There is no question that is more important than this one: Who is Jesus? Everything hangs on how we answer it. From our theology to our ethics, indeed especially eternal life and death, everything hangs on how we answer this one question. Our answer affects everything about who we are and how we live.
What is at least one specific way that our answer to the question "Who is Jesus?" affects who we are and how we live?
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Can you think of any passages of Scripture that illustrate this?
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Christ alone must connect all the doctrines of our theology because Christ alone stands as the cornerstone of all the purposes and plans of God himself. But if we misinterpret who Christ is and what he does in his life, death, and resurrection, then all other doctrines will likely suffer…misidentifying Christ will cause confusion in the church and harm our witness in the world.
(Stephen Wellum, Christ Alone: The Uniqueness of Jesus as Savior, 24)
Indeed, consider a couple of examples of how our Christology (our answer to the question "Who is Jesus?") stands at the center of all our theology:
Jesus and the Doctrine of God
Who is God? What is he like?
In John 14:9, Jesus asserts: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”
We know God only through Jesus. “He is the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), and the Word made flesh (John 1:14). Jesus reveals God. He reveals who God is, what he is like, and what he cares about. In the true, apostolic gospel, we hear and know God’s wondrous glory in the person and work of Jesus. If we get Jesus wrong, we get God wrong. We cannot know the Father apart from the Son, the Word who reveals him (Matt 11:25–30). And we cannot know the Holy Spirit apart from the Anointed One, who shares him with us (John 1:26; 14:15–21; Acts 1:4–5) (Michael Reeves, Rejoicing in Christ, 23).
Theologian Michael Reeves says this well:
What is it like in eternity? What’s there? For millennia, the human imagination has groped and guessed, peering into the darkness. And in that darkness it has dreamed of dreadful gods and goddesses, of devils and powers, or of space and ultimate nothingness. Staggered by immensity, we are left terrified of what might be. If there is a God behind it all, what is he like?
Jesus. That is the Christian answer. He is like Jesus Christ…Here, then, is the revolution: for all our dreams, our dark and frightened imaginings of God, there is no God in heaven who is unlike Jesus.
(Michael Reeves, Rejoicing in Christ, 13-14)
How does your answer to the question "Who is Jesus?" affect how you understand and worship God?
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Some religious people, like Muslims and Jehovah's Witnesses, answer the question "Who is Jesus?" very differently than us. How does their answer change the way they understand God and worship him?
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Jesus and the Doctrine of Humanity
Jesus is not only the key to understanding who God is, but he’s also the key to understanding who we are. Consider a few ways that Jesus stands at the center of our Anthropology (the study of humanity):
(1) Jesus is the true human, the last and greater Adam. From the beginning, we were made in his image (Gen 1:27–28; Col 1:15; 3:10). We were made through him and for him (Col 1:16). If we want to know why God made us and who we are, then we must understand who Jesus is.
(2) In Jesus’s wholehearted love for God and for others, we see the joy and glory of our humanity as God intended it. In his incarnation, he dignifies our humanity, like a great King who makes his dwelling among a slum and so raises the dignity of its inhabitants:
You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all, the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death.
(Athanasius, On the Incarnation, ii.9.)
In his death and resurrection, Jesus freed us from our slavery to sin and frees us to live as God intended. In his gospel, he reveals the true purpose of marriage and sexuality, of family and parenting, and also of suffering. Indeed, Paul rightly demands that all that we do, from the most mundane act of our lives to the greatest tasks with which God entrusts us, be done “in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col 3:17).
How does your answer to the question "Who is Jesus?" affect how you live as a human?
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How do the differing answers of Muslims and Jehovah's Witnesses change the way they live as humans?
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Jesus and Every Area of Doctrine!
We could go on all day, all week, all year if time allowed. Indeed, we will go on for all eternity! Christology stands at the center of all our theology because Christ stands at the center of life. This is how God made his world and how he redeemed his world. To know anything and anyone truly and rightly, we must know Jesus.
John Calvin warns us helpfully on this point:
For how comes it that we are carried about with so many strange doctrines but because the excellence of Christ is not perceived by us? For Christ alone makes all other things suddenly vanish. Hence there is nothing that Satan so much endeavors to accomplish as to bring on mists with the view of obscuring Christ, because he knows, that by this means the way is opened for every kind of falsehood. This, therefore, is the only means of retaining, as well as restoring pure doctrine–to place Christ before the view such as he is with all his blessings, that his excellence may be truly perceived.
-John Calvin from his comments on Colossians 1:12 in his Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul to the Colossians (translated by William Pringle).