The Work of Christ
1. Question: "Was Jesus a revolutionary?" Answer: One of the strangest doctrines of the so-called "new left" movement of recent decades was the idea that the early Christians were actually revolutionaries. The so-called hippies used to point out the similarity of their long hair, their "Jesus shoes," their nomadic life style, their persecution by the "establishment," and other such things, to analogous aspects in the life of Christ. They maintained that they, like Christ, were opposed to the society of their day and wanted to usher in a better social order.
Actually, this idea (like all the other ideas of the "new" left) was not new at all. Socialists and Communists have been claiming for more than a hundred years that Jesus was a true socialist and that the early church was really a communistic society. Much stranger and more disturbing than the claim itself, which has been refuted many times over the past century, is that it is now being echoed by many supposed Christians in their rather wistful desire to be "relevant" in this supposedly revolutionary age.
Even evangelical churches and youth organizations in many cases have adopted this technique, thinking somehow that calling Jesus a revolutionary will entice modern young people to accept Him! They forget that "preaching another Jesus, whom we have not preached" (2 Corinthians 11:4) is not really preaching Christ at all, but rather a self-manufactured pseudo-Christ, in whom there is no true salvation.
The image of Jesus as a revolutionary is not at all the picture given in the New Testament Scriptures. In the first place, His clothing and physical appearance were no different from those of the other people of His time. He and His disciples did not try to set themselves apart from the rest of society in this respect, as do many of today's radicals. The length of His hair is completely unknown to us (despite the supposed portraits of Him painted during the Middle Ages which picture Him with long hair), but it was certainly short enough to distinguish Him clearly as a man, rather than a woman. The Bible says, "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment, for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God" (Deuteronomy 22:5). Furthermore, it says: "If a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him" (1 Corinthians 11:14). The Lord Jesus came "not to destroy God's law but to fulfill it" (Matthew 5:17).
It is true that He was persecuted by the religious and political leaders, but this was hardly because He was a radical or rebel! As a matter of fact, the Jewish leaders themselves were anxious to throw off the Roman rule and were thus the real revolutionists of the day. The history of the time indicates a complex network of plots and abortive revolutions, but Christ and His followers had no part in any of this.
On the contrary, He continually urged His listeners to be good citizens, submitting to the government and obeying the law. "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's," He said (Matthew 22:21).
Rather than demanding their "rights," He instructed His followers: "Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods, ask them not again.... But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again" (Luke 6:30, 35). He lived in a time and place where slavery itself was a significant social institution, but He never spoke against it. Later many of the early Christians were from the slave population, and, rather than counselling agitation and rebellion, the Apostle Paul said: "Let us many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honour" (1 Timothy 6:1). Slavery eventually was abolished through the moral influence of Christianity, not by means of civil disobedience and revolution stirred up by the Christians.
Though Jesus was surely concerned with man's physical needs as well as his spiritual needs, He knew that the latter were infinitely more important and that in this present world, controlled as it is by sinful man and by Satan himself, neither poverty nor war could ever be eliminated. He counselled the rich young ruler, for example, to "sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor" (Mark 10:21), but He also cautioned that "the poor ye always have with you" (John 12:8). Thus, while Christian charity to the deserving needy (note 2 Thessalonians 3:10—"... if any would not work, neither should he eat") is commanded, yet He recognized that state-enforced welfare projects would always be futile.
Similarly, though He warned "all they that take the sword (that is, in aggression, either in warfare or for personal gain) shall perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52), He also said: "When ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be" (Mark 13:7).
Thus, although the Lord Jesus Christ did not at all approve or condone the evils of this present world, not once did He ever suggest either violent or non-violent rebellion against it! He said rather, at the very time when this world-system was actually condemning Him to death: "My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight" (John 18:36).
He came, in fact, "not to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved" (John 3:17). He came not to provide "bread and circuses" for the world's peoples, but rather salvation from sin and hell. "I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world" (John 6:51).
And ultimately, because He died and rose again, the world itself shall be transformed! When the Lord Jesus, now in heaven, comes back again, then "the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Romans 8:21). Christ came, not to stir up rebellion and revolution, but to bring salvation and regeneration to all who put their trust in Him!
2. Question: "If Jesus was God, how could He die?" Answer: The mystery of the divine-human nature of Christ is beyond our finite understanding. As the Son of Man, He was subject to His parents as a youth, engaged in a carpenter's trade, had to eat and sleep like other men, and was subject to pain and suffering, and finally to death, like other men.
But as the Son of God, He was born of a virgin mother, performed mighty miracles of creation, even controlling the wind and the sea, and finally conquered death itself when He left the empty tomb! As man He was "in all points tempted like as we are" (Hebrews 4:15), but as God, He "knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21). As man, He was unjustly "crucified and slain by wicked hands," but as the Lamb of God, He was "delivered" (to be put to death) by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God" (Acts 2:23).
The Bible simply presents as fact the great truth that Jesus Christ was both God and man. It does not try to explain how this could be, because it is inexplicable. It must be apprehended on faith alone, and true Christians have always found full rest and peace in this reality. Those of a skeptical and rationalist bent have always made this doctrine a stumbling block. The first heretics, the Gnostics, said that Christ was only divine, rejecting His humanity. Modern-day skeptics, on the other hand, reject His deity. The former said that, since He was God, He never really died on the cross. The latter say that, since He died, He could not have been God. But the Bible says that He was God and that He died!
One should remember, of course, that physical death is not the end of existence. When Christ's body died, God did not die in the sense that He ceased to exist. In the Spirit, He was intensely active (note 1 Peter 3:18; Ephesians 4:9, etc.). The death of His physical body (and even this was only for three days) was merely a change of state, as it were, from the limitations of the flesh to the freedom of the spirit. When He returned to His body, triumphant over death and hell (Revelation 1:18), He empowered even His physical body with full freedom from the limitations imposed by time and space, and the principle of decay and death, so that He now lives forever in His glorified body.
However, the most important aspect of the death of the Son of God was not His physical death, but His spiritual death, which was fully accomplished on the cross before He ever "yielded up the ghost" (Matthew 27:50) physically. For three awful hours darkness engulfed the whole land during the very middle of the day, as "He who knew no sin was made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Corinthians 5:21). Although He "did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth," nevertheless, He bore "our sins in His own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:22, 24). He became the very personification of evil, bearing the guilt of all the sins of all men of all time, enduring the punishment of the outraged holiness and perfect justice of the Creator of every man. Though He had always been in perfect communion with His Father, He now had to be utterly forsaken by God (Matthew 27:46), and allowed to drink to the very dregs the awful "cup" (Matthew 26:39) of God's infinite wrath.
This, of course, is the essence of what hell will be—that is, the state of being utterly forsaken by God. Those who reject the offer of forgiveness through the atoning death of Christ, and who thus continue to retain the guilt of their own sins, will finally be separated forever from the presence and power of God (2 Thessalonians 1:8, 9). Hell is an eternal existence far removed from all evidences of God's presence—an eternity of darkness, wickedness, turmoil, pain, and wretchedness, the just destiny of those who willfully reject God's gift, in Christ, of light, holiness, peace, immortality and joy.
In the most real sense, therefore, the Lord Jesus endured hell itself as our substitute, when He was forsaken by God for those three terrible hours on the cross. Thus, He could give the great victory cry: "It is finished!" (Luke 23:46; John 19:30), just before He dismissed the spirit, from His tortured body, back to the presence of His Father.
Here, once again, we confront the mystery of the divine-human nature of Christ, the "hypostatic union," as theologians have called it. Christ, as man, suffered and died, "more than any man" (Isaiah 52:14), but as God He could endure infinite and eternal punishment in a finite time and specific place, thus satisfying forever the righteousness of God and manifesting to perfection His redeeming love.
Though the "hypostatic union" is a mystery and a paradox, there is more mental, as well as spiritual, rest in accepting it by faith than there is in trying to explain away the overwhelming evidences of both His deity and His humanity. Similar paradoxes abound in His creation, perhaps even intentionally, as a reflection of their Creator.
Thus, "Space," like Christ, is both finite and infinite. "Time," like Christ, is both temporal and eternal. "Matter" is related to "Energy" in terms of the motion of Light, through Space, in Time, and "Light" is both a "wave" motion and a "particle" motion. The processes of nature seem both "deterministic" in terms of natural laws and yet "indeterministic" in their ultimate nature, paralleling the paradox of "predestination" versus "free choice and responsibility" in human experience. All of these and similar paradoxes we accept in terms of experience, even though we cannot reconcile them with our limited capacity of understanding.
Thus, too, the Christian believer, though he does not understand it all, can rejoice in the historical and experimental reality that God Himself, in Christ, has died for his sins and now lives forever as his eternal Savior.
3. Question: "Who was responsible for the death of Christ?" Answer: The crucifixion of Jesus Christ, by normal human standards of right and wrong, seems to have been the greatest miscarriage of justice in all the history of the world. In spite of the fact that he was guilty of no crime, against either individuals or society, and was in fact absolutely sinless even in the sight of God Himself, He was nevertheless subjected to an increasing crescendo of indignities and tortures, and finally to the most agonizing and cruel form of capital punishment ever invented by man. Surely, if there is such a thing as reason and morality in the universe, those responsible for such a crime ought to be recognized and brought to account.
A popular myth among many nominal "Christians," for two thousand years, has been that the Jews were responsible, and this has served as one excuse for many of the waves of persecution which the Jews have endured over the centuries. And indeed the leaders and representatives of the Jewish nation at the time of Christ did play a very definite part in the proceedings, though this is certainly no justification for charging a whole people with "deicide." The "chief priests and the scribes and the chief of the people sought to destroy him" (Luke 19:47). They arranged for His betrayal and arrest (Luke 22:2-6, 52) and called the Sanhedrin together for a mock trial to condemn Him (Mark 14:53-64). Not having authority to enforce the death penalty themselves, they persuaded the Roman governor, Pilate, to send Him to be crucified (Mark 15:14). When he demurred, they threatened to accuse him as an enemy of Caesar and palliated his conscience by saying, "His blood be on us, and on our children" (Matthew 27:25).
Though the Jewish leaders instigated the murder, it was, after all, the Gentiles who actually carried it out. Pilate "delivered Him to be crucified" (Matthew 27:26), and the Roman soldiers drove the spikes and thrust the spear. These were the official representatives of the greatest Gentile nation in the world at that time, the mighty Roman Empire. Thus both Jewish and Gentile officialdom were directly involved in the crucifixion of Christ, even though this in itself does not directly implicate either Jews or Gentiles as individuals.
There were also spiritual beings involved. "Then entered Satan into Judas" (Luke 22:3). The Evil One not only possessed and controlled Judas the betrayer, but undoubtedly also was behind the scenes in many of the other activities of that last week. Surrounding the cross itself were the principalities and powers of darkness (Luke 22:53; Colossians 2:14, 15).
But even this is not the whole picture. Jesus said to Pilate: "Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above" (John 19:11). The whole power of the Jewish and Gentile worlds, and even the might of Satan himself, could not suffice to place Jesus on the cross had not God Himself ordained it! The early church, in its confession to God, said: "For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, For to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before (that is, literally, 'predestinated') to be done" (Acts 4:27, 28).
Thus, although the Jews and the Gentiles, as well as the hosts of Satan, were directly responsible for the death of Christ, yet His heavenly Father was the One who permitted and, indeed, ordained it!
But even this is not all. The Lord Jesus was not forced by His Father, any more than He was forced by His enemies, to go to the cross. When His disciples tried to prevent His capture in the garden, He said: "Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and He shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?" (Matthew 26:53, 54). He said: "No man taketh (my life) from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again" (John 10:18).
It seems therefore that, in the final analysis, Christ Himself was responsible for His own death. He deliberately chose to suffer and die—and to rise again!
Now, He is Himself perfect wisdom, and in this great sacrifice of Himself is bound up all the meaning of life, as well as all the holiness and justice and love of God. "But God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). "Christ crucified" is, to them who believe, "the power of God, and the wisdom of God" (1 Corinthians 1:23, 24).
"Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3). He "tasted death for every man" (Hebrews 2:9). The Apostle Paul said: "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live: ...I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20).
Thus it finally comes to this: each one of us, individually, is responsible for the death of Christ. It was the sins of each man that nailed Him to the cross. Each of us has sinned willfully, in greater or lesser degree, against the God of creation and holiness, and therefore each of us deserved to die and spend eternity away from God in hell. But the Lord Jesus loved us so much that He was willing—even anxious—to suffer the judgment of death and hell as our substitute, in order that we might be saved. And God the Father was willing to offer His only begotten Son as the sacrifice for our sins, in order to satisfy both the demands of perfect justice and the compulsions of perfect love.
The forgiveness and peace, both temporal and eternal, thus purchased for us by Christ on His cross are now available freely and fully to each one who will acknowledge and receive Him, by simple trust, as his personal Lord and Savior.
4. Question: "How do we know Christ really rose from the dead?" Answer: The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the central fact of the Christian faith. As Paul wrote: "If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). The entire structure of Christianity—and indeed of any hope for eternal life and for any meaning to human existence—stands or falls with Christ's resurrection.
Death is man's greatest enemy, and every man, no matter how great, eventually dies. The whole world—physical, biological and social—is under the reign of death, imposed by God's Curse on man's dominion when he first rejected God's Word and brought sin into the world (Genesis 3:17). But Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God and the world's promised Redeemer, has conquered death, bearing the Curse Himself (Galatians 3:13), and thus opening the way to God and everlasting life.
The fact of His resurrection is the most important event of history and therefore, appropriately, is the most certain fact in all history. It is supported by a wider variety of testimonial and other evidence than any other historical event that has ever taken place since the world began. It is therefore mandatory that every individual must face the issue of the claims of Christ on his own life and service.
The very fact of Christianity is proof in itself. The preaching of the apostles (note Acts 2:22-36; 3:14-15; 4:10-12; 10:36-43; 13:26-39; 17:31; 26:22, 23; etc.) always centered on the resurrection. "With great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus" (Acts 4:33), and this was the message that won thousands to faith in Christ and indeed, as their enemies alleged, "turned the world upside down" (Acts 17:6). The first Christians were devout Jews, accustomed to worshipping the Lord faithfully on the seventh day of the week, but now they began meeting instead on the first day, because that was the day of the resurrection. Similarly, their greatest annual observance was the Passover, but this soon became Easter for them, when they realized that Christ had fulfilled the Passover, dying as the Lamb of God, and then rising again from the dead. These institutions—observance of the Lord's Day and Easter, as well as the Lord's Supper, and even the Christian Church itself—can be traced back to the apostolic period, and only the fact of the resurrection can account for them.
There can be no doubt whatever that the apostles and early Christians, by the tens of thousands, believed and preached the resurrection. Is it possible they could have been wrong and that their faith was based on some wicked deception or some fanatical delusion?
They certainly had every reason to consider this possibility. Most of them suffered severely for their faith, losing their possessions and often their lives in the great Jewish and Roman persecutions of the first century. They would hardly have persisted in their testimony unless they had been firmly persuaded, after thorough consideration of all the facts, that their Savior had conquered death!
They had the witness of the apostles, of course, and also of the "five hundred brethren at once" (1 Corinthians 15:6), all of whom had seen the Lord Jesus after His resurrection, and they were convinced their testimony was true.
Some have suggested that these post-resurrection appearances of Christ were only visions or hallucinations, or perhaps a case of mistaken identity. But visions and hallucinations don't occur repeatedly like this, to individuals and to groups, indoors and outdoors. And certainly the disciples could recognize the One who had been with them every day for more than three years.
As a matter of fact, when they saw Him in the upper room after the resurrection, they themselves first "supposed that they had seen a spirit" (Luke 24:37). But then He invited them to touch Him and especially to note the nail scars in His hands and feet. Then He ate dinner with them, and they could no longer doubt that it was Jesus Himself, in the same body, as they had always known Him.
Some have suggested that He never really died, but only fainted on the cross, thus illustrating the absurd lengths to which men will go to avoid facing facts. The Roman soldiers pronounced Him dead, the mixture of blood and water had poured forth from His wounded side, He was bound up in a great weight of grave clothes, and was sealed in a tomb for three days. A grievously wounded and weakened, almost-dead Jesus could never have inspired His disciples to the heights of courage and power which they soon began to manifest. Even if He had only swooned on the cross, He must have died soon after as a defeated and now-impotent leader.
In addition to the ten or more post-resurrection appearances of the Lord, there is the evidence of the empty tomb. The tomb had been sealed with the Roman seal and was guarded, under pain of death, by a detachment of Roman soldiers, and a great stone was rolled in front of its entrance. Nevertheless on the first Easter morning, the soldiers fled in terror as a mighty angel rolled away the stone, and the body had vanished from the grave, with the grave clothes still as they had lain before He had passed out of them.
The empty tomb has never been explained, except by the bodily resurrection. If the body actually were still there, or in any other place still accessible to the Jews or Romans, they would certainly have produced it as a sure means of immediately quenching the spreading flame of the Christian faith. If the apostles or other friends of Jesus somehow had the body themselves, and thus knew He was dead, they could never have preached His resurrection as they did, knowing it would surely mean persecution for them and possibly death. No man will willingly sacrifice his life for something he knows to be a lie!
Thus we have the certain testimony of the empty tomb and the many appearances of Christ after His resurrection, further supported by the uniform teaching of Scripture, innumerable references to it in the non-Biblical literature of the early Christians, the institutions of the Church, the Lord's Day and Easter, the promises and prophecies of the Old Testament, as well as the very necessity to bring real meaning and confidence into human life, all as proof of the fact of the bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead.
There is no other fact of history supported by such an array of evidence as this! And the final evidence is the experiential reality of the assurance of salvation and eternal life, enjoyed by each person who has ever placed his personal faith in the living Christ. "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:9).
5. Question: "Where is Jesus now?" Answer: Jesus is not, like other men who lived in the past, somewhere in a grave. He is unique among men, in that, though He died and was buried, He rose again! His resurrection was not in any sense a spiritual resurrection, because His spirit never died! It was His body that was raised, leaving an empty tomb. "Handle me and see," He told His astonished disciples; "a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have" (Luke 24:39).
His resurrection body, though truly a physical body, was also a spiritual body, controlled and activated by His spirit, no longer subject to the infirmities and limitations of the flesh. He could now instantly transport Himself to any place directed by His spirit—even from earth to heaven (John 20:17).
After clearly demonstrating the fact of His resurrection to His disciples, "to whom he showed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days," He ascended up to heaven (Acts 1:3). "And while they looked stedfastly toward heaven as He went up" (Acts 1:10), they received a promise from angels standing by. "This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11).
Thus, since He ascended bodily into heaven, He will some day return bodily from heaven. This can only mean that He is now bodily in heaven!
And this in turn means that heaven is a real, physical place, existing somewhere in this physical universe. Jesus, in fact, had said: "I go to prepare a place for you" (John 14:2). The place which He is now preparing is described in Revelation 21:2. "1 John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of Heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." This passage is not a description of heaven; rather it describes a city coming down out of heaven, to the earth. God's throne is itself in the midst of the city. "And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it" (Revelation 22:3).
Somewhere, right now, far out beyond the starry heavens, too far to be observed by man's puny telescopes or space vehicles but quite real nonetheless, exists a "city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God" (Hebrews 11:10). In this city are abiding the departed spirits of all those whose bodies are "asleep in Christ" in their graves. These are the ones who are now "absent from the body and present with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:1).
Some day, probably very soon, the Lord Jesus will once again leave His throne in the heavenly Jerusalem and return to earth. This "coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" will be "with all his saints" (1 Thessalonians 3:13). When He "shall descend from heaven," the "dead in Christ shall rise first," then "we which are alive," and all—both the reunited spirits and bodies of those resurrected from the graves, and the immortalized bodies of those then living—will "meet the Lord in the air" (1 Thessalonians 4:16, 17). They will all then "appear before the judgment seat of Christ" (2 Corinthians 5:10). This judgment throne may well be the same as the "throne being set in heaven" (that is, now, the atmospheric heaven) of Revelation 4:2, indicating that the holy city may then have come down to a point near the earth itself, there to remain as a sort of a stationary (or orbiting) satellite until the end of the great tribulation (Revelation 7:14) and the millennium (Revelation 21:1). Finally, it will descend to the new earth itself, there to remain forever (Revelation 22:5).
At this moment, therefore, the Lord Jesus is in the heaven of God's throne, a real physical place somewhere in His created universe, but "far above all heavens" (Ephesians 4:10), also called "the third heaven" and "paradise" (2 Corinthians 12:2, 4).
In numerous Scriptures, in fact, Jesus is said now to be "sitting on the right hand of God" (Colossians 3:1). In fact, there are no less than 21 distinct references in the Bible to the presence of Christ at the right hand of the Father! This remarkable fact has great significance, and a study of the passages will show that they are delineating two important aspects of Christ's present activity in this location.
The first such occurrence is in Psalm 16, the great psalm of Christ's resurrection, where Christ speaks prophetically: "In thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore" (Psalm 16:11). In this passage, obviously the emphasis is on the access and joyous fellowship which presence at the Father's right hand entails. The second occurrence is in Psalm 110:1: "The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool." This chapter speaks of the invincible power to be wielded over His enemies because of His position at God's right hand.
All the other occurrences of this phrase are in the New Testament, and all emphasize one or both of these two aspects of Christ's present position. Thus, He is "the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power" (Mark 14:62), able to exercise all necessary power on behalf of His own. "That ye may know... the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places, Far above all principality and power, and might, and dominion" (Ephesians 1:18-21).
But His presence at the Father's right hand is also a token of perfect fellowship and immediate access to the Father, and it is there that He continually intercedes for those who trust Him. "It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us" (Romans 8:34). "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous" (1 John 2:1).
For all who have received Him by faith as Lord and Savior, therefore, Jesus Christ is "such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens" (Hebrews 8:1), who is "able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them" (Hebrews 7:25).
The Bible Has the Answer.
Actually, this idea (like all the other ideas of the "new" left) was not new at all. Socialists and Communists have been claiming for more than a hundred years that Jesus was a true socialist and that the early church was really a communistic society. Much stranger and more disturbing than the claim itself, which has been refuted many times over the past century, is that it is now being echoed by many supposed Christians in their rather wistful desire to be "relevant" in this supposedly revolutionary age.
Even evangelical churches and youth organizations in many cases have adopted this technique, thinking somehow that calling Jesus a revolutionary will entice modern young people to accept Him! They forget that "preaching another Jesus, whom we have not preached" (2 Corinthians 11:4) is not really preaching Christ at all, but rather a self-manufactured pseudo-Christ, in whom there is no true salvation.
The image of Jesus as a revolutionary is not at all the picture given in the New Testament Scriptures. In the first place, His clothing and physical appearance were no different from those of the other people of His time. He and His disciples did not try to set themselves apart from the rest of society in this respect, as do many of today's radicals. The length of His hair is completely unknown to us (despite the supposed portraits of Him painted during the Middle Ages which picture Him with long hair), but it was certainly short enough to distinguish Him clearly as a man, rather than a woman. The Bible says, "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment, for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God" (Deuteronomy 22:5). Furthermore, it says: "If a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him" (1 Corinthians 11:14). The Lord Jesus came "not to destroy God's law but to fulfill it" (Matthew 5:17).
It is true that He was persecuted by the religious and political leaders, but this was hardly because He was a radical or rebel! As a matter of fact, the Jewish leaders themselves were anxious to throw off the Roman rule and were thus the real revolutionists of the day. The history of the time indicates a complex network of plots and abortive revolutions, but Christ and His followers had no part in any of this.
On the contrary, He continually urged His listeners to be good citizens, submitting to the government and obeying the law. "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's," He said (Matthew 22:21).
Rather than demanding their "rights," He instructed His followers: "Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods, ask them not again.... But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again" (Luke 6:30, 35). He lived in a time and place where slavery itself was a significant social institution, but He never spoke against it. Later many of the early Christians were from the slave population, and, rather than counselling agitation and rebellion, the Apostle Paul said: "Let us many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honour" (1 Timothy 6:1). Slavery eventually was abolished through the moral influence of Christianity, not by means of civil disobedience and revolution stirred up by the Christians.
Though Jesus was surely concerned with man's physical needs as well as his spiritual needs, He knew that the latter were infinitely more important and that in this present world, controlled as it is by sinful man and by Satan himself, neither poverty nor war could ever be eliminated. He counselled the rich young ruler, for example, to "sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor" (Mark 10:21), but He also cautioned that "the poor ye always have with you" (John 12:8). Thus, while Christian charity to the deserving needy (note 2 Thessalonians 3:10—"... if any would not work, neither should he eat") is commanded, yet He recognized that state-enforced welfare projects would always be futile.
Similarly, though He warned "all they that take the sword (that is, in aggression, either in warfare or for personal gain) shall perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52), He also said: "When ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be" (Mark 13:7).
Thus, although the Lord Jesus Christ did not at all approve or condone the evils of this present world, not once did He ever suggest either violent or non-violent rebellion against it! He said rather, at the very time when this world-system was actually condemning Him to death: "My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight" (John 18:36).
He came, in fact, "not to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved" (John 3:17). He came not to provide "bread and circuses" for the world's peoples, but rather salvation from sin and hell. "I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world" (John 6:51).
And ultimately, because He died and rose again, the world itself shall be transformed! When the Lord Jesus, now in heaven, comes back again, then "the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Romans 8:21). Christ came, not to stir up rebellion and revolution, but to bring salvation and regeneration to all who put their trust in Him!
2. Question: "If Jesus was God, how could He die?" Answer: The mystery of the divine-human nature of Christ is beyond our finite understanding. As the Son of Man, He was subject to His parents as a youth, engaged in a carpenter's trade, had to eat and sleep like other men, and was subject to pain and suffering, and finally to death, like other men.
But as the Son of God, He was born of a virgin mother, performed mighty miracles of creation, even controlling the wind and the sea, and finally conquered death itself when He left the empty tomb! As man He was "in all points tempted like as we are" (Hebrews 4:15), but as God, He "knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21). As man, He was unjustly "crucified and slain by wicked hands," but as the Lamb of God, He was "delivered" (to be put to death) by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God" (Acts 2:23).
The Bible simply presents as fact the great truth that Jesus Christ was both God and man. It does not try to explain how this could be, because it is inexplicable. It must be apprehended on faith alone, and true Christians have always found full rest and peace in this reality. Those of a skeptical and rationalist bent have always made this doctrine a stumbling block. The first heretics, the Gnostics, said that Christ was only divine, rejecting His humanity. Modern-day skeptics, on the other hand, reject His deity. The former said that, since He was God, He never really died on the cross. The latter say that, since He died, He could not have been God. But the Bible says that He was God and that He died!
One should remember, of course, that physical death is not the end of existence. When Christ's body died, God did not die in the sense that He ceased to exist. In the Spirit, He was intensely active (note 1 Peter 3:18; Ephesians 4:9, etc.). The death of His physical body (and even this was only for three days) was merely a change of state, as it were, from the limitations of the flesh to the freedom of the spirit. When He returned to His body, triumphant over death and hell (Revelation 1:18), He empowered even His physical body with full freedom from the limitations imposed by time and space, and the principle of decay and death, so that He now lives forever in His glorified body.
However, the most important aspect of the death of the Son of God was not His physical death, but His spiritual death, which was fully accomplished on the cross before He ever "yielded up the ghost" (Matthew 27:50) physically. For three awful hours darkness engulfed the whole land during the very middle of the day, as "He who knew no sin was made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Corinthians 5:21). Although He "did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth," nevertheless, He bore "our sins in His own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:22, 24). He became the very personification of evil, bearing the guilt of all the sins of all men of all time, enduring the punishment of the outraged holiness and perfect justice of the Creator of every man. Though He had always been in perfect communion with His Father, He now had to be utterly forsaken by God (Matthew 27:46), and allowed to drink to the very dregs the awful "cup" (Matthew 26:39) of God's infinite wrath.
This, of course, is the essence of what hell will be—that is, the state of being utterly forsaken by God. Those who reject the offer of forgiveness through the atoning death of Christ, and who thus continue to retain the guilt of their own sins, will finally be separated forever from the presence and power of God (2 Thessalonians 1:8, 9). Hell is an eternal existence far removed from all evidences of God's presence—an eternity of darkness, wickedness, turmoil, pain, and wretchedness, the just destiny of those who willfully reject God's gift, in Christ, of light, holiness, peace, immortality and joy.
In the most real sense, therefore, the Lord Jesus endured hell itself as our substitute, when He was forsaken by God for those three terrible hours on the cross. Thus, He could give the great victory cry: "It is finished!" (Luke 23:46; John 19:30), just before He dismissed the spirit, from His tortured body, back to the presence of His Father.
Here, once again, we confront the mystery of the divine-human nature of Christ, the "hypostatic union," as theologians have called it. Christ, as man, suffered and died, "more than any man" (Isaiah 52:14), but as God He could endure infinite and eternal punishment in a finite time and specific place, thus satisfying forever the righteousness of God and manifesting to perfection His redeeming love.
Though the "hypostatic union" is a mystery and a paradox, there is more mental, as well as spiritual, rest in accepting it by faith than there is in trying to explain away the overwhelming evidences of both His deity and His humanity. Similar paradoxes abound in His creation, perhaps even intentionally, as a reflection of their Creator.
Thus, "Space," like Christ, is both finite and infinite. "Time," like Christ, is both temporal and eternal. "Matter" is related to "Energy" in terms of the motion of Light, through Space, in Time, and "Light" is both a "wave" motion and a "particle" motion. The processes of nature seem both "deterministic" in terms of natural laws and yet "indeterministic" in their ultimate nature, paralleling the paradox of "predestination" versus "free choice and responsibility" in human experience. All of these and similar paradoxes we accept in terms of experience, even though we cannot reconcile them with our limited capacity of understanding.
Thus, too, the Christian believer, though he does not understand it all, can rejoice in the historical and experimental reality that God Himself, in Christ, has died for his sins and now lives forever as his eternal Savior.
3. Question: "Who was responsible for the death of Christ?" Answer: The crucifixion of Jesus Christ, by normal human standards of right and wrong, seems to have been the greatest miscarriage of justice in all the history of the world. In spite of the fact that he was guilty of no crime, against either individuals or society, and was in fact absolutely sinless even in the sight of God Himself, He was nevertheless subjected to an increasing crescendo of indignities and tortures, and finally to the most agonizing and cruel form of capital punishment ever invented by man. Surely, if there is such a thing as reason and morality in the universe, those responsible for such a crime ought to be recognized and brought to account.
A popular myth among many nominal "Christians," for two thousand years, has been that the Jews were responsible, and this has served as one excuse for many of the waves of persecution which the Jews have endured over the centuries. And indeed the leaders and representatives of the Jewish nation at the time of Christ did play a very definite part in the proceedings, though this is certainly no justification for charging a whole people with "deicide." The "chief priests and the scribes and the chief of the people sought to destroy him" (Luke 19:47). They arranged for His betrayal and arrest (Luke 22:2-6, 52) and called the Sanhedrin together for a mock trial to condemn Him (Mark 14:53-64). Not having authority to enforce the death penalty themselves, they persuaded the Roman governor, Pilate, to send Him to be crucified (Mark 15:14). When he demurred, they threatened to accuse him as an enemy of Caesar and palliated his conscience by saying, "His blood be on us, and on our children" (Matthew 27:25).
Though the Jewish leaders instigated the murder, it was, after all, the Gentiles who actually carried it out. Pilate "delivered Him to be crucified" (Matthew 27:26), and the Roman soldiers drove the spikes and thrust the spear. These were the official representatives of the greatest Gentile nation in the world at that time, the mighty Roman Empire. Thus both Jewish and Gentile officialdom were directly involved in the crucifixion of Christ, even though this in itself does not directly implicate either Jews or Gentiles as individuals.
There were also spiritual beings involved. "Then entered Satan into Judas" (Luke 22:3). The Evil One not only possessed and controlled Judas the betrayer, but undoubtedly also was behind the scenes in many of the other activities of that last week. Surrounding the cross itself were the principalities and powers of darkness (Luke 22:53; Colossians 2:14, 15).
But even this is not the whole picture. Jesus said to Pilate: "Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above" (John 19:11). The whole power of the Jewish and Gentile worlds, and even the might of Satan himself, could not suffice to place Jesus on the cross had not God Himself ordained it! The early church, in its confession to God, said: "For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, For to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before (that is, literally, 'predestinated') to be done" (Acts 4:27, 28).
Thus, although the Jews and the Gentiles, as well as the hosts of Satan, were directly responsible for the death of Christ, yet His heavenly Father was the One who permitted and, indeed, ordained it!
But even this is not all. The Lord Jesus was not forced by His Father, any more than He was forced by His enemies, to go to the cross. When His disciples tried to prevent His capture in the garden, He said: "Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and He shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?" (Matthew 26:53, 54). He said: "No man taketh (my life) from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again" (John 10:18).
It seems therefore that, in the final analysis, Christ Himself was responsible for His own death. He deliberately chose to suffer and die—and to rise again!
Now, He is Himself perfect wisdom, and in this great sacrifice of Himself is bound up all the meaning of life, as well as all the holiness and justice and love of God. "But God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). "Christ crucified" is, to them who believe, "the power of God, and the wisdom of God" (1 Corinthians 1:23, 24).
"Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3). He "tasted death for every man" (Hebrews 2:9). The Apostle Paul said: "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live: ...I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20).
Thus it finally comes to this: each one of us, individually, is responsible for the death of Christ. It was the sins of each man that nailed Him to the cross. Each of us has sinned willfully, in greater or lesser degree, against the God of creation and holiness, and therefore each of us deserved to die and spend eternity away from God in hell. But the Lord Jesus loved us so much that He was willing—even anxious—to suffer the judgment of death and hell as our substitute, in order that we might be saved. And God the Father was willing to offer His only begotten Son as the sacrifice for our sins, in order to satisfy both the demands of perfect justice and the compulsions of perfect love.
The forgiveness and peace, both temporal and eternal, thus purchased for us by Christ on His cross are now available freely and fully to each one who will acknowledge and receive Him, by simple trust, as his personal Lord and Savior.
4. Question: "How do we know Christ really rose from the dead?" Answer: The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the central fact of the Christian faith. As Paul wrote: "If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). The entire structure of Christianity—and indeed of any hope for eternal life and for any meaning to human existence—stands or falls with Christ's resurrection.
Death is man's greatest enemy, and every man, no matter how great, eventually dies. The whole world—physical, biological and social—is under the reign of death, imposed by God's Curse on man's dominion when he first rejected God's Word and brought sin into the world (Genesis 3:17). But Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God and the world's promised Redeemer, has conquered death, bearing the Curse Himself (Galatians 3:13), and thus opening the way to God and everlasting life.
The fact of His resurrection is the most important event of history and therefore, appropriately, is the most certain fact in all history. It is supported by a wider variety of testimonial and other evidence than any other historical event that has ever taken place since the world began. It is therefore mandatory that every individual must face the issue of the claims of Christ on his own life and service.
The very fact of Christianity is proof in itself. The preaching of the apostles (note Acts 2:22-36; 3:14-15; 4:10-12; 10:36-43; 13:26-39; 17:31; 26:22, 23; etc.) always centered on the resurrection. "With great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus" (Acts 4:33), and this was the message that won thousands to faith in Christ and indeed, as their enemies alleged, "turned the world upside down" (Acts 17:6). The first Christians were devout Jews, accustomed to worshipping the Lord faithfully on the seventh day of the week, but now they began meeting instead on the first day, because that was the day of the resurrection. Similarly, their greatest annual observance was the Passover, but this soon became Easter for them, when they realized that Christ had fulfilled the Passover, dying as the Lamb of God, and then rising again from the dead. These institutions—observance of the Lord's Day and Easter, as well as the Lord's Supper, and even the Christian Church itself—can be traced back to the apostolic period, and only the fact of the resurrection can account for them.
There can be no doubt whatever that the apostles and early Christians, by the tens of thousands, believed and preached the resurrection. Is it possible they could have been wrong and that their faith was based on some wicked deception or some fanatical delusion?
They certainly had every reason to consider this possibility. Most of them suffered severely for their faith, losing their possessions and often their lives in the great Jewish and Roman persecutions of the first century. They would hardly have persisted in their testimony unless they had been firmly persuaded, after thorough consideration of all the facts, that their Savior had conquered death!
They had the witness of the apostles, of course, and also of the "five hundred brethren at once" (1 Corinthians 15:6), all of whom had seen the Lord Jesus after His resurrection, and they were convinced their testimony was true.
Some have suggested that these post-resurrection appearances of Christ were only visions or hallucinations, or perhaps a case of mistaken identity. But visions and hallucinations don't occur repeatedly like this, to individuals and to groups, indoors and outdoors. And certainly the disciples could recognize the One who had been with them every day for more than three years.
As a matter of fact, when they saw Him in the upper room after the resurrection, they themselves first "supposed that they had seen a spirit" (Luke 24:37). But then He invited them to touch Him and especially to note the nail scars in His hands and feet. Then He ate dinner with them, and they could no longer doubt that it was Jesus Himself, in the same body, as they had always known Him.
Some have suggested that He never really died, but only fainted on the cross, thus illustrating the absurd lengths to which men will go to avoid facing facts. The Roman soldiers pronounced Him dead, the mixture of blood and water had poured forth from His wounded side, He was bound up in a great weight of grave clothes, and was sealed in a tomb for three days. A grievously wounded and weakened, almost-dead Jesus could never have inspired His disciples to the heights of courage and power which they soon began to manifest. Even if He had only swooned on the cross, He must have died soon after as a defeated and now-impotent leader.
In addition to the ten or more post-resurrection appearances of the Lord, there is the evidence of the empty tomb. The tomb had been sealed with the Roman seal and was guarded, under pain of death, by a detachment of Roman soldiers, and a great stone was rolled in front of its entrance. Nevertheless on the first Easter morning, the soldiers fled in terror as a mighty angel rolled away the stone, and the body had vanished from the grave, with the grave clothes still as they had lain before He had passed out of them.
The empty tomb has never been explained, except by the bodily resurrection. If the body actually were still there, or in any other place still accessible to the Jews or Romans, they would certainly have produced it as a sure means of immediately quenching the spreading flame of the Christian faith. If the apostles or other friends of Jesus somehow had the body themselves, and thus knew He was dead, they could never have preached His resurrection as they did, knowing it would surely mean persecution for them and possibly death. No man will willingly sacrifice his life for something he knows to be a lie!
Thus we have the certain testimony of the empty tomb and the many appearances of Christ after His resurrection, further supported by the uniform teaching of Scripture, innumerable references to it in the non-Biblical literature of the early Christians, the institutions of the Church, the Lord's Day and Easter, the promises and prophecies of the Old Testament, as well as the very necessity to bring real meaning and confidence into human life, all as proof of the fact of the bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead.
There is no other fact of history supported by such an array of evidence as this! And the final evidence is the experiential reality of the assurance of salvation and eternal life, enjoyed by each person who has ever placed his personal faith in the living Christ. "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:9).
5. Question: "Where is Jesus now?" Answer: Jesus is not, like other men who lived in the past, somewhere in a grave. He is unique among men, in that, though He died and was buried, He rose again! His resurrection was not in any sense a spiritual resurrection, because His spirit never died! It was His body that was raised, leaving an empty tomb. "Handle me and see," He told His astonished disciples; "a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have" (Luke 24:39).
His resurrection body, though truly a physical body, was also a spiritual body, controlled and activated by His spirit, no longer subject to the infirmities and limitations of the flesh. He could now instantly transport Himself to any place directed by His spirit—even from earth to heaven (John 20:17).
After clearly demonstrating the fact of His resurrection to His disciples, "to whom he showed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days," He ascended up to heaven (Acts 1:3). "And while they looked stedfastly toward heaven as He went up" (Acts 1:10), they received a promise from angels standing by. "This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11).
Thus, since He ascended bodily into heaven, He will some day return bodily from heaven. This can only mean that He is now bodily in heaven!
And this in turn means that heaven is a real, physical place, existing somewhere in this physical universe. Jesus, in fact, had said: "I go to prepare a place for you" (John 14:2). The place which He is now preparing is described in Revelation 21:2. "1 John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of Heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." This passage is not a description of heaven; rather it describes a city coming down out of heaven, to the earth. God's throne is itself in the midst of the city. "And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it" (Revelation 22:3).
Somewhere, right now, far out beyond the starry heavens, too far to be observed by man's puny telescopes or space vehicles but quite real nonetheless, exists a "city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God" (Hebrews 11:10). In this city are abiding the departed spirits of all those whose bodies are "asleep in Christ" in their graves. These are the ones who are now "absent from the body and present with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:1).
Some day, probably very soon, the Lord Jesus will once again leave His throne in the heavenly Jerusalem and return to earth. This "coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" will be "with all his saints" (1 Thessalonians 3:13). When He "shall descend from heaven," the "dead in Christ shall rise first," then "we which are alive," and all—both the reunited spirits and bodies of those resurrected from the graves, and the immortalized bodies of those then living—will "meet the Lord in the air" (1 Thessalonians 4:16, 17). They will all then "appear before the judgment seat of Christ" (2 Corinthians 5:10). This judgment throne may well be the same as the "throne being set in heaven" (that is, now, the atmospheric heaven) of Revelation 4:2, indicating that the holy city may then have come down to a point near the earth itself, there to remain as a sort of a stationary (or orbiting) satellite until the end of the great tribulation (Revelation 7:14) and the millennium (Revelation 21:1). Finally, it will descend to the new earth itself, there to remain forever (Revelation 22:5).
At this moment, therefore, the Lord Jesus is in the heaven of God's throne, a real physical place somewhere in His created universe, but "far above all heavens" (Ephesians 4:10), also called "the third heaven" and "paradise" (2 Corinthians 12:2, 4).
In numerous Scriptures, in fact, Jesus is said now to be "sitting on the right hand of God" (Colossians 3:1). In fact, there are no less than 21 distinct references in the Bible to the presence of Christ at the right hand of the Father! This remarkable fact has great significance, and a study of the passages will show that they are delineating two important aspects of Christ's present activity in this location.
The first such occurrence is in Psalm 16, the great psalm of Christ's resurrection, where Christ speaks prophetically: "In thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore" (Psalm 16:11). In this passage, obviously the emphasis is on the access and joyous fellowship which presence at the Father's right hand entails. The second occurrence is in Psalm 110:1: "The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool." This chapter speaks of the invincible power to be wielded over His enemies because of His position at God's right hand.
All the other occurrences of this phrase are in the New Testament, and all emphasize one or both of these two aspects of Christ's present position. Thus, He is "the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power" (Mark 14:62), able to exercise all necessary power on behalf of His own. "That ye may know... the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places, Far above all principality and power, and might, and dominion" (Ephesians 1:18-21).
But His presence at the Father's right hand is also a token of perfect fellowship and immediate access to the Father, and it is there that He continually intercedes for those who trust Him. "It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us" (Romans 8:34). "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous" (1 John 2:1).
For all who have received Him by faith as Lord and Savior, therefore, Jesus Christ is "such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens" (Hebrews 8:1), who is "able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them" (Hebrews 7:25).
The Bible Has the Answer.