HIS ONLY SON OUR LORD
‘Believe in God, believe also in Me.’
Manifestly, everybody must believe in God before he can believe in Jesus Christ in any deep sense; for to say that ‘Jesus is the Son of God’ already implies a belief in God. This was clearly true of the Christian converts from among the Jews, who were already worshippers of Jehovah; and it was true also, though to a less extent, of the Greeks, as St. Paul recognised in his famous speech at Athens; and it remains true of the converts from heathendom to-day.
Our Lord’s work, which the Catechism (following the Apostles) speaks of in one word as Redemption, is summed up in this Creed under three epithets, corresponding to the three epithets of God in the first clause. Jesus is described as (1) the Christ of God; (2) the Only Son of the Father; (3) our Lord—i.e. the Vicegerent of the All-sovereign Ruler. Let us take these three descriptions in order, so as to gain some clearness as to the view of our Lord’s office and Person, which the Christian Church puts before us as the ground of our faith in Him; always remembering that it is in Him that our faith is placed, and not in any propositions about Him.
I. We say, first, that Jesus is the Christ of God.—By Christ is meant ‘the anointed’—i.e. consecrated—servant of God for the work of redemption, Who was promised to the Fathers. And in so saying, we express our belief in the general providence of God throughout history; His good will to men from the creation of the world. We express our belief that the Redemption which Jesus effected, though it came at a definite epoch of the world’s history, was not an unexpected event, a sudden, isolated act of compassion on man’s misery, whether of the Creator Himself, or, as Marcion taught, of some higher and more beneficent deity; but was part of a process fore-ordained in the counsel of God from the beginning. We point back along the history of the Chosen People to a long series of kings and prophets, whose lives and writings are recorded in the Old Testament Scriptures, and show how they were always looking forward to a Divine redemption, always desiring to see the days of the promised Deliverer.
II. To come then to the second term: His only Son.—The history of the phrase ‘Son of God’ as applied to our Lord is of great interest. It began by being a synonym for the Christ, as is plain from its use by the demoniacs: ‘What have we to do with Thee, Jesus, Thou Son of God?’ and the High Priest, ‘Art Thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’ a use which bases itself on Psalms 2, where it is said of the King established on the holy hill of Zion, ‘Thou art My Son.’ But our Lord seems to have avoided its use, just as He avoided the other Messianic title of ‘Son of David,’ because of its associations. It had become worn, like a coin rubbed by passing from hand to hand till it becomes, in fact, a mere counter. Was this unique Son son always, or only after His human birth? There can be no doubt as to the opinion held by the first Christians. No one can forget the argument about God’s love in Romans 8, which describes Him as not sparing His own Son, but ‘sending Him in the likeness of sinful flesh’; or the argument about Christ’s humility in Philippians 2, which describes how He Who was in the form of God emptied Himself and was made in the likeness of men. And, apart from such special testimonies, the mere recognition of Christ as Divine carried with it also the recognition of His eternity. ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ This, of course, is not to say that there was always manhood in the Godhead, but that there was always sonship, the potentiality of manhood. If the aspect of redemption which we emphasise under the acknowledgment that Jesus is the Christ be the hallowing of our nature by the living in Christ and Christ in us, the aspect emphasised by this second acknowledgment that Jesus is the Son of God is one that directly follows from that—namely, that through this indwelling Presence we too have received the adoption of sons, and look up to God as our Father: ‘As many as received Him, to them He gave the privilege to become children of God.’ We are admitted through Him into the family of God, and enjoy that freedom which is the special attribute of sonship—‘the liberty of the glory of the children of God.’ ‘If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.’
III. We pass to the concluding phrase of this confession, ‘our Lord,’ which emphasises the truth that the Father is still known to us only through the Son, and that all authority has been committed unto Him. He is our Lord, the Vicegerent of the All-sovereign Ruler.
This acknowledgment is made emphatically by St. Peter in his speech at the first Pentecost, where, after quoting the 110th Psalm, ‘Jehovah said unto my Lord, Sit Thou on My right hand, till I make Thine enemies Thy footstool,’ he continues, ‘Let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made this Jesus Whom ye crucified Lord as well as Christ.’ The sense of St. Peter’s assertion therefore, that ‘Jesus is Lord’ is evident from his quotation from the 110th Psalm; where the Psalmist is speaking of the king. ‘Jehovah said unto my king, Sit Thou on My right hand.’ That, then, is the sense of ‘our Lord’ in this confession of faith. It means ‘our King, at the right hand of God’—i.e., our Divine King.
IV. No one can miss the significance of this acknowledgment in its bearing on our redemption.—I will notice only two points.
(a) If Jesus is our Lord, then His Commandments must be the rule of our lives; there is nothing for it for us who accept His lordship but ‘to bring every thought into captivity to His obedience’ (2 Corinthians 10:5). ‘Why call ye Me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?’ To such an appeal there can be no reply.
(b) If Jesus is Lord—the one Lord through Whom are all things—we must call upon Him for what we need. Notice, as you read the New Testament, how constantly this act of ‘calling upon the Name of the Lord’ is referred to as what especially marks and stamps a Christian. ‘The same Lord is Lord of all, and is rich unto all that call upon Him’ (Romans 10:12); ‘Paul, unto the Church of God at Corinth, with all that call upon the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, in every place, their Lord and ours.’ Faith, then, in Jesus of Nazareth, as the Christ, and as the only Son of God, comes to expression, and so to reality, as we bow our knees to call upon One Whom our hearts acknowledge to be in very truth our own Lord.
—Canon H. C. Beeching.
Illustration
‘Readers of Old Testament prophecy are often puzzled by the difficulty of determining whether the consecrated being spoken of is an individual or the whole people. The conception seems to have fluctuated, and with reason; for what the prophets had at heart was the realisation of the Divine promise to their whole nation—that the nation should be, in fact as in election, a holy people. They conceived it as a unit: Israel—God’s chosen servant, His beloved Son, His holy representative upon earth for the benefit of the world, the Christ to the nations; and the further idea of an individual Servant and Son consecrated to redeem the collective servant and son emerged only at times and indistinctly. And so it is of the utmost interest and significance that as soon as the confession of Jesus as the Christ had fallen from the lips of St. Peter, our Lord at once announced the founding of the redeemed kingdom, with its distinctive attribute of legislation after the will of God—“Upon this rock I will build My congregation, My Israel; and whatsoever thou shalt bind and loose on earth shall be bound and loosed in heaven.’ And by and by He gave this society a mission to the nations. So that we may express the truth about the Christ in this way: Jesus was the Christ to the Church; and the Church, by virtue of the presence in it of the spirit of Jesus, is the Christ to the world.’