Why the Saviour Must Be Both
When you pray, when you sing at church, when you stand at a graveside, you are trusting a Person. So it matters a great deal who He is. Who died for your sins? Who rose? Who is praying for you right now? Scripture gives one answer: the Lord Jesus Christ, truly God and truly man.
Both halves of that answer carry weight. Only God can save, and only the blood of the Son of God could pay a debt owed to an infinite God (Acts 20:28). Yet only a man could die in man's place. Because we are flesh and blood, He also himself likewise took part of the same (Hebrews 2:14). A Saviour who was God but not man could not die for us. A Saviour who was man but not God could not save us.
Only Jesus is able to deliver us, because He is both God and man. He can reach up to God because He is God, and He can reach down to us because He is one of us.
We believe that Jesus Christ is eternally God and possesses all the attributes of deity, that He was born of a virgin as God incarnate, and that He never gave up any attribute of His deity but only veiled it. This article shows how those truths fit together: two complete natures united in one person, without being mixed together and without being divided apart.
The biblical teaching that the eternal Son of God, in one undivided person, has a complete divine nature and a complete human nature, joined forever without mixture, change, division, or separation.
Other topics take up the pieces. The Deity of Christ shows that He is fully God, The Humanity of Christ that He is fully man, and The Incarnation how the Son became man in the virgin's womb. Here we ask how the two belong together in one Lord.
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For Deeper Study
- Jesus Christ Our LordAmazon John F. WalvoordA dispensational treatment of the person and work of Christ from eternity past to eternity future, including the two natures and the kenosis.
- Basic TheologyAmazon Charles C. RyrieA dispensational systematic theology written for church members. Its chapters on the person of Christ are clear and brief.
- The Person of ChristAmazon Donald MacleodA Free Church of Scotland theologian traces the doctrine from Scripture through Chalcedon to modern kenotic theories. Intermediate.
- God the Son Incarnate: The Doctrine of ChristAmazon Stephen J. WellumA thorough, advanced Christology by a Southern Baptist seminary professor. Calvinistic in soteriology, unlike this platform.
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsAmazon John FoxeThe classic Protestant record of those who died for the faith, from the early church to the English Reformation.
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The Deity of Christ
Jesus Christ is eternally and fully God: the uncreated Son, one in nature with the Father and personally distinct from Him.
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