All right, we're live. Well, good morning. I'm Jude Gallagher. You might be familiar with that last name. But I'm really happy to be here and have this opportunity to teach Adult Sunday School. My prayer is that it is beneficial for each and every one of you and that it will provide you with just a little bit more of an appreciation for what God has done for us in our Lord Christ. And since we just had Christmas, I wanted to talk about the incarnation and the nature of the union of Christ's human and divine natures. And so today we're going to be looking at the Council of Chalcedon, which is one of the church's ecumenical councils. It was in 451, and it laid out kind of the Orthodox teaching on how we are to think about what happened in the incarnation. When God became man, did he become mixed? Was his nature mixed with our nature? Or are there two persons in Christ? Can the divine really be united with the human? So that's kind of where we'll be going. But first, we're going to pray and ask God to have mercy on this time. Bow your heads with me. Holy Father, we thank you so much for this morning and for allowing us to gather here and to learn about you and to worship you in the presence of your people. I pray for your blessing on this next hour that you would please grant me peace and calm as I seek to articulate what your church has taught concerning the incarnation of your son. And I pray that you would use this time to elevate our view of you and to show us with more clarity the love that you have for us. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. So all of these notes, everything I'm going to be communicating to you this morning. It's kind of a compilation and synthesis from what I learned in one of my church history classes this past semester, and a few books. So I'm going to be using heavily Philip Schaaf's The Creeds of Christendom, Zacharias Sinus' commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, and Herman Boving's Reformed Dogmatics, and Louis Burkaw's Systematic Theology. So that's kind of where all I'm getting these things, and I'll be quoting from various sources and uh... if you have a question on you were you getting that idea sounds totally while that left field hopefully i can give you a good footnote point in the right direction uh... and before i forget i'm actually pass out copies of uh... the the creed that calcidon produced and this is uh... one of that Could you actually pass this though? Thank you so much. This is what the council produced concerning the union of Christ's two natures in his person. And it was directed against two opposite errors. The first one was Eutychianism or Monophysitism, which basically means mono meaning one, physis, nature, which basically means that Jesus Christ had one nature, a mixture, or kind of a blend of his divine and human natures. So that was one heresy on one side. And on the other, there was kind of an opposite that was vying for acceptance, which was called Nestorianism, which kind of did the opposite. It split and divided Christ's divine and human natures so that they were two persons and not one person. So this is what the creed is going against. But first, I kind of want to talk about why we need creeds and why creeds are important. I mean, we're all good Protestants. We all believe in sola scriptura. The Bible is the only infallible authority. But that doesn't mean that there aren't subsequent or subordinate authorities to scripture. So scripture is God's own words. And because it's God's words, the church has always confessed and believed that it is infallible. If God is speaking, his words are going to be, are necessarily true because he is the source of all truth and wisdom. So the Bible, the book stops with the Bible, but underneath it we have the ecumenical councils and the ecumenical creeds and confessions of the church that the church has confessed and stated universally. And so they have authority insofar as they are in alignment with what scripture says and insofar as they are faithful and accurate summaries of what scripture teaches. And so Philip Schaff, he provides a helpful definition of what a creed is. He says a creed or rule of faith or symbol, those are all kind of technical terms he's using. A creed or rule of faith or symbol is a confession of faith for public use or a form of word setting forth with authority certain articles of belief which are regarded by the framers as necessary for salvation or at least the well-being of the Christian church. So notice how he says creeds are confessions of faith. So they are responses to the witness of scripture. So faith by its nature seeks to confess, it seeks to respond to what God's words have said. We kind of see this in Matthew 16, 16, when Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, Jesus asks his disciples, who do you say that I am? And this is after Jesus has been teaching them and he has been performing many mighty miracles. God's work in Christ demands a response from us. And then Jesus, or sorry, Peter, he then responds, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. So it's kind of helpful to think of creeds. They're kind of a natural outflow of the faith that is in our hearts. Faith is something that is to be confessed, which is why Peter says in his sermon in Pentecost, if you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord, you will be saved. Or maybe that's, maybe I'm mixing up my My reference is right there. But anyway, the point is, faith is something that is confessed. We're stirred up to say what we believe. It's a confession. Yeah, and so a creed can be very short and simple, just like what Peter says in Matthew 16, 16. Or it can kind of be more longer and more technical and precise, like the creed I just handed out, or even the Nicene Creed that we recite every Sunday. And creeds are important for several reasons. Number one, they serve as expressions and summaries of what Scripture says, which helps us keep close to Scripture. They're valuable insofar as they keep us pointed to Scripture and keep us pointing to what Scripture teaches. They're responses to Scripture, and they seek to preserve and summarize what Scripture says. And because of that, they're always going to be subordinate to Scripture. Scripture comes first, and then the creeds are our response to it. So we have different views of creeds across Christendom. Obviously, the Roman Catholic Church, they view creeds as holding an equal authority to scripture. And we would disagree with that because we would say that scripture is what is the standard and creeds are our response to scripture. And they're always rooted in scripture. And so when our church fathers throughout church history, when they are formulating the Nicene Creed or the Statement of Union in Chalcedon here, they're always drawing from scripture and they're using scripture to inform how they formulate these statements of belief. And so they're always seeking to go back. And then after going back to scripture, then they then seek to explain what scripture says. And this kind of leads us into the second reason why creeds are important. Insofar as they are faithful summaries of what scripture teaches, they help us to discern orthodoxy from heresy. You might remember most Sundays when we recite the Nicene Creed, Pastor James will say, the Nicene Creed provides the outermost boundaries of true historic Christian faith. And that's really true. And so the Nicene Creed helps us determine and discern what we need to believe concerning God's revelation in his scripture. So the Trinity, the Nicene Creed, is a beautiful summary of what we believe about the Trinity. Three persons, one God, they're equal and consubstantial with each other, and we believe in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. That kind of provides the outermost boundaries. All Christians throughout history, we lock arms with them when we recite that creed, and if someone comes up And like a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon, and then they say, oh, but the sun is the first created being. We'd say, no, that is obviously clearly against the teaching of scripture. And we'd point them to scripture passages, like John 1, Hebrews 1, Colossians 1. But then we'd also point them, hey, to our creeds, the Nicene Creed, because this is what the church has understood scripture to say for thousands of years now. And so not only are you out of line with scripture, you're also very clearly out of line with what the Church has interpreted Scripture as and received Scripture as. So they're helpful tools to help us quickly go and say, what does Scripture teach on this thing? What does Scripture teach about the Trinity and the eternity of the Son? I'm sure we've all, we just had our election cycle and there's tons of politicians that are trying to gain votes and they say, oh, my faith is very important to me. I'm a man of faith. And that's all fine and dandy, but what do you mean when you say those things? What do you mean when you say like, oh, I believe in Jesus? And creeds help us flesh out what we mean when we say those things. And so we should all say, oh, I believe the Bible. It's God's infallible word. It's I believe in Jesus. He is God. But then we have to kind of unpack what those things say. Because people who are heretics, like Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses and people like that, they will always quote scripture. And then they will always, they'll try and say the same things we say. But the difference is because they pack those things with different meanings. And so the creeds and confessions of the church help us unpack what we mean when we say those things, and they help us compare what we're saying, what the church has said, and what scripture teaches against those who are not of us, those who are not following God's word. Does that make sense? That's like a fire hose right here. Okay, there we go. And then the last reason creeds are very important, I kind of alluded to this already, but they just connect us to our brothers and sisters throughout church history. When we recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday, when we recite the Apostles Creed or whatever it is, it's, at least for me, there's a great comfort and a great satisfaction in knowing that what we're doing right here on Sunday, December 29th, 2024, we're saying the same thing that believers in Germany said in 1629, as believers in China saying this morning, as believers in Antioch in AD 350 were saying. It connects us with our brothers and sisters and it helps. It just really drives on the point that we're all one family and one body, and it shows how God has been faithful to to keep his church over 2,000 years. And then lastly, we actually find several creedal statements in scripture. You have the Shema, hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, you shall know our gods before him, that's Deuteronomy 6.4. That's kind of a paradigmatic creed that Actually, Jewish men on their deathbeds, if they were able to speak, they would recite the Shema as their last words. It was incredibly important to them. Then we also have one, 1 Timothy 3.16, where Paul says, great is the mystery of godliness. We're going to come back to that because it kind of informs. how we're gonna be thinking about the hypostatic union today. And we also have Philippians 2, five through 11, that Christological hymn that Paul talks about where he says, Christ took on the form of a servant. He didn't count equality with God, it seemed to be grass. Many scholars and commentators will point to that and say, the way that this is structured, it's in a creedal formula. It's this compact statement of belief and it's, It actually predates what Paul is writing. So Paul is referencing an earlier statement of belief that he's not just coming up with it on the spot. And also just kind of as an apologetic tidbit or bonus point that actually gives credence to the reality of the resurrection. Because if Paul is writing his letters to his churches, and a lot of his letters, like Galatians especially, is one of the earliest letters we have in the New Testament. We're in around 8050. Paul has this very high view of Christ and of the resurrection, and he's getting those things from earlier. And it's not just something that just popped out of nowhere. like miles, miles away, 20, 30 years after the resurrection took place. Oh, I heard that this guy, Jesus, he rose from the dead. No, he's, he's referring to something that predates what he's saying. And so people like David Hume have said, Oh, the resurrection that the church became, came to believe the resurrection, uh, decades after the fact, and it was a legend and kind of like a game of telephone. The, Each person you tell, it kind of gets more exaggerated and hyperbolized as we go on. But that's kind of just a side point. All right. So that's kind of creeds. That's why they're important. Any questions? I think I'm talking really fast, so I'm going to take a deep breath and try to slow myself down and savor this because we're talking about things that are really amazing. That is a great question. I think there's some overlap. Off the top of my head, I don't think I'd give you a really precise answer. I'd say like our Westminster Confession, I think a confession is longer, and it kind of goes through the faith more systematically, where a creed is something that is meant to be recited publicly, and so it's going to be more compact. Yeah, it's going to lend itself to public confession as opposed to referencing it. Does that make sense? That's a good question. I don't think I have a very precise distinction. When people talk about them, they sometimes use the words interchangeably. Yeah, good question. Anything else? All right, cool. All right. We're going to be talking about a mystery today, and I do want to read 1 Timothy 3.16, which is what I referenced earlier. This is kind of an early creedal statement. And in this Paul's writing to his son, Timothy, he says, And so I just want to focus on kind of his first statement right there where he says, great indeed is the mystery of godliness. And then he immediately says that he, Christ, was manifested in the flesh. When we're talking about the Son of God incarnating, being made man, this is a mystery. And we do come very quickly to our limits. And that's not to say we can't know anything for certain about the incarnation. That's not to say that it's a hopeless exercise in talking about it, but this is something that we approach with a degree of reverence and awe because this is God Almighty, the great I am, and he becomes man and he's born of a Virgin Mary. And he's a little baby. And so at the same time, he is is wrapped in swaddling cloths, but he's also upholding the universe by the word of his power. And that is a mystery. But it is the mystery that our salvation depends on. So when we are faced with a mystery, let's let's take it. Let's not be discouraged by it. But let's actually let's grow and wonder and excitement for when we do see him face to face. And if God was someone or something that we could totally just map out and systematize and totally explain every single facet of who he was, he wouldn't be God. He is transcendent. He is the great I am. All right. So that's all of our background information. And now we're going to get into the Council of Chalcedon itself. All right. So Council of Chalcedon, it was held 8451. It was held in Bithynia, which is a region in Asia minor, which is modern day Turkey. And it was actually right opposite the river of Constantinople, which is now Istanbul. So very important region in early church history. There were 500 bishops present. So there was, if I'm not mistaken, that was up until this point, this was the largest council that was held at Nicaea. There was 318 bishops present, and now here at Chalcedon, About a hundred or a little over a hundred years later, there's more than double, or sorry, not more than double, that would mean there'd be more than 600 bishops. There's significantly more bishops present. And the creed that I passed out, this was adopted at the fourth and the fifth sessions. So on October 22nd and October 25th. And Chalcedon, when they got together, they reaffirmed The previous ecumenical councils, they reaffirmed Nicaea. They reaffirmed Constantinople. And Constantinople was a reaffirmation and kind of a reinforcement of what Nicaea said. 451. 451. And then what brought about Chalcedon is these these two controversies or one controversy, but there's two different groups. And I kind of mentioned them earlier, but the first one is monophysitism. And so I'll write this up here if you want to take notes. So mono meaning one and then physitism. I'm pretty sure it is. Yeah, pretty sure I spelled it right. So mono one and then physis means nature. This basically is the belief that when Jesus was incarnated, He had one nature, so his divine nature and his human natures were kind of mixed. Put him in a blender and you blend. And now you have this new third thing that is neither fully divine or truly divine and is neither truly human. So it's something that is new altogether. So this is kind of a mixture. Okay, so you have monophysitism on one side and then on the opposite you have Nestorianism. And then I'll explain. where these beliefs come from, Nestorianism. So this is the opposite. So this is, you have the two natures, the divine and the human. And Nestorius, who was the patriarch of Constance and Opal, he sought to safeguard the divine nature of the sun. And he said, wait a second, if you're mixing the two natures, that means that the divine nature is mutable, the divine nature changes. That can't be true. And so what he wanted to do, is he wanted to protect the divine nature from being mixed. And so he separated the two natures such that they were two persons. So Jesus was really the son of God and the son of man, and they were two eyes. Eye, like the subject. There were two subjects in Jesus. So this is the vision. Okay? Does that make sense so far? Okay, awesome. All right, so yeah, Eutychianism, it's named after, sorry, so the monophysitist view comes from this man named Eutychius, and that, it's sometimes called Eutychianism. Is it an E-S or a U-S? It's an E-S. So this is the guy that gave birth to monophysitism. So Eutychius, He was a monk in Constantinople, and he was hearing Nestorius, who was the bishop or the patriarch of Constantinople, dividing the two natures. And he says, that doesn't make any sense. They're the same. They're mixed. And Jesus is neither truly human nor truly God, but he's a new third thing. So this belief, I kind of already alluded to it, but it contradicts the teaching of scripture, and it's unacceptable. So first of all, it contradicts divine insanity. And that basically just means that God is, he's life of himself. He's self-sufficient, he's eternal, and he doesn't depend on anything or anyone else for his existence. You and I, we're all dependent creatures. We depend, we need oxygen, food, water, sleep, light, the list goes on and on. It can't be too hot, can't be too cold. God is. He exists. And so because of that, he does not change. And so because he cannot change, because he is life in itself, his nature is not subject to change. It cannot be mixed or added on to the human nature. Secondly, even if it was possible for his nature to change, And he became like this mixture, this third thing, like this hybrid between God and man. If that was the case, this actually prevents Jesus from being our covenant federal head. Hebrews 4.12 tells us that Jesus was made like his brothers in every respect. So the scripture explicitly says that when Jesus was incarnated, He was made like us in every single way. So everything that makes you a human being, made in God's image, Jesus has that. Everything that makes you a creature, you have a body, you have a soul, you have a mind, you have a will, Jesus has those things. He's a full and complete and true human. That is kind of the classic language that churches use. Jesus is true human, truly man. And I think that's in the creed that we have here. If he does not assume our nature, if he does not take on what makes us human, then we cannot be saved because we do not have our representative. In order for Jesus to represent us to God and to offer a sacrifice on our behalf, he actually has to himself be human. And if he's not truly human, then we're not saved. So this is actually a very important issue. This could seem like something that a bunch of nerdy theologians, they get together in their group, and they're just trying to discuss semantics. But this actually has bearing on whether or not Jesus came to save and whether or not he accomplished salvation. Does that make sense so far? And then lastly, this is kind of a subsidiary point. The Old Testament promises again and again that the Messiah is going to be born of a woman, that he's going to be the seed of Abraham, and that he's actually going to be the son of David. And when God promises David that one of his descendants will reign forever and ever, he's promising him that he will have a human son. And Jesus is only a human son if he's actually human, if he's actually descended from David. And so if Jesus is not, truly human, then God's promise to David that he will never lack a son sitting on his throne. God broke his promise. God didn't keep his promise. And so there's a couple scriptural references here. Jesus was flesh and blood, Hebrews 2.14, Colossians 2.9. And 1 Peter 2.24, and then he also has a soul or a spirit. You have that in Matthew 26 verses 38. You have Matthew 27 verse 50. And you also have that Luke 23.46. This is kind of talking about what on the cross Jesus gives up his soul. He yields his spirit to the Father. And also in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus says, my soul is exceedingly sorrowful even unto death. So it's speaking of his human soul. And you also have John 1321. Any questions so far? That is a great question, and you're getting ahead of my notes. But to kind of hold you off so far, no, it means if Jesus, the God-man, who is truly man, is standing in front of the Father, means I'm going to stand in front of the Father. Because Jesus is our head, we are His body. What happens to Him, happens to us. Where He goes, we will be. And which is what He says to His disciples before He ascends, I'm going to prepare a place for you. In John 15, I go to prepare a place for you, so that where I am, there you may be also. So this provides, this is kind of one of the foundations for our hope. When Jesus comes again, we're going to be with him, and we're not going to be disembodied, singing, playing harps, and singing. We're going to be embodied, and we're going to be more embodied, more perfectly ourselves than we ever have been. That's a good question. Yeah, we're going to talk about that toward the end of how this relates to our daily walk. Any other questions? All right, good. How am I doing on time? That's the real question. Oh, we're doing great. Okay. 1030? Okay. Yeah. Okay, so that's kind of monophysitism. Basically, the two natures are mixed. He's not that when Jesus was born in the Virgin Mary, when he was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, the person of the son, his nature was mixed into human nature, put into blender and such that he's neither, he's this new third thing, he's a hybrid. All right. So the opposite, which is kind of what people, Heard this, and then saw the problems in it, and we kind of just walked through some of those problems, walked through some of the scripture that shows us this is a problem. They kind of went, they overreacted. Excuse me. So Nestorius, he was kind of the main figure behind this. He was the patriarch of Constantinople, as I said, and he was accused and convicted of teaching that Christ's two natures were really two separate persons. And so he preferred to speak of a conjunction of Christ's two natures instead of a union. So they were kind of, I shouldn't have done this hand gesture. That's confusing. So conjunction, he kind of said that they were just, they were together. They were residing in the same body. He didn't want to say that they were united in the same body, which speaks to the degree and the quality of the incarnation. And so because of this, he called Mary the Christ-bearer. He didn't call her the Theotokos, which basically means God-bearer. And that's a problem. We might think, oh, calling Mary the mother of God, that's a Catholic thing. We don't want to be like the Catholics. In this instance, we actually kind of, what they're saying is right. Because when we call, when we don't say that Mary is the mother of God, we're denying, we're essentially denying the incarnation. And so let me kind of explain that. When we say Mary's the mother of God, we say that she's the mother of Jesus according to his human nature. And so if she's not the mother of Jesus according to his human nature, but she's the mother of just a human person that Jesus bonded himself to, then God really didn't become flesh. And John 1.14 says the word became flesh, which is the kind of, it's a clear, It's a clear indication of Jesus' humanity because you are what you become. The word didn't dwell in flesh, he became flesh. And so there's a very... The two natures of Christ are not just two persons. And so the same subject, the person of the Son, the second person of the Trinity, he was born of the Virgin Mary. And she carried him in her womb. And his human body, it grew and it gestated just like each of ours in our mother's wombs. And Luke tells us that Jesus, he grew in knowledge and stature. So his human nature, it changes and it's just like ours. But that doesn't mean, we're not saying that Mary is the mother of Jesus' eternal divine nature. Because Jesus is, the son is the son of the father eternally. He has no beginning, but when he enters into humanity, his human body and his human nature has a beginning. It was created for the purpose of salvation and the incarnation. Does that make sense? I don't think I really explained that very well. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. It does say, born of the Virgin Mary, the mother of God. Yeah. I would suspect that is why this particular confession doesn't normally make it into Protestant books of confession, because the explanation that you get, it takes some explaining. Yeah, it takes some explaining, and usually, I think at least the Westminster Confession, they use the Athanasian Creed, which kind of comes after the Council of Chalcedon, but it's taking like all the same ideas from it and it's saying the same thing, but it's kind of just, it's laying it out in a slightly different format. But yeah, so, and sorry, the Greek word theotokos, which is on the handout I gave you, that just, that literally means God bearer, which it's, all that is to say is that the child, the person that was in Mary's room, that was God himself. And we say that not to elevate Mary to this status of our co-redeemer and co-mediator, the queen of heaven. We're not saying that to elevate Mary. We're actually saying that to elevate Christ. Because we're saying that to say, no, he was God from the moment of his conception. He didn't become God. grow into God or he was God from the beginning. His human nature grew because it's the same as ours, but the person of the son, he's eternally God, nothing can change that. And so if he is really in flesh, if he is really incarnate, then Mary has to be his mother. And so when we say, when we, this kind of gets into something called the communication of properties, when that basically means that The attributes of each nature, the human nature and the divine nature, they can both be attributed to the one person. So when we say Jesus is God, he is God by virtue of his divine nature. But when we say Jesus was crucified, and when Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2.8, they crucified the Lord of glory, you can say God was crucified because his human nature in his body and his soul, he died. Which is the mystery. How can God become man and die? How can the one who is immortal in life itself actually taste death for us? And I'm getting ahead of myself, but this actually is one of the comforts of this doctrine is God loves you so much that even though it's impossible for him to die, he found a way so he could die for you. That's insane. He went out of his way to do it. And so we'll talk a little bit more about that at the end. Yeah, go ahead. Our language can't really encompass what God is and what he has done. It's crazy. The limitation of our language is to really say what really happened. Yeah, yeah, there's, we definitely, this is something the incarnation and The Trinity, these are things that are true things, but we can't find them out on our own. They have to be told to us. And we can know what it's not. We know the Trinity is not talking about three different gods. It's one God. But how the three persons are one God, the unity in the three, that is a mystery. And we can definitely grow in our understanding, You're right, it leaves us in awe. And I think God should leave us in awe. Yeah, great point. Yeah, so if there are two persons, if the human nature and the divine nature are, they're kind of, if the sun kind of indwells the human body, kind of like a ghost almost, and there's two individuals or two subjects inside the human body, then God didn't die for us. God didn't suffer for us. He didn't. It was this kind of created person, this man who suffered for us. And then we actually can't be saved because then God would, only that one person would have been saved. Which is why it's important that Jesus takes our nature, but not a specific, he doesn't take a personal nature. Does that make sense? Yeah, so the human nature that he assumes, it is not, he doesn't take on a person. So when I say, sorry, that's a great question. I need to define what I mean by nature in person. I should have done that sooner. So this is from Schaaf's book. So nature, that's the sum total of all the essential qualities of a thing. Nature is what makes a triangle a triangle. So it's all like the properties of a triangle. So it's three sides, bless you. All the angles add up to 180 degrees. And so what makes you and I human? We're body and soul. We're made in the image of God. We have rational minds. And so it's everything that makes a human being a human being. But it's not, there's not an individual. There's not a subject. So a person is. Yes, he did take a pre-existing person and he didn't create a person to then cohabit a body with. So a person is the one who acts. It's the one who's responsible. It's the rational actor. A person is the self-asserting subject or the ego, the I, like the I right here, like that is a person. And kind of again, it's really hard to kind of talk up to, to define what we mean here, or to kind of wrap our heads around it, because we know we're persons, and we know we have human nature, so it's kind of hard for us to separate our person from our human nature. Because if someone were to chop off my hand, I wouldn't say, oh, you chopped off my hand. No, you hurt me. You attacked me, like myself. It's not just something that is separate from me. So there's such a close connection and union between our souls and our bodies that it's hard for us to kind of separate them. And that's part of the mystery of the incarnation. Does that kind of help answer what you were saying? Sure? Maybe not totally convinced? That's OK. That's OK. But yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, he is utterly unique. C.S. Lewis calls it the miracle of miracles, the incarnation. So the way that Jesus walking on water, that is completely foreign to our everyday life and how the natural order works. The incarnation is like that, but for all the other miracles. It boggles the mind. It staggers us. But we can't say it is true. But it's also because it does escape the bounds of our capabilities, it's an article of faith. It is something that we have to accept. from the witness of scripture. It's something that God needs to tell us, and we trust him. It's not to say that we are completely, I don't want to say we're completely helpless, and we're about to just read through the statement in a second, and it is very precise, and it's very helpful to think about, but there are, it is a mystery, which is what I was getting at earlier with 1 Timothy 3.16. It is the mystery of godliness. Say it again? Well the first one takes away from the future. You subtract if you added humanity. He becomes less than 100% God. And this one becomes two different beings. So he's not one God. There's not one God. But it's an addition then to addition. And it says, we then, following the Holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in deity and also perfect in humanity, truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and body, consubstantial with the Father according to the deity, and consubstantial with us according to the humanity. In all things like unto us, without sin, begotten before all ages of the Father according to the deity, And in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, Theotokos, according to the humanity, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusably, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably. The distinction of the natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved and concurring in one person and one subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the prophets from the beginning have declared concerning him. And the Lord Jesus Christ himself has taught us, and the creed of the Holy Fathers has handed down to us. All right, so there's a lot there, but it's really helpful. Let's walk through it and kind of see how this specific language that they choose militates against the differing heresies. All right. All right. Thank you for coming, Bill. We'll just do that really quick. We've talked about most of this already, but I just want to highlight a couple of things. One and the same son, our Lord Jesus Christ. So right now it's kind of prohibiting the Nestorian view. The one who created the universe by the word of his power is the one who is incarnated. He is the one, the person who performed miracles, who is hungry, who is thirsty, who died on the cross and rose again. Truly God and truly man. So the integrity of both natures is preserved. The divine nature didn't change, and the human nature is the same as ours. That's what they mean by truly. It's rational soul and mind, which is what they say later. And then to drive the point home further, they say, consubstantial with the father according to the deity, which is what the Council of Nicaea, they put forth in their creed. When we say the same essence of the father, that's what they're saying right here. So his divine nature is the same as the father's, and his human nature is the same as ours. The same substance, same essence. In all things likened to us without sin. And then this kind of gets into the mother of God talk. So according to his deity, he's begotten of all ages of the father. So he has no beginning. But according to his human nature, he is born of the Virgin Mary. He is born in these last days. And then these These adverbs right here, these are very important. To be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusably, immutably, indivisibly, and separably. So the first two, inconfusably and immutably, those militate against monophysitism. Basically, the natures remain the natures. They remain what they are. They're not mixed, they're not confused, and they're not changed. So he's truly God and truly man. And then the second two, they go against the opposite teaching. So they're indivisibly and inseparably joined. So the union is such that they, you can't, they are possessed by one and the same person. They can't be separated. They're not two different people. They're not two distinct subjects. It's one subject who possesses both of them. And the natures are, they're united. They're not just, They're not just conjoined. So they interpenetrate one another. Jesus' body is God's body. God's blood was spilled for our salvation. And Paul again, 1 Corinthians 2, the Lord of glory was crucified. That is how close the union is. That's how closely Christ identifies with his body. His body, he looks at it, this is his body. Just like you and I look at our hands, this is our body. That's what Christ does. So why does this matter? It matters because we have a great high priest who took on our nature, who loves us so much that he came to die for us. The Lord of glory loves us so much and desires communion with us so much that he came as one of us. Our God loves us. Our God loves you. And he died for you. We say every week, it becomes rote. But if you think of God died for you, God became mortal so he could then give up his life. God became able to suffer so he could suffer for you, suffer for your sins, the worst of your sins, each and every single one of them. That is how much he loves you. And so that is why we celebrate Christmas. It's the greatest gift ever. It is the greatest testimony of God's love for us and his desire to be with us and commune with us. If either of these were true, God couldn't die for us truly. He couldn't commune with us. He couldn't enter into our life. But He did. And that is the very clear testimony of Scripture. I think I'm out of time. Hopefully that was helpful and I'd love to talk to you maybe after the service if I could clear up anything I said. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for taking time out of your morning to listen to seminary student. I've only done one semester, but it's a great, it's a great, it's very exciting to be able to do this. And I appreciate you allowing me to do this. Let's pray. Holy Father, thank you so much for sending your son to take on our human nature to become man. Thank you so much that you love us enough to do that. Lord Jesus, thank you that you are our faithful high priest. You are like us in every way. And that when we see you face to face, we will be like you. We will be glorified in our bodies. And thank you that where you are, you will take us. Please soften our hearts for the preaching of your word in just a few moments. Please give us eyes to see and ears to hear that we may respond in faith. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.