01.086. THE ISSUE RESPECTING JESUS OF NAZARETH (Concluded)
Lesson Seventy-three THE ISSUE RESPECTING JESUS OF NAZARETH (Concluded) Scripture Reading: 1 John 2:19-29; 1 John 4:1-6; 2 John 1:4-11.
Scriptures to Memorize: “Who is the liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, even he that denieth the Father and the Son. Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father; he that confesseth the Son hath the Father also” (1 John 2:22-23). “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).
44. Q. What is the orthodox Jewish view of Jesus?
A.The orthodox Jewish view of Jesus is the same as that of the so-called “Modernists.” That is, that Jesus was a great teacher and moral philosopher, a divinely-illumined man, but withal entirely man. (1) Despite God’s numberless efforts in his behalf and God’s longsuffering toward him, the Jew has from the earliest times persisted in his policy of rejecting spiritual light and truth. See 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Hebrews 3:1-4; Hebrews 3:13; Deuteronomy 32:15; Isaiah 63:10; Nehemiah 9:9-31; Acts 7:51-53; 2 Corinthians 3:14-15, etc. “A veil lieth upon their hearts,” explains Paul (2 Corinthians 3:15); again, “a hardness in part hath befallen Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in” (Romans 11:25). (2) This “hardness” and blindness persists even in our day and age. As an example, I might cite two instances from Dr. Joseph Klausner’s work, Jesus of Nazareth, published in 1926. The first pertains to the words used by Jesus in instituting the Lord’s Supper. “It is impossible to admit,” says this eminent Jewish scholar, “that Jesus would have said to his disciples that they should eat of his body and drink of his blood. . . . The drinking of blood, even if it was meant symbolically, could only have aroused horror in the minds of such simple Galilean Jews” (p. 329). This, mind you, despite the fact that the Jewish altars had dripped with the blood of sacrificial animals for many long centuries! And in the very face of the fact that this shedding of sacrificial blood was known all the time to have been essentially typical and anticipatory of the world’s Atonement! Just like the Twelve Apostles who, though associated with Jesus personally, for more than three years, failed utterly to grasp the spiritual content of His teaching with respect to the nature and scope of His covenant and kingdom, and were, even after His death and resurrection, still anticipating an earthly kingdom of the Messiah (Acts 1:6); so this modern Jewish authority fails to see beyond the literal, beyond the symbolical, to discern the profound spiritual truths expressed in the words of Jesus with respect to the Loaf and the Cup of the Lord’s Supper (Luke 22:14-20, Matthew 26:26-29). Again, in dealing with the resurrection of Jesus, Dr. Klausner dismisses the incident—the most important in the entire story of the historic origins of Christianity, and the one which if it could be disproved would result in the complete collapse of the Christian religion—with a bold statement to the effect that Joseph of Arimathea obtained the body of Jesus secretly and buried it somewhere in an unknown grave! Yet he fails to offer one iota of evidence in support of this bold statement! Thus, without a particle of testimony to give at least a semblance of strength to his assertion, this modern Jewish scholar dismisses with a mere gesture the most fundamental fact of the whole Christian System! (3) To cap the climax, we are now being told that orthodox Jews of today would be perfectly willing to fellowship with Christians on the common ground of the acceptance of Jesus as an ethical teacher and moral philosopher! Ernest R. Trattner, a Jew, in an article which appeared recently in The Thinker, under the caption, “Jesus and the Modern Mind,” writes as follows: “The Jew would see Jesus in a Jewish framework; the churches persist in viewing him in terms of the ancient creeds. The Jew would understand the Nazarene as a product of Jewish development on Jewish soil; the churches insist that he is the work of the Holy Ghost. The Jew would look at him through the glasses of history; the churches encourage men to use the lenses of doctrine, specially prepared according to the requisites of a pre-arranged system. The intelligent Jew enjoys the Jesus of the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark and Luke); the churches adore the Christ of the Fourth Gospel. And so the grand division goes on between the brethren of Jesus and his followers. . . . What of the future? If I may venture the prophecy, I believe that the Jewish world will move toward a progressive appreciation of Jesus, in proportion as the Christian world turns its back on the whole abracadabra of medieval theology.” The issue is stated here clearly! In brief, all that Jews would ask of Christians, in order that the two groups may find a common ground of fellowship and co-operation is that the latter abandon every fundamental of the Christian faith; every conviction they hold with respect to the death, resurrection, exaltation and sovereignty of Christ; every fundamental doctrine in fact that the Apostles preached in primitive times! This is asking too much! It is asking us to repudiate Peter’s great sermon on the day of Pentecost, Paul’s discourse on Mars Hill, his defense before King Agrippa—in short, every fact, command and promise of the Gospel! (4) The deity of Jesus has been the issue between the church of Christ and the Jewish Synagogue, from the time of the Apostles down to the present moment: the issue which the Church cannot compromise without the complete surrender of her “candlestick” and the absolute certainty of complete disintegration. For the Christian Church to surrender at this crucial point, against the evidence of the apostolic writings, would be for her to turn her back on the truth, to cast aside as worthless everything that Christianity has stood for for twenty centuries, to bind anew upon the human race the yoke of the Mosaic System, and to count the blood of the covenant, wherewith she has been sanctified, an unholy thing! This the true Church cannot, and will not, do!
45. Q. What is the outstanding characteristic of so-called “Modernism?”
A. The outstanding characteristic of so-called “Modernism” is that there is very little in it that is distinctively modern.
(1) The view that Jesus was only and entirely man, is as old as His ministry upon the earth. Mark 6:3-6, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James, and Joses, and Judas, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended in him. And Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief” (cf. Matthew 13:55). (2) This view of Jesus has been the view of Jews, Unitarians, Radicals, Liberals, etc., in fact, of unbelievers of all ages of Christian history. (3) Practically all the views which today parade in the purple and fine linen of “modern scholarship” flourished in the first four centuries of the Christian era. (a) The Ebionites, for example (about A.D. 100), denied outright the reality of Christ’s divine nature and held that He was merely man. (b) The Nazarenes (about 100) held to His supernatural birth, but rejected His inherent deity and His pre-existence as The Word. (c) Docetic Gnosticism (about 100 and following) denied the reality of Christ’s human body, and held Him to have been an “eon” or sort of angelic spirit between God and man. (d) Cerinthian Gnosticism (about A.D. 100, and following) assumed a distinction between the human Jesus (purely human), and the “eon” Christ, which was assumed to have come upon Him at His baptism and to have left Him at the Cross. (e) Gnosticism (about A.D. 100 to 400) in its various forms was a forerunner of present-day Christian Science, in its denial of the reality of matter and in its assumption of the divinity of man. God did not have to become man, according to the Gnostics, because man is himself essentially divine. This sounds exactly like Mrs. Eddy. (f) The Arians (from Arius, repudiated at Nice, A.D. 325) regarded The Word who united Himself to humanity in the person of Jesus, not as possessing absolute deity, but as having been the first and highest of created beings. Arius may be rightly regarded as the father of Unitarianism in its various forms. (g) The Nestorians (from Nestorius, removed from church office for heresy, in 431) regarded Jesus Christ as a man in very close relation to God; that is, more “divinely illumined” than others, etc. (4) It will thus be seen that, in the words of Dr. A. P. Peabody, “the canon of infidelity was closed almost as soon as that of the Scriptures.” “Modernism” in its various forms, is, with the addition of certain critical and evolutionary theories, but a revival, or perhaps it would be more correct to say, a continuation of these ancient heresies and cults.
46. Q. In what does the appalling insufficiency of these so called “liberal” views of Jesus consist?
A. Their insufficiency consists in the fact that they leave the world without a divine Redeemer and therefore hopelessly lost in sin.
(1) They consist entirely of negation, without affirmation; and being negative, are consequently destructive. They take the Lord away from us, but offer nothing to take His place. (2) They leave the human race without a sufficient Atonement for sin. If Jesus did not die for our sins (1 Corinthians 15:3), then certainly no one else has done so. Further, if Jesus was merely a man, He did not die for our sins, because He could not have done so. If His death was only that of a martyr, it could not be the world’s Atonement. They leave the human race without any certainty of “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25-26). If Jesus was not raised up from the dead, then certainly no one else has been raised; nor is there any “assurance of faith” or “certainty of hope” that any one will ever be raised. They ignore the overwhelming love and mercy of God as if His grace had never been manifested to mankind (John 3:16). (5) In short, they leave the human race back where it was two thousand years ago, floundering in the mire of natural religion and philosophy, hopelessly lost in sin, and hopelessly in bondage to death. 1 Corinthians 15:13-19, “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, neither hath Christ been raised: and if Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain, your faith also is vain. Yea, and we [i.e., the Apostles] are found false witnesses of God: because we witnessed of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, neither hath Christ been raised: and if Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also that are fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most pitiable.” Paul’s argument here is irrefutable; and is therefore urged upon the attention of all who deny or ignore the deity of Jesus Christ.
47. Q. What is the answer given by all true believers to the great question, Who is Jesus?
A. The answer given to this question by all true believers is, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.
(1) That is, He is the Divine-human Redeemer, the God-Man (God as well as man, and man as well as God), The Word who became incarnate, the Only Begotten from the Father, The Anointed One of God, The Son of the living God: in short, Incarnate Deity. (2) It is impossible, of course, for the human mind to fully elucidate this New Testament doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ; this great “mystery of godliness” (1 Timothy 3:16); this great mystery of Immanuel, “which is, being interpreted, God with us” (Matthew 1:23); this mystery of the indissoluble union of the divine and human natures, in the Person of the One who is known in history as Jesus of Nazareth. Nor is it necessary for us to attempt to explain this great mystery, or to define it in a series of dogmatic pronouncements. Suffice it for us that it has been embodied and expressed in the Christian Confession of Faith—I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God (cf. Matthew 16:16, John 20:30-31, Romans 10:9-10, etc.). May we therefore confess Him before men, that He may confess us before our Father who is in heaven (Matthew 10:32-33, Luke 12:8).
REVIEW EXAMINATION OVER LESSON SEVENTY-THREE 44.What is the orthodox Jewish view of Jesus?
45. What is the outstanding characteristic of so-called “Modernism”?
46. In what does the appalling insufficiency of these so-called “liberal” views of Jesus consist?
47. What is the answer given by all true believers to the great question, Who is Jesus?