The Deity of Christ - His Attributes (3)

We are looking at the characteristics of Christ and how they show that he is God, how they prove his deity, looking at many of the attributes of Christ and what we're doing is just taking the 15 attributes of God that we saw some time ago and looking into the Scriptures to see if they are found also of Christ. And if that is the case, then obviously there's a clear connection between Christ and God indicating that Christ is equal with the Father. He is deity, he is God, just as much as God the Father is. Up to this point, we have looked at the fact that Christ is self-existent, he is eternal, he is unchangeable, he is omnipresent, he is omniscient, and he is omnipotent. We began last week toward the end of our study talking about the fact that Christ is perfect, the seventh attribute of God that we see of Christ, Christ is perfect. So join me again if you would please in Colossians chapter 1. There are three things that Paul says in relationship to the perfection of Christ and they kind of build on each other and it's really quite a powerful argument when you think of what Paul was dealing with. I think I mentioned last week that Paul was dealing in the book of Colossians with a very early form of what would become in the second century a serious error called gnosticism. I wish I had thought to put the word on the screen for you, GNOS TICISM, gnosticism comes from the Greek word to know. These were people that felt they had a special inner knowledge, kind of a secret knowledge, and they developed a cult around all of that. One of their teachings was it was really taken from Greek philosophy was that God who is spirit certainly could not have any direct contact with this world, this earth or human body which is flesh and that whole Greek concept of the evil nature of the physical and the divine nature of the spiritual and they're so separate that they couldn't touch, they couldn't be together. So they said that God could not have been in Christ. Christ could not have been God. So what they said rather than what Paul taught, there's one mediator between God and man. The gnostic's taught that there were many mediators, many intermediary beings between God and Christ. And the one closest to God had a lot of deity in them, but the further down the chain, the God it was less and less and less and less, to find that you got down here to Christ and that kind of separated the physical from the spiritual, made sure the two didn't directly connect. That was what the gnostic's taught. And so they believed that there was a divine presence that came over Christ when he was baptized and then it left him before he was put on the cross. And that is a terrible heresy because it separates the two natures of Christ. The Bible teaches Christ is one person with two natures that are in his being and we'll talk about that later. But what Paul is writing about is against that early form of that cult or that heresy. And so what he does, he takes their word, their word for all of those intermediary beings between God and Christ was play Roma or the fullness. All of them together made this play Roma, the fullness of God. And so Paul takes that word and throws it right back in their face. And in chapter 1 verse 19, as we saw last week, Paul says, for God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him. Boom, there you go, right in the face of the gnastics. No, there is no such thing as slowly degraded forms of the deity that would end up in someone way down the chain here who had very little, if any, at all, of the likeness to God. And that would be Christ. No, Paul says, no, no. God was pleased to have all his play Roma, all his fullness, all of his divinity. Divine attributes empower dwell in Christ. And so he comes out swinging in the first chapter against this terrible heresy. But he goes on to say, well, let's stop, let's stop here in chapter 1 verse 19 before we go any further. Notice a second thing, God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him. Okay, and that word dwell was an important word too. It means to settle down and be at home as a permanent possession to dwell in him. Not come on him and visit him for a period of time during his ministry, like three years. No, all of the fullness of God, all of God's attributes, all of God's perfections, make their home in Christ. Well in him, they are his in a permanent possession. And then he says something in chapter 2 verses 9 and 10 that kind of builds on that. He says in verse 9, for in Christ, all the fullness of the deity lives. That's kind of what he's already said. It's in Christ. It's all the fullness of the deity, all the fullness of God, all of his nature, attributes everything that God is in Christ. But notice then he adds this in bodily form. Okay, now that really was a right hook to the Gnostics as well because they taught that deity could not have any contact with bodies, human bodies. And that's the reason there was a need for all these intermediary forms between God and Christ. But no, he says all the fullness of the Godhead or of God was permanently at home as Christ's possession in his physical body. Okay, you can't get any more direct than that to fight what this cult taught. It goes on to say in verse 10, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head of every power and authority. So all that we need, while we have spiritual growth and opportunity and provision and power is found in Christ. So Christ is all the fullness of God. He is perfect. Everything that God has, Christ has. Everything that God is, Christ is, could hardly be a stronger way of stating his full deity when he was here on earth as a permanent possession. Could hardly be a stronger way of saying that. So Christ is perfect. He has all the fullness of God in him bodily. Okay, any question or comment there? John? Gnostics couldn't handle or accept that Christ was that much. No, they couldn't. And basically because they were so full of Greek philosophy. Did they just cook this stuff on the own? They can eat different levels? Yeah. They just... It was a part of what the Greek world thought. The Greek gods were kind of intermediaries between God and man. They were God, part man, and not completely either. And so it was kind of... It really had its background in Greek philosophy. And they just bought into that. It's the danger of buying into the world's thinking and the world's philosophy and psychology and everything else and thinking we've got to sound respectable. And somehow we've got to mix Christianity with all of that to be respectable. That's where it leads you to. It leads you to some kind of hybrid, cultic thinking. That's exactly where the Gnostics come from. Okay. Good question, John. Yes, Steve? This is what he was addressing that was going on in the Church. This was not an outside TV with people actually in the Church. Yeah, but it was a very early form of it. The Gnostic Heresy is a hybrid Heresy. It has elements of mysticism. It has elements of Gnosticism. It has elements of Jewish legalism. If you read chapter two, there's some Jewish legalism involved in it too. And so a lot of commentators debate over what the Gnostic or what the Colossian Heresy really was. But it seems to be kind of a hybrid, a mixture of several things. And it was definitely affecting the Church. It was creeping into the Church. And that's why Paul had to deal with it so strongly. Is it all possible why it seems to be a breeding for Timothy? It's a different form of Timothy, I think, actually completely the time they had to happen. And it was some sort of Heresy which was sort of black to be called Paul. Is that possible also the same thing that was related? Yeah, it probably did have some similar teachings. So it was just to specifically say what it was. Yeah. He does kind of, in this early period, the little chapters relate to getting rid of these doctrines and these other issues that were going on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they were saying the resurrection has already passed and that had overtones of not mixing the body and the spirits of what came out of the same Greek philosophy. But yeah, it may have been, it may have been some narcissism mixed in there, but touches of it. Yeah. It is, it was a, it was a real problem. The book of first John deals with it even more so than what Paul does. first John's writing a little later, probably 30 years after Paul, and John takes it head on, and he's dealing with a more clear form of the heresy in first John 4 when he talks about the antichrist that come and say, Jesus Christ did not come in the flesh. And what to talk about is they were denying the humanity of Jesus, not as did his humanity. They were saying that God could not have been in a human body, and that was becoming a more fully articulated form of this nosticism. Yeah, yeah. Okay, any other questions? Yes, what? I've uttered to Paul connecting the University of London to frånwick flood, this makes another problem! Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And, you know, we have to be a little careful with that. We are not deity, obviously. And, you know, that's not what you're saying. But, the divine nature dwells in us. God's nature dwells in us. And so, we have all that we need, as Peter would say it, all that we need for life and godliness is found in Christ and our relationship with Him. Okay? Good. Anything else there on the perfection of Christ? Okay. Let's also look at the fact that in number eight, that Christ is infinite. Infinite means without limits. Just a couple of passages that indicate this, John 10, verse 28. I like to begin in verse 27, which is the beginning of the thought here. My sheep listen to my voice. I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life. And they shall never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. So, how does that show the fact that Christ is infinite? How does it show that He's without limits? Just ask you. If He can grant eternal life, He has to have that life in Himself, right? That's exactly what He said in John 5. The Father has given Him life in Himself so that He can give it to others. So, yes, that's one way to see that here in this passage. What's another way to see it that He's without limits? He's infinite. Okay. If we shall never perish because we have the eternal life He's given, then obviously He's not going to perish. Okay, good. I think there's at least one other way in this passage you can see. In fact, He's infinite. If we're in the end of the verse, we're in the end of the verse. We're in the end of the verse. Okay. All right. It's a timeless promise. At any time He can come in. And as we receive Him, He can come into dwell within us. There at the end of the verse where He says, no one will snatch them out of my hand. That's tied to the fact that we have eternal life, which means He's going to hold on to us. We're in His hand forever. Now, that's without limit. He is holding on to us forever, which is another indication that He is infinite. Has all power. We'll live forever. No limits. Okay. One other passage, Colossians 2, 3, back to that great book of Colossians, which is so full of the doctrine of Christ. Colossians 2, verse 3, in whom we've seen this before. In whom, speaking of Christ, are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Infaces for our purposes right now, in the word all, in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, all without limit, all wisdom, all knowledge. Okay. So Christ has wisdom and knowledge without any limit. And the same thing can be said of any of the other attributes, like His omnipresent, His omniscience. That means all. So He has knowledge without limit. He has present without limits. He's omnipotent. He has power without limits. So Christ is infinite in every sense of the word without limits. Questions, comments about that? Okay. Number nine, Christ is incomprehensible. We talked about that attribute of God, and we saw that that means that God cannot be fully comprehended or understood by our human minds, our finite minds. It's not that He can't be known. We can know Him personally, but He cannot be fully completely known by our finite minds. He's bigger than that. The first passage in relationship to Christ is Matthew 1127, where Jesus says, all things have been committed to me by my father, no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him. Now, obviously Jesus is not saying that nobody can know Christ, nobody can know the Father in the sense of salvation, knowledge, or something like that. That's obviously not what He's saying, because the New Testament is full of the fact that we can know Him personally. But what He's saying is, no one can fully know, completely know the Son except the Father, no one can fully know the Father except the Son, and why can they know each other in a way that we can't know them? Because they're one. They're one in nature. They're one in essence, and they both share deity. And so they both know each other fully, completely, but we cannot know either one of them fully or completely. In fact, one of the great privileges of being a child of God is the opportunity to grow in our knowledge of Him, to grow in our understanding of who He is, and what He's like, and what He does, and how He works in our lives, and in the world, and observing all that He does, growing in that knowledge and understanding, and it really becoming a part of our hearts and lives, and the greatest privileges of being a child of God. But we cannot fully know Him like the Son does, and no one can fully know the Son except one who is likewise God, the Father. All right, Ephesians 3, the other passage on this, Ephesians 3, verse 8, although I am less than the least of all the Lord's people, this grace was given me to preach to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ. Some translations have the unsurchable riches of Christ. Interesting word, the word boundless or unsurchable, or even better yet untraceable really is the idea. It's literally the Greek word for footprints with the first letter of the alphabet, alpha, or a, we might say, in front of it, which negates it. In other words, you can't trace His footprints. You can't completely trace His footsteps. He cannot be traced. We do a lot the same thing when we say unspeakable, or unworthy. We take words and put you in in front of them, and we even do that with the letter A. An atheist is one who is not a theist. So we still do the same thing, and that's what Paul's doing here. He says, I'm going to use the word for tracing someone's footprints, for tracking someone, and I'm going to say the riches of Christ are untrackable, unsearchable, boundless. And so Christ Himself is incomprehensible. His riches are too deep, too broad, too wide, too high for us to know, and that's very similar to what He says in the other passage in chapter 3. I think I have verse 19 down. Let's look at verse 17, the end of verse 17, where He begins the thought. He says, and I pray that you being rooted and established in love may have power together with all the Lord's holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. It's His prayer that we would continue to grasp all the dimensions of Christ's love and that we might know obviously be growing and increasing in our knowledge of a love that He says surpasses knowledge. It's an interesting wordplay, isn't it? He wants us to know something that surpasses knowledge. So obviously what He's saying is I want you to keep gaining on that knowledge, keep growing in that knowledge which you'll never know all of it, it surpasses knowledge. It's beyond our ability to grasp everything, and so we'll never know it all, but I want you to grow, Paul says, my prayer for you, that you grow in that love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge. And so Jesus' love is so deep and wide and high and long that we can't grasp it all. We can never get to the bottom of it or the height of it or the breadth of it. We just can't grasp it all, but He wants us to grow in our knowledge of that. So Christ is incomprehensible, not able to be fully known by the finite mind. Comments or questions there? To know that it has some limits. Pardon me? To know that it would have some limits. Yes, yes. There is an infinite amount of knowledge, but our ability to grasp it all is where the limits are. So for us to know the love of Christ, we're limited in our ability to grasp all there is to know. True of everything about God, isn't that me? It's even true about His Word, no matter how long you've been saved and no matter how long you've studied the Bible, nobody knows it all. Nobody knows everything in this book. You can continue to grow in depths of knowledge, of Word of God. So anything that God does is that way. Okay. The next six attributes we're going to do in three couplets. We're going to put them together. And the reason for that is they go together. They're kind of extensions of one another. The first one of the couplet will always be the character quality that exists in God or in Christ in and of Himself. And the second one is the way it's expressed in relationship to man, in relationship to people. So we're going to put them together since they are very similar and you'll see even in the scriptures they are often mentioned together. So let's take the first of those couplets. Christ is holy and righteous. Holy and righteous. And again, we talked about the meaning of these terms when we talked about the doctrine of God. I'm not going to go back through all of that and repeat all of that. But we're just looking at the scriptures to see if these qualities are indeed mentioned. I mentioned of Christ Himself. Luke chapter 1 is our first passage. Luke 1. This is the announcement of the birth of Christ to Mary by the angel Gabriel. He has announced the conception of Jesus and Mary has asked how shall this be in verse 34. Since I am a virgin and the angel answered in verse 35, the Holy Spirit will come on you and the power of the most high will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Notice he is the holy one at the moment of conception. He is the holy one that is to be born. But he is called the holy one, a perfect holiness. From the very moment of conception throughout his entire human life, he was perfectly holy. And that was required in order for him to be an adequate Savior. You know, if Christ had sinned in any way, then he would have disqualified himself to be our Savior. Because only a blameless, spotless lamb could take the place and be a substitute for the offerer for the one who needed to be forgiven. So Christ can only morally qualify Himself to be our Savior if He is completely holy. And that is stated from the very beginning, from the moment of conception. He is the holy one. Acts 3.14 is a description of Him as the holy one from the lips of the Apostle Peter. As he is preaching in the temple, he says, as you disowned the holy and righteous one and asked that a murderer be released to you. We looked at this before when we were looking at the names of Christ. He is the holy one and he is the righteous one. Both of those are Old Testament titles for the Messiah. Old Testament title, the holy one is often used of God. And the righteous one, Jeremiah 23, the righteous branch that will come out of David. A couple of others. 2 Timothy, chapter 4 and verse 8. Some of Paul's last words when he talks about being ready to die. And then he says in verse 8, now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day. And righteousness has to do with judgment. Righteousness has to do with how holiness is expressed to people in that God is just and righteous in the way deals with us. And so it is the perfect term to use for his judgment that he will be just, he will be righteous in the way he deals with us in judgment and Paul is expressing that here. And then the other passage, 1 John 2 1, where John says, my dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous one. Now you can tell that's a title of complete, perfect holiness and righteousness. I mean, no one would call any person the righteous one. You might say that a person is generally a righteous person in that they are just and righteous in their dealings with others. But the righteous one as a title, that's reserved for deity. So he is holy and righteous. Okay? Any observations, comments there? Questions? Okay, the next couple is that Christ is true and faithful. And those two go together, especially in the original language, they are very close. John 146, very familiar passage. Jesus answered, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. He is the truth. He is the embodiment of reality and of truthfulness. But there is more than just truth as opposed to falsehood in this word. The Hebrew background of the word truth, and you remember that even though this is written in Greek language, New Testament, the background, the thinking process, the theology is Jewish. It's Old Testament. It's Hebrew thinking. And so when Jesus is called the truth, the Hebrew concept of truth was closely tied to faithfulness. To be truthful, to be truthful, was to be the embodiment of faithfulness and steadfastness. Those two were closely tied. In fact, the words faithfulness and true come from the same Hebrew word. You know what that word is? Amen. We get our English word. Amen from it. Greek word is very similar. And it means true or in the Old King James vocabulary, verily. Or truly, you can count on this. So be it. This is a truthful, faithful, reliable saying. So the concepts of true and faithful go together. In Revelation 3, Jesus is referred to by all of those titles. Revelation chapter 3, verse 7, The angel of the church in Philadelphia, right? These are the words of him who is holy and true, who holds the keys of David, what he opens, no one can shut, what he shuts, no one can open. So he is true. Now, look at verse 14. To the angel of the church in Leotusia, right? These are the words of the amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God's creation. If you know the context here, this is Jesus speaking to the seven churches in Asia Minor. So when it says, these are the words of the amen, that's Jesus speaking. I'm the one talking to you. I am the one who is the amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God's creation. He is the one who is holy and true, who holds the key of David. So he is true, he is the amen, he is faithful, all of those things go together. Christ is true and faithful. Now remember, some of these attributes of God, we can share at least to some extent. So we can be faithful as well, but never perfectly. Christ has all of these attributes perfectly. He is always faithful. None of us are. We're not always faithful to our promises. We're not always faithful to do things that we have committed to do. We trespass, we fail in our faithfulness. Jesus never fails in his faithfulness, always faithful, always true. So he's true and faithful. Any comment or question there? Yes, I'm glad he forgives us. Yeah, and that is an expression of his truthfulness and faithfulness. We confess our sins, he is faithful to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Thank God for that, for his faithfulness. Okay, one other couplet of two attributes that go together. Christ is loving and merciful. Romans chapter 8, that great passage on the love of God at the end of the chapter. 835 says, who shall separate us from the love of Christ? And you remember he goes on to talk about all of these possibilities? No, he says in verse 37, and all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. And then he restates it. I'm convinced that neither death nor life, nor neither angels, nor demons, neither the present, nor the future, nor any powers, neither height, nor depth, nor anything that is not. Nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Great passage, kind of book ends there. Verse 35 talks about the love of Christ, verse 39 ends with the love of God in Christ. The Christ is loving. He is the ultimate expression of God's love. God's love is found in Christ. And then one other passage we'll look at tonight, and that is Jude, verse 21, Jude 21. Jude is a great book of warning about apostasy. Warning about people who leave the faith. By the way, apostasy is a great example of one of those words that you take and put the A in front of. It's actually directly from the Greek word, pistis, which is faith with the A in front of, but no faith. You've departed from the faith. You've left the faith. That's what apostasy is. Departure from the faith. And that's what this book is all about. Warns about false teachers, describes their judgment. And then at the end of the book, he gives guidelines on how to avoid these apostate, these false teachers and their teachings. One of the ways in verses 17 to 19 is to remember the teaching of the apostles, but he says, dear friends, remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus foretold. They said to you in the last times there would be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires. These are the people who divide you who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the spirit. So stick with the teaching of the apostles. Remember what they told you? The teaching of the apostles is inscribed in scriptures and the New Testament, the Word of God. And so one of the ways we can guard ourselves against false teaching is to immerse ourselves in scripture, in the Bible. It's why it's so important to study our Bible, to know our Bible, so that we can be warned of false teaching. So that's one way to avoid false teaching and false teachers. The second way in verse 20 is to build ourselves up in the faith, but you, dear friends, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, building yourself up in the most holy faith. If you go back to verse 3, he talks about that holy faith. He says, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God's holy people. The faith. The faith is the body of teaching of scripture, the faith which we believe it's not personal faith, trust, it's the faith, it's the doctrines of the Bible, the scriptures that we're, we're studying on Wednesday nights. That's the faith and it's the same faith that he's talking about in verse 21. Keep yourselves or verse 20 building yourselves up in your most holy faith. I think it's not talking there about personal faith as much as it is building ourselves up in the faith that he's introduced earlier in the book, building ourselves up in the faith, most holy faith. And then pray in the Holy Spirit, he says, pray with dependence upon the spirit, with a recognition that we're limited in our understanding in what we should pray for and how we should pray, like Paul says in Romans 8, we should, we should recognize that the Holy Spirit himself is praying for us, interceding for us when we don't know what to say. And then verse 21, keep yourselves in God's love that's not talking about keeping yourself saved, but it's keeping yourself in the context of God's love living there, staying there, keeping yourself there in the sense that you're occupied with God's love. And in fact, it literally means obedience. Jesus said something very similar this in John 15 verses 9 and 10, he said, as the father has loved me, so have I loved you now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I've kept my father's commands and remain in his love. So what does it mean to remain in God's love, to keep yourself in God's love, simply means to live an obedient lifestyle, obey his commands. And that will keep us from false teaching, it will protect us. But then he mentions this one other thing. And so we've been leading up to keep yourselves in God's love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life. The mercy of God is often mentioned in the Bible, but here's one place where it is the mercy of Christ, the mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ that will bring us to eternal life. And most students of the book of Jude believe that he's talking about the rapture here. We are to wait, we're to keep ourselves obedient as we wait for the mercy of Christ to bring us to eternal life, probably indicating his coming, the rapture, which is the ultimate expression of God's mercy because it is the completion of our salvation. It is that time when we will be once and for all delivered and our salvation will be completed as we're glorified in his presence. And so it's the ultimate expression, the completion of his mercy for us in salvation. So we're waiting for that, we're waiting for that ultimate expression of his mercy in delivering us from this world and into his presence and fulfilling the completion of our redemption, our salvation as we're with him. So Christ is loving in Romans 8, he is merciful in Jude 21. All right, any questions or comments about these attributes of Christ? All right, we're not going to go any further tonight because next time we get into a whole different topic and that is the works of Christ, which also demonstrate his deity. And so we'll leave the attributes of Christ, go to the works of Christ, which also give us the same result that he most certainly is God. Okay, let's pray. Father, we are grateful to you for your goodness to us this day and this week and throughout every day of our lives. We thank you that you are faithful and true, that you are holy and just, that you're loving and merciful, that you're infinite and complete, perfect, incomprehensible. All of these things that we have seen tonight, we know your word declares of you and of your son Jesus and yes of your spirit as well. And so Father, we thank you that we are in personal relationship with such a great Savior. Thank you Lord for our great Savior. May we come to know him better, not just to know more about him, but to really relish in what that means for us and what he does for us. We thank you for all that you do for us in Christ. It's in his name we pray, amen.