One of the ways that we protest the spirit of our age as we come to church is by, as we already have, by singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. We don't need to create our own truth. We don't have a category of my truth and your truth. We simply receive the truth and we're formed by that and shaped by that and we announce that truth to the world as we seek to have it embedded in our own hearts and then communicate it to others. And one of the ways that Christians have done that for centuries is by confessing the Apostles' Creed. This is not a truth that we have invented. It is not my way of being unique and expressive of who I want to be in a way that's special to me. It's saying this is the truth, and I receive it, and I rest in it, and I find comfort in it. And so let's confess these truths by standing and singing number 560, the Apostles' Creed. I believe in God the Father, Maker of all heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, our Savior, Father, Son of God. The Holy Ghost conceived Him, Virgin Mary, born God's Son. He in whom I have believed Him, God Almighty created. Not just pilot, crucified enduring now. Made within the grave so silent, as the prophets did foretell. For the soul still too was empty, on the third day he arose. Into heaven made his entry, rising from the lofty slopes, and was right, and he is seated, till his coming as he stand. ♪ Till we meet again to the living and the dead. ♪ ♪ I confess the Holy Spirit has been sent to bless the Son. ♪ ♪ To the Christ, salvation's near gift, God the Spirit brings. ♪ I believe the Church of Jesus, holy Catholic remains. We are one with all the ages, the Communion of the Saints. His sins are forgiven, and our body to be raised. Life with God is never-ending. Thou revertest faithfully. As we continue to study the essentials of the Christian faith using the Belgic Confession as a guide to understanding the Word of God, we consider the relationship of the two natures of Christ who is one person. And so in just a moment, we'll be reading Article 19 of the Belgic Confession of Faith. If you'd like to follow along, you can find it in the Forms and Prayers book on page 172. Going to read a few texts. First, just a phrase from 1 Timothy 3, verse 16, which we referenced last week, in which the Apostle Paul says this, We considered the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ last time. Now we're going to be focusing on the relationship between his two natures and his one person. So I'd like to read as just one example of passages in the Gospels where we have presented to us our Lord Jesus Christ. one beautiful unified person in whom we can witness two distinct natures. And you'll notice that in our reading. So Luke chapter 24, I'll read verse 36 through 53. As they, the disciples, were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, Peace to you. But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit. And they said to him and he said to them, Why are you troubled and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet that it is I myself. Touch me and see for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have. And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, Have you anything here to eat? And they gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them. Then he said to them, These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. And he opened their minds to understand the scriptures and said to them, Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead. And that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. And he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. and they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple, blessing God. Amen. Listen now as I read also Article 19 of the Belgian Confession of Faith, found on page 172 of the Forms and Prayers book. Article 19, the two natures of Christ. We believe that by being thus conceived, the person of the Son has been inseparably united and joined together with human nature in such a way that there are not two sons of God, nor two persons, but two natures united in a single person. with each nature retaining its own distinct properties. Thus his divine nature has always remained uncreated without beginning of days or end of life, filling heaven and earth. His human nature has not lost its properties, but continues to have those of a creature. It has a beginning of days. It is of a finite nature and retains all that belongs to a real body. And even though he by his resurrection gave it immortality, that nonetheless did not change the reality of his human nature. For our salvation and resurrection depend also on the reality of his body. But these two natures are so united together in one person that they are not even separated by his death. So then, What he committed to his father when he died was a real human spirit which left his body, but meanwhile his divine nature remained united with his human nature even when he was lying in the grave, and his deity never ceased to be in him, just as it was in him when he was a little child, though for a while it did not show itself as such. These are the reasons why we confess Him to be true God and true man, true God in order to conquer death by His power, and true man that He might die for us in the weakness of His flesh. Amen. Every true Christian wants to know Jesus. That was the desire of the Apostle Paul. He says, I want to know Christ. I want to know Him, the power of His resurrection. And he sets for us a pattern. We all ought to want to know Jesus. And part of knowing Jesus is understanding the relationship between his two natures and his single person. I want to ask this question this evening being truly God and truly man, what kind of a person is he? And while the church's teaching on this subject is somewhat technical, as you noted from our reading of the Belgic Confession, the Athanasian Creed does provide a helpful analogy which might serve as a jumping off point for us. The analogy is this, as in humans, The reasonable soul and flesh is one man. So we say in one person, there are in a sense two parts, a soul and flesh come together in one person. So in a similar way, God and man is one Christ. That's what we want to confess this evening as we strive to know Jesus better. In Christ, God and man unite. And so we make this confession with a church of all ages, and yet we still have questions about what this means. How can this be? How can Christ be a single unified person if he has two distinct natures? We may wonder, is he sort of human? Is he sort of divine, but not completely? Or is he sometimes human, sometimes divine? As we read the Gospels, you may ask that question. The answer is no, he's not sometimes human, sometimes he's not divine. But you do get that sense, that sense from time to time that one of his natures is dominant, or sort of jumps off the page as you read it. How do Christ's divine and human natures relate to each other? Does one overpower the other? Is Christ more human or more divine? Or maybe as you... have been considering these matters at the beginning of the sermon, you might have a different question altogether. Why does any of this matter? Why? Why would you want to be so technical? I just want to know Jesus. I just want to have a relationship with the son of God. And don't these questions and this study, which feels so technical and scientific, don't they overcomplicate the simplicity of Jesus as a loving savior? And of course, we need to be careful not to do that. We should never study Jesus as if he were a scientific subject that we dissect in a classroom setting. And yet, we should also all recognize that more accurate understanding can actually deepen our love, deepen our passion. So when we say we want to know Jesus, we don't want to know him in a simplistic way. Just as the more you know about a subject, the more that knowledge can deepen your love for that subject, the more you understand whatever it is you're passionate about, whether it's gardening and you understand the complexity of the relationship of the soil and the air and the water and the temperature and the timing and all these things, or whatever field it is, you understand something of the more technical side of the thing, but it can actually deepen your love for that thing, for that subject. And so, with a deeper understanding of the relation between Jesus, one person, and two natures, we can actually come to find him more lovely and more perfectly suited to be our Savior. So that's our goal this evening. First of all, wanting to assert, as the Bible commands us to, the reality of the two natures in Jesus one person. So we just want to proclaim together and confess the orthodox doctrine of the two natures of Jesus and his one person, and then we want to consider the relevance of this doctrine second. So first of all, the reality of the two natures in Christ's person. Here again, we're not inventing something. I'm not coming up with something new. We're listening to the Bible and the way that the church has understood it for ages. We have in front of us then this orthodox formula for knowing Christ. And this is important, again, as we would hopefully all say in our hearts, I want to know Jesus. Well, you must want to know Jesus the way the church has said, you must know Him according to the Word of God. And the way that you must know Christ is as one person with two natures. As we use this formula, we make two critical affirmations. First of all, we're affirming here that Christ's two natures unite in a single person. Christ's two natures, His deity and His humanity, unite in one single person. Jesus' divinity and humanity do not constitute two competing, unharmonious personalities in Jesus. Although we know what that might be like, we see something of that in the Gospels, where sometimes persons who are oppressed by demons had sort of their own nature, you might say, but they had the nature of a demon in them as well. And there was this this tension within their person. But that's not at all what we have in the person of Jesus Christ. It is true that the Gospels do sometimes show us more plainly. Either his divine or human nature, we saw that in our reading of Luke, Chapter 24. We catch here the fact that Jesus asked for food. He says, does anyone have anything to eat? And I'll eat it. And I'll show you that as I eat the food, I'm a person, a real person. I'm not a spirit as you're afraid I am. I have a body just like you. He was able to show them his hands and his feet that had the scars from The wounds that he endured in the crucifixion, wounds that would have been the same shape and of the same tenderness that you'd expect in any person. Jesus became physically exhausted, as you'd expect a person to become, who's working hard sometimes, days on end, without any break, the Gospels say. He He did all of the things that we would expect ordinary humans to do. And so we see that human nature coming out in the Gospels, but we also sometimes see flashes of Christ's complete deity, as in the transfiguration. where we read in Mark 9, verse 3, for example, that His clothes became shining, exceeding white, like snow, such as no launderer on earth can whiten them. It's the deity of Christ coming out. And that is because of God's decision to reveal that to his closest friends, his dearest disciples. He did not become divine when he was transfigured, but he revealed himself as divine so that his disciples could understand him better. We read in the Gospels that This person, Jesus, has the power to forgive sin, and yet the whole Bible teaches that only God has the power to forgive sin. It's one of the reasons that Jesus was in trouble from his enemies, is he claimed things to himself that only can be claimed by God. He could say, as he does in John 8 verse 58, before Abraham was, I am. And so you see these two, the two natures of Jesus in the gospels, and we see them and understand this as we must when we understand any writing, that the writers can only describe these two natures of Christ alongside each other. That is a mark of the limitation of writing and of human understanding. And so you see, from time to time, alongside each other, these two natures of Jesus Christ, we might imagine that they are in tension, but they aren't. In Christ's person, the natures harmonize with perfection. so that he is a true Savior, true God, and true man. He's one beautifully whole person with a true divine nature and a true human nature. And so the first thing that we're affirming with this orthodox formula is that Christ's two natures unite in a single person. When Christ is ministering or teaching, he doesn't say things like, according to my human nature, this or that, or my divinity says to you. No, he says I say to you, or I do this in the name of God. One person with two unified natures. But there's a second affirmation that God's people have always made, and that is that Christ's two natures retain their distinct properties. Christ's humanity doesn't get swallowed up by his divinity. It's not a different kind of humanity than your humanity. It's not up a level or two because it is in the person of Jesus Christ, not an ordinary man or woman like you or me. Christ's human nature has not lost its properties, as the confession puts it, nor even did his resurrection change the reality of his human nature. Some theologians even in the Reformation era have suggested that Jesus could perform miracles because his divine nature saturated his humanity. But if Christ possesses what then we would have to call in some way a deified humanity, how can he sympathize with our weaknesses? As we know he does from Hebrews 4 verse 15. We said last time that Jesus is qualified to intercede for God's children because he shares our same flesh and blood. And so we need to resist that sense, which maybe theologians arrived at out of a sense of reverence for Jesus or whatever, but that sense that he has a different kind of human nature, that his divinity has bled over into his humanity. And so he then is not just like us. To be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, he, in all things, had to be made like his brother in Hebrews 2.17 says. If Christ possesses a deified humanity, then it's unclear how the Holy Spirit helped him in his ministry. But Christ did miracles, not because his deity took over. Not because this one person became a different kind of thing. because of his two natures, but because he possessed the spirit without measure. And so what we see in scripture and what Christian theology clarifies for us in our quest to truly know Jesus is that he is a single blessed person with two distinct natures, humanity and divinity. These two natures retaining their distinct properties but coming together in a perfect way, harmonious way in the one person of our Lord Jesus Christ. And this reality is a great comfort for believers. It's not just a technical, theological formulation. It's not just the doctors of the church trying to look smart. This is what we need to know about Jesus Christ. And as we consider, secondly, the relevance of the two natures of Christ's single person, I want to reflect on three ways that this, not just the doctrine, But the truth, the reality, the person of Jesus Christ, how he is a blessing to us as he is true God and true man. And there's truly a limitless number of applications that we could draw from who Jesus truly is. But perhaps three things rise to the surface, at least as summarized by the Belgic Confession. And the first is this, Christ, answers our deepest longings. He answers our deepest longings by who He is as a true person and true God. This is so important because At some point or another in your life, you will feel like there is something so deeply wrong with you that it distorts your humanity at the most basic level. And this is what it means to be a sinner. Our longing for bodily perfection, our longing for spiritual Perfection runs deep in us, and yet there's a futility, there's a frustration. We, in our humanity, are groaning with all creation. We know that we're not right. We look at our bodies and we don't love what we see, and our souls are not right, and the things that we do are out of step, our passions. They seem so important to us. We feel like we ought to realize our passions and our dreams, even if they don't harmonize with Scripture. This is one of the problems of living in a fallen world. But Jesus answers these problems. Our longing for bodily and spiritual perfection can only be satisfied by union with the one in whom heaven and earth are perfectly joined. That's what we have in Jesus, heaven and earth coming together. Earth, just like us, people formed from the dust of the earth. We have our savior, Jesus Christ, but he comes down to us from heaven. Able to sympathize with us. but perfect God. The Son of God is inseparably united and connected with the human nature, as the confession puts it, without causing the human nature to lose its properties. So that as we unite with Christ, we unite real person to real person, real human to real human, And therefore, in that way, come to fellowship with the eternal God. What we have in Jesus is the ageless one choosing to be born and experience all our trials. In Jesus, the all-knowing God learned and became exhausted for us. The master of all things washed the feet of his friends as a sign of glory, emptying service for his beloved. And so in the very person of who Jesus is, true man who really understands us, really gets us. And true God, able to be a complete Savior, Christ answers our deepest longings, and we ought to come to Him then with our deepest longings, with our confusion, with our frustration, with our hurts, and say, Lord, you know me, and you are able to answer my deepest longing. Second, as we consider the relevance of the two persons in Christ, the two natures, rather, in Christ's person, we should be encouraged and empowered in our own progress in godliness. In other words, what we witness in Jesus Christ, the person who is spoken of in every part of Scripture and who is brought to us most visibly in the Gospels, what we have is Jesus genuinely growing and advancing in godliness as a real man with real struggles. And Jesus, the Bible tells us, learned obedience through suffering. There's a genuine struggle in the walk of godliness. We've meditated before as a congregation on Luke 2, verse 52, which says Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man. And that statement means nothing if Christ is not truly human. If there wasn't truly effort in doing that which Christ did, As a true human, Jesus' sanctification teaches us that growing in godliness is hard. Jesus did not advance in his human nature magically, but really and truly as a real person. fighting against the devil, facing real temptations, the strongest possible temptations, the full brunt of the temptations, never capitulating as we do, and therefore never feeling the full force of the temptation of the evil one. Growing in godliness is hard. And as we're reflecting on the true humanity of Jesus, and as we have confessed that his true human nature was not swallowed up by the divine, we see that the Son's earthly obedience was free and voluntary. It wasn't a different kind of obedience. It wasn't a magical obedience. It wasn't a deified obedience. It is real human obedience. It's important for us to see the striving of the man, Jesus, to please the Lord, to follow after the Lord's law, to love the things of God. Sometimes we quit growing because growth is harder than we think it should be. We feel that it should be easier to progress in godliness. I'm a Christian after all. I have the Spirit living in me, and I should just be able to go on through life and make easy progress. Why would you think that? Why would I think that? That wasn't the case for the Son of God. He presses on, sets His face like stone in the direction that He would have to proceed to go to the cross and to receive the wounds that our sins deserved. We have this encouragement, though. The Holy Spirit aids believers as he aided Jesus Christ. When Jesus Christ, for example, went into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil, he goes to the wilderness as true man, and true God, two natures and is one person. But he goes in to the wilderness, we're told, to fight with Satan, being filled with the Holy Spirit and led by the Spirit. Jesus has been baptized and the Holy Spirit comes upon him and encourages him in his ministry. The Father speaks to him and pledges his love for him. And then he goes immediately into the wilderness to be tempted. Even as you're tempted, even as this week, you're going to have plenty of opportunities to fail, to even make shipwreck of your faith, God forbid. The temptations are there. But we read in Romans 8.26, for example, likewise, the Spirit also helps us in our weakness. We could say when the trials get strong, the temptations are strong, we could say, Lord, I'm just a man. I'm just a woman. I'm just a boy. I'm just a girl. I don't know how I can live faithfully with these kinds of pressures. And the Lord reminds us of his beloved son, Jesus Christ. Not just a man, but a man, and a faithful man. And he says to us as well, I give you my spirit, and I will help you, and encourage you, and equip you. And so the Christian's battle against sin is hard, but no harder than Christ's. Don't bail out because it feels hard. If it seems hard, it's probably a reminder you're on the right track, as it was for Jesus as well. And like Jesus, all God's children will be victorious. One more thing I want to ponder as we think about the reality of our Savior Jesus Christ, one person with two distinct natures. And that is that Christ conquers death for us. It's a profound reality to me that The holy son of God bled the same kind of blood that's pulsing through your veins right now. But unlike us, he didn't have to bleed. He didn't have to die. He chose to. For us, the one who outlasts the heavens and the earth sacrificed himself for us in the prime of his human years. And so in Jesus we have true God conquering death by his power and true man dying for us in the weakness of his flesh. Believers then have this ultimate hope as Christ's human flesh really entered into heaven, having been sacrificed for us, so will redeemed sinners one day live with God in the flesh. And so we can say with the author of the Belgic Confession, our resurrection and salvation depend on the reality of his body, his soul, and his divinity. It is a great mystery as we read from 1 Timothy 3. The mystery of godliness is great. God took on flesh. How is it that God's Son can look like us and talk like us and feel like us? It's a great mystery, but by faith in the revealed will of God, his holy word, we can know him as he truly is. And so Christ asks the same question of us that he asked of his disciples, who do you say that I am? When you say, for example, that I know Jesus, that I love the Lord, who do you say that I am? We can give the same answer. We can say with Peter, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. But we can say more than that, not only because of what the scriptures have have progressively revealed to us since the moment that Peter made that confession, but because also of the way the Lord has guided his church and opened up the truths of God's word. We can say Christ Jesus. is yes, the son of the living God, but he's one perfect person with two beautiful and distinct natures, neither bleeding over into the other or corrupting the other or taking advantage of the other, remaining beautifully distinct, but joined together into this one person. And because of the way that He is as our Savior. He is perfectly suited to forgive us of our sins, to redeem the paradise that we lost, and to bring us in mysterious fellowship with God through the Son. And in this way, our joy can be full. And so the Lord comes to us today and says, do you want to know me? Do you want to know Jesus? then know him as he is and learn to say, Lord, I love you. I treasure all that you are as the scripture has revealed you to me. One beautiful person, two distinct natures, true God, true man, my savior, amen. Lord, we thank you for sending Christ into this world, not giving up, His eternal divinity, but gaining what He was not, namely true humanity. We pray that we would make this confession with boldness and confidence, having learned it from the Word of God and having it reinforced by the teaching of the church. And we pray that we would make this confession also with humility, not imagining that by using fancy theological formulations we are somehow gaining any credit with you, but being certain that if this is True. If our Lord Jesus is who Scripture says He is, then we can rest completely in Him, our bridge from earth to heaven. Hear our prayers and help us to be faithful in the week that lies before us and encourage us with the truth of the incarnation of Jesus Christ and the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Amen.