Sermon Tone Analysis

Most of us have probably seen Frank Capra’s Christmas movie, /It’s a Wonderful Life/.

As a child, George Bailey had high hopes and expectations.

He wanted to travel the world and see and do everything.

But when his father unexpectedly died, the mundane duties of running a small savings and loan in his hometown fell upon his shoulders.

He did the best he could with what he had.

He managed to send his younger brother to college, help a lot of the less fortunate people, and eventually married and settled in a house that probably should have been condemned.

At any rate, he seemed satisfied with his ordinary life until one Christmas Eve when his scatterbrained uncle lost a bank deposit.

The villain, Mr. Potter, threatened to turn this into a scandal.

At that point, George contemplated taking his own life for a very small insurance payoff.

But his guardian angel, Clarence Oddbody, helped him to see just how many people’s lives he had helped over the years.

George then realized that he had really had a wonderful life, and his newfound contentment gave a new meaning to the whole Christmas season.

In spite of its obvious Roman Catholic elements, /It’s a Wonderful Life/ is one of the greatest movies ever made.

But it’s only a Christmas movie to the degree that the viewer understands that a man can do good for his neighbor and be content with God’s providences only because the incarnation of Jesus Christ had as its purpose the complete redemption of those whom God had set apart for everlasting life.

Without that theological background, Capra’s film is entertainment but not much more.

The world has produced so many “Christmas” stories like this.

What shall we say of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, the Grinch (whatever that is!), Ebenezer Scrooge, and the elderly, bearded gentleman in /Miracle on 34th Street/?

They all play off the same basic theme: someone learning to love others and be kind at Christmas.

Yet, few of them, as clever and well done as they are, really get to the real meaning of Christmas.

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The Subject of Our Discussion

In today’s text Paul identifies the characters and events of the real Christmas story.

Its chief character is God, specifically the second person of the glorious Trinity.

The Lord Jesus Christ was /manifest in the flesh/; that is, although he was and continued to be true and eternal God, about two thousand years ago he took upon himself a complete human nature.

He was, therefore, truly God and truly man.

And further, this event took place in a real world of space and time.

He was seen by real angels according to Paul, not imaginary guardian angels, and his gospel was preached to and believed by real men.

The gospel is not a make-believe, feel-good story about non-existent Grinches, talking snowmen or counting-house owners.

Rather, it is a message of the Lord of the universe condescending to satisfy our deepest need, i.e., to take away our sin, to reconcile alienated sinners to himself, and to give us everlasting life.

In fact, some commentators think that I Timothy 3:16 was used in the first century as a hymn and others believe that it was an early creed.

This latter opinion has some merit since the word translated /without controversy/ in our text literally means “by saying the same thing” or “by common confession.”

It comes from the same root, for example, as the word translated /confess/ in Romans 10:9 — /That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved/.

To make this somewhat clear in the translations, just about every modern version since 1930 puts most of verse 16 into a semi-poetic form.

The translators did this to indicate that they believe Paul is here quoting something that was widely circulated in his day.

The subject of this confession is God manifested in the flesh.

Here is where the modern translations other than the NKJV have a problem.

Instead of saying that /God was manifested in the flesh/, they read “who was manifested in the flesh.”

The difference is the result of the way that the word /God/ was abbreviated in the Greek manuscripts (it could easily be mistaken for the pronoun “who”), but modern scholars use it to put as much distance between Jesus and God as possible.

They don’t want you to believe that Jesus is God incarnate.

But using a pronoun instead of the word /God/ does not accomplish this.

Why?

Because the nearest antecedent for the pronoun is /God/ at the end of verse 15.

To get to /Jesus/, you have to go all the way back to verse 13, which would be too far from the pronoun to be very likely.

And further, if Jesus were not God, how could the apostle insist so emphatically that he was /manifested in the flesh/?

So, whether the text has the word /God/ or a pronoun Paul clearly intended for us to understand that /God was manifest in the flesh/.

The subject of this confession, then, is God — not God in a general sense, however, but God who specifically assumed a human nature.

Since neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit were ever incarnate, the apostle must have had the Son in mind.

So, what we have here is not the either~/or situation critics want, but a both~/and situation.

Jesus is both God and manifest in the flesh.

That is, he is both God and man.

This verse is decisive.

About fifteen years ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a confessional conference in Chicago at the request of our Synod.

After several days of study, discussion and argument, the conference produced an extremely long confession about creation.

In my opinion, it wasn’t particularly well done, but the main problem with it was its length.

It was far too long for anyone to use.

I doubt that anyone has ever used it.

I’ve never seen it referenced in any of the controversies over creation since then.

In that sense, shorter confessions can sometimes be more useful than longer ones because they get to the point quicker.

Why would we need much more, for example, than what the RCUS adopted many years ago?

Our statement simply says “that God created the heavens and the earth in six normal days which were chronological periods of light and darkness as recorded in the book of Genesis.”[1]

This one sentence rules out every interpretation of Genesis 1 that denies that the days of creation were sidereal.

Likewise, Paul’s confession in our text is also very brief.

It includes only six phrases.

Yet, look at how much the apostle packed into so few words.

By using the word /God/, which I believe to be the correct reading of our text, he asserts the full deity of Jesus Christ.

To this he adds that Jesus /was manifest in the flesh/ — an assertion of his full humanity.

Yet, Jesus was not just “God in a body” as Billy Graham says, but a true and complete human nature.

He was born, grew up, ate, drank, bled and died, just like other men.

Even after his resurrection he demonstrated his true humanity in several ways.

On the other hand, we are not to conceive of the Lord’s two natures as if he were two distinct persons.

Note that all six of the verbs that Paul used to describe him are singular: God was manifested in the flesh (ἐφανερώθη), he was justified by the Spirit (ἐδικαιώθη), he was seen by angels (ὤφθη), he was preached unto the nations (ἐκηρύχθη), he was believed on in the world (ἐπιστεύθη), and he was taken up in glory (ἀνελήφθη).

There is no hint anywhere in our text that the incarnation resulted in two persons.

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The Mystery of Godliness

Now, before we consider the six parts of this confession individually, did you notice that Paul also gave us what may be the title for this confession?

He called it /the mystery of godliness/.

Godliness is easy to understand.

This confession has something to do with piety and devotion.

This, no doubt, refers to the godliness seen and known in Jesus Christ.

But the word /mystery/ has caused more than a few headaches.

/Perry Mason/ and /Matlock/ are mysteries.

But there is no “who dunnit?” here.

God did it.

He is the only one who could have done it.

Then there are also the mystery religions of the ancient Babylonians, Persians and Greeks.

The Freemasons are a modern example of the same kind of nonsense.

These pseudo-religions regard a mystery as a divine secret that is not only unrevealed but unknowable.

Devotees can be slowly absorbed into the non-intellectual realm of the secret, but no one can really claim to know what the secret is.

Some of this kind of thinking has infiltrated the church.

Liberal theologians following Karl Barth frequently speak of God as the Totally Other.

What they mean is that the disparity between God’s being and our being is so great that we cannot know anything about him at all.

They assume that a metaphysical disparity necessarily involves an epistemological one.

We can talk /about/ God.

We can point to him in a metaphorical or poetic sense.

We can sing the Apostles’ Creed because that’s art, but we should never confess the same words because that would bring God down into our world, which, they say, would effectively be a denial of his existence.

But this isn’t exactly what Paul meant when he called the gospel a /mystery/.

For him, and throughout the Scriptures, a mystery is a piece of knowledge that was once unknown but has now been revealed.

I’ll give just two verses to show that this is so.

The first is Ephesians 1:9.

Here Paul says that God has /made known unto us the mystery of his will/.

His mystery is not something that only the initiates of mystery religions experience, but knowledge that was generally available to all the brethren in Ephesus and to all of us as well.

And then in the third chapter of the same epistle (vv.

3–4), we find something similar: /How that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery; (as I wrote afore in few words, whereby, when ye read, ye may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ)/.