{"id":8596,"date":"2023-01-10T06:12:06","date_gmt":"2023-01-10T13:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/?p=8596"},"modified":"2023-01-10T06:12:06","modified_gmt":"2023-01-10T13:12:06","slug":"the-lordship-of-christ-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/?p=8596","title":{"rendered":"
The Lordship of Christ<\/div>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Click here for a pdf version.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Sermon on the Lordship of Christ for the Season of Epiphany<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What should you do when the Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses come to your door? (They believe Jesus is less than God.) Engage in a debate with them? No, thank them and send them on their way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s tempting to say to yourself: \u201cI know a Bible verse that will settle it for them.\u201d One such verse is 1 Cor 8:6, which is a kind of creed: \u201cFor us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things are and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this verse God the Father and God the Son are spoken of in perfect parallelism. But, of course, Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses will then say that in the same book, in 1 Cor 15:28, it reads: \u201cWhen all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him, that God may be everything to everyone.\u201d Therefore the Son is subordinate to the Father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we go over to John 14:9, it states that Jesus said to Phillip, \u201cHe who has seen me has seen the Father.\u201d But then in the same chapter, John 14:28, it says: \u201cThe Father is greater than I.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You are probably familiar with John 10:30: \u201cThe Father and I are one.\u201d But four verses later it states, quoting Psalm 82:6: \u201cYou are gods, all of you.\u201d And then John 1:1: \u201cIn the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.\u201d But John 1:18, when it speaks again of \u201cno one seeing the Father,\u201d it is the Son who makes him known. The Son is made a revealer and not made equal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same is true in the account in Mark 1:9-11 of the baptism of Jesus. At Jesus\u2019 baptism a voice from heaven spoke and said: \u201cThis is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.\u201d Everyone standing around would know that this is a citation from Psalm 2:7, and it goes on to say in that Psalm: \u201cToday have I begotten you.\u201d In the Gospel of Mark there is no birth narrative, and therefore it could be argued, as it was by some in the early church, that it was at this point in his baptism that Jesus was adopted and became equal with God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Typically when we read the New Testament we misunderstand the phrase, \u201cSon of God.\u201d We think it is an assertion about Jesus\u2019 divinity. But, as you see from Psalm 82:6 (\u201cYou are gods, all of you.\u201d), it can mean something like \u201csir.\u201d It doesn\u2019t mean something divine at all. And when the New Testament uses the phrase, \u201cSon of man,\u201d a third of the time it is referring to Daniel 7:13, where it says a heavenly divine figure will come from heaven. In the remaining places in the New Testament, \u201cSon of man\u201d is simply an honorific, a polite way of saying \u201cman.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does one learn out of all this? One learns that it is a very serious business to use Scripture, and because the Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses know these places and most of us don\u2019t know enough about Scripture to deal with this, the sensible thing to do is send them on their way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it does raise for us the problem of how to use the Bible. There are several temptations of the Evil One. The first temptation is to say that the Bible is clear and plain and simple to me, and it ought to be to you. We are really facing an argument in philosophy from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. Locke argued there is something that is self-evidently clear. People get caught in that trap and think that they can settle arguments by saying the Bible is plain, simple, and clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On top of that, the Evil One comes with a second argument: \u201cI\u2019ve got more passages than you do. I have 20 passages and you only have 17.\u201d Or someone might say: \u201cWe have to weigh passages.\u201d But then who\u2019s going to do the weighing, and how\u2019s that going to happen? The important thing is to remember that everyone uses the Bible, no matter who calls himself Christian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shakespeare famously wrote in The Merchant of Venice<\/em>, Act 1: \u201cEven the Devil quotes Scripture.\u201d He\u2019s referring to the temptation stories that you find in Matthew 4 and Luke 4, where there is a debate, and the Evil One quotes Scripture and then Jesus quotes Scripture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do we sort it out? What do we mean when we say: \u201cWe use the Bible\u201d?  In the Protestant tradition we don\u2019t say \u201cthe Church\u201d tells us what the Bible means. That\u2019s one way to go. When we do that, we are following Roman Catholic and Orthodox ways of thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We need to remember how this Bible developed. There was no final list of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament until 367 A.D (Athanasius, Fourth Easter Letter). People became Christian and people lived in the church for about 300 years with variations in the list of what later became the New Testament. It isn\u2019t as if there was only one way that people learned about Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can also refer to our Book of Concord<\/em>, which is our base for how we sort things out. In 1537 Luther wrote the Smalcald Articles. He had been asked to write what Lutherans hold because the Pope was going to call another council at Mantua. In Smalcald Article 3:4 he writes that the Gospel has five means of grace: 1) the spoken Word and that is a peculiar function of the gospel, then 2) Baptism, 3) the Lord\u2019s Supper, 4) confession and absolution, and 5) the mutual conversation and consolation of the faithful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s significant for us at the moment is that we notice that the Bible itself is not mentioned because it is the Gospel, the proclaimed Word, that is decisive and is ruling what we do. Luther famously used a metaphor to describe this: The Bible is the manger in which the Christ child lies. In other words, we don\u2019t want to confuse the manger with the Christ child. He also used a famous phrase in German that doesn\u2019t translate well: Was Christum treibet<\/em>, which means: What drives Christ. Where you find Christ, you find the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other thing he said is that we find Christ throughout Scripture, and whatever is not about Christ, we simply set aside. It\u2019s irrelevant. Christ is the key to Scripture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can illustrate this by something that happened in the Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue in 1965. When the dialogue began, the Catholics said to the Lutherans: What we\u2019d like to talk with you about is the Nicene Creed because we\u2019re not sure that you Lutherans hold the Nicene Creed. The Lutherans were in a state of shock and said: \u201cBut of course we do.\u201d And so they discussed it together. In the end they together produced a one-page statement which said: \u201cWe both affirm the Nicene Creed but for different reasons.\u201d The Roman Catholics affirm the Nicene Creed because it is binding tradition produced by an ecumenical council. And the Lutherans said: We hold to the Nicene Creed because it expresses the Gospel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a world of difference between these two ways of working. Lutherans and Protestants in general ask: What is the Gospel?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We sort that out as we look at how the New Testament sorts itself out. There are specific ways that the Apostle Paul writes about this. In 1 Cor 2:2: \u201cI decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.\u201d 1 Cor 1:22-24: \u201cFor Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It comes out in a very explicit way in Galatians 1 and 2, where Paul was writing to the Galatians about the Gospel. What had happened to them? They had fallen away from \u201cthe Gospel\u201d and fallen for a different gospel. He goes so far as to say in Gal 2:5 and 14, that there is \u201cthe Truth of the Gospel.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Gal 1:6-9 he writes: \u201cBut even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him damned.\u201d The word there in Greek is \u201canathema<\/em>,\u201d but the Hebrew word behind \u201canathema\u201d <\/em>is even stronger. It means \u201ccut off from God forever.\u201d This is very serious business. What we ask ourselves is: What is \u201cthe Gospel\u201d?, because it has to do with salvation and life forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Already in the first generation of Christians, in Paul himself, they used this creed: \u201cJesus is Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n