“The Christ”
As we approach the Birthday of our Lord we need to be reminded of His humanity and His continued Lordship over our lives.
Today he stands in heaven, next to God the Father and he is aware of all that transpires deep in our hearts, every sin we think and do, the crimes we commit, sometimes in his name. His Providential will works tirelessly across the width and breadth of creation. He sustains even the smallest particle just as he sustains each of us breath by breath.
Right now the world is in more turmoil than usual as God has permitted a pandemic to infect humanity. In the western countries for so long insulated from common death now sees death at our front door. The illusion that our science can save us and that we are too intelligent or well prepared for such calamities has been dispelled. But only Christ can save us.
If we look at the Apostles’ Creed it confesses, “We believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.” So Jesus is according to the Scriptures and stated in this careful summary of the early church is attributed to virginal conception. The creed makes three important claims about Jesus that we often overlook them. Consider the simplicity and depth of the church’s long-standing confession of Jesus as “Christ, his only Son, our Lord.”
“Jesus Christ” is his given name and messianic title. We often treat them erroneously like his first and last name. “Christ” is Greek for Anointed One (Messiah in Hebrew). For a thousand years before the first Christmas, God’s people waited for a coming Messiah “the Christ” who would fulfill God’s promises to and through the King David.
Just like his forefather David, he would be a human king. To be born in David’s line would mean to be born of a woman. When we attribute Christ to Jesus knowing full well his deity, we are not expecting anything less than a man.
When this man rose from the dead it became an objective fact of history, with more than five hundred witnesses (1 Corinthians 15:6), the final piece was now in place. After centuries of prophecy and a life of shocking revelations came the verdict: this man was not only Christ but indeed truly God, God’s own Son.
Now as we are prone to do, even the most obedient to Christ we in this country have fallen back on our own wisdom. Everything it seems has been politicized and connected with a preference of a group or political party. Many self-proclaimed Christians and Christian leaders have placed Christ clearly in a political party.
As Christian’s we are to be involved in our community, nation, and its politics. We know we are to be a light on the hill, salt & light. Jesus was active to a point and deeply passionate about the way the elite religious intellectuals treated people. Notice Jesus did not place his faith in any man of that time and there were some good men he could have endorsed. Jesus was about his Father’s business and we should be as well.
Christ came to inaugurate the Kingdom of God. The hidden plan was to die on the cross to reverse the sin of Adam so that all humanity would have their many sins forgiven in the sight of God the Father. The Ruler of this world was defeated, and his fate sealed. Yet we remain in an interim period what as been called the almost but not yet.
Theologian Wayne Grudem said this:
“God, in his wisdom, ordained a combination of human and divine influence in the birth of Christ, so that his full humanity would be evident to us from the fact of his ordinary human birth from a human mother, and his full deity would be evident from the fact of his conception in Mary’s womb by the powerful work of the Holy Spirit.”