Counting to Three for Christmas

We can learn the biblical teaching about Jesus by counting to three: one (1) person, in two (2) natures, who accomplishes a threefold (3) work.

When I was a kid, there was a holiday campaign slogan painted on coffee mugs and Christmas ornaments: “Jesus is the Reason for the Season.” You have probably seen and maybe you display this message to “Keep Christ in Christmas.” Some Christians, in fact, get offended when someone won’t say “Merry Christmas” and instead wishes them “Happy Holidays” at the grocery store. Even while I don’t necessarily think we should arm ourselves for a culture war over what phrase someone uses at a cashier’s counter, I understand the impulse. I share the impulse, because Jesus is the reason for the season. But more than worrying about how we wish someone well during the month of December, I am concerned about whether Christians are faithfully keeping Christ in Christmas.

Here’s what I mean: recent surveys of those who claim to follow Jesus and believe the Bible have demonstrated that many Christians don’t actually believe in the real Christ. Three-fourths of Bible-believing evangelical Christians don’t believe that Jesus is God. They instead believe that Jesus is a being created by God. For two-thousand years, the church has had a name for folks who believe those things. The name is not “Christian.” The name is “heretic.” A heretic believes something catastrophically false about God and about Jesus. A person who doesn’t believe the Bible’s teaching about God the Trinity or about Jesus Christ needs serious correction in their theological view of things.

Thankfully, correction is (nearly) as simple as counting to three. We can learn the biblical teaching about Jesus by counting 1, 2, 3. Jesus is one (1) person, in two (2) natures, who accomplishes a threefold (3) work. Let’s count together.

One Person

Jesus Christ is the person of God the Son, the eternally begotten Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). God the Father knows himself so perfectly and eternally that his knowledge proceeds eternally as the person of the Word, which is another way of describing God the Son. Thomas Aquinas said that this is sort of like the way we talk about conceiving an idea in our minds. Again, this is different from our own experience, because for us a word is just something we think or say. But in God, the Word is a divine person equally God with the Father and the Holy Spirit. In the name Son we see the full life and love of the Godhead, in the name Word we see that God is fully truth and wisdom. Jesus said, “I am the truth” (John 14:6). Paul said, “Christ is the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:25). “In him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). A person is the specific, rational, relational expression of a nature. A human person is unique, thinks, and loves as he or she bears the image of God. Jesus Christ is a divine person. A divine person is one who has all the attributes of the nature of God. So what is a nature? Let’s count from one to two.

Two Natures

God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, eternally has a divine nature. What is a nature? A nature is what is true of a given type of being. So the nature of a tree is to grow roots into the soil and branches into the air, to have a thicker midsection called a trunk, and to have smaller things called leaves or needles. The nature of a human is to have a body and a soul, a mind, a will, and emotions. The nature of God is to be eternal (apart from time, without beginning or end). The nature of God is infinite, without limits of knowledge or power, self-sufficient, not made up of parts, but fully and eternally who and what he is. The nature of God is good, love, and all of the infinite perfections that are what God is. Unlike human beings who have a separate expression of human nature for each individual person, God is three persons in one nature.

The mystery of the story of the Bible is that a divine person with the divine nature could take human nature and live as a single person, with two natures. The Bible teaches us, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14). And, “Existing in the form of God, [Christ] did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity.” (Phil. 2:6-7). So Christ was simultaneously limitless and limited, self-existent and dependent, all-knowing and unaware, all-powerful and weak, exalted and humiliated, sovereign over all things and subjected to many things, transcending suffering and suffering more than any other, unkillable yet killed.

Humans are “soul-and-body” (psychosomatic) creatures, a unity which God never intended for ultimate separation. When we affirm that Jesus took on human nature, we affirm that he had both a human body and a human soul. Jesus took on a human body. This means that Jesus was a real, flesh and blood man, with all that humanity entails. When he was whipped, he felt the searing pain in his back in wounds that spilled real blood. He was hungry (Mark 11:12), thirsty (John 19:28), and, to put it delicately, had to go to the bathroom. Jesus took on a human soul. Jesus was not simply God wearing a human suit. He truly experienced life as a man because he truly became a man. He felt human emotions, weeping at the death of Lazarus (John 11:35) and over the rebellion of his beloved Jerusalem (Luke 19:41). John Calvin says, “Christ has put on our feelings along with our flesh.”

Jesus took on human nature by being born of a virgin. “See, the virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will name him Immanuel, which is translated ‘God is with us’” (Matthew 1:23, quoting Isaiah 7:14). The virgin conception shows that that though Jesus is fully man, he is not conceived in the likeness of sinful man. Though Jesus is born as the seed of the woman, Abraham, and David, he is not born as the seed of Adam in sin. Whereas all other human conceptions are in the likeness of the first man, Adam, Jesus is conceived in Mary’s womb by the creatively purifying power of the Holy Spirit. The virgin conception means that the cycle of sin is broken. Everyone born after the first man Adam was born in the likeness of Adam and carries the spiritual-genetic disease called sin. But Jesus was born of a virgin, which broke the line of Adam’s sin. He was born of a virgin in Israel as a fulfillment of God’s promises and purposes. Jesus Christ is one person with two natures, who fulfills a threefold office.

Three Offices

When we study the Bible’s testimony to the work of Jesus Christ for his people, we find three strands or “offices,” woven together like a single braid. The work of Christ is “a cord of three strands” that “is not easily broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12). We can discover the work of Christ as we learn about his threefold office as our prophet, priest, and king.

Our Prophet

Throughout the gospels, people recognize the prophetic nature of Christ’s minsitry, but they misunderstand that he is a different kind of prophet. They say, “He’s a prophet, like one of the prophets from long ago” (Mark 6:15), but his prophetic work so surpasses the ancient prophets that he is a prophet unlike those from long ago. The OT prophets were like the moon, reflecting the word of God given to them, but Christ is the Sun, radiating the Word. He radiates the Word because he is the Word of God and the Wisdom of God.

Our Priest

“Under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22). In ancient Israel, the priests offered sacrifices before God on behalf of the people. They would stack stones into altars, lay bulls, sheep, goats on top of the altars, and kill the animals to atone for sin. The animal’s lifeblood would run down the altar, muddying the ground, reminding everyone that forgiveness requires an atoning sacrifice. Jesus is not just a priest who offers the sacrifices, but he offers himself. He is the offerer and the offering. He is the perfect, unblemished lamb. Jesus was tempted to look at women with lust, but he never did. He was tempted to be passive aggressive, but he never was. He was tempted to blur the truth for convenience, but he never did. He was tempted to work so hard that he ignored his family and friends, but he never did. He was tempted to be lazy and play instead of work, but he never did. One of the most amazing things about Jesus is that in his humanity he got super tired but he never let his exhaustion turn him into a sinful jerk. “He did not commit sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth; when he was insulted, he did not insult in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten but entrusted himself to the one who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:22–23).

He offered his life in obedience fully pleasing to God, according to God’s law. Jesus lived the life we are required to live, perfectly obeying every detail of the law of God from the heart. Jesus offered himself up as a sacrifice for sins on the Cross. The Cross is the hearbeat of it all, the place where our sins are forgiven and the tree that shadows our lives from the brutal heat of God’s wrath. The Bible uses a number of word pictures to describe the death of Christ, which at heart was a substitutionary death. By “substitutionary”, we mean that Jesus died “in our place”, as a “substitute”— “instead of” his people. Paul says, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Gal 3:13). As our substitutionary priest on the cross, Jesus is our sacrifice, our propitiation, our redemption, our reconciliation, our justification, our victory, and our example.

Our King

Jesus is a king in at least eight ways. He is the creator king. He is the Israelite king. He is the incarnate king. He is the crucified king. He is the risen king. He is the reigning king. He is the returning king. He is the eternal king. For all of the other stuff he’s gotten wrong, Kanye West got this one right with his album title: Jesus is King.

I could say a lot more. But I will leave it there for now, and leave you with this. Let’s keep the real Christ in Christmas. Let’s get back to the basics and learn to count to three with Jesus again this year.