The Gospel of Christ

Guest (Male): Have you ever wondered what it is about Jesus Christ that makes him so special and unique? Why is it that he has the power to radically change people's lives? That's a good question to ask, especially since the Bible says that he is the author and perfecter of our faith. Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. James Boice, teaching you to think and act biblically. Today we continue our new series in the book of Romans, part one, an introduction by looking at something we often take for granted: the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that makes Christianity different from the religions of the world. The apostle Paul knew that better than anyone. Let's turn now to Romans chapter one and find out why that is true.
Dr. James Boice: In the last few weeks in our introductory studies of Paul's great letter to the Romans, I've been trying to show that Christianity is unique. There have been a number of reasons for saying that, but today we come to the chief reason. Christianity is unique because it is founded upon a unique individual, the Lord Jesus Christ. And yet it's even more than that. It's not just that there is nobody like Jesus Christ, that is true, or even because of his divine human nature that nobody else ever can be like Jesus Christ, though that is also true. But it's also that Christianity is linked to the person of Jesus Christ in a unique way, in a way that just is not true of any other of the world's great religions. J.N.D. Anderson is a professor of law and oriental studies in London and has majored in comparative religions and the legal systems that they have and has made this point very clearly in a number of his writings. He says that Buddhism and Confucianism and even Islam are just not tied to the person of their founder in the way that Christianity is. They are chiefly teaching and it would have been possible, for example, for the teachings of Buddhism to have come into the world in quite another way than through the Buddha, or in the same way with Confucianism. Anybody else could have been the channel for that particular insight. Islam believes that God gave a special revelation to its adherents through the Prophet Muhammad, but Muhammad wasn't essential to that in the same way that Jesus Christ is essential to Christianity. Christianity is built, you see, not merely upon the teachings of Jesus, but upon his person. And as a result, if you take Jesus away from Christianity, you destroy the faith entirely. John W. Stott years ago in that little classic "Basic Christianity" summed this up well. He said, "The person and work of Christ are the rock upon which the Christian religion is built. If he is not who he said he was and if he did not do what he said he had come to do, the foundation is undermined and the whole superstructure will collapse. Take Christ from Christianity and you disembowel it; there's practically nothing left. Christ is the center of Christianity; all else is circumference." Now, this is what we come to as we move on in Paul's introduction to this great book. We looked at the theme of the book, namely the gospel, which Paul introduces in verse one as the gospel of God. And we saw when we looked at that phrase that the genitive "of God" is objective, not a subjective genitive. What that means is that God is the object of the gospel. He's the creator of the gospel; it's his idea. He brings it into being. It doesn't mean that God is the subject of what we teach. Now, sometimes in Christianity we do teach about God, but that's not what that phrase means. When we talk about the gospel being the gospel of God, it means that it's God's gospel. He's given it to us. But the gospel also has substance and that's what Paul comes to now. It is the gospel of God the Father, but it is all about Jesus Christ. The way he puts it is this: "The gospel of God," dash, "The gospel which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, he being God, you see, he promised it and then he brought it into being this gospel, but regarding his son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David and who through the spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the son of God by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord." So here at length, you see, Paul is talking about the substance of the gospel and he's pointing out that it is all centered in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, he introduces Jesus by calling him God's son, "his son" in verse four and "son of God" later on. We have unfortunately suffered a great distortion of the meaning of those words as a result of the liberalism of the last century. In the last century, the liberal gospel advanced its ideas under the great banner "The fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man" and they were fond of saying that we are all brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ and we are all sons and daughters of the Almighty. Now, there's a sense in which you can call all human beings sons and daughters of God, in the sense that we're his offspring. Paul himself uses that word, used it in talking to the Greeks. What he meant by that is God's created us. We're his creation and so we're responsible to him. But the way the Bible uses that term "son" or as it would have used the equivalent term "daughters" is not in a generic sense to speak of a kind of mystical deity or value to the human race at large, but in a specialized way. It uses it of believers to say that we become sons and daughters of God by being joined to Jesus Christ in saving faith. So we get related to God the Father the way he is related to God the Father by our union with him. There's that meaning. And all of that is based upon the greater meaning which is even before that, namely that although there's a sense in which we who believe in Christ become sons and daughters of the Almighty, Jesus Christ himself is nevertheless the son of God in an absolutely unique sense. A sense which really means he is deity itself. To call him the son of God is to call him God. When the Apostle Thomas fell down before him after the resurrection when Jesus had appeared on that second Sunday and worshiped him saying "My Lord and my God," Jesus did not do what the Apostle Paul and Barnabas did in a similar situation when the Greeks were falling down to worship them after a miracle and say, "Oh no, you're making a big mistake, don't worship me, I'm a man just like you are, worship God." Jesus received the worship. He rebuked Thomas, but he rebuked him for his unbelief, not for his worship. And he said, "You believe because you've seen. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet will believe," that is, blessed all who come to see this great truth down through all the history of the Christian church. So the point we begin with when we talk about the substance of Christianity is that it is centered in Jesus Christ and what makes it unique is that Jesus Christ above all things is God. He is the second person of the Trinity as we have come to say down through the development of the idea in Christian theology. Now, Paul doesn't only say that. That's his starting point. The next thing he goes on to talk about is the incarnation. These are powerful words. This is a section of Romans in which every word is important and in which the balance and the choice of words are so significant that even if Paul hadn't claimed to be an apostle and therefore one who speaks by revelation from God giving us the very words of God, we'd have to say this is more than human. This is really remarkable writing; it must have come from God. I want you to see a number of things about it. The first thing I want you to see are the contrasts that we have here, the contrast in the verses I read. First of all, there's a contrast between the human nature of Jesus, which we have in the New International Version translation "in his human nature," verse three, and his divine nature, which in this version is rendered "through the spirit of holiness." Now, let me show how that contrast works. In the Greek language, the first phrase "in his human nature" is actually the words "kata sarka." Now, "sarx" is the word "flesh" and "kata" is a preposition that means "according to" or "in respect to." Now, when we use the word "flesh" generally, it just means the fleshly part of our bodies. In biblical language, it means more than that. It means the whole human being as determined by the flesh. So it involves the body, the soul, and the spirit, all that makes us human beings, but as limited by that, you see, as opposed to being divine. We're human beings is what that means. And that's why the New International Version is quite correct when it renders the phrase "as to his human nature." That's what "kata sarka" actually means, as to his human nature. Now, the next phrase "through the spirit of holiness" is a bit misleading as we read it with our own perspective because whenever we come across that word "spirit" we think it must mean the Holy Spirit. And it may be that the New International Version translators thought that because they capitalized it "through the Spirit of holiness." But if you read this in Greek, the contrast is between "kata sarka" and this phrase, which in Greek is "kata pneuma." Now, "pneuma" means "spirit" or "breath" or "nature." So in the first place, you've got "kata sarka," which is according to his human nature, and now you have "kata pneuma," which means what? According to his divine nature. It must mean that. So when it speaks of the spirit of holiness, it's not speaking of the Holy Spirit, but of the holy divine nature of Jesus Christ, his divine nature. So there's the first contrast. Paul's beginning to talk about Christ as to being a man and as to being God. Second contrast emphasizes the first. You find "as to his human nature was a descendant of David" and later on "who through the spirit of holiness was declared to be the son of God." So you have a descendant of David, a son of David, and over here you have the son of God. So that's the second contrast. Now, the third contrast is the one that's really interesting and that's the verbs in these two verses. The first verb, the verb "was," occurs at the beginning: "regarding his son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David." And the second verb, which occurs in the second part of that, "and through the spirit of holiness was declared." So you have "was" and "declared." Now, "was" is a bit weak. In the Greek language, the word is "ginomai" and it literally means "became" or "came into being." I say that "was" is a bit weak because "was" is kind of timeless. You know it's past tense, but it could be eternally past or it could be temporarily past. You could say he was the eternal son of God in the sense that he was and he is and he always will be. Or you could say "was" in the sense that something happened that had not been true previously. Now, it's in that second sense that this word "ginomai" is used and that's why I say a better translation is "became." You see, it's not that he was a descendant of David in an eternal past sense because that wasn't true. He was the eternal son of God in an eternal past sense and still is and always will be, but he became a descendant of David at a particular point in history, which we mark off by calling it the moment of the incarnation. That's what Paul is talking about. Here's this eternal son of God who was declared to be that, it doesn't say he became that, he was declared to be that, but at this particular point in history, he became man, he became the god-man. And so something happened with Jesus in history; there was a change. You see, if that was preached to the Greeks, the Greeks would have a great deal of trouble understanding that because they thought the essence of God is that he is utterly unchanged, can't be acted upon in any way or changed in any way. And I must admit we approach this, we say, how can this be? We don't understand it philosophically, but it's what happened. The second person of the Godhead changed in the sense that he took to himself a nature he did not have before. He's always God, but now he became man as well and he remains man as well throughout all eternity. He went back to heaven, he didn't repudiate his humanity; he didn't lay it aside. He's still man. So he is the god-man. That is really a remarkable thing that's being said. Now let me draw your attention to one other thing. It's this phrase "descendant of David" that I mentioned. Reason I call your attention to that is that in terms of the logic or theology of this section, it is in a certain sense unnecessary. What Paul is really getting at here is the humanity of Christ. So when he said "who as to his human nature was," Paul could quite easily have said and made his point perfectly well "a man." Or he could have said "a true man" or "a full man" or "a man in all respects." "Who as to his human nature was a true man." That would have been his point and as to his divine nature was the son of God. You see, that would have been perfectly right. But he says something else. He adds something here. "Who as to his human nature was," he says, "a descendant of David." Now, why does he say that? Let me suggest three reasons why he says it. First of all, it gives a specific emphasis to his main point. His main point is that Jesus became a man, but you know, we read that and we say, well, you know, maybe in a mystical sense he became man. That is, he looked like a man or he seemed to operate like a man. There were heresies like that in the early ages of the church. When Paul says he became a descendant of David, what he says is when he became a man he became a specific man as real a human being as you or me. You see, they didn't have cameras back then, we don't have a picture of Jesus. It's a good thing, but if we had lived back then and we had had a camera and we could have taken a picture, we would have gotten a picture. Sometimes I've seen movies that are trying to stress the mystical and somebody in a movie will take a picture of something when they go to develop it, the image isn't there. "Oh, must have been a ghost," you see, that's the way it's done. If you took a picture of Jesus, it would have come out. His hair was a certain color, his eyes were a certain color, he weighed so many pounds, he belonged to a certain family, he had a family tree, he had history, you could have talked to his mother, could have talked to Joseph, could have talked to his brothers, his sisters, he could have told stories about his grandfather or his grandmother going back all his ancestors and probably he did. You see, so Paul when he says "a descendant of David" makes it as specific as it can possibly be. Jesus was a real man in this line of David. Now secondly, he uses this phrase "descendant of David" as a specific illustration of what he has said in the first part of verse two when he says that God promised this gospel beforehand through his prophets in the holy scripture. In other words, this gospel centered in Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of specific Old Testament prophecies. Now, what are they? Well, they're all kinds of prophecies. One of the chief set of prophecies are prophecies that concern the ancestry of the one who should come. He's not just going to be a man, he's going to be a man born in the line of King David so he's entitled to sit upon David's throne. This is said in many different places in the Old Testament. We know Isaiah 11:1 very well because of the Messiah: "A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse, from his roots a branch will bear fruit." Jesse was David's father; this is talking about the Messiah. Now Joseph was a descendant of David through the line of Solomon and if Jesus had been born of Joseph as a natural son of Joseph, Joseph being a natural human father to Jesus, Jesus though he would have inherited the right to the throne by means of his descent through King Solomon would never have been able to assume the throne because of the curse of Jeremiah 22:30. Now, how is a problem like that going to be resolved? It was resolved in a way that is utterly baffling to the skeptic. It's resolved so simply that only God could have done it. God sent Jesus born of the Virgin Mary, that is, of one who had no human father, but who because Joseph took the Virgin Mary under his care and later married her, though he did not know her until after the birth of Jesus, because of that relationship passed on his claim to the throne of David to Jesus by what we would call a process of adoption. So Jesus, as Joseph's adopted son, was entitled to the throne of David as a descendant of David through King Solomon, though he was not the natural son of Joseph and therefore didn't inherit the judgment pronounced in the curse. And to make it even more beautiful, Mary, as it turns out, was also a descendant of King David. But she was a descendant of David not through Solomon, the younger brother, but through Nathan, the older brother, and therefore had a very good claim to the throne herself, except for the fact that it was all of the descendants of Solomon who had reigned. You see, if you would have approached this from a human point of view and it's said, well, let's make a descendant of King Solomon our king, let's have Joseph, why the curse would have stood in the way. And if you had said by contrast, well then let's have a descendant of Nathan, Mary or Mary's son be king, well then all of the descendants through Solomon would have stood in the way. They'd have said, no, we've reigned upon the throne, we have the right to reign. But you see when in this sublime resolution, Joseph and Mary come together and Jesus is born of Mary, a virgin birth with a human mother, but without a human father, he became a descendant of David through Nathan, he became the descendant of David through Solomon, he exhausts both of the lines because he didn't have any children and he was the older brother. And the point of that, you see, is that not only as Paul says was he a descendant of David, he was the only descendant of David that can possibly make a claim to the messianic throne. There's no other. He exhausts all the lines; it's impossible for anybody else to claim to be the Messiah. So he is not who he said he is and if things did not happen as the Bible declares them to be, then all of the Old Testament prophecies are void, God has broken them, they'll never be fulfilled. And the only possible fulfillment is in Jesus Christ the son of God. I've given two reasons why Paul puts in that phrase "descendant of David." One, as I already said, is that it gives specific to what he's talking about when he introduces the incarnation. He became a specific man in David's line. Secondly, it's an illustration, a specific illustration of fulfilled prophecy. All of it was prophesied beforehand and it came true just as God said it would. There's a third reason. And the third reason is that by introducing Jesus as a descendant of David, Paul prepares for what he's going to say at the very end of the section. He's going to say Jesus Christ is Lord. Now, understand the situation. This book is written to the Romans. Romans are the powerful people of the day. The means of execution that the Romans used was crucifixion. They wouldn't crucify a Roman because it was considered such an ignominious death that it was the sort of thing that should only be inflicted upon slaves and foreigners. And that's how Jesus had died. Now Paul is proclaiming this Jesus, crucified under Pontius Pilate in a far-off remote area of the Roman world, as the Savior. A Roman who read that would naturally say, how can that be, a crucified slave or criminal? And what Paul begins to show is that although he was crucified by the Romans, he was nevertheless of noble royal descent. He was a descendant of the great King David and more than that, not only was he descendant of the great King David, that is his inheritance according to the flesh, he was in addition to that the son of God, which makes him more than any earthly king. He was, as he says at the very end of this, our Lord. Let me build on that by one more point. In the latter part of this where he's talking about the deity of Christ, we find the words "with power." It occurs in verse four, which says who through the spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the son of God by his resurrection from the dead. How do you handle those words "with power"? What do they relate to? Well, the most common interpretation, I suppose, is to relate them to the resurrection. Jesus could not have been raised from the dead unless it were with power. It required divine power and people who take that interpretation generally understand the phrase "spirit of holiness" as relating to the Holy Spirit and so they take the verse itself as saying that it is by the Holy Spirit and his power that Jesus was raised from the dead. Now, that is certainly true, that it was by the power of God that Jesus was raised from the dead, but there's several things wrong with that. One we've already seen, that phrase "spirit of holiness" probably does not refer to the Holy Spirit. It refers to the holy divine nature of Christ. And then secondly, nowhere else in the Bible do you find it taught that the Holy Spirit was the agent of the resurrection. It always says God the Father raised him from the dead. So that would be a very unusual phrasing for Paul or any other writer. Well, you say, if those words "with power" are not to relate to the resurrection, perhaps they relate to the words "declared." That is, he was declared with power or he was powerfully declared to be the son of God by the resurrection. Now, that is a very good interpretation. Charles Hodge held to that and I suspect as I read the New International Version that the translators generally came down on that line because they put the word "with power" right after the words "declared," was declared, was declared with power. We can understand how that would be true. It was by the resurrection that the deity of Christ was made known. Indeed, all of the great doctrines of Christianity relating to the work of Jesus Christ and his person are tied to the resurrection. The resurrection is the proof of them all. Certainly that is true. And yet I want to suggest that Haldane and Martyn Lloyd-Jones are right when they say on the basis of the word order in the Greek that the words "with power" actually relate to the term "son of God." In the Greek, it says that he was declared son of God with power by the resurrection. You say, well, what does that mean? Well, I suggest it fits into exactly everything else that Paul has been saying in these two verses. There was a time before the incarnation when Jesus was the son of God with power. The second person of the deity brought the worlds into existence. He operated with God the Father in everything that God the Father did. But when he came into this world as a man through the incarnation, as a babe in Bethlehem, though he remained the son of God, he was not the son of God with power. One of the things he laid aside. You say, well during his life, you know, he did miracles and that's true. The power of God was with him, the presence of the Father. But he said, you see, I can't do anything of myself. It's what the Father is doing that I do. That's the way it operated during the days of his flesh. In a certain sense, it's proper to say he was the son of God without power. And then Paul says but through the resurrection he was declared to be the son of God with power once again. And now we look at him not as a mere man, not as a helpless baby, not as a crucified savior alone, but as the Lord, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of the church. The one who reigns over the church and empowers his people and works through the gospel, the very gospel that the Apostle Paul is proclaiming to break the shackles of sin and bring people into submission within the bounds of his kingdom. The point of this, the conclusion which in this particular study comes at the end, not scattered throughout as is sometimes the case, the conclusion is that Jesus Christ must be that Lord for you. You see, if these things are true, if Jesus is the eternal son of God who became man in history, the moment we call the incarnation, and if by the resurrection he is declared once again to be the son of God with power and Lord of the church, then he is your Lord as well as your Savior, whether you acknowledge him or not. You can say to yourself, well, I think that's wrong, I don't believe that. That's all right, don't believe it, but search it out if you have good reasons. Don't believe it. But if it is true, and the evidence is on that side, then Jesus is your Lord and you must, you must bow before him, acknowledging his lordship and praising him that he has saved you by his death from your sins. Colonel Robert Ingersoll was no friend of Christianity. He was the famous agnostic of the last century. But although he was an enemy of Christianity, he saw some things about Christianity clearly. On one occasion he said, though in a critical vein, "Christianity cannot live in peace with any other form of faith. If that religion be true, there is but one Savior, one inspired book, and but one little narrow path that leads to heaven. Such a religion is necessarily uncompromising." Well, that is true because Jesus himself is uncompromising. He's uncompromising because of who he is. If he is the eternal son of God, then he is the Lord and he is your Lord and you must bow before him. Let us pray. Father, we thank you for this teaching, this plain teaching, this full teaching, this whole Christology wrapped up in these two short verses at the beginning of the book of Romans. Father, use those words. You've inspired them. They came to us through Paul by means of your Spirit. And so bless them we pray, bless them to our hearts. Grant that no one hearing this, facing these claims as we have today, might simply brush them off. But Father, we pray instead that you will use them as you do use your word to generate spiritual unrest in the heart of unbelievers until by your grace and in response to your love, they turn from their sin to Jesus who is the Lord and the Christ. We pray in his name. Amen and amen.
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