Heresies and Debates

Sermon Transcript

As we get started, I want you to take your Bibles, please, and turn to the little book of 2 John. We’re week six in our study of Christology, and especially as we get into today’s discussion, I fear that some may begin to grow weary of what seems to you perhaps like theological hair-splitting.

 

And I want to remind you, nothing could be more important than getting our Christology right. I want to take your mind back to our very first week when we said, listen, if we don’t have this right, we’ve got nothing right. I mean, our religion, if you will, is all about the person and work of Jesus Christ. No man will come to the Father except through Him.

 

And already, John, you know, I trust, is the longest living apostle, and his books come at the end of the writing period of the apostles. And he writes this little book, 2 John. Take a look at verse number 7, and notice how important Christology is in John’s teaching to these young churches.

 

Verse 7: “For many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh.”

 

You can’t mistake that He came, right? I mean, that’s what this whole thing is about. But apparently, as we’ll see tonight, that was something of a departure from the biblical position of who Jesus was.

 

“Such a one”—now, how big a deal is this? Well, let’s just, they all love Jesus, so let’s just toss around the inflated beach ball and sing, I love Jesus. Yes, I do. I love Jesus. How about you? It’s all fine because we love Jesus, but he says, no, we’ve got to get it right. We have to have our Christology right.

 

“Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.” You may be pro-Christ, but if you’re not pro-Orthodox, biblical, proper, accurate doctrine about who Christ is, that’s a problem.

 

Verse 8: “Watch yourselves so that you may not lose what we’ve worked for, but may win a full reward. Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting.”

 

You can’t even say hi to him.

 

“For whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works.”

 

I mean, this is a big deal, right? And so I don’t even think we’re going to get close to being as uptight about Christology as the Apostle John was, see? So if I’m going to move you a little bit forward in your Christology, you thinking a little more carefully and accurately and thoughtfully about who He is—I mean, it feels like we’re kind of plodding along and teasing out the ups and downs of all of this—just remember, this is important. I mean, this is critical to the Apostle John, and it should be critical to us.

 

So, before we begin session six, let’s talk to God about our understanding and love for the truth. Pray with me, please.

 

God, it is so important that we have the same attitude toward that you do. We cannot mess with it. We didn’t create it. It’s not open to our private interpretation. It is not something that we can in any way be loose about or be, quote-unquote, open-minded about. We have to be firm on these things. We have to teach these things, understand these things, and be able to express them, at least within the terms that the Bible has given us about the person, the nature of who Christ is.

 

And if we don’t, God, if we go on ahead, see, we’re going to have trouble. We’re going to fall into the error. And one of the most common ones at the end of the first century was something about denying the reality of the humanity of who Christ was.

 

So help us, God, tonight, as we think this through, as we work this through, as we look at several passages that’ll help us, God, to understand all of this, and I pray that it would strengthen and ground us in biblical, solid, good, orthodox teaching about who you are.

 

So we come to you in the authority of Jesus Christ, the only mediator between God and man, in whose name we pray. Amen.

 

Okay. By the way, heresy—we’ll use that word a lot tonight—when he says, “if anyone goes on ahead.” Did you hear that? It’s almost like here’s this place where truth is, and if you get beyond that, if you transgress the bounds of that, then you are a heretic.

 

Heresy is another one of these words that comes to us from the Greek language that simply means a choice. This is interesting. Think this through. A choice. If you think you can choose how you view these things, you see, and you go on ahead and you choose to believe something different than the parameters set out in Scripture, then you are a heretic, right? You’ve gone on ahead. You’ve veered off the path. So, keep that in mind as we think this through.

 

And since we spent so much time to date talking about the deity of Christ—is He God—we need to turn our attention today to the humanity of Christ, which is, as I read in 2 John verse 7, very, very important. And we cannot lose this, though most people, certainly from a 21st century perspective looking back, they’re not going to deny that.

 

The debates we seem to have and the fights we seem to have aren’t with was this Jewish quote-unquote Messiah really human? We’re usually battling was He really God? And I get that, but we do need to spend a little bit of time, just part of our time, considering the humanity of Christ.

 

A. A Real Physical Body

 

Let’s start with this, letter A. Let’s talk about a real physical body, okay? That’s a good place for us to start. The claim is, when we say that He came in the flesh, that means that Christ was truly in a physical container, a biological body.

 

Let’s turn to Luke chapter 2. Luke chapter 2, verse 40.

 

We learn something about the childhood of Christ in Luke 2. Luke gives us the most information about His birth and His childhood. And we’re familiar with this. We read it at Christmas, at least the surrounding verses.

 

And here in verse number 40, after the discussion of His presentation at the temple and His circumcision, and now we’re going to get into, in verse 41, the boy goes to the temple and sits around talking about how that’s his father’s house, and you should have known I would have been about his business as he finds his way there and stays there while his parents go back.

 

Look at this, verse 39: “And when they had performed everything according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee.” That’s where he grew up, in the region of Galilee, Nazareth, to their own town of Nazareth. Okay?

 

Now, note this. The child, right? We’re talking about now from his eighth day to his 12-year-old birthday, which is in verse 41 there: “The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon him.”

 

That phrase, “the child grew and became strong.” From eight days to 12 years old, that biological unit that he was in, it grew, and his muscles, you know, became strong, right? He became someone who you could look at and say, that kid is physically growing. You know, his cousins or his aunt and uncle, oh my, how you’ve grown. He grew.

 

So, he seems to have—this is overly obvious—but the Bible is presenting him as physically growing. He didn’t show up on the scene to do something for a few years and then die on a cross. He started as an embryo, and he grew physically.

 

Okay, physical growth, well, that certainly speaks to a physical body.

 

Turn over to Matthew chapter 4. Matthew chapter 4. Not only did he grow from a child to a 12-year-old and then on to an adult, less than 40—that’s what we know from John, how old he was, got some guesses about his age, early 30s.

 

Look at Matthew 4:2, verse 1. Here’s the context. “Jesus was led by the Spirit.” This wasn’t Satan dragging Him out into the wilderness. This was the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. This was part of His victory in overcoming sin for us, right, to do all the right things against all the temptations of the devil.

 

And then it says, after He had fasted—this is almost comical—40 days and 40 nights, three words: “He was hungry.”

 

Now, I’d be hungry after four hours, but he’s hungry after 40 days. Well, because he’s certainly in control of his physical body, but certainly his body has physical needs. When he doesn’t eat, see, for 40 days, he’s hungry. His biological, physical body needs fuel. It needs food. He couldn’t exist without it. Obviously, amazingly self-disciplined, which was part of his obedience, but he had a real physical body that really physically grew, and he had physical needs.

 

Like he slept, right? He got tired and he slept every night. He slept when he was tired after preaching in the boat, remember that? In the middle of the storm, he goes to sleep every night. Gets up early, I’ll give you that, long before dawn, to pray, but he slept. Things like that, physical needs.

 

We could look at a lot of passages, but that’s enough for that one.

 

Turn to John chapter 4. John chapter 4, the account of the woman at the well. They’re traveling in a very unconventional way through the middle of Samaria, which the Jews wouldn’t normally do. They would normally go on the other side of the Jordan River to avoid the land of the Samaritans. And you know who the Samaritans are.

 

They were the northern tribes of Israel that were taken in 721 B.C. by the Assyrians and conquered, and they intermarried with the Assyrians. And because of that, the Jews hated them. It was bad to be a Gentile. It was way worse to be a Samaritan. That’s why the story of the quote-unquote good Samaritan was such a big deal. That’s a guy you would kick into the curb, not help, right?

 

The Samaritans hated the Jews. Jews hated Samaritans.

 

John 4, they come to the town of Samaria called Sychar, which is already, you don’t really belong here, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.

 

And verse 6 says, “Jacob’s well was there, so Jesus, wearied as he was from the journey, was sitting beside the well, and it was about the sixth hour.”

 

That’s a great story. He’s wanting food, and he’s not just needing physical nourishment, but he’s experiencing throughout his life signs of physical fatigue. He can’t go on forever, not only awake, but he can’t travel in the middle of the day at the sixth hour, when the sun was high, he was tired, he was exhausted, he needed to rest, he needed food, he needed water from the well. The disciples went into Sychar to get lunch. It was an example of him being wearied from his journey.

 

And we can look at several more examples of him physically wearing out in one way or another.

 

Well, the ultimate physical wearing out, which was debated early in the church, was found in his—you can just jot it down, but let’s look at it—his physical death. He had physical growth, he had physical needs while he was healthy and doing fine. He had physical fatigue when he was in a place of need.

 

And then the ultimate problem is if you, you know, kicked him hard enough and you hung him on a cross and you speared him in the side and you beat him in the face, you could kill him. He could physically die. And that was important to note as we talked about the various heresies of the early church.

 

Physical death.

 

Luke 23:46 says, “Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’” That’s death. I mean, death is when your spirit leaves your body, and your body then ceases to function. “And having said this, He breathed His last.”

 

Obviously, we know He died. But what kind of death was that? Well, there’s several aspects to that. More on that when we talk about the ministry of Christ.

 

But we need to see simple things: physical growth, physical needs, physical fatigue, physical death. He had a real physical body. Though that was debated—for most in this room, no big deal, Mike.

 

Well, it gets a little more complicated.

 

B. His Humanity

 

Letter B, let’s talk about his humanity. That wasn’t all that uncomfortable, was it? That was easy.

 

It’s a little more uncomfortable now because some of us haven’t even thought these kinds of things through. This one’s not so hard. We’ll start easy.

 

But John 8, verse 40—to get the whole sentence, I guess we should start in verse 39. But the punchline is in verse 40.

 

Now, to have a physical body is one thing, but to say I’m fully human, right, there’s more to it than that, okay? Here’s a statement from Jesus.

 

Start with how they answered him. Verse 39: they answered him, and here’s what they said: “Abraham is our father.”

 

And Jesus responded to that and said, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me.” Here it comes now: ha anthropos, right? “A man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did.”

 

Now, there’s a statement, by the way, that Jehovah Witnesses will show you. We dealt with them enough last week, but those are the kinds of things that we least need to see in the Scripture.

 

Jesus has no problem calling himself things like the Son of Man, though we tied that to Daniel 7, which made that more of a statement of his deity than his humanity. Certainly, just on the surface, Son of Man means that you are a part of mankind.

 

And to use a word like man to describe himself, he clearly had no problem with very human titles. “I am a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God.”

 

Now, we’re always looking for verses about how he hints to his deity that he was God, but there are clearly statements throughout the Gospels where he makes clear that he’s saying he is a man.

 

Human titles—we could look at more, but let’s leave it at that for now—and turn to Luke 2:52.

 

This was after his 12-year-old experience. He gets circumcised on the eighth day. Then the statement of verse 40 said, “He grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon him.”

 

Then the statement of his—or the narrative of his dealings with the rabbis in the temple, teachers of the law in the temple, and at the end of that discussion, after they caught up with their 12-year-old Messiah son, it says in verse 52: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature,” okay, so He keeps on growing from 12 to adulthood, “and in favor with God and man.”

 

Okay, the part I want you to see there is this little statement: he increased in wisdom.

 

Okay, if you’re going to look at his humanity, right, you could say, well, I expect that. If he’s simply God in a human container, then there’s no growing in wisdom, right? Because God is all wise, right?

 

So, whatever we’re saying about him here, it’s important that we recognize there’s some distinction about his wisdom.

 

A couple other passages. I didn’t put them on the screen. But how about John 12? John 12 is going to refer to another discussion about the center of his immaterial part. If his immaterial part of his thinking or his mind is—and it’s not his brain. Your brain is your hard drive. Your mind is the thing that drives your hard drive. It’s your software.

 

If the software is growing in wisdom, then it’s—I mean, that’s not God, see? Because God doesn’t grow in wisdom.

 

And then there are statements about this immaterial part of Him, and I got to be careful now with some words as we look at them. But this word, for instance, in verse number 27, speaks of His immaterial part and describes His immaterial part this way.

 

Verse 27 of John 12. John 12:27: “Now is my soul,” right, my psuche, “troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? No, but for this purpose I have come to this hour.”

 

The whole Garden of Gethsemane scene that we usually read from the book of Matthew, you’ve got this struggle in his soul, it’s described here.

 

Now, I say that because I’m not a trichotomist. You know what a trichotomist is, right? Someone who believes that we are body, soul, and spirit.

 

Soul is a word that generally overlaps to describe humanity. This is my view on it, and I think I could prove this if I had an hour to throw some charts up on the overhead.

 

But soul is a word that’s a little more sloppy, shall I say.

 

The other word I want you to look at that’s much more exacting is this word. It’s found in John 13, the very next chapter.

 

John 13, drop down to verse 21: “After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his pneuma, his spirit.” Is that a capital S on that spirit word there? No. This is his spirit, his immaterial part, and it’s not settled.

 

It’s a word, though it’s not the word merizomai, the normal word for anxiety, it’s a word that’s akin to that. I’m unsettled. We often talk about, because we’re Christians, I was anxious—anxious, just concerned. This is a weaker word than merizomai, but it’s still the concept.

 

It was unsettled in my spirit. It’s troubled.

 

“And I testified, truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.”

 

So he’s considering the betrayal that he’s going to get from Judas and his spirit is unsettled. It’s troubled.

 

Soul—just to get back to that, this is kind of a sidebar discussion—soul is more of a sloppy word, like when the captain, they got a hole in the hull of the ship and it’s going down and the captain asks how many souls on board, right? How many people are there? Human beings. Don’t care about the cats and the dogs at this point, but how many souls on board? Humans on board.

 

But when we look at humans, they’re made up of two parts. Though soul is more of a sloppy term for someone who’s not just a biological unit. He’s a living being, right?

 

But he has in him a spirit. It’s like when God creates Adam from the dust of the earth, that’s body, right? He breathes in him the breath of life, that spirit, and he becomes a living being or a soul, and a nepesh, he’s now a soul, a human soul, right?

 

But the point is, the immaterial part—certainly you cannot be a soul without a spirit, put it that way. And we’re talking now about an immaterial part, which you see the translators don’t even put a capital S on, because we seem in this troubled—and that’s the word used both in chapter 12:27 and chapter 13:21—he’s troubled in his soul or in his spirit.

 

And he is growing in wisdom in his mind, let’s just call it that.

 

By the way, that’s one reason I’m not a trichotomist, because he says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, right? There’s lots of ways to describe the immaterial parts or segments of who I am, but let’s just put it this—

 

And this may be a stretch for you to think through. But Jesus, according to passages like this, as we look throughout the Gospels, has a human mind, or you can call it a human soul, or to be more exacting, a human spirit.

 

Hmm. See, because He couldn’t have a divine mind if His mind was growing in wisdom, and He wouldn’t have, arguably, the kind of reactions He often has throughout His ministry if it was simply a description of a divine soul, so he possesses a human soul. And that’s an important thing that the church has worked hard to forge out through time to make sure we don’t forget that.

 

John 11:33. Physical container, okay, I got that, but he’s a human. Takes on human titles like man, he’s not ashamed or afraid of those titles. He has a human mind, a human soul, a human spirit. Those are not distinct. That’s why there’s dashes there or whatever they’re called, slashes there.

 

He’s an immaterial, in church history, I think a rational mind or a rational soul. He’s an immaterial, he has the software of a human being.

 

11:32 and 33, just to get some context now: Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, fell at his feet, saying, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother Lazarus would not have died,” right? But he waited on purpose for, you know, chance to reveal His glory in this situation.

 

But verse 33 says, “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in His”—there it is again—pneuma, small s, His human spirit, right? “And He was greatly troubled.”

 

This though, later on, in the verse you learned first as a kid, “Jesus wept,” right?

 

We know that that troubling was not the frustration, the anxiety, or the torn between, you know, not my will, but your will be done, distinction there, but this is a sense of grief and sorrow, and he experiences those, and you may argue, well, God experiences those things too, and you’re right.

 

God experiences those things because, let me just put it this way, we experience those things because God experiences those things, and God made us in his image.

 

But the description of his emotions are springing not from his divinity. Statements like this say they’re springing from his own spirit.

 

So his emotions are human emotions, not divine emotions. They’re human emotions as ours are, as they reflect divinity, because he’s made, in this case, in the image of God, in this case, as we are in his humanity—his human software.

 

Human titles, human mind, soul, spirit, human emotions—but turn over to Hebrews 4. And we could look in the Gospels for this, but it’s better to see summaries like this to tie it all together.

 

Hebrews chapter 4, verse 14 says: “Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession.”

 

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,” including the experience of human emotions, the experience of growing in wisdom, the experience of having a troubled or a concerned mind, being a man, calling himself a man.

 

We’ve got one that can sympathize with all the weaknesses of humanity, “but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin.”

 

So, whatever we say about his humanity, and you can trace it to the virgin birth, or you can just say it was part of God’s protection, though He is part of the subjective, He is part of humanity subjected to the curse of Genesis 3, in that He’s going to die, He’s going to age, He’s going to be weak, He’s going to need sleep, things we will not need in a resurrected body.

 

Because of that, though we would say, no matter what you say about His humanity, though it may be subject to in His humanity, the limitations of humanity—all of that humanity is without sin.

 

Now, don’t separate those two because Adam was not God prior to the fall, right? Think that through. He was human and finite but sinless.

 

Christ goes one better than that in that he is subject to death after the fall, and yet he is without sin. He is human, but that does not equal sinful, though that’s all we know. If you’re human, you’re sinful, and that’s what we say. Well, the error is human. That’s not what he did, though he was fully human, and the software was fully human, and the hardware was fully human.

 

Human titles, human mind, soul, spirit, human emotions, but I guess I should have said human perfection.

 

Now, this is hard to imagine because we don’t know what human perfection was prior to the fall, and we certainly can’t hardly fathom human perfection after the fall, subject to the curse of the fall, right? But that’s what we’ve got.

 

In Adam, we had perfect human, and we’ve never met that. And in Christ, we have perfect human under the curse of Genesis 3. If you want to call it that, though it’s never called that in Genesis 3, though he does say, “cursed is the ground because of you.”

 

All right, now that stretches us a bit, but it gets worse because now we have to think through how these two come together.

 

The Union of Deity and Humanity

 

The union of deity and humanity. Now, I’m already thinking out of the box because I’ve never met Adam or Eve, but they were a lot different than anybody I’ve ever met.

 

And certainly now you’re going to add to that someone who after the fall is subject to death, has limitations, needs to sleep, gets tired, grows weary, you know, has hangnails, you know, whatever, catches a cold, has runny noses, cried as a baby.

 

That’s why I like that line in Away in a Manger, you know, “no crying he makes.” I don’t know where you get that from because he’s a human baby. Human babies can’t talk, right? It’s not like he was just pretending and every now and then said to Mary, “Mary, I’m hungry,” right? He was really a baby and couldn’t talk, and so that’s how they communicate, and when they need to be changed or they’re hungry, they cry.

 

Now, have you thought about that? You need to think about that’s who he was. I mean, he had acne, right? You didn’t want to think about that tonight at church, but he’s fully human.

 

In other words, he’s in a cursed body. And don’t get me wrong on this. What I mean is he’s post-Genesis 3, subject to all the frailties of humanity after the fall and yet without sin.

 

How does that work when you say for two or three weeks now He’s deity?

 

Well, let’s define some words that have been hammered out for five or six centuries after Christ—four, I guess, four or five—and debated after that.

 

Let me say this. Jesus has, just to try and put this together, two natures. I’m going to give you now the orthodox position after—

 

See, and some people, we don’t… If you’re an architect and you go to school and you’re going to build a bridge, you don’t start from scratch and just say, well, how might this work? Right? You are going to build your theories on bridge making based on the failures of the past of guys that built bridges that didn’t work out that well.

 

Like that old picture of the swaying—what do they call that? the suspension bridge. Remember that and the wind in San Francisco? Have you seen that old black and white picture? Well, that didn’t work, whatever they did, because that doesn’t make for a nice drive across the bridge in windy weather in San Francisco Bay. So they had to adjust it.

 

And that’s my point, is that when we look through these statements, it’s so exacting, it seems like word games. When we weren’t precise about these words, these theories were put to the—then they failed. See, so through time, we had to figure out if you’re going to do things like state the nature of Christ, you’re going to have to do it this way, because if you don’t, take that to a logical conclusion, then it’s going to fail.

 

That’s why our wording is so careful and precise and exacting.

 

And when we talk about God—I’m sorry, Christ, the incarnate Christ—we need to talk about two natures. We can’t get around that.

 

And by nature, here’s what I mean: a complex of attributes, okay? There are a complex of attributes that you would say are human, and there are complex of attributes that you would say are divine. And that’s what we’re saying.

 

And in Christ, He had two natures. And in those two natures, you can define it this way: he had a fully complete, nothing lacking set of attributes that were divine and a set of attributes that were fully human.

 

And you’re saying, how does that possibly work? And that’s a great question, right?

 

And we’ll talk about it tonight, but we would say you can see times where He exercises—and I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself—who He is, let’s just put it that way, drawing on one nature in one situation and drawing on another nature in another situation, right?

 

When He says things like, you know, no one knows the day of the hour, you know, no one knows, not the angels of heaven, not even me. Well, what’s with that because God’s divine attributes are omniscience, right? And that means you know everything. But he didn’t, right? Well, what’s that? Well, in his humanity, right? He drew from that nature in that situation.

 

And when the gal with the flow of blood touched him, he says, “Who touched me?” Right? If you only think that he draws from a divine set or complex of attributes, you’d say, well, then he’s playing games. He’s kidding. He’s joking. He’s, you know, he’s playing dumb. But that’s not what we see.

 

And we’ve already tried to prove that from passages like Luke 2, he grew in wisdom. How do you do that? Luke 2:52, unless you’re describing the expression of a growing Christ through his human attributes—fully human, fully divine, having both sets of attributes.

 

And you’re going to say, well, those are in conflict. I get that. We’ll get to this.

 

On a week, we’re going to talk about something called the kenosis, and I’ll just give you the line. You may have heard me say it from the platform before, where Jesus, as God, lays aside the independent exercise of His divine attributes. That line will be important, and we’ll write it out and talk about it.

 

But the point is, He doesn’t independently exercise those attributes, certainly during His earthly ministry, and that’ll be an important thing to discuss and look at from several different angles.

 

But what we’re saying is he has the complex of attributes that spell human and the full set of complex of attributes that spell divinity.

 

He may have operated in the sphere of his humanity. At other times, he operated in the sphere of his divinity. He did not know what humans could not know in some cases, and in other cases, “I saw you when you were sitting under the tree.” Well, how can you do that? You weren’t there, right?

 

He knew what they were saying in their minds, right? How do you do that? Is he a mind reader? Well, he’s exercising divine attributes in that case, and his statements and perceptions are operating within the sphere of his divinity.

 

More on that as we get along.

 

But this will be an important word here, letter B, person. He has two natures, but we would say he is one person.

 

And you’d say, well, that feels really schizophrenic to say he’s fully God, fully man, two different sets of complex attributes. And yet, what we’re saying is there’s something about God being God and man that in his humanity functions as one person.

 

And the word we’ve used throughout church history and early church history to describe this is hypostasis, which means a substantive reality. Who he was, was one.

 

And by that, I’m saying he has two natures, but he’s one person. We call that the hypostatic union. And by that—and that’s an important phrase, and we’ll see as we look through the chart on the back—it’s important to recognize that He has two natures, right? But He is one person.

 

And it’s sort of like the Trinity. If that hurts your brain, get used to it in theology, because we’re talking about God, and He’s not like you or anybody you know, right? He is a God who is quite complex, existing as three in one in Trinity, which does overlap with this discussion.

 

And the second person of the Trinity is now, since the incarnation—not before, but since the incarnation—a hypostatically joined, right, God and man in one person, two natures, not a new third nature and not two persons.

 

More on that as we go. You had starting to hurt on that one yet? A little bit.

 

Let me just make two statements about this that reached their pinnacle in expression in the fifth century.

 

These two natures, we’re saying, are not mixed, and I guess I just threw that out. We don’t create a third thing. If I pour 7-Up and Hawaiian Punch into a glass, I get something new, right? We’re not saying he’s a mixed, you know, cocktail of divinity and humanity. These natures are not mixed.

 

They’re not conjoined, and they are rather inseparable.

 

In other words, once the incarnation takes place, we have in Christ—we call Him the incarnate Christ—a new reality, a person now who is God and man, and those two can never be separated.

 

That’s why, and you’ll hear this around the church, and maybe you’ve used this phrase, we can call Him, rightly so, the God-man.

 

C. Jesus is the God-man

 

Letter C, Jesus is the God-man, and that’s a good way to put it. And you say, well, that’s weird. That’s true. It’s as weird as three in one. But that’s what he is described to be and what we’re left with when we think it through and talk it through.

 

Jesus is the God-man.

 

All right, talk about heretics and heroes. Heretics, as I’ve said, are people that choose to go beyond the bounds of what the Scripture says.

 

And when it comes to Christ, we are left with a view of him being 100% God and 100% man, yet one person. And that’s, in essence, what we’re dealing with throughout church history, and the pendulum swings back and forth.

 

So let’s talk about that, and I use the chart here, and I’ve never seen a lot of charts, but I’ve not seen one quite like this, but I like this because I made it. So let’s do it this way.

 

We’re going to work through the first five centuries of the church, and if you can, at the top, let’s head these columns this way.

 

Let’s start with this. On the left-hand side, Jesus—there are some in one way or another by their theology will get to the place of saying, Jesus is not fully man. Whatever He is, He’s not fully human.

 

The other side, the other ditch is that He’s not fully God, and we deal with that a lot in our day, and you’ll see the shift as we go through the centuries.

 

Now, what we’re saying is Jesus is the God-man. That’s a short way of saying fully God and fully man. He’s fully both. He possesses the complex of attributes for humanity and the full complex of attributes for divinity, though he may not exercise either one of them at any given time, but he’s got them both.

 

Jesus is not fully man. Jesus is not fully God. Jesus is the God-man.

 

We won’t take much time on this, but of course what we’re saying is that’s what the New Testament teaches. He’s the God-man.

 

So in the first century, boom, God-man.

 

But we’ve already seen that in the first century, by the end of the canon, near the end of the first century—I mean, John is writing his last letters in the 90s—we’ve already got a problem of people saying, and we read it in 2 John, that Jesus hasn’t come in the flesh.

 

Now, they’re not saying he didn’t come, but what they’re saying is he hasn’t come in the flesh.

 

So, we won’t fill in every box, but we’re going to show that the pendulum swings one way or the other, and then someone or some group has to bring it back to the biblical teaching.

 

So, we’ll fill in two boxes per row, with the exception of the first one, okay?

 

But at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second century, we got a problem that we can label and should get to know as doceticism slash Gnosticism. Sometimes it’s called docetic Gnosticism or docetic Gnostics. Doceticism and Gnosticism, the docetic Gnostics.

 

Marcion is a name you might have heard that goes in this box.

 

I don’t give you a lot of space to write notes, but here’s what you need to know and you can remember it this way.

 

Doceticism, right, is from the Greek word doken, which is the word to appear, to seem, it looks like. Doceticism—and the Gnostics love this—they were docetic. They said he appears to be human. He appears to be a man, but he only appears to be. Docetic, doceticism. He’s not really.

 

The Gnostics love the Platonic dualism that we talked a little bit about last week, that material things, at least in the Gnostic view, were bad, and the spiritual things were good.

 

So, God came to the world, but He would never take on real humanity. I don’t care if you say it’s without sin. If He walked around like a human being, He wasn’t really human, because God would never do that, because God would never lower Himself to that place.

 

So, he dokened, he appeared to be human, but he wasn’t really human.

 

They could never believe that Jesus—I’m sorry, that God could in any real sense be joined with humanity. The material world is evil.

 

By the way, doceticism is a great… Remember we talked about last week, we talked about Philo. Remember that? The Jewish first sentence—nobody nodded at me. You remember Philo?

 

Philo took first century—he was not a Christian—he was a Jew who married the Platonic philosophers, the Greek philosophers with Judaism and created this thing. He kind of acquiesced his Judaism and he break beliefs with the cool university professors of the day. Okay?

 

Doceticism did the same thing, only these were Christians, and they took the same kind of Greek philosophy and the dualistic view of the world, and they said, well, we’ll build that into our Christianity, and we’ll say, we believe that Christ came. We just would never say He came in the sarche, in the flesh. That’s the word, and that’s a word even—I mean, we talk about the flesh. That usually is a bad thing in the Bible, right?

 

But what we’re saying is that Jesus came in the flesh. He really was in the flesh. He was really in humanity, in a human container, physical body, and he was a human.

 

And they said, no, he couldn’t be. And the Gnostics took that as their belief.

 

But what I was trying to say with that, Philo and the Gnostics and Docetic Gnostics basically did the same thing, and that was they were so impressed with the intellectual elites of the day that they tried to adapt their spiritual theology to the intellectual elites of the day.

 

And I guess I just bring that up as a pastor saying, why are we impressed with the world and their theories and their ideas, which, by the way, always go out of vogue. Have you noticed that?

 

Nobody’s really talking about Platonic philosophy as a way to live in 21st century America. As a matter of fact, the things that we do to adapt our theology to the erudite, you know, intellectuals of the day, I don’t… you know, we talk about creation evolution, for instance. I say to myself, what version of evolution do you want me to buy? Right?

 

And you’re going to say, well, I want you to buy today’s version. And I’m going to say, well, I’m going to set my watch. How long am I supposed to have that version? Because I know that’s going to change in 10 years. Right?

 

We went from uniformitarianism, and I’m supposed to now read Genesis in light of a uniformitarianistic evolutionary theory, and then all of a sudden that’s out the window, and we see radiation waves in the universe and Hubble and all that. He names up, Redshift, and we say, wow, well, now we believe in a Big Bang.

 

So now I’m supposed to adapt my theology and my Genesis reading to the Big Bang theory now. And I’m thinking, what’s next? It’s constantly shifting.

 

And I think to myself, let’s not be, you know, modern docetics, or let’s not, from a Jewish perspective, become Philo, trying to make sure that we are acceptable in an intellectual arena.

 

I don’t care what they say about my belief in God creating things out of nothing. And I really don’t care what they think of my view of Christ. I don’t care because the intellectual elites of any society continue to move and change in their beliefs and ideas and what they say and claim is truth today won’t be what’s taught in the university a hundred years from now I guarantee it.

 

And yet theologians are supposed to stand on the unchanging word of God, and I’m saying why don’t we just do that and stop being so bashful and keep adapting our theology to the to the trend the intellectual trends of the day—that’s my view.

 

That wasn’t a hearty applause, but I appreciate that. And we’ll take heat for that, or I will, and have.

 

And I just think, you know, we’re better off sticking with something that the intellectual thing seems to keep crisscrossing.

 

I think about, you know, the uniformitarianistic views of geology, for instance, for so long. When I was at the University of Arizona and we talked about these things and they were beginning to shift their views now to some kind of catastrophe, not only for the Big Bang Theory, which was well in swing when I was in college, but then it became, you know, something about the extinction of the dinosaurs and there must have been some nuclear winter-caused, you know, cataclysmic event that took place and it was probably a meteor and so really it killed off everything on the planet and buried biological matter quickly and created natural fossil fuels and things like that.

 

And I don’t know, it was a big time when everything was killed and everything was covered. And I said, like a flood. And yeah, not that.

 

And I’m thinking to myself, you know, all these theories keep changing based on the data that we learn. It’s amazing. And they’re changing all the time. All the time.

 

I was just reading about, not kidney stones, what’s the other stones you get? Gallbladder. You know, we just recently discovered that your gallbladder, this is new medical news, creates insulin, right? Which we never, they didn’t know that until, I mean, the last five years.

 

We’re learning, in the past, it was like, all I’m saying is everything changes except God’s Word. And I’m saying we ought to just stick with that.

 

“The flower fades,” right? The grass goes, you know, Isaiah 40. But the word of the Lord, it stands, it endures forever.

 

There’s my little sidebar soapbox.

 

1 John 4. Let’s just read this one just before we wrap up and say goodbye to the pot-smoking Gnostics. You’ve heard me say that too many times, I know.

 

Here’s another statement in 1 John. He wrote this letter. Obviously, it echoes what we started the night with, but 1 John 4, and I labeled it 1st and 2nd century because by the end of the 1st century, it was there. These were there. Clearly, John was responding to it.

 

I don’t think Gnosticism, by the way, as I’ve often said, was fully orbed by the first century, but the seeds of it were there, and Doceticism in some form was there.

 

1 John 4:1: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they’re from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.”

 

Verse 2: “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God,”

 

“And every spirit that does not confess Jesus in that way, that he’s coming, is not from God. This is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you’ve heard was coming and now is already in the world.”

 

All right.

 

Well, I said we talk about heretics and heroes. Let’s talk about this guy, Ignatius. Because Ignatius looked at doceticism in the end of the first and second century and said, that’s bad, and we need to fix that. And so he was a stalwart for biblical Christology, and Ignatius fought it.

 

By the way, Ignatius, you former Catholics, and Ignatius of—no, this is, there’s lots of Ignatiuses, Ignatiai, throughout church history. This is the Ignatius, Ignatius of Antioch, if you want to, you know, where they were first called Christians in Antioch, not the Antioch in Asia Minor, the Antioch in Syria, the Antioch there where they were called Christians. That’s where he was pastoring, Ignatius of Antioch.

 

By the way, we have several surviving letters. We have seven surviving letters from Ignatius. He, by the way, was the disciple of Polycarp. Did you guys go to the adult Bible class? You guys know more about this than I do. You go to the adult Bible class, do they talk about Polycarp? Polycarp and Ignatius, and Polycarp was the disciple of who? Sunday school grads. You’re the real Sunday—John.

 

So, he’s a couple steps removed from John.

 

And Ignatius wrote to the Romans. He wrote to the Philippians. He wrote to the Philadelphians. There’s another biblical city that we know about, not in America, of course. What’s the other one? Smyrna, Ephesus, and a few others. But anyway, his letters are full of interesting things.

 

But one of the things he was constantly fighting against was the docetic view that Jesus was not really God. Now, there was no, you know, Polaroids back then, but here’s one of the pictures of his face.

 

But here is the kind of thing that he wrote. See if you don’t get what he’s fighting against here. He writes stuff like this, speaking of Christ:

 

“Jesus Christ, who was really born, who both ate and drank, who really was persecuted under Pontius Pilate, who really was crucified and died,” right? “Jesus Christ, our God.”

 

Full humanity, full deity. Do you see that? That’s the kind of thing Ignatius was fighting with the docetic view that he, docetic, right? doken appeared. He just appeared to be a man. No, no, no. He was really born and he really ate and really drank and really was persecuted and really was crucified and he really died.

 

There’s a lot of “really” there and implied.

 

By the way, Ignatius, we should—was we one that you guys covered in your class? Because I’m always busy during that Sunday school hour. Did you guys talk about Ignatius? Did you talk about how he died? Pete was teaching this, right? Or was it Jeff? Pete?

 

Did they say that he died in the Colosseum eaten by lions? There’s like five accounts of his martyrdom. And he even kind of felt that it was coming. He would talk about it before it happened.

 

But, you know, it is interesting. Most people believe that he died, one account, in the Colosseum eaten by lions. Trajan was the emperor at the time.

 

Here’s another popular, famous picture of him, icon in the Greek church. But, you know, he’s got lions eating him. I don’t know if that’s the picture I want to be remembered by.

 

Of course, martyrdom was raised up as a great and noble thing to do for Christ.

 

So he’s a hero, because when he saw someone saying Jesus wasn’t really human, he just looked to be human, but it wasn’t really, Ignatius was going to fight hard against it, and because he was such an outspoken Christian, of course, the government wasn’t big on that, and Trajan decided to make sport of him and kill him.

 

All right, so we got doceticism corrected by Ignatius.

 

Okay, in the second century we had a group that was a Jewish group, the Ebionites. Ebionism. Ebionism literally means, uh, “the poor ones” in Hebrew, and they saw that as a sign of their piety. They were poor and even that statement from God, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

 

So the Ebionites pictured their piety. At least they—nothing more than a Jewish sect.

 

And you can imagine if you’re a Jewish sect, what are you going to say? God would never become a man, right? So he’s not fully God.

 

Docetics said he is God, he’s not really man, and the Ebionites said, okay, we believe in this Jesus guy, and we believe he was the Messiah, much like modern Jews, they might say if the guy came and they believed he was the Messiah, but we can’t conceive that God would become man.

 

They affirm that Jesus was the natural son of Joseph and Mary, which bothers me as I read that, because I think, how, right? Like I said, you know, the whole account in Matthew is that Joseph is, you know, tweaked that she’s having sex with someone else and is going to divorce her, but he loves her, so he’s going to do it quietly.

 

And now the Ebionites said, well, no, it really was their kid. And I’m thinking, how does that even mesh with the gospel account? Which, by the way, the gospel that they liked was the gospel of Matthew because it was the Jewish gospel. So I don’t understand how the Ebionites can come away with even that statement. He was really born of Joseph and Mary.

 

They taught that he became whatever they believed to be the Son of God, the special one from God, the Messiah, the anointed one, at his baptism because there was that scene where this dove comes down, remember that? And “This is my Son whom I’m pleased, hear him.” That they said, well, that’s when he became the Son of God.

 

Now, He’s not God, fully God. He’s a man and He’s the Messiah, but He’s not fully divine.

 

They like to put it this way. Jesus was joined with the eternal Christ at His baptism. See, He wasn’t the Christ. He got this Christ element at His baptism.

 

By the way, and I know this sounds dusty and old, there’s a resurgence of the Ebionites today. They’re called the Neo-Ebionites.

 

And it is kind of one of the—remember I, was it Sunday where I was talking about Messianic congregations? Kind of stepped on some toes because it’s really cool and keen and everything, but I said we don’t need them, and I referenced that book, you know, How Jewish is Christianity, and I said I take Varner’s view, which is we don’t need Messianic congregations, not the way they practice all that stuff.

 

Well, out of some Messianic congregations, and what do they call it, the Assembly of Yahweh, I think they called themselves, grew a resurgence of what they call now—they call themselves the Neo-Ebionites. And they believe, being very Jewish, that God didn’t become a man. He’s not fully God. We believe He’s the Messiah, but He’s not fully divine.

 

What’s another name? Oh, the sacred name movement, they call it. That’s another name by which it’s come.

 

But Messianic congregations out of that grew a new resurgence of Ebionism.

 

Well, who fixed that for us? Didn’t fix it because it’s alive again. I guess we need a new Irenaeus to go out and bat back the doctrines of demons here.

 

But Irenaeus was from Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey. He was the Bishop of Lyons. Lyons was in Gaul, modern-day France, right?

 

This is an interesting thing. His books, you know, the thing that he was known for was Against Heresies, right? That was his bestseller, right? That was what he’s known for. I mean, and if you go to the old, you know, patristic fathers, you’ll see Against Heresies by Irenaeus.

 

And though that’s what he’s known for, and you think, well, like he’s the heretic hunter, you know, they like to call people that, like a bad heretic hunter.

 

You know what he was known as? The great peacekeeper.

 

Do you see how the early church recognized we can never have peace unless we agree on doctrine? And when you see heresy, we better correct it.

 

And he was out there on the front lines fighting heresy when it came to Christology in particular and other things, but the thing was he was known as the great peacekeeper of the early church. That was one of his nicknames.

 

He hated the Gnostics, of course, Mr. Peacekeeper, and the Ebionites he wrote against.

 

Here’s a picture, not a Polaroid, of one of the icons of Irenaeus.

 

Here’s one of his quotes, for instance. I love the way it’s put here: “Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was”—here’s a word he coined—“enfleshed,” we call it the incarnation, right? “Enfleshed for our salvation, our Lord and God, Savior and King.”

 

That’s a quote from some of his teachings.

 

I love this line, and I didn’t put this on the screen, but he said, “If we were to preach to the apostles, thinking back a generation, the inventions of these heretics, the modern heretics he was fighting, they would at once stop their ears up and flee and run as far off as possible, not enduring even to listen to these blasphemous addresses.”

 

Peacekeeper said, we can’t have that.

 

Because if the apostles could hear what they’re saying about Christ, they would run away screaming.

 

Irenaeus, good man.

 

And you know what? Now that I’m thinking about that, Irenaeus was the disciple of Polycarp, and Polycarp was the disciple of John. I misspoke before. They both start with I, Ignatius and Irenaeus. Sorry.

 

Let’s keep going.

 

This one’s big. Arianism. Oh, I know that one. Heil Hitler, white supremacists, right? No, that’s different.

 

Arius was a pastor in Egypt, Alexandria, Egypt, in the fourth century. Arianism spelled with a Y, not an I. You know that one, right? That’s different. The Arian race, the Indo-European. That’s not this, obviously.

 

Arius was responding to the modalists, which we haven’t really talked much about, Sabellians, and he began to stress the uniqueness of the three persons of the Godhead.

 

Now, this is probably the most famous of all, Arius and the Arianism, because it sparked a gigantic, at the right time, a gigantic response to this heresy. And there’s so much we could say about it, we don’t have time, but here’s a great picture.

 

This is a picture, by the way, of Nicholas of Myra. Remember, I’ve preached about Nicholas. I spent a whole sermon on that once. Nicholas is the figure we get Santa Claus from. Remember, Nicholas, he became the pastor there in his town, and he was helping people out with monetary things, and he was rich, inherited wealth as a young kid. His parents had died.

 

This is him slapping Arius. I love it. Because of his heresy.

 

So there’s Santa Claus. I was talking about a lump of coal.

 

And I said slap, but it looks like his fist’s closed there. So he’s punching Arius in the face. I love it. Another peacemaker there.

 

Well, what was it all about? Here’s a word, and I should have brought this up maybe earlier, but this is the issue when I talk about, is the Son really God? is the word for substance or essence, okay?

 

And homo, right, we know that word, is the same.

 

And the teaching to this point, at least within the church, with Irenaeus and Ignatius and everyone else who was biblical, was that he was homoousius, and there was no dash between it, but I separate it for you. Homoousius, and that means that the Son’s divinity was the same essence as the Father’s.

 

Arius started to teach homoiusius, that he wasn’t the same, but he was homo, he was similar. He was a kind of God, but he wasn’t God like that God, the God, the God, the Father God.

 

So Arius then was fudging on the divinity of Christ, and he would say he’s God and he’s divine, but he’s not God like the Father’s God. He’s of a similar substance of the Father, not the same.

 

The way out heretics believed in what was called heteroousius. Hetero, different, a different substance.

 

Homoousius, the same substance, same essence, but homoiusius, that was Arius’s tagline.

 

And that’s why there’s all kinds of jokes about all this fighting went on over a single iota, right, because it was an i between homoousius and homoiusius that created such a—created Santa Claus to smack a guy in the face over a single iota.

 

I had to share that picture though. That’s a good one. You’ll want that, won’t you, around Christmas? That’d be a great Christmas card cover: Naughty or nice, right?

 

All right.

 

Well, why is this one so famous? So famous because a guy in 313, or actually 312, becomes a Christian. And he happens to be in a position of great power. And his name was Constantine, the emperor, fighting at the Milvian Bridge. You know the story. You Sunday school grads certainly know the story.

 

And he calls out to the God of the Christians, and he wants to win the battle, and kind of has this foxhole conversion. And God, you know, in His providence or whatever, I don’t know if you’re responding specifically to the prayer or not, but he wins the battle and he commits his life to Christ, which has been greatly questioned.

 

But, you know, as I’ve taught before about Constantine, I’m convinced he, you know, for all the Dan Brown reasons why they don’t think he is a real Christian, there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary.

 

But he is going to call a council at Nicaea, the Council of Nicaea.

 

And again, just the background on this. He’s got a newfound faith. He legalizes Christianity in 313 with the Edict of Milan. He’s now putting Christian signs and, you know, the Chi-Rho on the coins. I mean, he makes Sunday a national holiday. So every Sunday they get up. I mean, this guy is doing all kinds of things now. And you know how new Christians are, right? Here he is. He’s on fire.

 

And now he’s looking out there while all the Christians in the empire, as he legalizes Christianity, they’re all fighting. What are they fighting about? Homoousius or homoiusius. Which is it?

 

See, Arius, very popular pastor, a lot of influence.

 

Well, he’s got a—I mean, I want peace in the kingdom, man. So he calls a council, the Council of Nicaea, probably the most famous council of all.

 

If you go to seminary, and if you didn’t go to seminary, no one ever really heard of it until Dan Brown writes The Da Vinci Code.

 

And then The Da Vinci Code—do you remember what The Da Vinci Code, remember what Dan Brown said was his, what do you call it, historical fiction, in that here he was trying to tell the truth about what really happened?

 

He said that Constantine, wanting to subjugate women, wanting to create Jesus, who was just a human rabbi, and the Gnostics knew all about how just he was a human rabbi, he wanted to make him divine.

 

Well, Nicaea did talk about the dominion of Christ, and he wanted to create a Bible that would make him sound divine, so he created a Bible at the Council of Nicaea.

 

This was all Constantine’s dirty little trick and his power play.

 

That’s not it at all.

 

This is a young Christian, you know, who’s—I guess he’s been a Christian for a while now, for 10 years or so.

 

He calls a council to have the people figure out, well, what is it going to be? Let’s get all the pastors together and have a council of all the pastors to tell us what is it. Let’s get all the seminary profs together and figure this out.

 

Is he of the same substance of the Father, right? Or is he of a similar substance of the Father?

 

What is the deal with Christ?

 

By the way, they didn’t create any canon. They didn’t talk about any Bible books. They didn’t write any new scriptures. They didn’t, you know, tweak the real story of the Gnostics. They went there to figure out homoousius or homoiusius. We’ve got to figure this out.

 

And he stands back after underwriting it all and tries to deal with what was called the Arian controversy, 325, which, by the way, they did have a camera present there, I guess.

 

Here’s a picture, a lot of cool hats with all the pastors, no ball caps. But there’s a famous drawing of the Council of Nicaea.

 

But here’s what they came up with, okay? Here was the statement:

 

“And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only begotten, that is, of the essence of the Father, homoousia, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.”

 

So what was it? Santa Claus is going to smack Arius in the face because he was wrong, right?

 

Because they were going to say, no, no, no, all we know about what the Bible says is he was fully God and fully man. If he’s fully God, he’s the same substance or essence of divinity as the Father is.

 

And that was the big work of the Council of Nicaea.

 

Apollinarianism. Apollinarianism has nothing to do with NASA or space.

 

Apollinarius was another pastor that preached that the logos, right, what was the uncreated person of the second person of the Trinity, came to the person of Jesus and zapped out his humanity and replaced his humanity with a logos.

 

So the human Jesus ceased to be, and the logos came upon him, and now he was divinity residing in a human body. He no longer had a human spirit as we know it. See, that was Apollinarianism, which said he is fully God, just in a container of humanity, and whatever humanity that Jesus had is gone when the logos came into him.

 

Now, to be fair to Apollinarius, he was a trichotomist. So, he believed in body, soul, and spirit. So, I know I feel like we’re cutting hairs here, but splitting hairs.

 

He believed that his spirit got zapped out, and that was replaced with divinity. So, really, he was two-thirds human, but not fully human. So, that was close, but not what we had been hammering out.

 

Now, the Council of Nicaea, just for the sake of time, was dealing with the Arian controversy and trying to figure out is he the similar substance or the same substance.

 

Apollinarius came on and said, well, it’s much like, and this is true, daimonizomai. Have I talked about, daimonizomai is the word in the Bible for demon possession, which is a bad translation.

 

Daimonizomai, which is the word demon-caused passivity. That when someone becomes passive and the demon becomes active, speaks through them. You’ve seen the movies.

 

And that picture was what describes daimonizomai is the passive stem there. And it was the concept of the person becomes passive and the demon becomes active.

 

That’s the picture that Apollinarius basically sketched of Christ. And that is that God came in him and took over a human being, zapped out the human personality of Jesus, and became kind of the directing force within this human container that was passive.

 

Well, they called a council, the Council of Constantinople. And the Council of Constantinople responded to Apollinarianism and said, no, that’s not it. And that’s all I can really say for the sake of time.

 

Jesus was fully human. He wasn’t a divinely possessed human being.

 

Nestorianism. Nestorianism.

 

Nestorius was a leader of the church in Constantinople, which is modern-day Istanbul. He divided Christ into two persons.

 

There are two persons there. Remember we said the hypostatic union is two natures, complex, you know, of attributes into one person.

 

He said, no, there’s two natures and two persons. Humanity had the form of the Godhead bestowed upon it, and the end result was that he compromised the divinity of Christ because the divine nature came upon human nature and existed next to human nature, but there was two persons there, not one person.

 

So because of that, we had a diluted divinity. I wish I had more time for that.

 

They called a council. Now we were done with individuals writing against heresies. The Council of Ephesus was called in 431 to condemn the two-person doctrine and affirm the full deity of Christ, that the divinity of Christ was complete, the humanity of Christ was complete, and it was all expressed in one person.

 

They get harder to say here.

 

Remember Eutychus in the Bible? And this is not the same guy, obviously. This guy was born in 378. Eutychism.

 

Eutychism—this is not Eutychist, but Eutychism was his name, and he lived here in the 5th century.

 

Not only did he teach that there was one person, because the pendulum kind of swung in this case too, but he doesn’t now say that he’s not fully man, but he says there’s only one nature.

 

And now what’s happening is we don’t believe in two natures, two persons, but what he said is there’s no longer two natures. There’s one person and there’s one nature, and the human nature and the divine nature have come together to make a new third nature, and that new third nature is the God-human nature, and it’s a new thing.

 

We could talk more about that because several important words came out of that, but maybe they’ll show up as we continue our series.

 

But anyway, two persons were responded to with, no, there’s one new nature.

 

But if there’s one new nature, then what we’ve mixed with humanity now is less than divinity, because it’s human slash divine.

 

And this was now really the end-all council for describing the deity of Christ, which is saying nothing less than what was said at Ephesus or Constantinople or Irenaeus or Ignatius. This was the biblical teaching.

 

The Council of Chalcedon, which is really, as I said, the end-all statement because it keeps trying to deal with all of the errors for the first few centuries of the church.

 

It stated it this way, and here’s an icon of the Council of Chalcedon. Two slides here.

 

“Our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul,” human soul, “and body,” human body, “of one substance with the Father,” just to get back to Arian for a minute, right? “As regards his Godhead.”

 

“And one in the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, recognized in two natures.”

 

What about those two natures now? Because we’ve had to deal with two different guys that are talking about the natures, two natures, one nature, combined nature, mixed nature.

 

“Two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”

 

The distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union.

 

Full humanity, full divinity, full complexity of that nature, full complexity of that nature in one person. The hypostatic union, stated at Chalcedon, and since then, basically, there hasn’t been much of a need to update the statement, because it’s dealt with most of the heresies, and they’ve only been recycled since the 5th century.

 

So, wow, I didn’t get any of that, Mike. Well, then I have a book for you.

 

And I tell you, this is great, and I just learned about this. I think it’s a brand new book, actually. I didn’t check the date. But someone gave me this recently, and I enjoyed it. And it’s easy to read, and it’s short.

 

And you know, some books take so long to ramp up into this. Right out of the gate, you’re dealing with the issues of doceticism. And it’s done in a way that is understandable and helpful.

 

But it’s called For Us and Our Salvation: The Doctrine of Christ in the Early Church. And we probably won’t have this in the bookstore because it’s a brand new book, but we’ll get it. Debbie will get it for us by Stephen Nichols. And you’ll like that book.

 

If any of this was of interest to you, what Stephen Nichols does in this book, which is helpful, is he goes back and forth chapter to chapter from describing the issues and then taking source material, having it translated in a way that’s easy to read, and he just basically gives you these guys in their own words. And so it’s helpful. That’s a good book for you.

 

All right?

 

Let’s pray and I’ll let you go. Sorry we went a little long.

 

What time are we supposed to be done? Is it 8:15? I’m one minute early then. But I’m going to pray for two minutes, so let’s pray.

 

God, thanks for tonight. I do thank you so much for all that you give us. And I know this is a lot of information in one hour, but we just pray that you would help us to sort some of it out, at least to recognize, like that bridge-building architect illustration, that people have tried to slide to one direction or the other, and at some point the doctrine crumbles under being analyzed biblically.

 

So we want to get back to the basic understanding of full-orbed God and full-orbed man in one person, the hypostatic union, or to put it briefly in one simple phrase, Jesus is the God-man. It would be a good way to sum it up.

 

So God, help us to think that way and to be able to maybe even go back over this, or maybe Nichols’ book will be helpful for some here just to kind of marinate these early controversies that have helped us to articulate the full divinity and full humanity of Christ.

 

In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.