| Introduction Every year we are inundated with a barrage of commercials and ads telling us the things we must have in order to have a happy Christmas. There are lists of Christmas essentials everywhere! According to the website brainz.org, the most essential Christmas gift of the season is the Kindle Fire. That's the one essential thing you have to have in order to have a good Christmas. The truth is that there are very few truly essential things that we must have in order to have a happy Christmas. Perhaps the most essential thing of all is a right understanding of the necessity of having a Savior who is both God and man. One of the most important books, and likely least read books, in Christianity is a book by the title Cur Deus Homo? (Why God Man?) by Anselm of Canterbury, written around 1094, in which he attempts to explain why our Savior must be both fully God and fully man. So this will be first of three Christmas essentials we will be consider in the month of December: a Savior is only a Savior if he is both God and man in one person. This teaching is a hard one for us to wrap our minds around, but it is worth spending our time to understand. I. Jesus Christ as fully human. A. The earliest heresies concerning Christ involved a denial of the humanity of Christ. B. Jesus Christ existed before the incarnation and he became fully human at the incarnation. C. The Bible teaches that Jesus Christ was a man. 1. He is called a man. 2. Jesus possesses elements essential to humanity: a human body and a human soul 3. Jesus experienced normal human needs and emotions – hunger, thirst, weariness, compassion, love, grief, anger, etc. 4. Jesus suffered and died. D. In more recent centuries, there hasn't been as much trouble in understanding that Jesus was fully human. E. There have been, however, lots of struggles in acknowledging that he is fully divine. II. Jesus Christ as fully God A. It is the teaching of both Old and New Testaments that Christ the Son of God is indeed God the Son, Jn. 1:1-3. B. Besides John 1, there are plenty of passages that speak of Jesus as God. C. The Bible commands us to worship Jesus. D. These two truths about Jesus Christ – he is fully human and he is fully divine – make him the perfect Savior. III. Jesus Christ as the perfect Savior as God and man. A. The reason Jesus must be both God and man in one person is that he represents both God and man in the Covenant of Grace. B. Why does Jesus need to be fully man? So that he can represent us in life and in death. C. Why does Jesus need to be fully God? 1. That God may receive all the glory for our salvation. 2. That God may reserve the supreme sacrifice to himself 3. That God's justice would be satisfied Conclusion We come full circle back to Anselm's Cur Deus Homo? Why did we spend a perfectly good 40 minutes on this topic? Because without a right understanding of whom Christ is, what he did for us becomes utterly insignificant. R.C. Sproul says: At the heart of Anselm's answer to that question was his understanding of the character of God. Anselm saw that the chief reason a God-man was necessary was the justice of God. That may seem to be a strange answer. Thinking of the cross and of Christ's atonement, we assume that the thing that most strenuously motivated God to send Christ into the world was His love or His mercy. As a result, we tend to overlook the characteristic of God's nature that makes the atonement absolutely necessary—His justice. God is loving, but a major part of what He loves is His own perfect character, with a major aspect being the importance of maintaining justice and righteousness. Though God pardons sinners and makes great provision for expressing His mercy, He will never negotiate His justice. If we fail to understand that, the cross of Christ will be utterly meaningless to us. So this is a Christmas essential Jesus Christ, the God-man who came to save his people.  | |||
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Thursday, December 13, 2012
A Christmas Essential: Why the God-Man? - Jn. 1:1-5
