Pondering the Person of Christ (Mt. 22:41-46)

  

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The question our Lord asks his hearers is a good question for all of us to consider: “While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, saying, What think ye of Christ? whose son is he?” (41-42).  This is similar to a question he asked his disciples back in chapter 16, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” (13), which elicited Peter’s Great Confession: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (16).  

Here we see, from our Lord’s own mouth, that it matters what we think about Christ.  Christianity is not a religion that focuses only on the feelings and bypasses the mind.  It is the most natural question for a Christian to ask, or be asked, “What do you think?”  It is not because our religion supposes that correct thinking is all there is to true religion.  After all, even the devils believe that God exists and tremble (Jam. 2:9).  But true religion requires faith in God – “the just shall live by faith” – and you cannot have faith apart from the understanding.  What is called saving faith requires knowledge, conviction, and trust.  You cannot have one without the other.  Knowledge of God that does not lead to trust in God is useless.  But you cannot get to trust if you have no knowledge!  Paul basically makes this point in Romans 10, when he argues, “whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?” (Rom. 10:13-14).  You cannot pray apart from faith, and you cannot have faith apart from hearing, and the hearing here is the hearing of the gospel, which has content and is delivered to the mind as well as the heart.

In fact, Paul begins the 10th chapter of Romans with his wish that his kinsmen might be saved, and then he diagnoses the problem in these terms: “they being ignorant of God’s righteousness” (Rom. 10:3).  There is an ignorance that is sinful.  An ignorance that is rooted, not so much in the lack of information, but in the willful rejection of the truth – its suppression (cf. Rom. 1:18,ff).

And I suspect that is exactly what our Lord was wanting to expose in his question here in Matthew 22.  In this chapter, we have the Pharisees and their accomplices the Herodians who “took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk” (15).  They weren’t serious in their questions to Jesus, as I suspect a lot of people are when they try to disprove the Chrisitan faith or try to catch unwary Christians with clever and difficult questions.  I’m not saying that it’s not wrong to be intellectually curious – after all, as I began, it’s entirely a Christian thing to do to ask the question, “What do you think?”  But there are questions which come from genuine intellectual curiosity or difficulty, and then those that come from hearts that just want to justify themselves in their sin and rejection of God.  That is what our Lord was dealing with here.  

And so, he gives them, as it were, a taste of their own medicine.  He asks them a question which he knows they will not be able to answer.  And in fact we are told that “no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions” (Mt. 22:46).  Which, by the way, shows that they weren’t really interested in getting at the truth: if they had, they would have kept asking him questions.  They just wanted to win a debate and disgrace Jesus in the process.  Like Pilate, they were willing to ask the question, “What is truth?” but they weren’t willing to stay around for the answer.

But let’s be different.  Let’s be willing to hear from Jesus and listen to his question.  For it gives us some incredible insights into the person and work of Jesus and how we might relate to him today.  So first of all, I want to consider what this text says about the person of Christ, and the second, how we know this, and third, what this means for us.

What this text tells us about Christ.

As we begin, I want to make the observation that this text (Mt 22) is a witness to Jesus’ understanding that the OT Psalms are inspired of the Lord (Spirit should be capitalized, as it is in the ESV): “How then doth David in spirit call him Lord, saying, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool?” (Mt.  22:43-44).  So this is not just a random religious text.  These are the words of the divinely inspired king of Isreal telling us something important about the Christ who would come.  What does he say?

The Christ is a historical person.

Psalm 110, which our Lord is quoting here, was understood by all in Jesus’ day to be a reference to the Christ.  We know from Matthew 16 and many, many other places that Jesus understood himself to be the Christ.  In his words before the High Priest, this is exactly how he identifies himself: “Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven” (Mk 14:61-62). The Christ in the person of Jesus is not a mythical category, but the description of a real, historical person.

He is witnessed to by four gospels written independently, in the first century, by eye-witnesses or by men who got their information from eye-witnesses.  He is witnessed to by the apostle Paul, who met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, and who wrote just 20 years after Jesus died that “I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3-4).  He is witnessed to by Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian.  He is witnessed to by first-century Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus.  He is witnessed to by the early church fathers of the late first and early second century.  Jesus is not the fiction of someone’s imagination.  He is a real, historical person.

And that is important because Jesus said that he came to save us from our sins.  We don’t sin in an imaginary world.  We don’t live in a world which is only broken in imaginary ways.  No: sin is real and brokenness is very real, and it’s all around us.  We don’t need a comic-book superhero: we need someone who walked the earth we walk on and breathed the air we breathe.  We need someone who “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).  But that is not all that this text tells us about Christ.  

The Christ is the eternal Son of God.

What does it means when Jesus acknowledges that he is the Son of God to the High Priest in Mark 14?  It’s more than a mere repetition of the name Christ, the anointed Messiah who would defeat God’s enemies and rescue his people.  It is much more than that, for the name “Son of God” is a reference to his divinity.  The Jews in Jesus’ day understood this.  It’s why they said, after Jesus claimed that God was his Father and that he and his Father were one (Jn. 10:30): “For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God” (10:33). Jesus is God: he is the eternal Son of God, and as such, one with the Father and Spirit in essence.  

“Whose son is he?”  Notice that Jesus presses them on this issue – he is not merely the son of David since David calls him Lord!  “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool? If David then call him Lord, how is he his son?” (44-45).  Jesus is the son of David, and as we will see this in itself is significant.  But he is much, much more than that.  He is the sovereign king over all the universe.  He is the one Isaiah saw in Isaiah 6, the one high and lifted up whose train filled the temple and whom the seraphim praised, as John reports in John 12.  

This is at the heart of the Chrisitan message and gospel.  The gospel is not a call to save ourselves.  It is not first and foremost even a call to moral reformation, though it does include a call to repentance.  It is first and foremost the good news that God will save his people: “He shall save his people from their sins” (Mt. 1:21).  It is not a Disney-like call to have faith in a fallen humanity, but a realistic call to put our trust in God who alone can save us.  The miracle is that God the Son, without ever subtracting from his deity, added to his person true human nature.  As the apostle John put it, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:1-3, 14).  Or, as the apostle Paul put it, “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich” (2 Cor. 8:9).  Jesus is not just David’s son, though he is.  He is also David’s Lord, because he is the eternal Son of God the Father.

Jesus became human.  But he was always and eternally the Son of God.  As the Son of God, he did not begin to be, for he always was God the Son, the eternal Word who created all things.  This is why the Scriptures don’t say that Jesus came to be the Son of God, but that the Father sent him who was already the Son: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (Jn. 3:16; cf. Rom. 8:3).  Jesus is God.

The Christ is the Son of Mary.

Our previous point was that he is the Son of God.  But he is also the son of Mary.  As he is the son of Mary, he is a true human being.  He is the son of David, but he is so because he is the son of Mary (Luke 3).  As a real human man, he had a human mind and a human body.  The Scriptures tell us that “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man” (Lk. 2:52).  It tells us that he got tired, hungry, and angry, that he wept and slept.  He felt the pain of betrayal by Judas.  He really did undergo the suffering of the cross.  He was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.  He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, as we read in Isaiah 53.  He took not to himself the nature of angels, we read in Hebrews 2, but he took to himself the seed of Abraham (Heb. 2:16).  It is for this reason, we are told, that “in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted” (17-18).

Most of the earliest heresies the church had to struggle with were denials in one form or another of one or more of these truths.  The docetists denied the real humanity of Christ.  There were those who denied that he had a proper human and divine nature, mixing them up, or canceling one in favor of the other (e.g. Nestorians and Eutychians).  There were those, like the ancient Arians (mirrored in today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses) who denied the real deity of Christ.  But the Church overcame all these heresies by proclaiming what the Bible itself says over and over again.  As the Shorter Catechism sums this witness up: “The only Redeemer of God’s elect is the Lord Jesus Christ, who, being the eternal Son of God, became man, and so was, and continueth to be, God and man in two distinct natures, and one person, for ever.”  What think ye of Christ?  Well, this is what we need to think of him!

The Christ is the descendent of Adam, Abraham, and David.  The heir to all the promises.

We must not stop there.  Yes, it is of utmost importance that we uphold the Biblical truths that Jesus is a real, historical person, that he is truly God, and truly man.  But we cannot and should not abstract the person of Christ from the Biblical storyline.  As we see in this account from Matthew’s gospel, everyone understood that the Christ was to be the descendent of king David.  And this is significant.

Why is this significant?  I’m glad you asked!

The Bible begins by relating that, apparently very soon after man was made by God, that he was tempted and fell into sin.  Sin brought condemnation, guilt, judgment, and death, just as God warned Adam and Eve.  But along with the judgment, God brought in a promise, a promise of ultimate rescue and salvation from all the devastating effects of sin.  It came in his word of judgment upon the serpent who tempted Eve into taking the forbidden fruit: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15).  In this promise is the prediction that a son will be born who will destroy the works of the devil.  But that’s all God gave to Adam and Eve at that time.  However, God did not leave humanity forever with such a bare promise.

When God called Abraham out of Ur, he expanded the amount of information and revelation concerning this Seed of the Woman: “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 12:3).  The Seed of the Woman who would undo the works of the devil is now revealed as the one in whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed.  The Seed of the Woman is now revealed to be the Seed of Abraham.

And then God gave to king David a covenantal promise, a promise which is alluded to in Psalm 110, quoted in Matthew 22.  The Davidic Covenant was the divine promise to David that “thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee: thy throne shall be established for ever” (2 Sam. 7:16).  Now the Seed of the Woman who is the Seed of Abraham is revealed to be the Seed of David, who would deliver us from our sins, bring everlasting blessing upon us, and rule over us and defend us from all his and our enemies.

This is why the Gospel of Matthew begins the way it does: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Mt. 1:1).  Jesus is the heir to all the promises of Scripture. He is the one who is foretold and foreshadowed in all the OT rituals.  He is the ultimate subject of the prophets.  As Paul will put it to the Corinthians, “For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us” (2 Cor. 1:20).  The story of Jesus is more than just the story of a prophet.  It is more even than the story of the God-Man, though it is that.  It is the story, and the proof, that God keeps his promises, all of them.

How did Jesus fulfill these promises?  He fulfilled the promises by fulfilling God’s law.  He lived and perfectly obeyed all of God’s holy commandments – not that he needed to do it – after all, he is God himself!  So why would Christ submit to the Law of God?  He did so for us, as our substitute and representative, to do what we have failed to do.  We do not keep God’s law.  We are cosmic criminals, traitors against God.  But Jesus kept all God’s laws perfectly.  And then he suffered the punishment of our failures and sins on the cross – again, for us.  God is holy and sin must be punished.  How can sinners be saved from God’s wrath so that he remains holy and just?  Only by someone taking our place and suffering in our stead.  This is what Jesus did.  He is the propitiation for our sins, the one who satisfied in our place the retributive justice of God against our sins – justice that we deserve.  He did all this to fulfil the promises of God for the guilty sinners that he would save.

And now that brings us to the application to ourselves.

How do we know this?

Now an obvious question is, “How do we know this?”  How can we, in the twenty-first century, know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God?  

In Jesus’ day, his miracles were meant to be pointers to the people that he was who he said he was.  We can’t see those miracles and it’s easy for people simply to dismiss them.  But there is one miracle that is not so easy to dismiss.  It is the miracle of the resurrection.  And though I don’t have the time today to go into all the details, I can confidently say that the evidence for the resurrection is so strong that it really is incredible for people to reject it.

Let me give you three reasons why you should believe in the resurrection.  First, because the account of the resurrection is not something that was cooked up years after Jesus lived.  We know from Paul’s own letter to the Corinthians that the resurrection of Jesus was something believed from the very beginning of the Christian movement, immediately after the earthly ministry of Jesus ended.  We’ve already noted that the canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were written in the first century.  The account of Jesus’ resurrection is not a legend that developed over time.  This is significant because it means that the first audience of the gospel message was not in some far-off land but in Palestine itself.  And this lead to our second point: the first believers in the gospel were people who lived in the very places where Jesus and his apostles ministered.  If Jesus was crucified and never rose again, there would have been an easy way to find out!  There is a reason why the claim of the empty tomb was never debunked, and why the enemies of Christianity had to come up with a far-fetched claim that the disciples stole his body.  If the gospels weren’t true, if they were filled with unprovable claims, then it’s hard to explain how the message would ever have taken root in the very places where these things happened.  Third, the apostles themselves who preached this message would have known that this is a lie and then died for it.  It is easy to see how people can die for something that is a lie when they believe it to be true.  It is hard to see how so many people who know that something is not true would then give their lives for it.  But that is what you have to believe if Jesus did not rise from the dead.  To put it succinctly, the Christian movement would simply have never happened if Jesus had not risen from the dead.  

He did rise from the dead, and having risen, proved that he is the David’s son and David’s Lord, that he is the eternal Son of God who created all things, that he is the son of Mary who came to take our place before the judgement seat of God, who came to fulfill all that the prophets spoke would take place.  In him truly all the promises of God are yes and amen.

What this means for us.

What think ye of Christ?  This is not meant to be an academic question, as if once we have satisfactorily answered the question and got our A, then we can move on to other things.  For if Jesus is who he said he was, whom the Psalms and the prophets foretold him to be, whose works vindicated his claims, and especially his resurrection, then we are inevitably faced with a choice.  

We see that choice in Mark 8, for example.  After Mark relates how Jesus confronted his own disciples with the question of his identity (27-33), he then passes seamlessly into an exhortation to follow him:

And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. (Mark 8:34-38)

This is the only response that is fitting, if Jesus is who he said he was: to worship him, to believe in him, to come after him, to deny ourselves, to take up our crosses and follow him.  It means that we will see that the profit that comes from this world incomparably paltry in comparison with the profit that comes from knowing Christ and trusting in him for our life and our salvation.  That we should not be ashamed of Christ or his words in this adulterous and sinful generation.  In Christ alone we gain our souls even if we lose them in this world.

The reason is simple: because he is man, he can take our place before God’s law.  Because he is God, he can endure the wrath of God that we deserve.  He alone can save us.  Only one who is both man and God has the ability to save rebellious man.  That’s who Jesus is, and there is no one else like him.  That is why he is the way, the truth and the life, why no one can come to the Father except through him (Jn. 14:6).  That is why there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved (Acts 4:12).  And that is why it is the greatest news to hear the Savior say to us: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Mt. 11:28-30).