, that those Christmases when all has seemed calm and bright didn’t actually prove to be the best ones?

The light of Christ’s first Advent dawned in days of deep darkness.

Zechariah prophesied of his coming “to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Luke 1:78–79).

That’s where God’s people found themselves that first Christmas: sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death. Matthew 4:16

Matthew 4:16 (ESV)

16 the people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned.”

(echoing Isaiah 42) captures that darkness, and the inbreaking of light, as well as any of our favorite Advent readings:

The people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned.

They dwelled in darkness as they awaited his first advent.

Jesus didn’t come to a world already filled with comfort and joy. He came to bring peace to a world at war.

He came to bring true comfort to a world distressed.

He came to announce good news of great joy to those drowning in a sea of sorrows. He came as light, shining in the darkness.

The Light

Jesus came as Light, and he came to triumph, not be turned back.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

But holding the darkness at bay didn’t mean his victory was easy or immediate. “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him” (John 1:11).

Even as his sun rose and began to chase away the night, it did not flee all at once.

“This is the judgment,” he said, “the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19).

Yet the tide had turned with his coming. Light had dawned,

Jesus called his followers, out of the darkness, into his light. “Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12) also John 12:46).

For three decades, his light pushed back against the darkness.

And then, as he went to the cross, he gave the darkness it’s one last thrust.

“This is your hour, and the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53). Judas went out from the Twelve, “and it was night” (John 13:30).

At the Cross the battle of the ages between darkness and light came at last to its head.

Then followed that Black Sabbath, that longest, bleakest day in all history — the day, from sunup to sundown, that the Son of God lay dead.

On Sunday morning, though, the women “came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb” (John 20:1).

On Sunday Morning In the very belly of the darkness, the light began to shine anew. He was alive again, and now with indestructible life.

Once and for all, Light had dealt the Dark its deathblow.

We now live in fundamentally different days, however dark they seem. Christ has come and conquered.

Even as we engage in the final campaign, the Light has already triumphed.

We endure “this present darkness” (Ephesians 6:12) and know well its dangers, but we do so having already tasted Christ’s decisive act of deliverance.

David Mathias

The Father “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13). Delivered. Past tense. It is done.

“God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

How do you get this salvation that Jesus came to bring?

“He shall save His people from their sins.”

His people. He doesn’t mean just Jewish people. He means all people, any person who comes to trust himself or herself entirely to Christ for time and eternity.

In chapter 8 of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus speaks about a day when people will come from every point of the compass to eat a great banquet, a celebration in the kingdom of heaven.

All kinds of people, you see, from all kinds of backgrounds are welcome.

You are invited, but you must become one of His people.

You must place your faith, your trust in Jesus only.

Ask Him.

Stop trying to deal with your sin problem on your own. It will never work. Ask Him. He came to save His people from their sins. That’s the mission.

[1]Platt, D. (2013). Exalting jesus in matthew (D. L. Akin, D. Platt, & T. Merida, Eds.; p. 17). Holman Reference. [2]Platt, D. (2013). Exalting jesus in matthew (D. L. Akin, D. Platt, & T. Merida, Eds.; p. 19). Holman Reference. [3]Platt, D. (2013). Exalting jesus in matthew (D. L. Akin, D. Platt, & T. Merida, Eds.; p. 20). Holman Reference. [4]Platt, D. (2013). Exalting jesus in matthew (D. L. Akin, D. Platt, & T. Merida, Eds.; p. 20). Holman Reference. 3 Many of the points concerning Jesus’ incarnation and the relationship between His human and divine natures are taken from Grudem, Systematic Theology, 556–63.