But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. | Titus 3:4–7
In the sermon Sunday, we looked at Jesus claim of divinity, with specific focus on Jesus role of authority as Judge of the world. The thing that makes this specific claim difficult is that it doesn’t allow us to accept Jesus as we want Him to be. I referenced CS Lewis’ famous: liar, lunatic, Lord breakdown in my sermon; in his words:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
We can’t just accept Jesus, we have to accept Him as He has revealed Himself. He called Himself God, so we either worship Him as God or we have to reject Him.
But there is more to this than just divinity. As Jesus describes who He is, He does it in a Trinitarian way. Making it very clear that His work is the work of the Father and that in all things they are intricately linked. Father, Son, and Spirit are all working together toward the same end. When we think of Jesus, we should consider Him in relation to the Father and Spirit.
What this means for our understanding of Jesus, is that we don’t get to separate the grace and mercy of Jesus from the law and order of the Father. We don’t get to set our hope on the saving work of Jesus, without recognizing the continuing work of the Spirit. When we ask WWJD, we must consider what the Father and Spirit are doing as well.
There is a tendency to redefine God by pitting Father, Son, and Holy Spirit against one another. As if they exist in some sort of power struggle (like so many earthly leadership relationships). The Trinity is in perfect alignment, each person doing the part that they covenanted together to do before the foundation of the world. It is only in recognizing ALL of their parts that we begin to grasp the fullness of the plan of redemption and can understand both our minuscule part within it, but also the honor of being invited into relationship with such a marvelous God.
Let us be careful not to minimize or simplify Jesus into someone we can more readily understand or can more easily accept. He is the Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, and Judge. We either accept the whole Biblical description of who He is in Trinity, or we worship someone else entirely. As Augustine so eloquently put it:
If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.