When we study the Gospels, we noted that the focus was on the last week of Christ on earth – the passion week – the rest are introductory with the view of explaining who Jesus is, why he came, and why the cross in God’s salvation plan.
As we look at the Gospels in depth, we see the significant doctrines and theology on who God is, what His eternal plan is, why it has to involve the Triune God, and the hope and consummation of this plan, for His people and their glorious relationship with Him.
Some of us may be familiar with the Athanasian Creed. This Creed, which is a long statement about the Trinity, takes a lot of unpacking, but it is very essential for Christians and Christianity to uphold.
It is the belief that God is as truly three as he is one; that the unity of his being, his ‘substance,’ as the creed calls it, is tri-personal; that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are coequal and coeternal, uncreated and inseparable, undivided though distinguishable. This truth that becomes clear when Jesus in the Gospels indicates, on the one hand, that though he is divine and to be worshipped, he is not the same person as the Father, whose will he does and to whom he prays – and then indicates, on the other hand, that the Holy Spirit, who will come as his deputy, is a further divine person on the same footing as himself. It is this truth that the Athanasian Creed is spelling out; it is also the truth we will discover when we study the Gospels closely.
The doctrine of salvation is the good news of the Father’s g
The rule of this creed is to rule out erroneous ideas, of which there are always many when the Trinity is under discussion.
Some think that God is one person playing several roles in a single story; and oftentime when we illustrate what the Trinity is, in a class or Sunday school session, we may actually project such a view in the illustration, for the illustration does full justice to the meaning and reality of the Trinity.
Then there is the idea that Jesus and the Spirit are not personally divine, but are God’s two top creatures doing top jobs. Jevohan’s Witnesses think that. There is also the idea that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three gods whose solidarity is action made the fact that they are not one in being. Mormons think that. A further false idea is that the Son is God of a weaker strain than the Father and the Spirit’s divinity is weaker still. All these ideas had a run for their money in the early church before being condemned as heresies. All of them still pop up from time to time even today.
The doctrine of salvation is the good news of the Father’s giving us his Son to redeem us and his Spirit to renew us. The doctrine of the Trinity is the good news of three divine persons working together to raise us into spiritual life and bring us to the glory of God’s kingdom. The Athanasian Creed guides this good news in the way that fences around a field guard growing crops from preying animals. Such fences are needed, but they do not have equal value with the crops they protect, and such value as they have derives from those crops themselves. Trinitarian orthodoxy, in other words, has value only as it sustains and safeguards evangelical faith. Nonetheless, the Athanasius Creed is named after Athanasius, a godly Christian and theologian, who tirelessly defended the doctrine of the Trinity against forces which also boast of learned individuals and theologians in their own right (the value of reading Church history and knowing our roots and our theological values and doctrines ‘fought over’ and affirmed by individuals who often paid a great price to do it).
At least two conclusions follow from the truth of the Trinity:
1) Do not dismiss the doctrine of the Trinity as so much useless lumber for the mind. If the place of any of the three persons is misconceived or denied the gospel falls (hence the need to study and preach the Gospels in line with the doctrine of the Trinity). Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, and those liberal Protestants for whom the personal deity of the Son and the Spirit is suspect, can never state the gospel rightly because they think of the Godhead wrongly. Clear confession of the Trinity is foundational. The gospel proclaims precisely the joint saving action of the three persons, and it is lost as soon as one’s hold on their distinct divine personhood slackens.
2) Let the doctrine of the Trinity keep our understanding of the gospel in good shape. Let it remind us to give equal emphasis in our thinking and our witness to the sovereign initiative of the Father who planned salvation, the anointing sacrifice of theSon who obtained salvation, and the mighty power of the Spirit who applies salvation.
An illustration that is helpful affirms the need to give equal emphasis to the three persons in our preaching (and teaching by implication):
Many of us are familiar with Dr. Martlyn Lloyd Jones – a great and effective preacher. The late Dr. used to tell how early in his ministry a senior pastor said to him that having listened to several of Dr. Jones’s sermons, he could not make out whether the ‘Doctor’ was a Quaker or a hyper-Calvinist, because all the sermons centred on either the Spirit’s work in the human heart or the sovereignty of God in salvation, and little was said about the cross and faith in the crucified Saviour. ‘The Doctor’ quickly took the point! But there are many preachers today,and other Christians, too, who in their thinking and speaking and teaching either stress the cross all the time and say all too little about the Spirit, or stress God’s saving plan, or the Spirit’s renewing work all the time and say all too little about the cross. Take care! False proportions in our doctrine are the beginning of false doctrine itself. Small distortions of the truth end up with untruths. Heresies often have their beginning in this manner.
When we study the Gospels, it is interesting to see how the three persons of the Godhead ‘pop up’ or appear in so many passages. Jesus was filled with the Spirit at birth and when he was baptised by John the Baptist, the Father declared that he is God’s beloved Son and the Spirit descended upon him like a dove. In John’s Gospel, Jesus was declared as the Word in the beginning and he was with God and the Word was God. At the mount of transfiguration, the Father again declared that Jesus is the Son and uged those present to listen to him. The Spirit sent him into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil; and the Father sent angels to strengthen him after 40 days of fasting when he had to face the temptations. Jesus told Philip that if he had seen him, he had seen the Father. Although many of these passages may not appear so obvious in affirming the Trinity, enough is seen in the Gospels to realise this truth. In all four Gospels, the emphasis was on the last week of the life of Jesus on earth when the ‘cross’ featured so prominently and the cry of Jesus to his Father in the garden as well as on the cross. Even in the early parts of the Gospels, the authority of Jesus to cast out demons, to heal diseases, to forgive sin, to raise the dead, to be Lord of the Sabbath and the royal bridegroom – all these display his authority as the authority of God.
So in our study and preaching of the Gospels, let us see the focus on Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God, the Lamb of God; but let us not lose sight of the Father and the Spirit in Jesus’ birth, growth, and ministry.
Let us not be sidetracked into focusing on topics which may be helpful in themselves but in the process of the preaching and teaching, we lose sight of the almighty Trinity.
(B)
In the last sharing, we noted the ‘revelation’ of the doctrine of Trinity as we study the Gospels, and how the three persons of the Godhead are intimately involved in the salvation plan of God for the fallen humanity.
In our salvation God stands revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, executing in tri-personal unity a single co-operative enterprise of raising sinners from the gutter of spiritual destruction to share Christ’s glory forever; and of seeing that God-centred thought and life, springing from a change of heart (effected by God) that expresses itself in grateful praise, is the essence of true knowledge of God. Once we come to this, we can hardly miss the covenant theology of the Scriptures. And we also will not miss the covenant theology in the Gospels.
As we study the plan of salvation; God’s promises; faith; Jesus Christ the God-man; the church in both Testaments; the intricacies of Old Testament worship; prayer; communion with God; and many more themes in Scriptures, we must notice that all these relational realities are all covenantal in their very essence.
Each of the matters just mentioned is anchored in God’s resolve to relate to his human creatures, and have us relate to him, in covenant – which means a way for man to relate to God that reflects facets of the fellowship of the Son and the Spirit with the Father in the unity of the Godhead.
Biblical doctrine, from first to last, has to do with covenantal relationships between God and man; biblical ethics has to do with expressing God’s covenantal relationship to us in covenantal relationships between ourselves and others; and Christian religion has the nature of covenant life, in which God is the direct object of our faith, hope, love, worship, and service, all expressed and manifested in gratitude and grace.
A covenant relationship is a voluntary mutual commitment that binds each party to the other. When God tells Abraham, ” I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you….to be your God ..I will be their God (Gen.17:6-8), God is committing himself to Abraham and Abraham’s seed in a unique covenant. God’s covenant commitment expresses eternal election, his covenant love to individual sinners flows from choice of them to be his forever in the peace of justification and the joy of glorification. The commitment in which electing sovereignty thus shows itself has the nature of a promise, the fulfilment of which is guaranteed by God’s absolute fidelity and trustworthiness.
The covenant promise itself, “I will be your God,” is an unconditional undertaking on God’s part to be ‘for us’ (Rom. 8″31), ‘on our side’ (Ps.124:1-5), using all resources for the furthering of the ultimate good of others (including us, believers who are from the spiritual ‘seed’ of Abraham) to whom he thus pledges himself, “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God’ (Exod. 6:7), the covenant promise constantly repeated throughout both testaments.
The God-given covenant carries, of course, obligations. The life of faith and repentance, and the obedience to which faith leads, constitute the covenant-keeping through which God’s people receive the fullness of God’s covenant blessing. Covenant faithfulness is the condition and means of receiving covenant benefits, and there is nothing arbitrary in that, for the blessings flow from the relationship; and human rebelliousness and unfaithfulness stop the flow by disrupting the relationship.
Israel’s unfaithfulness is seen throughout the Old Testament story, and the New Testament makes it plain that churches and Christians will lose blessings that would otherwise be theirs, should covenant faithfulness be lacking in their lives.
In the Gospels, we see how the ‘leaders’ of Israel repeatedly rejected the Messiah, who came in line with God’s covenantal promise, and also ended up with them crucifying the Lord Jesus. Despite Jesus’ testimony and authority, they refused to acknowledge him; instead they tried to protect their own reputation and position again and again.
In the genealogies, we see the Covenant of God with his people, stretching from Adam; from Abraham; from David, through the OT and finally, after some 400 years of silence, the Messiah (Jesus) came to inaugurate a new age and a recreation of humanity and a new beginning for God’s people. Do we see the Covenant Theology in the study of the Gospels; do we see God’s goodness, faithfulness; abounding love; mercy – from the OT to the coming of the Messiah – and from thence, to the church and the new heavens and new earth?
Our hope and the promise of God to us his people, is based on his unconditional covenant to “be our God, and we his people’, not on our worthiness, our performance as Christians, but on our consistent efforts (in dependence of his Spirit) to strive and persevere with sincerity to be faithful to him, despite our failures, our weaknesses, for in Christ, we continue to be forgiven if we continue a life of repentance, and endurance to seek his honour and glory, come what may, until we see Him face to face!
(C)
We have considered the doctrine of “TRINITY’ and the doctrine of the “COVENANT” thus far, seen in the Gospels, as we look deeper in our study. We also noted that the Gospels concentrated on the last week (passion week) of the life of Jesus on earth, giving as much as one third, or half of each gospel to this week; the earlier parts throw light on who Jesus is, what he came for, his mission, and the responses of various ones from those among God’s people, to him, his claims, his miracles, and his teachings.
We now see that the main subject of the Gospels is the Saviour and his Salvation. All four Gospels bring out this clearly from various angles; and as we look deeper, we realise that they actually crystallise the theology of God’s plan of Salvation for fallen humanity.
When John the Baptist questions Jesus’ identity (Luke 7:19-20), Jesus responds by quoting Isaiah 35:6.7. According to Isaiah, this great Saviour of God’s people will bring release from all that spoils this sin-wrecked world, suffering as it does under the deserved wrath of God. The Saviour will lead his people on the highway of Salvation (Isaiah 35:4 – the new Exodus to the new promised land). Thus Jesus views his miracles and healing as eschatologiccal thunderbolts, providing evidence for his glorious salvation and also a foretaste of it. When Luke used the Greek word ‘save’, it means ‘heal’ and it is often translated as such and can mean either one in meaning – Jesus uses precisely the same words to the sinful woman (Luke 7:50) as he does to the woman with bleeding (8:48) – this indicates that when Luke uses the word in these incidents, he is describing aspects of the salvation that Jesus has come to bring.
The miracles show Jesus to be the redeeming Saviour of Isaiah 35. They are evidence that the new Age of Salvation has begun with his arrival. They are ‘pictures’ of salvation – they give a snapshot of the future.
Disease, death, disordered creation, the devil himself – all of these are evidence of a fallen world that is under the judgment of God. In his miracles of healing illnesses, raising the dead, calming the storm, driving out demons, Jesus shows who he is and why some are responding negatively to him. Those who reject him do so not through lack of evidence, but through hardness of heart. The rejection of salvation and the Saviour is moral, not intellectual, and Jesus himself condemns them as being like children in the playground, who refuse to come out to dance, no matter what music is offered (Luke 7:31-32).
Here is a warning; even to us believers, that even though the evidence is clear, the logic and reasoning in the mind seem reasonable, we can still harden our hearts, and we can hear without really listening to God’s Word and His Spirit. In this condition, we grieve the heart of God, and as we continue to harden our heart, it becomes callous and no longer tender and open to Him. In such a state, nothing can get through to us, even the preaching, studying of God’s Word, and the loving counsel of dear brethren would receive a response of “I know it already and I have heard it already”. If the Pharisees and teachers of the Law, supposedly knowledgeable of Torah and Scripture, could not respond positively to Jesus, the very best of us, with hearts that are not open, would surely not be able to receive God’s revelation positively, despite the stark evidence staring at us openly
Contrast the Pharisee (Luke 7:36.37,39); he is self-righteous and having invited the KIng of kings into his house fails to treat him with even a modicum of the respect that is due. The woman, the personification of the poor sinner for whom Jesus has come, put her faith in Jesus – she has provided the model response: “your faith has saved you; go in peace.” (Luke 7:50)
It is the response of faith in Jesus and God which is the right and model response no matter what the circumstances are, no matter how knowledgeable we are, no matter what others think and no matter how things would turn out from our point of view and our time frame – it must always be like Thomas’ – “My Lord and my God.” As disciples, do not expect the immediate future to be plain sailing; in fact, disciples are to expect persecution, struggles and pain as pilgrims here on earth, and the response each time this comes about must be faith in him and not ‘tossed to and fro” by every negative situation and by every wind of false doctrine and conclusion. If we do not expect such development and such pressures and struggles, we do not really understand what it means to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Him. Jesus, for the joy set before him, endured the cross and suffered the pain for us, in love, in mercy, in grace, for he saw the joy for us and him together in the new heavens and new earth eternally. If our dear Lord and Master was willing to do this for us in sacrificial love, is it too much for him to expect us to follow him, for he knew that the path to eternal light is to strive on ‘in the darkness’ temporarily to acquire divine love and true happiness in God, as He designed for us His creatures.
(D)
God’s Salvation scrutinised and analysed:
We noted previously that as we studied the Gospels, we see God’s salvation plan and gift as the focal centre of the gospel. It may be helpful for us to consider what this gift of salvation means in the breadth, height, and depth of what God achieves in this plan for those who believe, albeit still in the broadest terms, as this full coverage would take many sharings and study to communicate.
Salvation, in essence, is deliverance from evil, rescue, from a state of jeopardy and misery into one of safety and therefore of joy. From the Old Testament, God is revealed as one who brings salvation from various evils, and in the New Testament, the gift of salvation is the focal centre of the gospel.
Salvation is the divine gift to persons who know themselves to be godless and guilty, of a new relationship of reconciliation with God the Creator through the mediatory ministry of Jesus Christ the Saviour (seen in Jesus coming to sinners, and those in need of a divine “Physician” in the Gospels).
In this relationship sinful human beings are no longer exposed to the prospect of God’s wrath on judgment day, but are justified – that is, pardoned for the past, accepted in the present for the future, and guaranteed the eternal reward of the righteous, although in themselves they are sinners still.
Justification by grace, on the basis of what Jesus did and suffered for us (seen clearly in the Gospels), is truly the last judgment so far as we are concerned; it is God the judge pronouncing here and now the verdict that determines how we shall spend eternity – this is indeed the fundamental blessing that the gospel brings, and on which every other blessing rests (Rom. 3:21-5:21;Gal. 2: 15-3:29; Phil. 3:7-14). Hence the significance of understanding and appreciation “Justification by grace through faith” for the Christians (who are regenerated by the Spirit and ‘born again’) – for those who are justified, there need not be doubts about our eternal future in Christ; there need not be vacillation and ‘fear’ that God would reject us in Christ, even though in our walk here on earth, repentance in Christ is a way of life until we see Him face to face.
But there is more; linked with justification is the gift of adoption, whereby the judge takes us into his family as his sons, daughters, and heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ (Rom. 8:17). The gift is free, to sinners only; it cannot be earned on a basis of merit, only received on a basis of mercy. The receiving is by faith, which means the empty hands of the heart out-stretched to embrace Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord in the knowledge that he brings this salvation with him to make it ours (again seen clearly in the Gospels).
Thus we appreciate that “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the Life; and no one can come to the Father but through him” – there is no other way!
Faith involves repentance, a saying no to sin and self-centredness in order to say yes to the Christ who tells us to follow him, to take his yoke upon us and learn of him, and to sense him henceforth and forever, remaining and continuing in his REST (what Sabbath actually means in reality).
But there is yet more: Those whose lives become a matter of faith and repentance in sustained exercise thereby show themselves to have been regenerated or “born of the Spirit (John 3: 3-8),” that is, they have been united by the Holy Spirit with Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection. The effect of this is that without losing their own personal identity they have become, in the most fundamental sense, new creatures in Christ, living with him a new life (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15). The newness of the new life springs from the fact that the Son of God now reproduces and sustains in us at the motivational core of our being the same thrusting and controlling desire to love, honour, and glorify the Father that drove him throughout his life on earth (as it had driven him from all eternity and drives him still, and will go on driving him in heaven for ever).
With this desire, the Holy Spirit – Christ’s emissary and deputy in this world – maintains residence within us to transform our character from being Adamic and Satanic to being Christlike, and to empower us for the obedience and the usefulness that will please God.
To have renounced deliberate sinning, and in steady purpose to have ‘crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires’ (mortification – Gal. 5:24), is what it means to be dead with Christ (Rom. 6:2-6; Gal. 2:20). To be driven by Christ’s implanted desires while being changed by Christ’s Spirit into Christ’s moral image is what it means to be risen with Christ (Rom. 7:4,6). Thus the regenerated person is no longer ruled by the world, the flesh, and the devil, but is led by the Spirit through the biblical word into paths of enterprising and zealous obedience, and this constitutes sanctification, that is, heaven’s glorification in the bud.
The church is the fellowship of those who, having been saved from sin’s penalty by justification, are now being saved from its power by sanctification and who look ahead to the day when they will be saved from sin’s presence and perfected in holiness and joy through glorification.
This then, in broadest terms, is what the salvation of God through Christ means. We need to see and understand all the facets of this wonderful gift of God through his Son; otherwise, we may end up having the wrong perceptions, with their accompanying doubts, tossed by every wind of doctrine, and living lives which, instead of glorifying God, grieve Him and cause Him much pain and disappointment.