I'll give you a moment to turn to the Galatians epistle, to chapter four. Book of Galatians as well. I'll be making frequent reference, in fact, we'll read through the entirety in the sermon itself of article 19 of the Belgian Confession. You can find this in the Thin Forms and Prayers book on page 172, 172. As you turn there, I'll mention something else unrelated to the sermon. something of an expression of gratitude, something of an exhortation. You know, in Exodus, I'm not Moses, but I do empathize with something about Moses' life, and maybe you do as well, that early on in his life, he has this sense of calling that God wants to use him, but the way that he goes about it is not the way that the Lord would have him to go about it, and he proceeds to beat a man to death, and then waits 40 more years before he really gets going in the ministry that he had hoped for. And when I was 18, I already had a sense that I felt called to ministry, and I had gone to Bible college, and I didn't beat anyone to death, but the very first sermon that I ever had the opportunity to give was over an hour and a half long, and they brought me a stool partway through, I think, to indicate this is getting long, and I took that as an encouragement. And I am a couple sermons away now from my 500th sermon at this church. And you've heard all of them. And I have a certain affection, particularly for the evening crowd, because in the first five years, I was mostly preaching the evening. And you heard a lot of the worst sermons, structurally and otherwise. And this church has been so encouraging and has been patient and has been a church of prayer. And when I think about our decision to take on an associate with Reverend Smith and our desire now to have a summer intern, pray and trust and endure. And I don't say that with respect to Mike Luckman, I haven't heard him preach very much. but just all interns and all pastors. Pray that God will bless it and pray that he gives us the heart to be receptive and to benefit. It's so exciting to me to be a part of a church that cares about another generation of ministers. Now, that being said, I trust that you're in Galatians 4. This morning, we had the opportunity to see in a story something reflecting Christ's two natures, divine and human. And we continue to see him this evening in Belgian Confession 19, seeing what we as a reformed Christian church have confessed for hundreds of years and really just part of the broader historic Catholic church. Churches who all believe essentially the same gospel throughout the ages, salvation by grace alone through faith in Christ alone, and a Trinitarian God and a Christ who is truly God and man. And this evening we come to the question, how do we speak about the relationship between Christ, humanity, and his deity? And are there things that we should avoid both in our thinking and in our speaking? And then what are some of the practical consequences of those beliefs? Now, the place that we're starting at this evening, we're not going to linger here the entire time, but we're going to look at a number of passages related to this. The place we begin is the Epistle to Galatians, where the apostle is writing to a church that is tempted to fall away from a true understanding of the gospel. They're being enticed to a view that would tell them that they contribute through their works something of their own salvation. And here, the apostle is laying out to them in part that Christ's nature, or really I should say natures, separates him from us in that only he can provide redemption. We cannot contribute to it because we don't have the qualifications of being truly God and truly man. So let's begin here at verse four and see what it says in Galatians 4, verse four. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father, so you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through faith. Let's ask the Lord's special blessing. Heavenly Father, please work by your spirit this evening. Illumine us not only to have a factually correct understanding of what you have revealed in the word and what you have guided your churches to confess for millennia, but please grant us to be illumined with a sense of, a spiritual sense of your presence, your love, your power, in order that we would give back to you a fresh fullness of gratitude, and also that our faith would be strengthened, and that we would be eager for the inheritance that is ours. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. The first three centuries of the Christian church were characterized in a sense like all the centuries of the Christian church, a time where there was almost constant debate going on among those who professed to be Christians. That has always been a part of being in this world, Christ warned us, and we're told in Jude to contend for the faith delivered once for all. Contending is a part of the Christian life. But something that sets out those first three centuries from everything that follows after, concerns the primary focus of debate during that time. Now, all kinds of things are being debated among people, but the focus of those debates was not some of those things that maybe, if you're less familiar with the early church, it's not the things that maybe you would have thought were the issue. For instance, they were not having debates over creation days. even though pagans believed radically different things. That was not the primary focus of the church at that time, or over the order of salvation, or the ordination, for instance, of women. My point here is not that none of those things matter. It's that all of those things pale in significance to the question of who is Jesus Christ? Because on all those other issues, if you get them exactly right, but you get Christ wrong, then you don't know him and there is not salvation. How we understand the relationship between Christ's human and divine natures goes to the very core of whether or not he is worthy of worship and whether or not he is able to save us. And that's why it's so important to come back to this and to have something of the tools to explain these things, especially to the young and to the less mature. And so we have an opportunity this evening to think about that and to be reformed in that, perhaps, or to be renewed in it. Now, what I want to do is lay this out under three main headings. First, we're going to look at some pitfalls to avoid when we speak or think about Jesus. Some pitfalls to avoid. And then secondly, I want to present to you the scriptural understanding, which is also our confessional understanding. What do we confess, the Bible says, about Christ's two natures? And then I want to provide just some of the practical responses. What does the Lord call us to do in response to this? So let's start first, pitfalls to avoid. Last week, Reverend Smith laid out one of those in greater detail that I'm not going to focus on as much, which is to think of Christ's divine and human natures as mixed. Like he's a kind of amalgam. And certainly pagans believed in that sort of thing. You have somebody like Hercules, who's semi-divine. And so he's more than a man, but he's less than God. And in the early church, especially given the context of paganism, Greek and Roman paganism all around them, many people who are first hearing about Christianity and hearing about Jesus' miracles wondered if that's what he was. And when they heard about the virgin birth and that God is his father, they did, understandably, coming from that background, think, yeah, maybe Jesus is some kind of mixture. Cuz I mean, after all, he was able to die, and God can't die. This is not what the Bible teaches. There is no mixture of the two natures. Rather, they are united with one person, always remaining distinct in their character, as we'll come to see. But a different pitfall that we need to avoid, and one that has cropped up, I think, more in some modern circles, is thinking of the person of the son really as two persons. as if there's God the Son and then the man Jesus. Now, this has existed as an idea since the early church. There was a group of people, they went under a lot of different names based on whatever different teacher was most influential at that time who taught that view, but a basic view called adoptionism. In this view called adoptionism, there was a man, Jesus, who was unusually good and was a prophet. At the time of his baptism, The Father adopted him and perhaps in some sense overshadowed him by the second person of the Trinity. And so he's kind of being controlled. And in this view, it's not that there's a personal union of these natures, but a moral union. That Jesus is just, to put it frankly, on the same page. He's on the same page, but he's a different person. This is not at all what we believe. Now, where does that come up in modern circles? Sometimes it's because we're wrestling with parts of the Gospels where Jesus seems to indicate a certain ignorance about facts. We go, well, isn't he the son of God, so doesn't he know? So what would he mean that he doesn't know the day or the hour of something? I confess to you, I don't have a perfect handle. I just know other parts of scripture that are clear enough that I can say that is not the correct answer. To say that there are two persons rather than one, Rather, the scriptures are uniform in their witness that there is one person. And if I had to venture a way of describing what's happening when Jesus expresses his not knowing things, he's speaking according to his humanity. But at the same time, he could, if he desired, speak according to his deity, and they're both true, because they're different ways of knowing. Hear what it says in Galatians 4, verse 4 again, which demonstrates the unity of the person and the distinction of the nature. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son. Now, when it says the fullness of time, you think that the promise that the son was coming was given minutes, hours after the fall of Adam and Eve into sin. And then they're waiting and they're waiting and they're waiting and they're waiting and ages are passing and sin is happening and people are dying. And where is the promise of the Messiah? The Lord has his own purposes. When the fullness of time had come, or when it was complete, God sent forth his Son. And the point here is to recognize the pre-existence of the Son. He sent forth his Son, meaning his Son already was. There was no, you know, that in the birth the Son came into being, or the Son became his Son when he was adopted at his baptism, or something like that. God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who are under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, note in verse six, God has sent the spirit of his son, singular singular, not plural plural, not the spirits of his sons as if according to his humanity, he has a distinct personhood and his deity has a distinct personhood. There's one identity that is divine, but has taken to himself human nature. Now compare that to 2 Corinthians 8 verse 9. Again, stressing the preexistence of the divine son. 2 Corinthians 8, 9. For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. When is that talking about? When was Jesus rich? And at what point did he become poor? Well, we know clearly from the Gospels, he wasn't born into a rich family. He was born into an impoverished family. So it's not like at some later point he gave up all of his money so that we might get his money. The riches here is talking about spiritual riches and the glory of being in right standing with God on high. And Christ for a time set aside the visible splendor that he was receiving from created beings. When we talk about his emptying himself, he lost none of his divine attributes. But he was willing to, in that sense, go for a time without receiving the kind of visible splendor that he enjoyed when he was manifesting his glory in heaven. And among us, he suffered himself to endure all kinds of poverty. All kinds, not just monetary. All kinds of poverty. Poverty of anguish, of sorrow, of being an outcast in many respects. in order that you might become rich. Now, how does our Belgian Confession deal with this? It underscores the pitfall. You find this again on page 173 in Article 19, when it says this, we believe that by being thus conceived, the person of the Son has been inseparably united and joined together with human nature in such a way that there are not two sons of God, nor to persons. Without belaboring it, I want you to know and understand. Maybe you're aware of this from church history. You may say, I've never known anybody who was really teaching this. It was extremely rampant in the first 300 years, and why can we give thanks that it has largely not reared its head, and it has in certain ways. Some of these Christological errors manifest in, say, Mormonism, where Jesus is a created being, likewise, Jehovah's Witnesses. But for the most part, the Trinitarian heresies have stayed dead. Why have they stayed dead? When you go, oh, this seems so obvious. Because for 2,000 years, on a fairly regular basis, pastors have been bringing this up again, and just making sure that nail does not wiggle back out of the wood. That is what we're doing here tonight, to make sure Trinitarian heresies stay dead. And in this, what do we say then? It provides the correct way of speaking, but two natures united in a single person, with each nature retaining its own distinct properties. Now when it says nature's here, that's talking about a kind of substance or a kind of being, something that possesses attributes that we can describe. But personhood is reflecting identity, consciousness, and so there's one person, two natures, not a mixture or a temporary union. This then brings us to consider the biblical understanding. What does it mean doctrinally and practically, as we read here, for each nature to retain its own distinct properties? This brings us to our second main division. What is the scriptural and confessional understanding of Christ's union? Sometimes called the hypostatic union. If you ever encounter that, it's talking just Two natures, one person, inseparable. Look again, Belgian Confession, Article 19, and then we'll see some Bible passages that underscore this or really undergird it. Article 19, thus his divine nature has always remained uncreated, without beginning of days or end of life, to quote Hebrews, filling heaven and earth. And we saw that this morning, didn't we? While Jesus, according to his human nature, is asleep in the boat, According to his divine nature, he is the definition of awake. As Jesus was a young infant learning Aramaic and Hebrew. You ever picture that? Every toddler is adorable, and I wish I could have met Jesus as a two-year-old and heard some of his first words, but that's the irony. His first words, he is the word. And he never, according to his divine nature, was learning anything. This is a mystery beyond comprehension, but it is something for adoration. And if I could wrap my head around it, he would not be worthy of worship. But it is adorable. It's something, I don't mean adorable in that two-year-old toddler sense anymore. I mean something that incites love and admiration. When you think that for God, this was the mystery hidden from eternity, his plan from the ages to save sinners, was not that he would just send in someone else, but he himself would come down and take to himself what seems an unbridgeable thing. The infinite substance of the divine can never become merged with that which is finite. But personhood provides the nexus point where two can be united, and this is the genius of God. And so, what do we read in scripture? It says Colossians 1, verse 16, Colossians 1, 16, Christological passages in the Bible, and there's much more there that we can't mine tonight. By him, speaking of Jesus, all things were created, which means Jesus was not created. That's one of the passages I like to go to when speaking with the people who come to my door to be evangelized. You know the people I'm talking about. In God's providence, that's why they're there. If they're at your door, I highly recommend don't hide from them. Don't be too busy. Have a kind of rap sheet of a few verses. If nothing else, have something written down. You can ask me and I'll give you something. And just put it in their hand and close the door again. But you have an opportunity to speak with people. And this is one of the passages I go to. By him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. And so it's not just that he's the demiurge that God used, you know, the first created thing that God used to create other things. That's the Jehovah's Witness view, by the way. That Jesus is a created thing that God used to make other created things. No, all things are created for him. And that is irreconcilable with the fact that scripture says all things are created for God. And he is before all things and in him all things hold together. I am not an astrophysicist or the son of an astrophysicist. I have read people talk about how they are confused, why particles ordinarily manifest in one place and not another place. It is so far beyond my pay grade, but I am so grateful that when those astrophysicists are climbing the mountain of knowledge and understanding, and they're about to pull themselves up over the precipice with all of their learning to understand how exactly and why are the molecules where they are right now, that at the very top, they'll find a gathering of simple Christians having a picnic who have been there the whole time because they believed this passage that told them Christ holds all things together. How he does it, I don't know, and I don't have to, but he is truly God, and he has never set aside nor can he set aside his divine attributes. Belch Confession Article 19 then identifies the properties of his human nature, and stresses that these are never set aside either, before or after his resurrection. Religion Confession 19, look again, where it's speaking of following his resurrection. His human nature has not lost its properties, because there were those who were stating that after the resurrection, attributes of Christ's humanity are divinized. And you'll find that in Aspects of Lutheranism, where Christ's physical body is said to be ubiquitous everywhere. And this is them trying to understand the Lord's Supper. In what sense is Christ here? And we would say he's sacramentally here. And spiritually, we are taken up by the Spirit to Christ in order that we might receive through faith. But this is what it's dealing with. So it says, his human nature has not lost its properties, but continues to have those of a creature. It has a beginning of days. It is of a finite nature and retains all that belongs to a real body. Do you remember the part, remember after Jesus is raised and the disciples are looking up to heaven and the angels say to them, why are you looking up? He's not here, but he'll be back. He's not here and they're not talking about his divine nature, which is omnipresent. They're talking about his humanity. And Jesus' humanity really is truly circumscribed. It's not infinite because he is God. Truly because he's also human, he's in a place and it's not here. And that means our flesh is somewhere. Someone with our nature has already gone into the age to come. The age to come is not simply, so often we think of the age to come as a point on a linear time, The age to come, you know, that's 200 years from now, or maybe that's 2,000 years from now, or 20,000 years from now. The age to come is over there. Yes, in a sense, the age to come is brought to its fullness at Christ's bodily return, but the age to come is also a mode of being, and Christ is the first fruits of that age to come. He's part of the, according to his humanity, his humanity is participating in what the new creation is like. and yet it is still human. And we go on, even though he, by his resurrection, gave it immortality, that nonetheless did not change the reality of his human nature, for our salvation and resurrection depend also on the reality of his body. This was the great argument in the book of Hebrews, and Hebrews chapter seven in particular. In order for you to have the confidence that we need when we stand before God, we need a mediator who's truly God and truly man. One who can represent us perfectly at all times. Hebrews 7 verse 25, consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him since he always lives to make intercession for them. And the intercession he's making is not just according to his divine nature, but is a true human being interceding for you. You ever think about that? Let's put it that way. There is a man in glory who prays for you. There is a man in glory who thinks about you. That's not fictional language. That's the reality of the strange but true world of scripture. And perhaps the greatest wonder And the greatest mystery is that even through the gates of death, Christ, according to his divine person, was never separated from humanity. And that means that while his body and soul were for a time separated, his human body and his human spirit were separated from each other, just as all human beings who die experience that for a time, nevertheless, His divine person remained united with both his human body and his human soul through death. Have you ever thought about that? So that what happens to Jesus while his body is in the grave? His spirit didn't just sleep for a few days in the body. His spirit was doing the kind and having the kind of experience that our spirits will have in the interim before the resurrection. Christ is experiencing spiritually the grave, Hades. Sometimes you have wondered why in our Apostles' Creed we say that Christ descended into hell. The Greek term for hell can be used in multiple ways, and frequently it's just the grave, Hades, grave. And Christ descended in a twofold way. His body certainly went into the ground. But also his spirit experienced what we would call a lower state, in the sense that it's lower than what God's long-term and ideal plan is, the union of body and soul. Christ, now not in a way where he was suffering, he had finished, but he experienced that passage into afterlife. This is why he's able to say to the man on the cross, the thief next to him, today you will be with me in paradise. And he doesn't just mean with the second person according to his divine nature. He means your spirit's headed there and my spirit is headed there. What a comfort for the believer to know that in passing from this life, we pass not merely, although it would be blessed, into the glorious presence of the ways that God manifests his divine nature in heaven that seems to terrify everyone who ever comes into contact with it. You know, Isaiah coming into the presence of the throne and falling on the ground, terrified. Similarly, Daniel. But we pass from this life, and the first thing that we'll be brought into presence with, as I read in scripture, is the presence of the resurrected son, whose own body is the assurance that our day of resurrection comes to. And so this is deeply essential to us. Belgian Confession 19 again, and finally for the article. But these two natures are so united, together in one person that they are not even separated by his death. So then what he committed to his father when he died was a real human spirit which left his body. But meanwhile, his divine nature remained united with his human nature, even while he was lying in the grave. And his deity never ceased to be in him, just as it was in him when he was a little child, though for a while it did not show itself as such. That's, I can't wrap my head around that, but I believe it. Every other human being who has died did not simultaneously experience death and experience a dead body, their own body. Their spirit has departed, follow that? By definition, your body has died, your spirit has left to wherever's next. But God the Son has the experience per se of both dead body and dead spirit. Spirit taken up to him. What does that mean for us practically? And by way of conclusion here, I just want to draw your mind back to a few things here. Anything less than this doctrine, as difficult as it may be in some sense, which you might say, well, it seems pretty straightforward. That's because you haven't pondered it deeply enough to run into the parts where you go, ah, how does, ah, that's hard. I'm telling you, you'll reach those limits if you spend the time. But anything less than this is neither scriptural, it won't line up with the data of scripture, nor does it present to us a Christ who is worthy of worship and able to redeem. If Christ is just a good teacher, then we are all doomed, because my sins are against an infinitely worthy being who is beyond all time. I need an infinitely valuable redeemer. Galatians 4, verse four through seven, again, what we began with, But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you're sons, God has sent forth the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father, so you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. Because of who and what he is, you have, I can't make you receive it by faith. You're going to, I speak to everyone who believes here, you're going to live forever with a joy that doesn't compare to anything you've ever known. What a gift. Let's close in prayer. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you and we praise you for sending forth your son for our salvation, to conquer death by his power, and to die for us in the weakness of his flesh. We praise you and we thank you, and we ask that you would help us to be in awe of you, but this cannot come to pass unless you work by your spirit again and again, and we ask it not for this night only, or only for ourselves, but that throughout the world you would be always renewing, always bringing back your people to confess and to rejoice in our unique and perfect Savior. For in his name we pray, amen.