Jesus Is the Christ of God
Big Idea: God’s great gift to the elect is the faith he gives to believe in the Christ.
The average Hebrew on the street thought Christ was excellent. They were impressed with his prophetic character but didn’t have the slightest idea that he was the Messiah. Their best guess was that he was a prophet. Significantly, their guess was tinged with the supernatural because they thought he might be an Old Testament prophet come back to life. But they did not understand that he was the divine deliverer, the Messiah, and their miss was as good as a mile. Their stunted grasp of the person of Christ shows the variety of opinions that have existed about him despite his impeccable life, death, and resurrection.
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 a 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.
Thou art the Christ. The confession is short, but it embraces all that is contained in our salvation; for the designation Christ, or Anointed, includes both an everlasting Kingdom and an everlasting Priesthood, to reconcile us to God, and, by expiating our sins through his sacrifice, to obtain for us a perfect righteousness, and, having received us under his protection, to uphold and supply and enrich us with every description of blessings
What we think about Jesus is everything. Acceptance or rejection of him makes all the difference. We must understand that he is Messiah, God’s Son who came to us in human flesh and was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead, thus paying the full penalty for our sins. Now he reigns in Heaven, and one day he will judge every human who has ever lived. To be there with him, we must believe this—we must rest our lives on it.
Big Idea: God’s great gift to the elect is the faith he gives to believe in the Christ.
Instead of the glorious Christ language, Jesus chooses the mysterious Son of Man language, and announces suffering, rejection, and death, but then resurrection on the third day. Jesus is the Christ, but should only be announced as such by those who realize that the Christ must suffer and enter into his glory (24:26). The insistent necessity of the will of God presses upon Jesus this requirement. And that such is the case is witnessed to in the Scriptures (18:31; 24:25–27; etc.).
Well, was Peter’s answer just another human opinion? Was it just an impulsive response revealing Peter’s great admiration and enthusiasm for his Master? Not according to both Matthew and Luke’s accounts, for as soon as Peter says, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’, Jesus responds immediately, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah’ (Matt. 16:17). Jesus then explains why Peter is blessed, ‘for this was not revealed to you by man, but my Father in heaven.’ Simon’s words were not a matter simply of human conjecture; they were the result of divine revelation.
If the Christ to whom you are responding is a Christ without suffering, without atonement, without incarnation, a Christ who is not Messiah, he is not the biblical Christ. I urge you to come to a clear, focused understanding of the true identity of Jesus, who is the Christ of God.