Christianity 101: The Doctrine of Christ

Scripture: Isaiah 531-7; Colossians 1.11-20; Philippians 2.1-11; Matthew 21.33-46


The doctrine of Christ can be boiled down to these two propositions, and then a third:

1) Jesus Christ is the true human being (Son of Man) by which all human beings should be measured.
2) Jesus Christ is God. To be Son of God is unique to Jesus – no one else is Son like He is.
3) And finally, being in the very unique position that Jesus is in, being fully human and fully God, He is the bridge to bring a lost humanity back to the Creator.


You can see how if either of the first two propositions are not true, then the third comes under serious suspicion as well, and probably cannot be true either. Let’s examine all three propositions in a little detail.

There is a scene in the Gospel of John where Jesus sits down at a village well in Samaria and asks a woman for a drink of water. Don Miller says, “this is like a known evangelical Christian going into a gay bar and asking a man to buy him a beer.” Ya know, it just wasn’t done. And yet this woman doesn’t walk away in fear, scorn, anger, anything expected. She stays and talks to Jesus and ends up telling him her life story. She later goes and tells her friends, “You have got to meet this man. He told me everything there is to know about myself.” And apparently, in this woman’s eyes, it was a good thing for Jesus to know this. Again Miller comments, “through this system of defense Christ walks with ease, never seeming to fear that He would do damage by rummaging around in the tender complexity of a person’s identity. Instead, He goes nearly immediately to our greatest fears, our most injured spaces, and speaks into those places with authority.”

I trust Jesus with my secrets. And I’m not the only one. He has a way with people. I think it has something to do with the proposition that not only does he know what it’s like to be human, but He knows what’s it’s like to become human as the Creator intended Adam and Eve’s descendants to be.

People like being around Jesus. The wedding reception, the party of notorious people at the tax collector’s house, none of these parties stopped when Jesus arrived – they got better. People were attracted to Jesus, even though by all accounts, he wasn’t attractive for the reasons that we sometimes think make people attractive. He wasn’t handsome. Though it should be said he wasn’t the effeminate will-o’-wisp that some in the church have made him out to be. He was strong and forceful – remember Him cleaning out the Temple in anger over their greed? But he was no Brad Pitt in his looks. No, Jesus was attractive for other reasons.

Here’s the thing: Jesus didn’t care about the stupid stuff that many of us care about. Remember the Lifeboat theory, where everything’s a competition in his life, where you live, where you work, what you drive? Jesus couldn’t care less about that stuff. He finds “the things humanity finds valuable worthless and absurd, and to the person in the lifeboat, Jesus would seem to see things backward.”

It’s that way because Jesus is trying to show us that for the moment, things are backward and upside down and in reverse order in this world. He comes to turn the world around with His kingdom. “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first,” he says.

And then there is proposition two – not only is Jesus the Real Human Being, but He is the real God. He is not only a prophet but He is God in all divinity and transcendence and immanence and all those characteristics we attribute to the Holy One. Listen to the parable of the landowner in Matthew. The vineyard is rented out to tenant farmers for a time. The landowner sends his servants (prophets) to collect the fruit due him, but one by one the landowner’s servants are abused, beaten, and killed. Last of all, the landowner sends his own son, “surely they will respect him.” But the wicked tenants scorn the heir, take of hold him and kill him.

An ominous question follows: When the owner of vineyard returns, what will he do to those tenants?

In this case, we are reminded of what a precarious position we are in – what do we do about this Jesus? Certainly, we cannot patronize him, or ignore him forever. And beware those who would reject him! He is no mere man only.

In Philippians chapter two you have this famous passage known as the Kerygma, a summation of who this Jesus is, “who though he was in form (and nature) God, he did not consider his preexistent status something to cling to, but instead, Jesus emptied himself, and took the form of a slave, being born a human ( humbly he came to the world he created goes the song) he continued to humble himself in obedience, even to the point of death, and the worst kind – death on a cross.” Remember last week how we said that God is humble? We don’t know the half of it.

“The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and give his life a ransom for many.”

I am so far away and apart in goodness from the Son of God, and yet I am not half the human he is either.

Maybe that’s what Chesterton meant when he said “all of human history comes to an intersection in the Cross.” There is simply no one more crucial than Jesus the Christ. The only One who can truly be called “good” is the One who has willingly paid the price of death for the sins of humanity.

“Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, “ John the Baptist called out to him.

These are just propositions, you know. Philosophy, theology, the stuff of religion. They are interesting for some, and they may even move others. But this is what moves me, and this is what really matters:

Jesus is the only being I have ever met that I wanted to worship.

I want to worship this true human, this true God, this Jesus.

Why am I a Christian? I am a Christian because of Jesus. Is there any other reason?