Who is Jesus?

I want o provide a quick recap of what we have discussed so far. Two weeks ago we looked at how God as our holy creator, makes the rules and sets the terms by which we are measured. Last week we looked at how man is NOT good and does not measure up to the standard God set. On our own we will always fall short, on our own there is no hope for us to ever attain heaven or be in the presence of our creator. That is the plain and simple reality, on our own we can never be good enough or meet God’s standard. Yet even though this realization is a dark truth that leaves men in despair, Hope can be found.

A Word of Hope

Mark begins his account of Jesus’ life with the words, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” From the very beginning, Mark and the other Gospel writers and early Christians knew that the coming of Jesus Christ was God’s good news. Good news to dead in its sin. A world devastated by the effects of sin. In the midst of a fallen world, the prophesied coming of Jesus was his piercing, thundering announcement that now everything had changed.

Fully God, Fully Man

All the gospel writers begin their accounts of Jesus’ life by showing that he was no ordinary man. Matthew and Luke tell the story of an angel coming to a young virgin named Mary and telling her that she would be with child. Incredulous at the news, Mary asks, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel explains, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God” (Luke 1:34–35). John begins his story with an even more astonishing statement: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14).

All of this—Jesus’ birth to a virgin, the title “Son of God,” John’s assertion that “the Word was God” together with his announcement that “the Word became flesh”—is meant to teach us who Jesus is.

Put simply, the Bible tells us that Jesus is both truly human and truly God. This is a crucial point to understand about him, for it is only the truly human, truly divine Son of God who can save us. If Jesus were just another man—like us in every respect, including our fallenness and sin—he would no more be able to save us than one dead man can save another. But because he is the Son of God, without sin and equal in every divine perfection to God the Father, he is able to defeat death and save us from our sin. In the same way, it is also critical that Jesus be truly one of us—that is, Totally human—so that he can rightly represent us before his Father. As Hebrews 4:15 explains, Jesus is able “to sympathize with our weaknesses” because he “in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”

The Messiah King—Here!

When Jesus began his ministry, he proclaimed a fantastic message: “The time has come! The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe!”

As you can imagine, word of this man preaching that the kingdom of God had come spread quickly throughout the country. As news spread of Christ and his teaching excited crowds soon surrounded Jesus. They yearned to hear his message of the “good news” that he was proclaiming.

For centuries, through his law and his prophets, God had foretold a time when he would once and for all put an end to the world’s evil and rescue his people from their sin. He would sweep away all resistance and establish his rule, his “kingdom,” over all the earth. Even more, God had promised that he would establish his kingdom in the person of a messianic King, one in the royal line of the great King David. In 2 Samuel 7:11, God promised David that one of his sons would rule on his throne forever. And the prophet Isaiah said of this kingly son:

6  For to us a child is born,

to us a son is given;

and the government shall be upon his shoulder,

and his name shall be called

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

7  Of the increase of his government and of peace

there will be no end,

on the throne of David and over his kingdom,

to establish it and to uphold it

with justice and with righteousness

from this time forth and forevermore.

The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. (Isa. 9:6–7 ESV)

The waiting was finally over and the time of the long-awaited Davidic Messiah was finally here!

The Gospel writers are insistent that this Davidic King is none other than Jesus himself. Luke records the words of the angel announcing Jesus’ birth to Mary:

He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. (Luke 1:32–33)

Matthew begins his book with a genealogy that traces Jesus’ ancestry directly back to King David, and then on back to Abraham himself. Interestingly enough, Matthew stylizes his genealogy, dividing it into three generations of fourteen. In most ancient languages these letters also have numeric values, Hebrew is no different. Fourteen, as any good Jew would have known, was the number arrived at by adding up the values of the three Hebrew letters D-V-D, “David.”

Unexpected Good News—If You Can Get in on It

The story does not end with the proclamation of the Jewish Messiag-King though. The New Testament continues and shows how King Jesus inaugurated the rule of God on earth and began rolling back the curse of sin. This kingdom Jesus inaugurated, though, looked nothing like what the Jews expected. They wanted a messiah who would establish an earthly, political kingdom that would overthrow and supplant the Roman Empire, the ruling power of the day. Yet here was Jesus not at all looking for an earthly crown, but preaching, teaching, healing the sick, forgiving sin, raising the dead, and telling the Roman governor in no uncertain terms, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world” (John 18:36).

That’s not to say his kingdom would never be of this world. Just a little earlier Jesus had said to the high priest, “You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62), and we know the end of the story when Christ reigns over a newly made heaven and earth absent of sins effect completely.

Now all that is undeniably good news, but Jesus is not yet done. Despite the wonderful truths he has presented thus far, there is still the elephant in the room, man’s disobedience and sin. Unless something happens to remove the guilt of our disobedience and rebellion against God, we are still separated from him and destined for the eternal punishment of hell.

Thank God, that this is not the end of the story. In fact this is where we begin to see and understand how good the good news of Jesus really is. Christ came not only to inaugurate the kingdom of God, but also to bring sinners into the kingdom by dying in their place and for their sin, taking their punishment on himself and securing forgiveness for them, making them righteous in God’s sight, and qualifying them to share in the inheritance of the kingdom (Col. 1:12).

A Suffering King

“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” That’s what John the Baptist, the camel-skin-clad, locust-eating prophet, said when he saw Jesus coming toward him (John 1:29). What did he mean? The Lamb of God? Taking away the sin of the world?

Every first-century Jew would have known immediately what John meant by “the Lamb of God taking away sin.” It was a reference to the Jewish festival of the Passover, a memorial of God’s miraculous deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt some fifteen hundred years earlier.

The Passover feast—and especially the Passover lamb—became a powerful symbol of the idea that the penalty of death for one’s sins could be paid by the death of another. This idea of “penal substitution,” in fact, grounded the entire system of Old Testament sacrifices. On the annual Day of Atonement, the high priest went into the center of the temple, known as the Most Holy Place, and killed an unblemished animal as payment for the people’s sins. Year after year this happened, and year after year the penalty for the people’s sins was deferred yet again by the blood of the lamb.

It took time, but eventually the followers of Jesus realized that his mission was not just to usher in the kingdom of God through his life, but to make himself substitutionary sacrifice dying for his people. Jesus was suffering King depicted in Isaiah.

Jesus himself knew from the very beginning that his mission was to die for the sins of his people. The angel had announced at his very birth that “he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21), and Luke tells us that “when the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Jesus foretold his death many times in the gospels, and when Peter foolishly tried to stand in his way, Jesus rebuked him: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me” (Matt. 16:23). Jesus came with a mission and a purpose, to die for his people and nothing could stop him from fulfilling that mission.

Jesus understood the significance and purpose of his death. In Mark 10:45, he says, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” And in Matthew 26:28, as he shared a last supper with his disciples, he took a cup of wine and declared, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:27–28). “I lay down my life for the sheep,” he said in John. “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:15, 18). Jesus knew why he was going to die. Out of love for his people he willingly laid down his life, the Lamb of God slain so his people could be forgiven and reconciled to their creator once again.

Taught by the Holy Spirit, the early Christians also understood what Jesus had accomplished on the cross. Paul described it like this: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13–14). And in another place he explained, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21 NIV). Peter wrote, “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18). And, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Pet. 2:24).

This is where what Christ did for us is really driven home. For you see when Jesus died, it was not the punishment and wrath of God for his own sins that he endured. (He didn’t have any!) It was the punishment for his people’s sins! As he hung on the cross at Calvary, Jesus bore all the horrible weight of the sin of God’s people and willingly took the wrath of God in our place. All our rebellion, all our disobedience, all our sin he willingly took those upon his shoulders. The most beloved son of God, who had was in perfect triune harmonious existence for all of eternity, willing faced the wrath meant for us and in so doing had to endure more than we can ever imagine as God the Father turned his back on God the Son who had become sin on our behalf.

That is why Jesus cried out in agony, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). God his Father, who is holy and righteous, whose eyes are too pure even to look on evil, looked at his Son, saw the sins of his Son’s people resting on his shoulders, turned away in disgust, and poured out his wrath on his own Son. Matthew writes that darkness covered the land for about three hours while Jesus hung on the cross. That was the darkness of judgment, the weight of the Father’s wrath falling on Jesus as he bore his people’s sins and died in their place.

Isaiah prophesied about this seven centuries before it happened:

4  Surely he has borne our griefs

and carried our sorrows;

yet we esteemed him stricken,

smitten by God, and afflicted.

5  But he was pierced for our transgressions;

he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,

and with his wounds we are healed. (Isa. 53:4–5)

Do you see the significance of this? Ultimately, it means that I’m the one who should have died, not Jesus. I should have been punished. And yet he took my place. He died for me.

They were my transgressions, but his wounds. My iniquities, but his chastisement. My sin, his sorrow. And his punishment bought my peace. His stripes won my healing. His grief, my joy.

His death, my life.

The Heart of the Gospel

Sadly, this doctrine of substitution is probably the one part of the Christian gospel that the world hates most. People are simply disgusted at the idea of Jesus being punished for someone else’s sin. More than one author has called it “divine child abuse.” And yet to toss substitutionary atonement aside is to cut out the heart of the gospel. To be sure, there are many pictures in Scripture of what Christ accomplished with his death: example, reconciliation, and victory, to name three. But underneath them all is the reality to which all the other images point—penal substitution. You simply cannot leave it out. A righteous and holy God can justify the ungodly because in Jesus’ death, mercy and justice were perfectly reconciled. The curse was righteously executed, and we were mercifully saved.

He Has Risen

However, as we know, if the story merely ended with the death of Jesus Christ it would be incomplete and we would still be lost. While Christ had atoned for our sins, there was one more important aspect to his earthly ministry that was yet to be accomplished. We know that death itself would be defeated through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

If Christ had remained dead like any other “savior” or “teacher” or “prophet,” his death would have meant nothing more than yours or mine. Death’s waves would have closed over him just as they do over every other human life, every claim he made would have sunk into nothingness, and humanity would still be without hope of being saved from sin. But when breath entered his resurrected lungs again, when resurrection life electrified his glorified body, everything Jesus claimed was fully, finally, unquestionably, and irrevocably vindicated.

Paul exults in Romans 8 over Jesus’ resurrection and what it means for believers:

Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. (Rom. 8:33–34)