Jesus: God's Full and Final Word to Humanity

12/06/09
Jesus: God’s Full and Final Word to Humanity
Hudson UMC

Today’s sermon is in many ways a continuation from the one last week. As the sermon title says, Jesus is God’s full and final word to humanity. I think that talking about God’s final word can make us uncomfortable, so I want to clarify that word a bit. When I say that Jesus is God’s final word to humanity, I do not mean it in a limiting sense, that God spoke once and now it is over. I mean final in the sense of “completion.” Also, this final word is not a one-time event that is over, but an event that continues on to this day.

The opening verses of the book of Hebrews are helpful here. “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much better than the angels, as He has inherited a more excellent name than they.”

So, when I say that Jesus is God’s full and final word to humanity, I’m not talking about the sayings of Jesus, I don’t mean the stories about Jesus, I don’t even mean the entire Bible. After all, even all the words in the world would not be able to capture the reality that I am talking about. I mean that the man Jesus, the second Person of the Holy Trinity who lived among us, as a person, the living Son of God, is this full and final word of God.

This sermon is a kind of completion of the sermon from last week, where we talked about God painstakingly reshaping the Israelite culture so it could progressively understand more of what God was saying to them. Again, revelation is not just an unveiling of God, but also a preparing of human beings to receive what God has unveiled. Throughout Israel’s long history, God was accommodating His self-revelation to humanity and accommodating humanity to receive His self-revelation. Over the centuries, these two things got closer and closer until, in Jesus, they coincided in a single person. In Jesus, God has totally unveiled Himself to humanity and, also in Jesus, humanity has finally been able to totally receive God.

The big point of today’s sermon, which everything else I have to say will just be unpacking, is that Jesus is the self-revelation of God to us. If you remember nothing else this morning, remember that the man Jesus is nothing less that God revealing God’s self to us through God’s self. Now, there is a sense in which God revealed Himself to us through the Old Testament prophets. However, in Jesus, we have the completion of what God was doing through those prophets. Jesus was also a prophet, but it was not only His word that was the revelation from God, His very person, His very being, was the revelation. It is important to Christian faith, and especially for the Christian life, that we do not think that God’s revelation in Jesus is over here while God is over there. God’s revelation to us in Jesus is God.

In the man Jesus of Nazareth, what God does and who God is cannot ever be separated. We need to always remember that, when Jesus does something, it is God doing it. When Jesus says something, it is God saying it. Now, that has given some people a hard time, because sometimes Jesus says and does some things that we do not like. There are even some things that Jesus says that people throughout the modern period have found to be morally reprehensible. Because of things like this, some critics want to put Jesus the man over here and Christ, the real Son of God, over there. They want to be able to separate what the man who walked the earth said and did from what God has said and done in our midst. If we make some kind of divide in the person of Christ, where we say that this thing that Jesus has said or done is from Jesus the human being and this other thing that He has said or done is from God, we can deal with those things that might bother us.

But there is a problem with this and it is not only theological, but utterly practical; it concerns our very salvation. If God and Man in Jesus can be separated, and the scriptures don’t guide us in how to do that, how do we go about determining what God has done and what Jesus has done? We can’t, or, if we do, it is based only on our own human subjectivity, what we want to think about God and, since there is no objectivity, it has no real meaning. For example, how would we know for sure that the crucifixion was not only a human act? If there is no firm criterion by which to judge what is a divine action or a human action, how can we know that the cross was not anything other than a tragedy and an instance of human cruelty? If the cross was nothing more than a human action, what becomes of the Gospel and our salvation? It is not a coincidence that the thinkers who have taken offence at Jesus and started making this kind of distinction between His divine and human activities all too often ended up saying that Jesus was nothing more than a great human teacher.

If we believe that there is any validity in the Christian message, which we do, we must believe that Jesus is God, even when He does things that might bother us, or even offend us. Some of you may be worried that I am advocating a rigid biblical literalism that does not allow for any critical thinking. After all, it sounds a little like the position that says, “unless the Bible is inerrant in all matters, including modern understandings of science and history, we cannot trust it.” However, this is not what I am saying. I am not fighting to say that the Bible, simply as words on the page, is divine but that Jesus is divine. This is not placing the inerrancy on a text, or even a collection of texts, but on the Person of Jesus Christ, who transcends even that which is written about Him.

So, if Jesus really is God’s full and final word for us as human beings, what does that mean for us? It means, above all else, that God has not withheld Himself from us. God did not entrust our salvation to something that is less than God, but entered into our world to do it Himself. It is like as the old saying goes, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” God is not afraid of our broken condition, but is willing to actually recreate it, not by a wave of the hand, but by an active indwelling of our condition, making our brokenness God’s own and overcoming it from the inside.

Another thing that this means for us, which may be the most amazing of all, is that, through becoming a human being as Jesus and by pouring out the Holy Spirit upon the church at Pentecost, God has made Himself known to us through Himself. What is so incredible is that this means that there is nothing more that God can say about Himself because God has already revealed God’s own self to us in Jesus. While we always need the Spirit to guide us into new understandings and fresh insights into the mystery of God, there is not anything utterly new that we need God to say because God’s own Word has come among us in a real and personal way.

This is important for us to know because the last of the books of the New Testament was written by about 100 AD. It’s been a long time since God has definitively moved and given us a totally new word. In the meantime, time has marched on, cultures have developed and changed. Do we need a new word from God in addition to and other than the living Word that has become flesh among us? Other religious groups think so. For example, the Mormons believe that the Old and New Testaments are not sufficient to reveal what we need to know. For them, we need another set of texts that show us things about God that we did not see already in God’s previous self-revelation.

If we believe that God needs to tell us something utterly new about Himself that is not already contained within the personal self-revelation in Jesus Christ, that is, if Jesus is not God’s full and final word to us, we actually undermine the entire Gospel. The only reason we would say something like that is if we thought that Jesus was not really God in flesh. It would mean that there is something that is true about God that is not true about Jesus and something that is true about Jesus that is not true about God. In the end, Jesus would become nothing more than a human being. Maybe a wonderful human being, but simply a human nonetheless. It is not a coincidence that the Mormons consider Jesus to be a saint, rather than the fullness of the one God of Israel.

You might be thinking, “So what, pastor? How does this impact my life today? How can this help me live as a Christian from day to day?” It has a big part to play. This takes all the mythology and superstition out of the Gospel. If you want God to speak to you, or if you want to learn more about Him, you don’t need to look for some mysterious new revelation, a new sacred text that is divorced from the community that God has established or a new insight that is not tied to the revelation of God in Christ. There is no secret way to God, there is only the way that God has revealed to us. If we want to know God, we need only look to Jesus.

This is what Paul was getting at when he quoted Moses. “But the righteousness that comes from faith says, ‘Do not say in your heart, “Who will ascend into heaven?” (that is, to bring Christ down) “or ‘who will descend into the abyss?”’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? ‘The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart’…because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

God’s word is near to us. We do not have to go on a mystical journey or reach a certain level of spiritual maturity in order to have real access to God. We have the Bible, which tells us about the amazing thing that God has done by coming into our midst and revealing Himself in a way that we can understand. It is like Martin Luther said, God came among us as a baby because it is the only way we would not be terrified of Him. God has done so much to help us understand Him in a real way.

And yet, though God has taken so many steps to help us understand, we clearly do not know who God is simply by being human, there clearly must be something we need to do. Yes, there is. If we want to have real knowledge of God, we need to listen to the witnesses that God has prepared to point us to what God has done. These witnesses were the apostles and they wrote the New Testament. They were the people that Jesus gathered around Himself to spend three years traveling together, living together, and worshiping together. They came from the nation of Israel so they had been formed at an early age by the centuries of interaction that God had with their ancestors. By following Jesus as His disciples, they allowed Him to connect the dots in their hearts and minds.

So, if the person of Jesus is God’s full and final word to humanity, and we need to know Jesus, what should we do? We need to spend time reading the books of the Bible that bear witness to that Word. The simple fact of the matter is that we can never understand the ministry of Jesus, or grasp the word of God for our lives on a daily basis unless we become fully part of the community that Jesus brought together and the Spirit empowered. We do this by meditating on the scriptures, indwelling them so that they permeate our entire lives and even reshape the way we live and the way we think, just like God reshaped the people of Israel. However, reading the Bible is not enough. Remember, God’s revelation is not the text on the page but the person of Jesus. There is a big difference between knowing about God and truly knowing God in a deep and personal way.

To really know God, we cannot simply spend time in the scripture, though, if we neglect the scripture, we will never have any clarity when we think about God. To know God means that we take what God has done and allow it to penetrate our hearts, minds and lives. It is not until the Gospel transforms our lives that we really understand it. It is not until we are so impacted by the good news of Jesus Christ that every aspect of our lives is shaped by our encounter with God that we really can say that we know God.

What I am getting at is that the Christian life is something that must be embodied. Revelation is not complete until it is received. What does it look like when it is received? We read in the book of Acts, right after Peter preached the first Christian sermon, that three thousand people joined the newly born church. The very next thing we read is this: “They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” Look at how the Christian life is described. First, the teaching of the apostles, where they learned about Jesus and how Jesus shows us who God is. Next, fellowship. Christianity does not exist without Christian fellowship. John Wesley put it this way, “There is no religion but social religion, no holiness but social holiness.” Our faith simply cannot thrive, or even exist, without others walking the Christian life along with us. The third is the breaking of bread. They shared their entire lives with each other. Even meals were a time to gather together. The Christian life demands that we share even our food with one another. The last thing mentioned is prayer. If we do not pray, if we do not continually approach the throne of God, we will miss what God is saying to us. There is no Christian faith without active prayer.

Brothers and sisters, I encourage you, come to know our Lord Jesus Christ; as Paul said, be reconciled to God. There are some who, when I speak of this complete embodied faith, the only faith that the New Testament knows, you are nodding your heads, having experienced it and lived it for many years. Others might not yet understand what I am talking about. This year, for Advent, let this be a time when you not only celebrate that God has come into the world and revealed Himself in an unprecedented way to humanity, but a time that you have invited God to come into your heart and reveal Himself in an unprecedented way in your life. Do not rest with only an intellectual knowledge of the basic themes of Christian faith. Enter into them with your whole life every day, and God will move mightily. Let us pray.

AMEN