PREACHING ANOTHER JESUS
Whenever the Lord Jesus is presented not as the biblical Jesus but as a great religious teacher, a good model of righteousness or even a wonderful mentor and prophet, we can be sure that another Jesus is being preached. The danger of the false teachers is their wrong or false estimate of Jesus. Whenever the message ceases to be purely centered on the biblical Jesus, and fails to draw its inspiration and power solely from Him who died as a penal substitute for our sins and rose again for our justification, the message is already corrupted.
We must not allow anything or anyone to draw us away from placing complete confidence in Christ the Son of the most High God, God Himself and man in one Person, who laid down His life to atone for our sin. When false teachers call you from one Christ to another, we must know that this call is not from God. The false teacher calls you from trusting the righteousness of Christ (His objective work done for you and made yours by faith for your justification) to trusting in an alleged work of another spirit.
The key characteristics of Jesus and His public ministry were meekness, gentleness and an attitude of self-emptying, which caused Him to give up the glory He shared with His father to take on the shame and rejection of the cross for our sake.
“Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made him- self 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! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”
(Philippians 2:6-8).
These verses highlight the essence of the being of the Lord Jesus and His mission when He became man.
In Jesus, God makes Himself visible to the believers. But His identity remains hidden to those with divided and unbelieving hearts. Only those whose hearts are purified by faith ‘see’ Him as He really is, the almighty God in all His glory. Jesus Christ not only justifies us by sharing with us His righteousness; He also sanctifies us and transforms us by making us righteous. He is the only mediator between God and man; we need no other, for He alone qualifies to be the One and only.
Bishop J.C. Ryle, in Day by day with J. C. Ryle (edited by Eric Russell) crystallised the mission of the Lord Jesus. He wrote:
“Our Lord Jesus Christ did not die merely as a martyr, or as a splendid example of self-sacrifice and self-denial: those who can see no more than that in His death, fall infinitely short of the truth; they lose sight of the very foundation-stone of Christianity, and miss the whole comfort of the gospel. Christ died as a sacrifice for man’s sin; He died to make reconciliation for man’s iniquity; He died to purge our sins by the offering of Himself; He died to redeem us from the curse which we all deserved, and to make satisfaction to the justice of God, which must otherwise have condemned us. Never let us forget this!”
D. A. Carson elaborated in A Model of Christian Maturity:
“Yet as soon as Jesus Christ is not the sole basis for our salvation, as soon as our acceptability before God depends on something more than his sacrifice on the cross, we have denied the sufficiency of his person and work. At that point the Jesus being preached is no longer the biblical Jesus but an unreal product of human imagination, a relatively powerless figure who cannot effectively save his people from their sins unless they supplement his work with something of their own merit.”
When we detect the absence of the biblical Christ in the preaching of the gospel, we can be sure that we are dealing with deception, even though other aspects may sound right and the delivery of the message may appear impressive. Let us be clear about this. The preaching of the true biblical Jesus will bring about the proper spirit in the believers; this wholesome spirit would also be manifested in the messenger and the preacher. Deception, however, will result in a different spirit and this will be elaborated in the next chapter.