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WHO IS CHRIST?

Text: Matthew 1:18-25 "Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. 19 Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily. 20 But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. 21 And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins. 22 Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying 23 Behold a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. 24 Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: 25 And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS."

The Christmas Season always brings new questions in the media about the person and nature of Jesus Christ. News magazines herald cover stories that question the nature of the Savior.

Who is Jesus Christ? Before you answer that question, let me set the scene. It's a few minutes past noon in downtown New York. A camera crew stops someone for a spontaneous interview. To his surprise, their questions have nothing to do with the White House, politics, the economy, or where you stand on capital punishment. The interviewer wants to know what he thinks about Jesus Christ. Who is He? While he fumbles for an answer the video camera records his discomfort. He wasn't prepared for this.

The seconds pass as various answers flash across his mind. "A good man...the Son of God...a prophet ... rabbi ...a teacher of God's Law ...the embodiment of God's love...the Messiah of Israel...the Savior...a man just like any other man...King of Kings...a misunderstood teacher ...Lord of the universe...a fool who thought he was God's Son.

Which answer would you give? Before you answer, let me say that you can find people today who will give every one of those possible answers.

But it's nothing new. When Jesus asked His disciples, "Who do people say I am?" they replied with four different answers (see Matthew 16:13-16). Even when He walked on this earth, people were confused as to His true identity.

Some thought He was a prophet, others that He was a great political leader, and still others that He was John the Baptist come back to life.

One question with many answers. One man with many faces. It's not enough to believe in Jesus. You must be certain that the Jesus you believe in is the right Jesus. In a world of spiritual counterfeits, your eternal destiny depends on knowing the Christ of Christmas who is revealed in the New Testament.

Who is Jesus Christ? Or to borrow a phrase from television, "Will the real Jesus please stand up?" The only way to discover the real Jesus is to go to the original source-the Bible.

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If you would like to know Jesus personally, here are seven statements that summarize who He really is:

1. He had a supernatural entrance into the world.

We know from the Old Testament that many details of His coming were predicted hundreds of years before His birth. The prophet Isaiah predicted He would be born of a virgin, and another prophet named Micah identified His birthplace as Bethlehem. The great creeds of the church use this sentence to describe His birth: "Conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary." Although we often speak of the "virgin birth," the real miracle took place nine months before Bethlehem when the Holy Spirit over-shadowed Mary and created within her womb the divine-human person of the Lord Jesus Christ. The fact that He was born of a virgin means He had an earthly mother but no earthly father. No one else has ever been born in this manner.

2. He was God in human flesh.

Christians use the word Incarnation to describe this truth. It means that when Christ was conceived in Mary, God the Son took on human flesh. Though He was God, He added humanity without subtracting from His deity. He was not half-God and half-man but fully God and fully man, two natures united in one person. He was fully human in every respect, yet without sin. Hebrews 1:3 says that Jesus is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being. The first phrase means that Christ is the "shining forth" of God. He is to God what sunlight is to the sun. The second phrase means that Jesus Christ bears within Himself the exact stamp of the divine nature-like a die being stamped into a piece of metal. When He was born, He was called Immanuel, God with us. Jesus was the Son of God and God the Son. That is why when the apostle Thomas finally saw the resurrected Christ, he fell on his face and cried, My Lord and my God! (John 20:28).

3. He is the standard of absolute righteousness.

When Jesus Christ walked on the earth, He was perfectly righteous. This speaks to two sides of His character. On the negative side, He never sinned in thought, word, or deed. He is the only "Perfect 10" who ever lived. All the rest of us have fallen far short of perfection, but not Jesus. He did not sin outwardly because He did not sin inwardly. He was without fault and without evil. He never had an evil thought, never said an evil word, never committed even one evil deed. He never cheated, never lied, never procrastinated, never got bitter, never lost His temper, never lusted, never sought an easy way out of a hard situation, never bent the truth to make Himself look good, never cursed, never turned His back on His friends, never broke any laws of God, and never deviated in the slightest degree from the path of His Father's will.

On the positive side, this means He perfectly fulfilled God's Law. He lived a life of perfect holiness, perfect purity, perfect kindness, perfect truth, and perfect goodness. Just as the first Adam sinned and all humanity fell with him, even so Christ came as the "last Adam" who through His obedience to God won salvation for all those who follow Him. He succeeded where we failed, and He obeyed where we rebelled. By His perfect life, He fulfilled everything that God required of us.

4. He did things only God can do.

He made amazing claims and then backed them up with amazing deeds. He repeatedly claimed equality with God. He said that He was one with the Father and that to see Him was to see the Father. He spoke with divine authority: I am the living water, I am the light of the world; I am the way, the truth, and the life. He even claimed the ability to raise Himself from the dead. People who are only vaguely familiar with Jesus tend to underestimate this part of His teaching.

They like to label Him as a great oral teacher while discounting His divine claims. But as C.S. Lewis remarked, a person who talked like Jesus talked, if He wasn't who He said He was, wouldn't be a good teacher. You can't have Jesus without dealing with His claims of deity.

He backed up those claims by repeatedly demonstrating power over the forces of nature, sickness, and death. He even claimed the power to forgive sins. This is what initially got Him in trouble with the Jewish leaders. They rightly saw Jesus as virtually claiming to be God, but they drew the wrong conclusion. He claimed to forgive sins because He was indeed God in human flesh.

5. He died as a sacrifice for our sins.

The story of His earthly life ends this way. Though innocent of all wrongdoing, He was crucified as a common criminal. Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, three times declared, "I find no fault in him." The Bible says he died as the just for the unjust, the innocent for the guilty, the good for the bad. He died as our substitute, standing in our place, taking our punishment, bearing our sins in His own body. With His own blood He paid the full price for our disobedience. In so doing He completely satisfied God's righteous demands and enabled God to be merciful to sinners who come to Him in Jesus' name. Through His death we are set free from the penalty of sin forever.

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6. He proved His claims by rising from the dead.

In many discussions with His disciples, Jesus openly predicted His death and His resurrection. Nothing that happened came as a surprise to Him. He knew it all and saw it all long in advance. Late on the evening of Good Friday, His followers tenderly took His dead body from the cross. Wrapping Him in grave-clothes, they laid His corpse in a borrowed tomb not far from Skull Hill, the place where He died. The next day the Romans, the Jews, and the disciples agreed on only one thing: Jesus was truly dead. Because of fear that someone might disturb the grave and remove His body, an elite squad of Roman soldiers stood guard at His tomb, which was sealed and covered with an enormous stone.

Early on Sunday morning, when Mary and the other women came to the tomb, they planned to anoint His dead body. But instead they found the soldiers unconscious on the ground, the seal broken, the stone rolled away, and angels guarding the entrance. The angels announced that Jesus had risen from the dead. The women were confused and frightened and reported to the men that the tomb was empty. Later that day, and many times over the next forty days, Jesus appeared in bodily form to His disciples as well as to over five hundred other people. Then He ascended into heaven where He now sits at the Father's right hand.

After two thousand years, skeptics have never provided a sufficient answer to this question: What happened to the body of Jesus? No one ever found His dead body because by Easter Sunday it wasn't dead anymore. There is no other reasonable answer than this: Jesus Christ actually, literally, and physically rose from the dead. And from that day to this, the Christian church has made the Resurrection the cornerstone of the gospel message.

The resurrection of Jesus is vitally important because it proves that He really is the Son of God and that everything He said is true. No one else has ever come back from the dead never to die again. This means that in the most profound sense Jesus Christ is alive today. And that's why you can know Him personally. Because He is alive, He gives eternal life to those who trust in Him. And because He conquered death, those who trust in Him need not fear death, for they have assurance that they will go to heaven to be with the Lord Jesus when they die. When He returns to the earth, their bodies will be raised from the dead. All this is guaranteed to the believer because Christ rose from the dead.

7. He will one day return to the earth.

With this final fact, we move from the distant past to the not-so-distant future. There is yet one more event in the "career" of Jesus Christ. One day He will return to the earth. He promised to return-"I will come again" -and He will keep that promise. He will come just as He left-visibly and bodily. His coming is not merely spiritual but actual and literal. This is truly an astounding thought. The same Jesus who was born in Bethlehem, walked on this earth, died on the cross, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven is coming again. The actual, historical figure who lived two thousand years ago on the other side of the world is returning to the earth one more time. Though no one knows the day or the hour, the fact of His return is certain.

THE CHRIST WE NEED

Only the Christ revealed in the pages of Holy Scripture can save us. But the Jesus of the Bible is not the only "Jesus" in the marketplace of ideas. To be almost right about Jesus is to be totally wrong. Why? Because we are not saved by good opinions about Jesus. We are not saved because we have a good feeling about Jesus. We are not saved because we like His moral teaching. We are saved by all that Jesus accomplished for us in His obedient life, His sacrificial death and His bodily resurrection from the dead.

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If Jesus is who He said He is, there is no truth more worthy of your time, no person more important to know. The Christian church is made up of men and women who confess one revolutionary truth---that Jesus or Nazareth is the Son of the living God.

And until you believe that, and confess that, you cannot be called a Christian. It matters not that you may have positive feelings about Jesus Christ or that you think He was a very good man. You are not a Christian until you confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

Who is the Christ of Christmas? Think how you would respond. Your answer determines your eternal destiny.


ONE SOLITARY LIFE

Born in an obscure village, He was the child of a peasant woman. He worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty years old, and then for three years, He travelled around the country, stopping long enough to talk and listen to people and help where He could. He never wrote a book. He never had a hit record. He never went to college. He never ran for public office. He never had a family or owned a house. He never did any of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but Himself. But when He was only thirty three years old, the tide of public opinion turned against Him, and His friends all rejected Him. When He was arrested, very few wanted anything to do with Him. After the trial, He was executed by the State along with admitted thieves. Only because a generous friend offered his own cemetery plot was there any place to bury Him. This all happened nineteen centuries ago, and yet, today, He is the leading figure of the human race, and the ultimate example of love. Now, it is no exaggeration to say that all the armies that have ever marched, all the navies that have ever set sail; all the rulers that have ever ruled, all the kings that have ever reigned on this earth, all put together, have not affected the life of man on earth like THIS ONE SOLITARY LIFE.