3. Who is Jesus Christ?

I heard the testimony a few years ago of a man who was involved in pastoral ministry in prisons. On one occasion he asked an inmate, whom he was meeting for first time, what he knew about Jesus. The man shrugged his shoulders and said, “It’s a swear word!”

I also recently heard a report on the radio, in the run-up to Christmas, about a primary school pupil who went home and told his mother how the teacher had been showing them how to make a crib “for the baby cheeses”.

In my ‘baby-boomer’ generation, everybody went to church at least once a year, every family had a Bible in the house, and everybody knew at least the outline of the background stories to Christmas and Easter. Even die-hard atheists were familiar with the Gospel and knew who Jesus was.

Not so today. Liberal secular humanism has left Christianity behind, and many people have no idea whatsoever who Jesus was. There are even some who question whether there is any historical accuracy in the Gospel narrative.

Of course, the Bible is a religious book, so it’s obviously a made-up story! Right?

But Jesus of Nazareth was a real person who really walked this earth, performed miracles, was executed as a criminal, and rose to life again three days later.

So the question is not, “who WAS Jesus?”, but “who IS Jesus?”

Let’s have a look at a few scriptures that’ll help us to answer that question:

The opening lines of the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, are well known even to people who have never read the Bible for themselves. The three crew members of Apollo 8 read it from space to the entire world on Christmas Eve in 1968.

One of the interesting things about this passage is the Hebrew word translated into English as ‘God’. The word is ‘el-o-heem’, which is actually plural, i.e. it means ‘Gods’.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first is a Hebrew idiom, where the plural is used to emphasise the largeness, greatness, or magnificence of something. A good example of this is the creature called BEHEMOTH (Job 40:15). No-one is quite sure what animal the writer had in mind, but it was obviously an impressive one, as its name is given as plural.

It could be that God is referred to as ‘Gods’ to highlight His greatness and omnipotence.

However, there is another possibility. Look at verse 26:

Here, God is clearly referring to Himself as being more than one. And yet there is only one God.

Is this one of those famous contradictions that some people say the Bible is full of?

No. It’s not a CONTRADICTION. It’s a PARADOX.

A paradox is when two statements, both of which are true, seem to contradict one another.

The truth is that God is one being, but is three distinct persons. This is what the word ‘trinity’ means – tri-unity, or three-in-one.

In another article I will look in more detail at the threeness of God. At present, all I want to do is bring it to our attention so that we can answer the question, ‘who is Jesus Christ?’

The Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, hinted at the Trinity but never made it clear. In the New Testament, however, we can see it clearly stated that the Godhead comprises three individuals:

• God the FATHER, who is God TRANSCENDENT – i.e. He is over, above, and beyond everyone and everything else, including the two other persons of the Godhead;
• God the SON, who is God MANIFEST – i.e. wherever God appears to anyone in any form, it is God the Son, not God the Father;
• God the HOLY SPIRIT, who is God IMMANENT – i.e. God at work in the world, specifically God at work in the lives of His saints, unseen, unobtrusive, yet always there and everywhere.

The passages of scripture quoted at the beginning of this article refer to God the Son, God Manifest, the Word, who became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth (John 1:14).

Son of God …

This passage tells us how the Lord Jesus Christ came to be conceived, and it contains three key indicators of who He is:

1. Jesus did NOT have a human father. Mary was betrothed to Joseph (i.e. they were formally committed to be married, but the wedding had not yet taken place) and she was still a virgin. It was God who miraculously implanted the seed of Jesus in Mary’s womb. In fact, in verse 35 we see all three persons of the Godhead involved in this miracle: the Holy Spirit (God Immanent); God the Father, referred to here as ‘the Host High’ (God Transcendent); and God the Son (God Manifest).
2. The name ‘Jesus’ was given by God Himself, not by Joseph or Mary.
3. Jesus will inherit “the throne of his father David”, so that He will reign over the house of Jacob (another name for Israel) for ever, and His kingdom shall never end.

Both Joseph (Matthew 1:6) and Mary (Luke 3:31) were descendants of King David, the greatest of Israel’s kings, and the one who united the Israeli nation following years of chaos and division. God had promised to David that his son would be a son to God, and that God would be his father (2 Samuel 7:12-16). This prophecy was fulfilled in part through David’s immediate son, Solomon, but the people of Israel always believed that God was speaking of another son, one yet to come, whose “throne would be established for ever”.

There a number of references in the Old Testament to this coming king, this son of David. For example:

In verse 2 it speaks about the Lord and His ANOINTED. The term ‘the Lord’s Anointed’ always refers to the king (e.g. 1 Samuel 16:6; Lamentations 4:20). The Hebrew word translated ‘anointed’ is pronounced ‘maw-shee'-akh’, and gives us our English word ‘messiah’. The equivalent word in Greek, the language of the New Testament, is ‘christos’, which in English is rendered ‘christ’.

The name ‘Jesus’ is the Greek form of the Hebrew ‘ye-ho-shoo-ah’ or ‘ye-shoo-ah’, which we would pronounce as ‘Joshua’. Its meaning is ‘Jehovah is salvation’ (where ‘Jehovah’ represents the covenant name of God).

This means that God Himself is declaring that His virgin-born son is the agent on earth of His plan of salvation, and that this Jesus is the promised Messiah, or Christ, the Anointed One, the King of kings whose throne will endure forever (see Luke 2:25-38).

… and Son of Man

It would be reasonable to assume that, since Jesus was the Son of God, a member of the Godhead, and physically conceived in Mary’s womb by the power of the Holy Spirit, that He would have entered our physical space with all of the powers and privileges of divinity, like some Marvel Comics super-hero.

But that assumption would be wrong.

This is what apostle Paul says about it:

The letter to the Hebrews adds:

From the moment of His conception to the moment of His death, Jesus lived and died as a human being, just like you and me. The two big differences were:

1. He had a calling upon His life, as many other people do, such as the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:5) and the apostle Paul (Galatians 1:15), with the attendant divine empowerment (or ‘anointing’, as it is often called), which enabled Him, among other things, to preach to thousands, to perform miracles, and to rise from the dead (John 10:17-18);
2. He lived without sin. Paul’s assertion that ‘all have sinned’ (Romans 3:23) does not apply to Jesus. He came to save us from our sins. If He himself had been a sinner, His mission would have failed miserably, but it succeeded because He won the victory over sin in His own life.

All of these things Jesus accomplished through FAITH in the power and the grace of God, showing us the way that we, too, ought to live – in faithful obedience, no matter what the personal cost might be.

Hebrews 5:7, quoted above, is probably referring to Christ’s experience in the Garden of Gethsemane on the evening before His crucifixion:

Jesus was not just God pretending to be a man by wearing a human body as a disguise. While He was on the earth, He was human through and through, tempted in ALL points just as you are, yet not yielding to the temptations and not falling into sin, not because He was above sin, but because He was in total, selfless, humble submission to the will of His heavenly Father.

Throughout His three-and-a-half years or so of public ministry, Jesus regularly referred to Himself as ‘the son of man’ and never as ‘the Son of God’. What was the significance of this?

The term ‘son of man’ was used by God Himself when addressing His servant, the prophet Ezekiel (e.g. Ezekiel 2:1,3,6,8). Ezekiel received some of the most stunning visions of any of the prophets, and some of the clearest instructions regarding what God wanted him to do. It would have been very easy for Ezekiel to become puffed up with a sense of his own importance. Perhaps God was helping him to remain humble by addressing him in this way.

Jesus chose to refer to Himself by this nickname. Was He somehow comparing Himself to Ezekiel? Or was He just giving expression to His humility?

Or was He, maybe, associating Himself with another Son of Man, referred to by the prophet Daniel?

As Jesus stood trial before the religious authorities, this allusion was not lost on them:

What do you think about the Christ?

Some time before this, Jesus had been disputing with the religious leaders in Jerusalem. One of their factions were known as the Pharisees. They were strict adherents of the law of Moses and were patiently waiting, with eager expectation, for the Messiah, the Son of David, to come and save the Israeli nation from the oppressive occupation of Rome.

Jesus quoted here from the opening verse of Psalm 110, a psalm that was recognised by the Jewish rabbis as a Messianic psalm – i.e. one which prophesied the coming Messiah (or ‘Christ’ in Greek, the language of the New Testament) - the saviour of the nation of Israel, and the saviour of the world, a King far greater than the great king David.

Let me ask you the same question today. Having read through this article, what do you think about the Christ? Whose son do you believe Him to be?

The New Testament scriptures make it clear that He was the Son of God. If you are able to believe that, then you are well on the way to becoming a Christian. If not, then you still have a little further to go.

Let me leave you with one final scripture, and ask you to meditate upon it: