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CHAPTER 1

When one of my sons graduated from college, it was the tradition at his alma mater to have a baccalaureate service on the night before commencement. Historically, of course, baccalaureate services were established for a minister of the gospel to deliver a sermon. Today, however, unless the institution hosting the baccalaureate service is evangelical, one does not expect a Christian sermon to be preached, and I certainly wasn't expecting such a sermon in this case. As a matter of fact, a Jewish rabbi had been invited to deliver the baccalaureate address, a rabbi I happened to know. He is bright, winsome, and interesting, so I was not surprised to find his address uplifting, practical, and thoughtful. In fact, it is the best I remember; I found that I agreed with everything he said with no exceptions.

As I walked away from that experience, I couldn't help but reflect on the state of much Christian preaching today. It is usually less interesting than the rabbi's preaching, and it often contains nothing with which the rabbi himself would disagree. Many of the sermons preached on TV and radio and in church pulpits are sadly devoid of anything distinctly Christian. They often consist of "common sense" things with which people of good will are generally in agreement. We often simply offer the same practical "how to" wisdom that others offer, except that we make reference to a Bible story or a Bible truth. My friend the rabbi also uses stories and principles from both the Old Testament and the New Testament, and he does it exceedingly well. So what should be distinctive about Christian preaching?

Christian preaching is fundamentally about Jesus Christ and what he has done to redeem his people. The gospel proclaims him. The gospel glorifies God the Father by glorifying Christ. If we misunderstand or misinterpret who Christ is and what Christ did, we endanger our eternal salvation. At the heart of The Gospel Coalition's Confessional Statement, therefore, is our declaration concerning Jesus Christ and his great work of redemption. This is at the heart of what we teach, preach, and counsel.

Christ, the Eternal Son

"We believe that, moved by love and in obedience to his Father ..." From the beginning, our Confessional Statement addresses this question: "Why would Jesus Christ do what he did?" What we learn from the Bible is that there is only one explanation: Jesus Christ loves us, not because of who we are but because of who he is. There is no way to understand Jesus Christ apart from love. Love motivated everything he did. If we cannot receive love, we cannot receive Christ. If we cannot give love, we cannot serve Christ. The grand motive behind all of his words and deeds, behind his great sacrifice for us, is his undeserved, unmerited, unmitigated love for us.

What makes this love all the more amazing is that before Jesus Christ came to earth, he existed as the second person of the Godhead, the eternal Son of God. John says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). John also calls him the "One and Only" son (John 1:14). He was "before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light" (Nicene Creed). From all eternity he was perfectly happy, coequal with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. He was not in need of friends, for he had intimate, infinitely satisfying communion with his Father and thus enjoyed all the pleasures of eternal bliss.

The love that moved him to leave his blessed environment and come to this earth is a love he shares with his Father from all eternity — for us! Jesus said that he came to do his Father's will, and his Father's will is that his people should be saved. The Son of God shares completely in that loving intention — a love so pure, so powerful, and so gracious that men and angels can never comprehend it.

Christ, Our Humble Savior

"... the eternal Son became human ..."

One of the most remarkable characteristics of Jesus Christ is his humility. One cannot fathom the depth of humility that is required to leave heaven's throne to be born on earth of a poor peasant woman. Thousands of hymns and poems have been written in an attempt to capture this amazing reality.

Thou Who wast rich beyond all splendor,
Paul joins the chorus when he says: "Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross!" (Phil. 2:6–8).

This humility was necessary for human beings to be saved from our plight. Our circumstances were such that we could not be saved by human effort. What Jesus Christ did for us, we could never do for ourselves. The only way we could ever be rescued was for God to condescend to our miserable condition in our broken world. He had to come and get us. And that's exactly what he did.

The life of Jesus Christ can be divided into two historical sequences: his humiliation and his exaltation. When we speak of his humiliation, we usually include his incarnation, his perfect submission to the law of God, and his suffering, death, and burial. One can see this sequence in our Confessional Statement. Each of these aspects of his humiliation is essential to the redemption of God's people, and, therefore, it is right and good for us to believe these things, to contemplate them, to celebrate them, and to live in light of them.

His Incarnation

"... the Word became flesh, fully God and fully human being, one Person in two natures. The man Jesus, the promised Messiah of Israel, was conceived through the miraculous agency of the Holy Spirit, and was born of the virgin Mary."

The conception and birth of Jesus Christ is not just unusual or miraculous but rather sui generis (of its own kind; unique). To be sure, in the Old Testament there are some highly unusual conceptions and births, the chief of which would be Abraham (ninety-nine years of age) and Sarah (ninety years of age) giving birth to Isaac. There are also the peculiar births of Samuel (1 Samuel 1), Samson (Judges 13), and John the Baptist (Luke 1), but all these, as well as every other birth that has ever occurred, involved a human father and a human mother.

Only in the case of Jesus of Nazareth was a human being conceived and born of only one human parent and God. Through the years, and even today, some have said that the doctrine of the virgin birth is nice but not necessary, something we should not fight over, or about which we should not get too exercised. On the contrary, the great theologian Athanasius (AD 296–373) taught that the full humanity of Christ was necessary because God could save only what Christ became, so if Christ were not fully human, humans could not be fully saved. Anselm (AD 1033–1109) taught that Christ must be fully God in order for his sacrifice to be sufficient for all God's people; otherwise one man could, at best, be substituted for only one other person.

We still believe this today, not primarily because Anselm and Athanasius taught it, but because Matthew's and Luke's God-breathed writings teach it (Matthew 1; Luke 1–2). How can we understand the depth of Christ's humility in the incarnation? If Bill and Melinda Gates left their palatial home on the West Coast and took up residence in the middle of the Kibera slums in Nairobi, Kenya, they still would not touch the level of self-denial that Jesus endured to take on our flesh. What a loving Savior, indeed!

His Perfect Submission to the Father

"He perfectly obeyed his heavenly Father, lived a sinless life, performed miraculous signs ..."

Not too long ago, my church, Second Presbyterian in Memphis, Tennessee, gave my wife and me a sabbatical, and we spent four weeks traveling about. On each Sunday we visited a different church, and I was shocked to hear preachers on two consecutive Sundays, hundreds of miles apart, make apologies to their congregations for Christ's impatience, testiness, and insensitivity. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Who do these preachers think they are? Do they understand the implications of their heresy? Do they realize that if Christ were a sinner of any type or degree that he would have been a "blemished" sacrifice, unworthy to atone for our sins?

But, praise God, the Bible declares that he is a worthy sacrifice for us because, although tempted in every way as we are, he never sinned — in thought, word, or deed. Not only is his life a worthy sacrifice for our sins, but also the Bible teaches that he willingly put himself under the law, in order that he might accomplish for all of us what our first human father, Adam, failed to do. Jesus was "born under the law" (Gal. 4:4–7), circumcised (Luke 2), parented (Luke 2), and baptized by John (John 1) in order to fulfill all righteousness on our behalf.

His Suffering, Death, and Burial

"... was crucified under Pontius Pilate ..."

Jesus suffered many things during his three years of public ministry: the demands of the poor and the lame and the bereaved, the contempt of the religious leaders, the unbelief of his own disciples, and the brutality of the Roman occupiers in Israel. But his greatest suffering came at the hands of his own Father. The night before his crucifixion in the garden of Gethsemane, under great stress and anguish, he prayed, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done" (Luke 22:42). And then, from the cross, in fulfillment of the messianic psalm (Psalm 22), Jesus cried out to his Father, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46)

Why would God allow, even foreordain, such a seeming travesty of justice? (Acts 2:22–23). The Qur'an proposes an answer to that question: Jesus did not actually die. It was someone else who died (Judas) who merely appeared to be Jesus. The Qur'an conceives that a righteous prophet like Jesus could never have been so humiliated; God would not allow it. But — amazing thing — God not only allowed it, but decreed it from all eternity (1 Pet. 1:19–20). Jesus, out of love for us, suffered the ultimate indignity of being whipped and crucified like a common criminal. Amazing love! How can it be that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

Christ, Our Exalted Lord

One can only imagine the quiet desperation of the disciples on the Saturday following the crucifixion of Jesus. They had believed that he was the long-awaited Messiah. But everybody knows that messiahs reign; and to reign, they must be alive. Jesus was now dead. His death contradicted everything they heard and saw in him for the three years they traveled with him.

They served with him, ate with him, slept with him, and prayed with him, and they never heard a sinful word, saw a bad attitude, or witnessed lack of love toward the needy, and they never saw him stumped by clergy and scholars. They saw him calm the wind and the waves, cast out demons, heal the blind, and even raise the dead. They called him "the Christ," and he assured them that the Holy Spirit had revealed that truth to them. Everything pointed to his messiahship. How could he be dead? A "dead messiah" is an oxymoron, like "fried ice."

On the Sunday morning following his Friday crucifixion, some of the women made their way to Jesus' tomb in order to care for and honor his remains with spices. They became the first known human witnesses to the greatest reversal of fortune ever experienced by any human being. Jesus had been dead. He was now alive! What theologians call the exaltation of Christ had been inaugurated. The exaltation of Christ consists of his resurrection, his ascension, his session (sitting) at God's right hand, and his glorious return.

His Resurrection

"... arose bodily from the dead on the third day ..."

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the crowning event of all God's mighty works of redemption — more magnificent than the dividing of the Red Sea, more awesome than the quaking of Mount Sinai, more tremendous than the tumbling of Jericho's walls, more impressive than David's triumph over Goliath. The future of the created order rests upon this one great act of God. The hope of every true believer rests solidly on the historical reality of this event.

The resurrection of Christ was not, as some claim, just an idea, not a "spiritual resurrection" of sorts, but a bodily resurrection of the same body that had agonized and died on Calvary's tree. This is what the early disciples powerfully, courageously, and relentlessly proclaimed: "God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ" (Acts 2:36). The disciples took great joy in the fact that their Lord Jesus had been completely vindicated and most highly exalted "and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead" (Rom. 1:4).

His Ascension

"... and ascended into heaven ..."

The disciples were joyful not only because they knew that Jesus is alive, but because they watched him ascend into heaven (Luke 24; Acts 1). By the cross and empty tomb, he had conquered all his and our enemies, and now, before their eyes, returns home as King. No longer could he be subject to the pride of the Pharisees, the plots of the Sadducees, or the cruelties of the Romans. No longer would he be manhandled by Caiaphas, Pilate, and their minions — or by the Devil himself. He ascended to the right hand of God, forever safe, forever secure, forever happy, forever King.

Look, ye saints, the sight is glorious:
His Session

"As the mediatorial King, he is seated at the right hand of God the Father, exercising in heaven and on earth all of God's sovereignty, and is our High Priest and righteous Advocate."

Some years ago I was leading a prayer group of pastors, missionaries, and their spouses. Before we prayed, I asked them to close their eyes and simply imagine Jesus Christ. After a few moments I asked them to share with the group what they "saw" in their imaginations. One person saw him loving and blessing the little children; one saw him teaching the multitudes; one saw him multiplying the loaves and fishes; one saw him praying in the garden of Gethsemane.

Upon reflection, we realized something significant (besides the fact that most of our images came from the simple pictures in an old King James family Bible): all our pictures of him were pre-ascension. We were not thinking of Jesus as he is, but as he once was. The exaltation of Jesus Christ is not only a historical event, but also a present reality. Jesus is no longer clothed in perishable flesh, but in imperishable glory. When the apostle John, in a vision, sees Jesus as he is, John falls down as though dead. Only God himself can revive him (Rev. 1:17).

This overwhelmingly radiant, exalted Christ is the Christ whom John came to know, love, worship, and serve. Christ now reigns as mediatorial King, interceding for us, ruling over us, and advocating for us. He has taken our flesh into the councils of the triune God where we are perfectly represented and continually protected. We, therefore, have nothing to fear but God himself (Matt. 10:28).

His Glorious Return

Christ will return in glory to consummate all things and to take his rightful place as King and exalted Lord, in whom and under whom the entire cosmos is unified in endless praise (Eph. 1:10).

Christ, Our Representative and Substitute

"We believe that by his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus Christ acted as our representative and substitute. He did this so that in him we might become the righteousness of God ..."

We would have sufficient cause to praise and adore Jesus Christ if all we knew of him were the things already discussed in this booklet: his eternal deity, his loving obedience to his Father, his humility, and his unrivaled glory at the right hand of God. The Bible, however, gives us even more personal reasons to love and serve him. Everything he did, he did for us.

He was born into this world for us (Gal. 4:4–7); he was crucified for our sins (Gal. 3:13); he was raised for our justification (Rom. 4:25); he ascended to heaven to prepare a place for us (John 14:12). We learn in the Scriptures that the way Christ did this was to become our substitute so that he could do in our place what we could not do for ourselves. This concept is at the very heart of the Christian faith, and without it, the gospel loses its unique power.

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Excerpted from "Christ's Redemption"
by .
Copyright © 2011 The Gospel Coalition.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
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