THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS CHRIST, Chapter 5 - He is Lord of Heaven and Earth

 Throughout the times that backdrop most of the Old Testament, the nations that surrounded Israel conceived of a world in which there were gods that ruled over a nation or territory. Several of these territorial deities are named in the Old Testament – Ba’al, Dagon, Molech, Rimmon, Nebo, Bel, Marduk, and Azazel, for example. But the God of the Bible, Yahweh (“Yar-way”) refused to be thought of as a mere territorial god! Yet, despite His constant revelation to His covenant people, the Hebrews, even they could not conceive of their God as being any greater than the conception of gods by the surrounding nations. Ultimately this wrong theology would lead to Israel’s demise time and time again. Then, what the Middle-Eastern Lutheran theologian, Dr. Munther Isaac, calls “the Jesus Event” happened! And once-and-for-all from that time on, no-one could ever be excused for conceiving of the God of the Bible as anything less than the GOD of all Heaven and all Earth!

Know therefore today, and lay it to your heart,
that the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath;
there is no other.
Deuteronomy 4:39

In my previous chapter, I discussed how Jesus the Christ was the ultimate fulfilment of all of the hopes of, and promises to, Israel (2Cor. 1:20). Without a doubt, Israel greatest Old Testament longing was for the fulfilment of the LORD’s promise to them to fully possess their Promised Land –

Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants, to whom You swore by Your own self,
and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven,
and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.’”
Exodus 32:13

This promise given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was then transmitted to the descendants via the covenant that Moses administered at Sinai (Ex. 19:20; 24:8). A covenant is an agreement with agreed terms. Israel agreed to the terms of the Yahweh’s covenant with them. His promise to bring them out of bondage in Egypt as slaves and into the Promised Land “flowing with milk and honey” (Deut. 6:3) as free settlers was a part their covenant with GOD.

But you shall keep My statutes and My rules and do none of these abominations,
either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you
(for the people of the land, who were before you, did all of these abominations, so that the land became unclean),
lest the land vomit you out when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.
Leviticus 18:26-28

But Israel broke their covenant with Yahweh and failed to keep the terms of the covenant that they had vowed to keep (Josh. 24:16-21). Time and time again GOD sent prophets to them to warn them that they risked incurring the penalty of breaking their covenant with GOD (2Chron. 24:19; Jer. 25:4). But Israel had been deceived into thinking that their GOD was merely like the territorial gods of the surrounding nations – gods who were relatively impotent. First, the ten northern tribes of Israel paid the penalty for breaking their covenant with Yahweh. Just as the terms of their covenant had conditioned, they were invaded by a northern nation, dispossessed from their land, and then permanently exiled (they became known as the tribes of Israel). About a hundred years later, the remain tribes in the south, collectively known as Judah had also broken their covenant with GOD and the prophet Jeremiah was raised up to plead with them to return to the LORD in repentance or risk the same penalty as their “sister” in the north had experienced:

And I thought, ‘After she has done all this she will return to Me,’ but she did not return, and her treacherous sister Judah saw it. She saw that for all the adulteries of that faithless one, Israel, I had sent her away with a decree of divorce. Yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear, but she too went and played the whore….Yet for all this her treacherous sister Judah did not return to Me with her whole heart, but in pretense, declares the LORD.”
Jeremiah 3:7-8, 10 

Jeremiah’s prophetic reminders to the people of Judah fell largely on deaf ears. Judah likewise abandoned Yahweh and also broke their covenant with GOD, and, as Jeremiah had warned (Jer. 6:22) they too were invaded, and they too were exiled, and they too were never again to lay possession to the land that had once been promised to them in their covenant with the LORD. Among the exiles were Daniel, Mordecai, Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah. When Cyrus (also known as Darius) decreed that all exiled Jews (for so the Babylonians nicknamed the people of Judah) could now return to their ancestral home, only some did. And by the time of Christ, the territory of Israel was under Roman occupation, as it had been since the time of Pompey which began decades earlier. The Jews had by this time somewhat rebuilt their temple and had been aided by the assistance of the Romans’ appointed ‘king’ of Judah, Herod the Great. Their temple precinct was granted by the Romans to be under their rule. Thus, by the time of Christ, the temple and its three outer court yards had become emblematic of what GOD’s Promised Land was meant to be: a holy place where God and man could meet; a sacred space where sacrifices could be offered to atone for sins; and, a place of judgment where GOD’s will could be enforced.  

 

THE “JESUS-EVENT”

IF you and I had been party to the appearing of the long-awaited Messiah, Jesus the Christ, (by earthly reckoning, the descendant of King David) I strongly doubt that we could have picked Him out from a small crowd! The prophet Isaiah foretold – 

My Servant [would] grew up in the LORD’s presence like a tender green shoot,
like a root in dry ground. There was nothing beautiful or majestic about His appearance,
nothing to attract us to Him.
Isaiah 53:2 NLT (originally written 8th century B.C.)

Using A.I., researchers recently used the images of the Shroud of Turin to determine what Jesus might have looked like.

But when Jesus, the Promised Messiah, appeared, He said some shocking things to many Jewish ears – especially the Jewish religious leaders. He declared that it was He who was the place where God and man could meet (Jn. 14:6). He declared that He was greater than the Temple (Matt. 12:6). He declared that He would be the atoning sacrifice for sins (Matt. 26:28; Mark 10:45). And He declared all judgment on behalf of GOD had been given to Him (Jn. 5:22). Dr. Munther Isaac describes the effects of Christ’s statements in terms that resembled an earthquake that happened and producing “a series of aftershocks”! Christ was saying that it was not the Temple that made be holy – it was Him! It was not the sacrificing of animals that could atone for their sins – it was Him, the Lamb of God! It was not the High Priest who ruled on behalf of Yahweh – it was exclusively Him! Even at the ‘trial’ of Christ before Caiaphas, He made an outstanding to the declaration after the High Priest had put Him under oath to tell the truth:

Now the chief priests and the whole council were seeking false testimony against Jesus that they might put him to death, but they found none, though many false witnesses came forward. At last two came forward and said,
“This man said, ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to rebuild it in three days.’”
And the high priest stood up and said, “Have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you?”
But Jesus remained silent. And the high priest said to him,
“I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.”
Jesus said to him, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”
Matthew 26:59-64

HE IS LORD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH!

The aftershocks of what Jesus the Christ said and did were felt for decades after His initial mission was accomplished (His display of the Father, His death on the cross, His resurrection, and His ascension) and it was then committed to His disciples to complete when He commissioned them just prior to His ascension. Like a sonic bomb when a visible jet speeds past the observer then seconds later they hear the loud ‘KA-BOOOOOM!’ the words of Christ’s Great Commission – “All authority in heaven in and earth has been given to Me….Go into all the world….Make disciples of nations….” (Matt. 28:18-20; Mark 16:15).

I know that what I am trying to convey to you, my reader, may not be fully appreciated. But I pray that as the Spirit takes the truth of what GOD’s Word has revealed about Christ, you might experience the sound of a sonic boom in your soul as you realise this truth: Jesus Christ is Lord of all Heaven and all earth! May the aftershocks of this revelation cause your soul to be rocked with the revelation that there is nothing in this universe or your heart the He does not know! May more after-shocks of this revelation hit your soul like nuclear explosive waves as you come to realise that He is LORD over event that we will call ‘history’ and over care that you now call ‘a problem’. Little wonder then the apostle Paul was knocked of his spiritual feet with the wave of this revelation when he announced to the Colossians this fridge magnet text:

It doesn’t matter if you a waitress, a doctor, a Prime Minister, a king, a President, or a teenager —there is not one cause of anxiety, care, trouble, concern, or worry, that Jesus the Christ, the Lord of Heaven of Heaven and Earth who is seated, as the creed declares, at the right hand of the Father, that He can’t carry – if you would only give it to Him! 

What a Friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

Your Pastor,

Andrew

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THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS CHRIST, Part 4 - He is the Divine Promise Keeper

 

Throughout the Old Testament, God made certain promises to the patriarchs (Abraham, Issac, and Jacob/Israel) that their descendants, the nation of Israel, longed to see fulfilled. These promises centred on having a holy Homeland and a Messiah. Over the centuries that followed their expulsion from their Land which sent them into exile into Babylon initially and then into Persia, the Israelites became known as Jews. Their expectations of how these divine promises would be fulfilled then became greatly embellished with the promise of a homeland being interpretted to mean that the Romans would be overthrown and expelled out of ‘their’ land,  by the promised messiah who would then have to be a powerful military commander. These embellished expectations then gave rise to the Jewish sect known as the Zealots; and, prior to the Zealots it led various other unsuccessful Jewish revolts. But when the messiah actually appeared, He was not the military commander that the Jews were expecting. How could this carpenter’s son from Nazareth be the heir to King David’s throne and the one who would ultimately fulfil the promises of God to Israel? So how justified were the first-century Jews in their expectations of how God would fulfil His promises to them? How obligated was Jesus the Messiah to fulfil the promises of God? And what implications does this have for Christians today who are committed to claiming the promises of God?  

 

KING DAVID PROPHETICALLY IDENTIFIED
THE MESSIAH AS HIS LORD

¶ And as Jesus taught in the temple, He said,
“How can the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David?
David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared,“‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.”’
¶ David himself calls Him Lord. So how is He his son?”
And the great throng heard him gladly.
Mark 12:35-37

The answer to Christ’s question is grounded in how the Jews referred to someone as their father, and how they referred to someone as a son. In English we have the ability to identify our ancestors as our: father; grandfather; great-grandfather; great-great-grandfather, and so on. Inversely, we can also refer to their male descendant as their: son; grandson; great-grandson; great-great-grandson, and so on. The Jews through the ensuing centuries could refer to Abraham as “our father” (Lk. 1:73; 3:8) and as it turns out, with such an emphasis on respecting elders, it was unusual for someone to refer to their eventual descendant as their ‘Lord’, yet, David could refer to his descendant, Jesus, as his “son” (Matt. 1:1). Thus, King David was prophetically declaring that the Messiah would be the divine Lord (Psalm 2). This then forms the background to the angelic announcement to the shepherds on the night the Jesus was born –

¶ And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night.  And an angel of the Lord appeared to them,
and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear.
And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold,
I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.
Luke 2:8-11

The angel announced that Jesus was: (i) a Saviour; (ii) the Christ (Messiah); and (iii) the Lord. Significantly, the angel also specified that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (Luke 2:4) which fulfilled what the prophets had foretold (2Sam. 7:12-13; Mic. 5:2). The angelic designation of Jesus as ‘saviour’ may well have been understood by the shepherds to mean what the Rabbis had long told their congregations about the coming Messiah as a military commander. But it wasn’t just these shepherds who probably held this expectation, even Christ’s own disciples expressed this understanding to Jesus immediately prior to His ascension:

¶ So when they had come together, they asked Him,
“Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”
Acts 1:6

By the time of Acts 1, Christ’s disciples had already come to understand that Jesus was Christ, Lord and GOD who was worthy of the worship only due to GOD. It is therefore reasonable to understand why the disciples expected that Jesus would fulfil the promises that GOD had made to the patriarchs and which the nation of Israel expected the Messiah would deliver. This is why Christ’s response to His disciples’ question is so revealing (Acts 1:7) and it then leads us to reconsider how we understand “the promises of God.”

 

UNDERSTANDING THE PROMISES OF GOD 

The brief exchange between the disciples and the risen Lord prior to Christ’s ascension reveals three important insights:

1. Sometimes our expectations of GOD are misunderstandings of what the Scriptures actually say.

2. Understand that GOD always keeps His promises which may then invite us to consider how He has done so with a fresh perspective.

3. Recognise that often it takes the passage of time for us to realise and understand that GOD has kept His promises in a way that far exceeds what we had actually expected.

Paul’s statement to the Corinthians that Jesus had fulfilled all of the promises to Israel is an application of the above three insights. Paul, a converted Jew to Christianity grew up longing for God’s promises to Israel to repossess its Biblically-prescribed borders under the military leadership of the promised Messiah. In his consideration of these divine promises to Israel he had come to realise that Jesus had indeed fulfilled all of these promises which then confirmed that Christ was LORD of Lords (1Tim. 6:15) because He was the Divine Promise-Keeper.

In relation to these promises, Dr. Munther Isaac in his book, From Land to Lands, From Eden to the Renewed Earth (pps. 193-4), cites Dr. Peter W.L. Walker’s book, Jesus and the Holy City (p. 117)- “Moreover, Walker argues that the phrase ‘all the promises’ would necessarily include those concerning the land.” “In other words, the story of Israel, in its totality, including the part related to the land, must find its fulfillment – its Yes – in Jesus. Therefore, the land cannot but be a major themes in the story the NT writers are telling — a story that is continuing on the story of the OT, in which the land was such a central theme. Furthermore, some themes in the NT — like the selection of the twelve disciples, Jesus’ interaction with the temple, and the covenant with Abraham — are strongly tied with the theme of the land. If the land is a major them in the OT, then it is inherently a major one in the NT.” And Dr. Isaac goes on to point out that Jesus Himself was the fulfilment of what the Land promise was ultimately all about – where God and man could meet and worshipers of God could display God’s light of holiness to the world.  

 

THE PROMISES OF GOD IN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS THAT BELIEVERS CAN ‘CLAIM’ TODAY

God’s promises to Israel was not just about a Messiah and a homeland. His promise was that He would establish a new covenant that would be open to both Israelites and gentiles. 

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD:
I will put My law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God,
and they shall be My people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbour and each his brother, saying,
‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest,
declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
Jeremiah 31:33-34

God’s promise of a new covenant to supersede the Mosaic Covenant, was to be a covenant in which He would forgive sins without the need for ongoing sacrifices. This would be made possible by the promise of His Son acting as the atoning sacrifice (Isa. 53:4-5). And long before this, GOD had promised that His Son would be born as the Seed of the woman who would vanquish (conquer and destroy) the source of evil by striking the serpent’s (representative of the devil) head (Gen. 3:15). The patriarchs also understood that GOD’s promises also included resurrection from the dead (Job 19:26; Psa. 16:10). And, rather than being limited to a specific small piece of land, God’s promises also included the Lord dwelling forever with the righteous in a new heaven and earth that He would make (Isa. 65:17; 66:22). All of these promises the prophets declared – uncertain of what GOD was actually revealing:

Obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
¶ Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace
that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully,
inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating
when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories.
It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you,
in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached
the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.
First Peter 1:9-12

We are now in the New Covenant foretold by the prophets and expounded by Christ’s apostles. Since all of these promises have now been fulfilled, or at least now set in motion, the New Testament believer can now stand on the promises that Christ will ever be with them by the infilling of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:20). The believer can stand on the promise — which means, pray to the Lord with confidence — that Jesus was indeed the Messiah who came to atone for their sins and redeem those who confess their sins and turn to Him through faith and repentance (1John 1:8-9). The believer can also pray with the assurance of the promise in First Peter 5:7 that we can cast all of our cares onto Him – because He cares for us. He is therefore, not just the promise-keeping Lord, He is the One who promises to always love us and cause all things to work together for our good and His glory (Romans 8:28).

Your Pastor,

Andrew

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THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS CHRIST, CHAPTER 3

 

For those unfamiliar with the story of the Bible who may be seeking to remedy that unfamiliarity, I would recommend that they start reading in the New Testament. It is there that they will be introduced immediately to Jesus who is the central character of the whole Bible. For many novice readers of the Bible who then attempt to read the Old Testament of the Bible (its first 39 books), it initially seems like they are reading a completely unrelated story which seems to describe a completely different God.

But with a little patience and persistence the reader will begin to suspect that this is not a different story but is in fact the prequel to the New Testament. Then a strange supernatural thing happens as they continue to become acquainted with the lives of the patriarchs, judges, kings and prophets, as these characters interact with enemies, giants, angels, strange heavenly beings, and GOD Himself, the reader begins to see in a similar way to what a photographer could not previously see clearly until his camera’s focus was adjusted to make the picture clear — the GOD who created, acted, spoke and judged, frequently referred to Himself as ‘us’, ‘we’, ‘our’, and at times seemed to have conversations with divine characters identified as ‘the LORD’ and ‘Me’ and ‘His Spirit’ (Isa. 48:16).

And this all begins to sound very reminiscent of the GOD described in the New Testament as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. With a growing knowledge of the Bible and hunger to understand it, the follower of Christ discovers that literally for thousands of years prior to this day there have been many many others who have also walked the journey of discovery through the mysterious pages of the Bible and have each made a startling discovery about the human Jesus’ pre-existence throughout the pages of the Old Testament. 

As a young Christian I used to hear the old-timers say about the Bible, “The New is concealed in the Old and the Old is revealed in the New.” Apparently, what they were saying was that things that would one day be revealed in the New Testament were already in the Old Testament, but were disguised. Those very same disguised things in the Old Testament are then like the disguised super-hero who takes his disguise off to reveal his true identity. The apostle Paul revealed that it was Jesus who created the heavens and the earth in the beginning (Gen. 1:1; Col. 1:15-18). It was the apostle John who recorded that it was the ‘pre-incarnate’ (that is, before Jesus came into the world through the womb of Mary) Jesus who appeared to Abraham with two accompanying heavenly beings before these two accompanists went to Sodom and Gomorrah to destroy its citizens for their sexual perversion (Jn. 8:56). The writer of The Epistle to the Hebrews revealed that it was Jesus who sent the prophets to wayward Israel summoning them to repent, and that throughout this time it was Jesus who was sustaining the entire universe (Heb. 1:1-3). And it was Matthew and Luke who recorded Jesus walking out of Jerusalem to ascend up the overlooking Mount of Olives where Jesus sat down to look at the city that had just rejected Him. Christ then said something that clearly shocked His Jewish disciples. “Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, I sent you prophets…and you rejected them.”

This is what sets Christianity apart from every other religion. Buddha did not claim to be GOD (in fact, he claimed there was no GOD). Zoroaster did not claim to be GOD. Mohammed did not claim to be GOD. But Jesus did. Unlike the claim of Mormons (“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints”) Jesus was not a human who became a god. And unlike the claim of Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jesus was not the Archangel Michael who then became the Christ (we note in Revelation 12 that Jesus is distinguished from Michael as He ascended to His Father and was enthroned at His Father’s right hand while the archangel Michael overthrew Satan casting him and his fellow fallen evil beings out of the heaven (Rev. 12:7-9).

 

CHRISTOPHANIES, THEOPHANIES,
& ‘THE ANGEL OF THE LORD’

An “epiphany” is an appearing. A theophany is ‘an appearance of God.’ A Christophany is ‘an appearance of the Second Person of the Godhead (Jesus).’ If you would like to dive a little deeper into the study of theophanies and Christophanies then refer to diagram extract from Holman Bible Dictionary adjacent. There are significant instances of these in which most biblical scholars have reasons to believe that they all refer to pre-incarnate appearances of Christ.

These reasons include:

(i) The theophany is sometimes referred to as the Angel of the LORD who then spoke in the first person as GOD (“I say…” or “I will…”)  (Gen 16:7-13) unlike prophets or mere angels who spoke on behalf of the LORD, (“Thus says the LORD…” )

(ii) The theophany often received worship as GOD (Gen. 17:3; Josh. 5:14)

(iii) The theophany is sometimes referred to as the Glory of the Lord (Exo. 33:9-10; Ezek. 10:4) and the Name of the Lord (Isa. 30:27; 59:19).

The Lord Jesus Christ was revealed within the Old Testament as the LORD, GOD, the Angel of the Lord, the Commander of the Army of the Lord, the Name of the Lord, and the Glory of the Lord. The Old Testament writers also revealed that He was the Son of God (Psalm 2:7; Prov. 30:4). In the intertestamental period there was a growing awareness that the God of Israel had an eternal Son (Wisd. of Sol. 2:18; 4Ezra 7:28-29; 13:32, 37, 52; 14:9; Book of Enoch 105:2). This pre-New Testament literature reveals that the Lord Jesus Christ was the eternal Son of God whom the prophet Isaiah not only said that the day was coming when He would be born as a human from the womb of a virgin (Isa. 7:14), the prophet also revealed His magnificent identity:

For to us a child is born,
to us a Son is given;
and the government shall be upon His shoulder,
and His name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of His government and of peace
there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over His kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.
Isaiah 9:6-7

WHAT THIS ALL MEANS FOR YOU

The GOD who created the universe, our earth, our first father and mother, and you, is your LORD! You were made by Him and for Him. You are not an accident. He has a purpose for your life. But you can choose either to embrace Him as your LORD – leading to your eternal life and divine bliss; or, despise Him and reject His claim to Lordship and declare your eternal opposition to Him. For those who choose the former, and accept Christ as the rightful Lord of their life, they also discover that He cares infinitely for them with an unconditional love. Accepting Christ’s Lordship is a deeply spiritual transaction where He does for the believer what only the True Lord can do – forgive their sins and gift them with eternal life. Knowing Christ as Lord gives the believer a new heart of love and care for others which leads the believer to have a burden to pray for those who do not know the Lord. It is also gives the believer the confidence that their prayers are being heard. And this is why I want you to realise who Jesus really is, and what His Lordship means for you! 

Your Pastor,

Andrew

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