Jesus of Nazareth: God and Man

A couple of weeks ago, Carl was asked during his teaching on man and woman to define Gnosticism. Unfortunately Carl’s teaching on the doctrine of man and woman went longer than expected and with the baptism scheduled directly afterwards he did not have time to give a clear definition.  So for completeness I will state the definition here before I start since it fits rather well with today’s topic of Jesus being fully God and fully man.

Gnosticism was a second century heresy claiming that salvation could be gained through secret knowledge. Gnosticism is derived from the Greek word gnosis, meaning "to know." Gnostics also believed that the material world (matter) was evil and that only the spirit is good. They constructed an evil God and the Old Testament to explain the creation of the world (matter), and they considered Jesus Christ a wholly spiritual God.

Gnostics were divided on Jesus. One view held that Jesus only appeared to have human form but that He was actually spirit only. The other view contended that Jesus’ divine spirit came upon His human body at baptism and departed before the crucifixion. Christianity, on the other hand, holds that Jesus was fully man and fully God and that His human and divine natures were both present and necessary to provide a suitable sacrifice for humanity's sin.

Humanity: Male and Female

 

Welcome! Today we continue our series on Sound Doctrine, this time is the second of three messages on humanity. Last week, John talked about the nature of man, “Soul and Spirit, Flesh and Bone.” This week we venture into an area that is controversial in the sense that our society has changed dramatically in what it believes to be true and right – the area of humanity as male and female. Now, I am the pastor among the three of us that generally develops sermon series and assigns teaching assignments. Fred has pointed out that in the past that I tend to give him the most controversial or difficult assignments. Fred is, by and large, right about this, although I have some good excuses – Fred is the one among us with significant training and experience as a counselor, and a lot of these difficult topics fall along these lines. This week’s topic is one I would consider controversial, so I would like to ask Fred to come up here and finish today’s message. Just kidding! Fred, this is an early Christmas present to you – stay in your seat! 

Humanity: Soul and Spirit, Flesh and Bone

We enter a new chapter today on this series on doctrine.  We began the series talking about the Bible: how it is unique, and how it is the basis of our understanding about God and the things of God (and really everything).  Then, we spent a couple of weeks talking about God and what He is like.  Most recently, we have been talking about God’s creation including last week’s topic, the spiritual creatures God made: angels.  Both the audio and transcripts for those messages are posted on the church website.  Just go to clemsoncc.org and look for the “Message Archive” on the left side.  Click there, and you can find whichever message you are interested in.  If you have trouble, let us know, and we will help you get what you need.

This week, we are beginning a three-week chapter about another spiritual creature God made.  We are going to talk about us.  … Humanity … Humankind … Man.

I started thinking about humanity and whence man came.  As is usual, when I wax philosophical, my mind usually wanders not to deep and hidden things but rather to the simple, so I naturally ended up at the familiar nursery rhyme.

“What are little boys made of? Slugs [or snips] and snails and puppy-dog tails; that's what little boys are made of.  What are little girls made of?  Sugar and spice and everything nice; that's what little girls are made of.”

God's Creation: A Little Higher than Us

This summer, Stephen Hawking, the wheelchair-bound physicist, helped launch a major new effort to search for signs of intelligent alien life. “The new initiative is scheduled to operate for 10 years and will search for signs of non-naturally occurring communications in both radio frequencies and laser transmissions. The initiative will scan the 1 million stars closest to earth in the Milky Way, as well as the 100 closest galaxies.”  At a media event for this project, explaining why he thought it was important and why he was personally supporting it, Hawking said, “We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know.”

Well, we do know. We are not the only intelligent beings in Creation. Apart from God Himself, there are also angelic beings. And so today we are going to look at what Scripture tells us about these beings.  

There is a lot we don’t know about angels. We do know that they are spiritual beings, whose purposes include helping us:

Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation? – Heb. 1:14

God's Creation: God's Works

Praise the Lord. I will extol the Lord with all my heart in the council of the upright and in the assembly. Great are the works of the Lord; they are pondered by all who delight in them. Glorious and majestic are His deeds, and His righteousness endures forever. He has caused His wonders to be remembered; the Lord is gracious and compassionate. He provides food for those who fear Him; He remembers His covenant forever. – Psalm 111:1-5

He has shown His people the power of His works, giving them the lands of other nations. The works of His hands are faithful and just; all His precepts are trustworthy. They are established for ever and ever, enacted in faithfulness and uprightness. He provided redemption for His people; he ordained His covenant forever—holy and awesome is His name. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow His precepts have good understanding. To Him belongs eternal praise. – Psalm 111:6-10

Welcome! Today we continue our series called Sound Doctrine and look at God’s works. Obviously this is quite a huge topic. I think we can broadly classify God’s works into three categories: God’s works of creation, God’s work of upholding His creation, and God’s works in dealing with man and creation, most notably His work of redemption accomplished through Jesus’ death and resurrection. We could spend forever on these topics, and we will talk about redemption in detail later in this series. For this reason, I am going to primarily focus on the first of these topics, God’s works of creation.  I will also touch on the second topic, God’s work of upholding His creation, although we will really deal with it more next week when we talk about God’s sovereignty.

God's Nature: Threeness in Oneness

Aloneness.  I can’t imagine anyone who’s never dealt with aloneness.  It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, married or single, a teenager or elderly.  It’s one of the things we all have in common.

When I was a teenager I felt really alone.  I went to school, worked each week at an assisted living facility, ran a small lawn care business, worked around our family’s farm, spent time with my family, and went fishing, hunting, and camping, mostly by myself.  As I did all these things I had a nagging feeling, just wishing some guy from the church would just call me and spend some time with me.  

After a while, I did invite myself into a friendship with a couple guys in the church. We began to spend time with each other outside of the Thursday night men’s prayer meeting.  On Monday nights we spent time building unity through a very time honored tradition in the mountains of North Carolina. We watched the completely real sport of professional wrestling.  Some of you might call it “wrestling” but it is more accurately pronounced “wrastling.”  It may have seem silly from the outside looking in but it was important to me.

Throughout the whole Bible we see that God has provided solutions to this need that all of us have.  He’s provided a relationship with Him, a relationship with others in the church, marriage, and friendships in general.  But a friendship with God is foundational to all the other relationships.  In 1 John 1:3-4 it says, “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.”  God is giving us an invitation to be in fellowship with Himself and with the other believers.

God's Nature: Like Us

 

How many of you were excited when you saw that we would be doing a series on doctrine? To some people, doctrine sounds like a boring and impractical subject – the kind of thing that theologians sit around and debate academically. However, as Carl said at the beginning, it ought to be intensely practical and indeed vital to our Christian life: What do we actually believe and why? And what difference should it make to the way we live our lives day by day? How do we apply what the Bible teaches us? And how do we answer people who question our core beliefs?

So I actually love talking about doctrine. It can be a controversial subject, as you probably know. Devout and well-meaning believers have disagreed over several points of doctrine that are not clearly explained in the Bible. But these are not central to our understanding of who God is, what salvation means, and how we should live as followers of Jesus. We don’t need to be afraid of the areas where true Christians disagree. I really like the quote from Mark Twain: “It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.” 

The Bible: Living By God's Word

Welcome! Today we look at a tremendously important topic: what it means to live by God’s Word, the Bible. Because this is part of our series called Sound Doctrine, I want to start by talking about what theologians call the necessity and sufficiency of Scripture, and then we will talk about some practical principles and steps towards growing in the process of living by God’s Word.

So let’s start with the necessity of Scripture. In what sense is Scripture “necessary”? What does this mean? Well, one sense is in knowledge of the gospel, the good news that Christ died to save sinners, and that by believing in Him, in trusting Him, we can be forgiven and reconciled to God and experience eternal life with Him. I think of what Paul writes in Romans 10:

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. As Scripture says, “Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame.” For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” – Romans 10:9-13 

The Bible: The Nature of God's Word

Last week, Carl launched us into a new series entitled Sound Doctrine.  Our foundation verse for this series is Titus 2:1, 

You, however, must teach what is appropriate to sound doctrine. 

He explained that doctrine is teaching, and, Biblical teaching or doctrine is both practical, applicable, and includes the theology behind it.

The basis of what we teach is critical.  If we have the wrong foundation behind what we teach, it is worthless.

Jesus quoted the book Isaiah, saying, 

“… you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition.  You hypocrites!  Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings [doctrines] are but rules taught by men.’”

Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him ‘unclean,’ but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him ‘unclean.’”  --Matthew 15:6-11 

According to Jesus, wrong teaching or teaching things contradictory to what the Bible says makes our worship vain, without purpose, worthless.

The Bible: Introduction

Welcome to our new series, Sound Doctrine! What is a doctrine? In English, the word “doctrine” comes from the Latin word docere, which means “to teach,” and this word leads to doctor, which means “teacher,” and this word in turn leads to doctrina, which means “teaching.” In the context of Christianity, a doctrine is a teaching of what the Bible has to say about a particular topic. 

The title of our series alludes to Titus 2:1, which says,

You, however, must teach what is appropriate to sound doctrine. – Titus 2:1

To understand the “however” in this verse we need to look back in chapter 1. Here we find the following:

For there are many rebellious people, full of meaningless talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision group. They must be silenced, because they are disrupting whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach—and that for the sake of dishonest gain. – Titus 1:10-11