I wish to show that our Lord Jesus is indeed “the missing one”—no longer convincingly present in the house of his friends. First, notice that vague teachings about Christ hang like a fog over him.
As our Mediator, Jesus is the connection between God and man, the bridge over the chasm separating the divine and the human. Or to use another figure, suggested by Scripture, he is the ladder linking heaven and earth. Precisely here we can see our double trouble. Teachers zealous to defend the deity of the Son of God have in many cases shoved up the bottom rung of the ladder until, in reality, the ladder is no longer standing on earth. Then, surprisingly enough, these same teachers, by holding to a subordination within the Trinity, have often pulled the top rung down from heaven. Let us now carefully examine this ladder set “afloat” by well-meaning Christian teachers.
Skinned Bananas
Married less than a year, my late wife and I moved to a middle-sized city in New England to found a new church. As far as I could tell, I was the only Protestant pastor living there who held to the Trinity. This very liberal stronghold boasted the daunting nickname “graveyard of evangelism.” No evangelistic zeal was welcome there! We moved into a building on the south end of Main Street and began remodeling it as our chapel.
The city was stirred. “New Church!” cried the local newspaper on the front page. Hearing of our project, banks refused to lend money, even to their own customers and homeowners who were part of our flock and wished to help with the mortgage. One prominent church on North Main Street warned everyone not to get involved with us by posting this veiled jab on their corner message board: “The banana that leaves the bunch gets skinned.”
My opening remark the following Sunday was, “Only the skinned banana is good to eat!” Behind the excitement was a doctrinal tension. Within the city’s imposing church structures, truth was denied, actively preached against. I still have in my files samples of materials one church used to train their Sunday School teachers on how to undermine the historicity of Scripture and to explain away the supernatural. With all my strength I labored to provide an orthodox alternative. Our work prospered, and a strong church emerged.
I mention these events from more than a half-century ago to illustrate the errant doctrine that I struggled against and that is so common today. Because many in my audience had heard for years that our Lord Jesus was a noble carpenter but only a prophet-type leader, I was intent on proclaiming his absolute deity. And of course that emphasis was good and necessary. But when I read a text like Acts 10:38, which explains Jesus’ wondrous works as happening “because God was with him,” I so much wanted to change those words to read, “because he was God.” I wanted all texts possible to shout out, “Jesus is the divine Son of God!” The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are ever God Almighty. The trouble was, and is today, that all the hammering in one direction can cause one to lose very precious truth in the other direction.
Dangerous Deifying of Jesus’ Humanity
Both Unitarians and those who take Scripture seriously agree that Jesus lived on earth as a man. It is surprising, though, to discover that the latter sometimes do not steadfastly hold to their own teaching. Let’s uncover this inconsistency.
When he lived on earth, our Lord did not demonstrate his omnipresence, a fact that causes little debate. He made the tiring trek to Samaria one step at a time. Though in his eternal deity he could be said to be everywhere present, he was not in Samaria in his body until he walked there, just as his disciples had to do. For some reason, this walking—to the point of weariness, without reliance on his omnipresence—does not seem to bother our Lord’s friends today. But when it comes to his omnipotence and omniscience, that is quite another matter! Many see flashes of these attributes repeatedly.
Faithful pastors teach from Philippians 2 that when the Son of God came to earth, he laid aside the display of his deity. Then the same good pastors often reverse field and argue that Jesus’ miracles (and there are lots of them!) are in fact a display of his deity. Mark 2:8 is frequently cited as such a display: “Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts.” (When Jesus asks questions to learn information, these teachers must then feel that he has either lapsed back into human limitations or else that he is simply playacting his role as a man.) In this passage and many others, the Holy Spirit’s working within our Lord’s genuine human agency is too often overlooked.
The question must be faced: What exactly did Jesus lay aside, according to Philippians 2? Not his deity. (Here we all agree.) But if we say that he laid aside the display of, and reliance on, his deity, then can we turn around and take what he laid aside as proof of his deity? Obviously not! The grand truth of his deity must be established on other grounds.
After Jesus heals the man born blind, the grateful fellow testifies, “Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind” (John 9:32). Next, he makes a deduction from the miracle, “If this man [that is, Jesus] were not from God, he could do nothing” (v. 33). Here is the question: Is the miracle to be explained by the fact that Jesus was from God, or by the fact that he is God? Both are true, but which is the expressed source of our Lord’s earthly work?
Christ’s mighty works do point us toward the conclusion that he is eternal Deity in flesh, but not in the way so often taught. Precisely here is where we have lost our Lord.
A Doubly Serious Mistake
Basing our teaching of Jesus’ deity directly on his works, miracles, and signs, rather than on his words and other Scripture, is seriously wrong on two counts: it is contrary to what Scripture actually teaches, and it compromises the realness of Christ’s humanity and the integrity of the incarnation. The real Lord is thereby hidden from us—and often those most eager to defend the faith are the guilty party.
Let’s now ask and answer again the important question: Are the miraculous works of Jesus the Messiah to be attributed to the Holy Spirit working through him, or are they due to our Lord’s own second-person-of-the-Trinity deity? We must all agree that the Scripture teaches that Jesus is the Son of God, coequal with the Father and the Spirit. Still further, we should agree that the Son did not stop being God while on earth. Our inquiry has to do with the manifestation of his divine nature, now that he is joined with our humanity. What does the Bible say?
When in amazement the Jews asked concerning Jesus, “How did this man get such learning without having studied?” Jesus gave the answer, “My teaching is not my own. It comes from him who sent me” (John 7:15-16). He later reiterated this truth when he said, “The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work,” and “These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me” (14:10, 24).
Keep in mind that we are asking Scripture this question: Did Jesus do his marvelous teaching and miraculous work using his resources as the divine Son of God, or did he do them as a Spirit-filled man? Peter is clear in Acts 10:38 as he taught Cornelius’s household “how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him.”
In the light of this teaching—that our Savior’s wonder works were done “because God was with him”—what shall we say, then, of those who teach that Jesus hungers, sleeps, and weeps as man, but that as God he feeds the multitudes and rises from slumber and quiets the sea storm, and as God he calls Lazarus from the grave? True, only God can do these things, but what we are trying to discover is whether Jesus did these miracles as a Spirit-filled man, or whether he did them as a display of his own deity? When the staggering challenges of human needs around him would overwhelm his human resources, did he rise up as infinite God and care for the situation? Or did Jesus remain in league with us, demonstrating the power of God’s Spirit working within a wholly dedicated life? Does or does not Philippians 2 teach that the Son laid aside the display of his majesty?
Acts 10:38 notwithstanding, some still argue that he raised the dead, thereby proving that he is God. To this I respond, please read again Acts 10:38 and consider with me the following line of reasoning for defending Christ’s deity without departing from plain statements of Scripture.
Peter also raised the dead (Dorcas, see Acts 9:39-42), but when Cornelius attempted to bow before him, Peter stopped him, saying, “I am only a man myself” (Acts 10:26). Peter’s works prove that he is a Spirit-filled man. You can trust the words of a Spirit-filled man, and he says, “I am only a man.” By the same token, you can trust the words of Jesus Christ, whose works certify that he is God’s Spirit-filled human representative, and he teaches us that he is the divine Son of God. That is how we know with certainty that the Lord Jesus is God. Our human nature likes to stake all on miracles and signs, but Jesus said, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).
God simply has not given such a crucial place to signs and wonders that the proof of our Lord’s eternal deity should rest on these. No, it rests ultimately on his word, as he insists in John 8:24, “If you do not believe that I am the one I claim to be, you will indeed die in your sins.” The Gospel of John stands out in Scripture for its affirmation of Christ’s eternal deity as the Son of God. Yet this same book repeatedly quotes our Lord as he claims true humanity, and his message is used to set forth his identity as Messiah. Here is a sample:
“Who are you?” they asked.
“Just what I have been claiming all along,” Jesus replied. “I have much to say in judgment of you. But he who sent me is reliable, and what I have heard from him I tell the world.”
They did not understand that he was telling them about his Father. So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am the one I claim to be [the Messiah, God’s Son] and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me. The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him.” Even as he spoke, many put their faith in him.
To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:25-32)
Shortly after the above pronouncement, Jesus describes himself to his foes as “a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God” (John 8:40). To miss his message is to misunderstand who he is.
Christ did not live a life removed from the dusty way of ordinary human existence. He did not periodically shift into the display-of-deity mode. “Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (Heb. 2:18). Then rejoice, believers, in our Lord’s genuine human nature and—apart from our sin—in his complete identity with us: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin” (Heb. 4:15).
Yes, Jesus is most certainly the eternal, infinite Son of God, but he became man also and lived within the bounds of human resources (having to use physical energy, brain, and walking from one place to another) instead of relying on, and demonstrating, his own divine resources (omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence). Hebrews 5:7-9 makes it dramatically clear: “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears. . . . He learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”
How grateful we are that our Savior did not disconnect from us by reaching back into his own eternal resources when he faced challenges on earth. At Lazarus’s grave, before he called the dead man to rise, he first prayed to his Father in heaven. Consequently, when we see the mighty power of the Holy Spirit, we are thereby encouraged in our faith and stirred to follow him in a close contact of prayer. Study carefully John 14:12-14:
I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.
Before moving on, let’s recapitulate. Consider these three truths about Jesus that should help us maintain the integrity of his incarnation. First, his real birth provides a genuine humanity. Second, his real life proves a genuine humanity. Third, his real suffering and death require a genuine humanity. In relation to this third point, we all know that God can neither lie nor die. But Christ died. This fact places a special guard about his human nature. While we must maintain the unity and integrity of his personhood, Calvary’s death requires us to affirm the genuineness of his human nature. (See appendix 1 for discussion of whether we can say that God died on the cross.)
Does the Ladder Reach All the Way Up?
Having established the integrity of Christ’s humanity, let’s now make sure that faulty notions about his subordination within the Trinity do not hinder our own relationship with him as our Mediator.
It is commonly said that Jesus is 100 percent God and 100 percent man. I think I know what speakers mean by this statement, but these words in themselves encourage hearers to accept a vague confusion (100 percent + 100 percent = 200 percent). Is it not better to say that the Lord is truly God but that he also has become man? From all eternity the Son is ever God; then a couple thousand years ago, he also took on humanity.
Numbers of times I have heard persons who would claim to be very sound in their biblical faith teach error regarding the subordination of Jesus Christ. They often do so on the basis of Scriptures like John 14:28, where Jesus said, “If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.” A group of thirty-five respected pastors discussed this very text in my hearing some years ago. So far as I could tell, not one, including the leader, sided with me. All felt that the Son was subordinate to the Father both on earth and in eternity. During a break, I dashed to the nearby office of the resident professor of theology. Hearing of the position taken by the discussion leader, he said quietly, “My colleague is wrong.”
True enough, Jesus obeyed his parents, paid taxes, prayed to God, and yielded to his will, even to death on the cross, but this submission must not be understood so as to contradict his words in John 10:30, “I and the Father are one,” or the words of Paul about Christ, “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (Phil. 2:6-7).
Simply put, Does the Scripture emphasize the Son’s subordination within the Godhead, the Trinity, or does the teaching have primary reference to his role as the incarnate Redeemer? The latter is true. Sonship does not imply eternal, essential subordination to the Father; rather, the term “Son” sets forth equality and union in one essence. Remember the apostle’s comments in John 5:18, “For this reason the Jews tried all the harder to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.”
However we understand the functional relation of the Father and the Son as it was in eternity, we must not press this relation back into the essence, or eternal substance, of God. Consider how carefully the Father balances truths about his Son in Hebrews 1, when he says, beginning at verse 5, “You are my Son; today I have become your Father,” Here he is speaking of the human birth of the Messiah, with all the admiration and approval of the Father in heaven. The next verse adds the command “Let all God’s angels worship him.” Verse 8 follows with, “But about the Son he [God, the Father] says, ‘Your throne, O God, will last for ever and ever.’” Not only are angels ordered to worship the Son, but the Father addresses the Son as God.
There is no such thing as being, in the same sense, both “equal with” and “less than.” Yet there are some who want the mediatorial ladder to reach to the Tri-Unity, while they at the same time give strong emphasis to the Son’s subordination to the Father prior to creation back in all eternity. Within the essence of the Godhead, there is no variation or gradation or alteration. God in substance is pure One, a perfect Unity, and absolutely immutable.
The plurality of the persons of the Trinity does not imply gradation or divisions within the Godhead: “The Father of the heavenly lights . . . does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17). Reference to the three persons as first, second, and third enables our finite minds to think in an orderly fashion and avoid confusion, but the terms do not indicate High, Middle, Low. It would be helpful if teachers would cease speaking of any one of the three as “part” of the Trinity. The Godhead has no parts! Rather, all three (persons) participate fully in the one (essence). (Don’t forget the fundamental text Deut. 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”) The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are members, not parts, of the Godhead. The one being is indivisible and immutable. Furthermore, the incarnation brought no alteration in the essence of God.
All must admit that fully explaining and grasping the Trinity is beyond human capacities. But that limitation is no excuse for abandoning the revealed insights given us by God and turning to such typical statements as, “We can’t understand the Trinity—how God is three and yet one—but we accept it by faith.” This treatment forces the poor listeners to make a terrible choice between believing a sheer contradiction or having a defective faith regarding the Trinity.
It is far better to say that God is three in one way, and one in another way. He is one as to his essence, and three as to persons. Three persons participating equally, fully in the one essence. God is one being existing in the three distinct persons. You and I are one-person beings, but God is a three-person being. It ought not surprise us to learn that God is different from us. Furthermore, his wondrous being can be known only through his Word, as the Spirit of truth enlightens us. Remember, we are talking of revealed truth. God’s revelation is not confusion. Surely, we are not burdened with having to overcome an apparent contradiction by some kind of tenacious faith.
God is knowable because he is a self-revealing Deity. The grand truth of God’s existence is embraced and understood by faith arising from Scripture and confirmed in experience. The data that feeds faith, then, is God’s Word and all his works in providence and creation. At the heart of it all stands our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who is the living Word of God.
Will We Ever See God?
That the question about ever seeing God is still being asked 2,000 years after Jesus gave his answer to it proves how dimly we see and know him. “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work” (John 14:9-10).
This Jesus, who is the supreme Message of God to mankind, is said to be also “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Heb. 1:3). He was called Immanuel, which means, “God with us” (Matt. 1:23). Jesus came forth from Mary’s womb in our nature and likeness—“he appeared in a body” (1 Tim. 3:16)—and yet with perfect fidelity he manifested God to us: “He is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15).
Image worship is sternly forbidden in the Bible, but when it comes to our Lord Jesus as the image of God, we must worship. He is God, come to us in human nature; he has taken the decisive position as Mediator between God and man. This means that he both represents God to us and represents us to God. At this point we are dealing with the former. We will deal with the latter when we take up the study of our Lord’s ascension and how we approach God as we pray in Jesus’ name.
We see that both the person and the work of Christ are involved in the matter of his being the image of God to us. In order to bring us into contact with the true God, this one divine being not only must be truly God but also must show his divine nature living and working in real human nature. The disciple John wrote about this truly human Jesus:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete. (1 John 1:1-4)
Though Almighty God is infinite, invisible, and not limited to any physical boundaries that would let us “locate” him with our senses, he has reached out to us visibly by the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus’ humanity, we can know God, “for God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him” (Col. 1:19); again, “In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Col. 2:9). This means that the ladder stands firmly where we stand—in earth’s soil—and reaches all the way to the triune Godhead. Get hold of even the bottom rung of the ladder, and you will be transformed. Jesus promises, “When a man believes in me, he does not believe in me only, but in the one who sent me. When he looks at me, he sees the one who sent me. I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness” (John 12:44-46).
In the opening words of his gospel account, John introduces the Son of God as the Word. He is ever the Revelation, Expression, or Great Message of God. But his assignment to image God to us involves more than words: “When Christ came into the world, he said: ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me’” (Heb. 10:5). Or as John puts it, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
Having a body and human nature enables Jesus to image, or mirror, God directly to us in many dimensions in addition to the visual. The problem is that “he was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him” (John 1:10). Our concern here, however, is not only what the world thinks, but especially how believers are misunderstanding, or misrepresenting and mistreating, their Lord.
Damage Assessment
Harm done to the church by the blurred teachings about our Lord’s person is perhaps beyond estimating, but let us attempt some assessment.
Jesus once said, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). See how important this knowing is! “Whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away…. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:16, 18). The apostle adds in 4:6, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” In the light of these promises, why the dullness and ineffectiveness of contemporary believers? Perhaps many do not see much of Jesus. This means they know incorrectly. And therefore they show little.
Recall our illustration of Jesus as the ladder. If his mediation does not reach all the way into our very humanity on the one end, and if it does not extend into absolute equality with the Father at the other end, we have lost the real Lord Jesus Christ, and we are out of touch with God.
By saying that our Lord’s powerful works came from his own deity, not from the Spirit working within him, teachers obscure our understanding of the Spirit’s work in Jesus. We are then set adrift in this world without a Savior whose example is in our league. How crucial is the damage done by those who, in their press to assert our Lord’s deity, give up his true manhood! Both his deity and his manhood must be held securely.
Again, those who teach must be careful not to sully the doctrine of the Son’s eternal deity when they speak of a subordination that existed prior to creation—before anything existed “outside” of God. When closely questioned, too many among the ranks of believers hold that the Son is less than the Father. Those who would be custodians of Trinitarian doctrine must make very sure that they do not appear to be placing the Son below the Father. Unguarded teaching in this area of doctrine is responsible for the sad, unthinking drift of many into serious error regarding God’s Son. The burden of responsibility is surely on all of us, while teaching the condescension of the Son, to make clear that the subordination does not extend to the substance of the eternal Godhead.
In the following pages, we will examine several other serious errors. They concern our Lord’s work of atonement, intercession, rule, and headship of the church, as well as our service for him in evangelism and in the various dimensions of edifying and sustaining others. If we are sent as he was sent (see John 20:21), any cloudiness in our view of Jesus’ person and work will greatly hinder our effort to represent and serve him.
Vaguely defined truth cannot be defended. Instead, it is lost. Wherever truth is lost, strongly voiced proclamations using well-illustrated points do not make things right.
A particular focus of difficulty will be seen in the area of prayer. Ready, confident access to the Father depends very much on what we learn from Jesus’ real, Spirit-filled, human life and our present alignment with him, and from Jesus’ present place with the Father. Some of the additional problems to be unearthed will be simply consequences of errors already mentioned. Others will be “new,” but all ultimately derive from a faulty handling of the truth about the Lord Jesus Christ.
Review and Appeal
The Son of God truly humbled himself and became one of us, apart from our sinful bent. Though he never ceased to be God, he lived on earth within the bounds of human resources, with the support of the Holy Spirit.
Although he now has both divine and human natures, our Lord is one person. On earth he rightfully accepted Thomas’s worship (addressing Jesus as “my Lord and my God,” John 20:28), and he taught that he is the Son of God. This truth, though, came by revelation, not by demonstration of miracles (see Matt. 16:16-17).
Jesus, then, is the supreme Revealer of God. If this truth should be confused and lost to our understanding, we likely also will lose a firm grasp on his life and work as Redeemer and Ruler.
As pictured earlier, many of the faithful are left holding empty bottles. Instead of being filled with potent truth, they contain mostly just air. Labels are to some
extent correct and orthodox, but what power resides in the paper? It is not good to live “having a form of godliness but denying its power” (2 Tim. 3:5).
We have only begun our story, but already I trust it will be apparent that getting these matters right and bringing Christ back to his place should take priority over so many other things. For example, how can we genuinely look for the Lord’s second coming when to such a degree we have obscured his first coming?
(The above is taken from my book, “Bringing Christ Back,” available for order here.)