We have come today to the third line of The Apostles’ Creed: “and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.”

This is actually a very clever piece of writing. If you can imagine yourself reading this and you know nothing about the Christian faith, it is like opening a book and finding that the first page in the book is drawing you in and making you say, “What is this all about?” Or some opening overture to a great musical symphony, where there’s things that you hear and you think, “What is the composer going to make of this?” And so John is drawing us in to think about Jesus as the Word of God. And today we are thinking about believing as Christians in “Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.”

Now, there is something wrong about The Apostles’ Creed, isn’t there? Or is there? You’re a physician and somebody comes into your office with a tiny head, tiny feet and an enormous body. What do you think? Well, I don’t suppose you need to go to medical school to think, “There may be something wrong here”! Or you’re a teacher and in the examination the question has been, “Please answer in three parts the following question”, and one of your students has written a very simple sentence to answer the first question and a sentence and a half to put the third bit in, and then he has got this huge bit in the middle. If you’re a teacher you write in red ink in the margin, “This answer is not properly proportioned.” Now, when you think about The Creed, when you look at the way it is set out, you might be forgiven for thinking (as actually without saying so many religious people do really think), “There’s something not right here!” I mean, we’ve got this single statement about the Almighty God, who has created the heavens and the earth, and then we’ve got this small statement at the end about what the church is, and in the middle there is this absolutely enormous statement about Jesus. And (now here’s an interesting thing) there’s not a single statement here that says, “And here is what Jesus said. Here is what Jesus taught.”

Now, isn’t there something profoundly wrong with that? My answer obviously is going to be no, for a variety of reasons. What do I mean by that question? Well, simply this: for many religious people – I suspect actually many people in the broader boundaries of the Christian church, and sadly, if you listen carefully, many people who present themselves as Christian teachers – all of their emphasis is going to be on God, but not on the historical events of the life and death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. The things that they will skilfully avoid are the things that Jesus is being emphasised as being in The Apostles’ Creed – virgin conceived, crucified in history, raised bodily, seated at the right hand of God, and coming again in glory. Often today you can listen to religious teachers or people who are religious, and you ask them, “What is the Christian gospel?”, and what they will say is all in terms of what we are to do. “The Christian gospel is you try to live the good life. The Christian gospel is that you keep golden rule.” Or the Christian gospel is “What I love really is the parables of Jesus.” And you see, where all the emphasis is, is on what Jesus taught.

But when we say The Apostles’ Creed, we’ve actually got to be fairly well informed in understanding it to know that Jesus taught anything. The Apostles’ Creed is saying that the really significant thing about the Lord Jesus Christ is not what He taught. The really significant thing about the Lord Jesus Christ is who He is and what He did, and everything He taught was with a view to helping us to understand the question, “Who are you, Jesus, and what have you come to do?” And what have you come to do. But surely that is still out of balance? Not at all, because you see, you only really understand what somebody means when they say, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth” when you ask them the question, “Yes, but tell me what you believe about the Lord Jesus Christ.” There all kinds of people in all kinds of strange religions would could can say, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” Could John believe in Jesus Christ as Lord?

One of the phrases I was brought up with in my home town was: at the end of the day the really important thing is that you believe in the existence of a God. It doesn’t matter if you are X or Y or Z or Q – the great thing is faith! The great thing is to have faith. And the phrase was this: “because after all, we are all Jock Tamson’s Bairns”. What people were saying was, “At the end of the day, we are all the children of God.” It doesn’t make any difference; we’re all the children of God. But you see, that wasn’t the teaching of the Lord Jesus, was it? The teaching of the Lord Jesus was that actually by nature we’re not the children of God, and it is only through faith in Him and by the special work of the Holy Spirit that we become the children of God. So it really makes all the difference in the world in being a Christian that I understand why these ancient Christians, in a world that was actually full of exactly the same kind of confusion as there is in the contemporary world, felt it so important to spell out what Christians believe on the basis of the Bible’s teaching about the identity of the Lord Jesus Christ.

You’ll notice in a very interesting way (at least I found this as I’ve been thinking about this in the last day or so), I found it a very fascinating thing that this simple statement “I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord” is a statement first about eternity, second about prophesy, third about history, and fourth about today. And that is the way I want to invite you to think about this statement just for a minute or two. It is a statement about eternity; it is a statement about prophesy; it is a statement about history; and it is also a statement about today.

Eternity⤒🔗

How is it a statement about eternity? Because we confess that we believe in Jesus Christ, God the Father Almighty’s only Son. You know the name of the great early Christian Augustine, who was an immensely serious man. He had lived the hippy life, broken his mother’s heart, and then he was gloriously brought to faith in Jesus Christ. I mean, he would have smoked “pot” if he thought it would give him a good experience! He had really tried everything, and then he was marvellously converted and became a great Christian thinker. In one of his works he responds to the question of smart guys who say, “So then, you believe in God, the Creator of heaven and earth. So what was He doing before creation? You tell me that.” And Augustine had this very clever answer (and I think it was actually intentionally funny, although it is actually not right): “He was making a hell for the curious”. And you see what he was really saying was, “Who do you think you are? A few ounces of dust, and you’ve got the arrogance to say, ‘I’m not going to believe in Him until He tells me what He was doing before He created the likes of me.’”

You know, that is not the right answer. The right answer is (if I can put it this way in the vernacular): He was absolutely having the time of His life with His Son! Even at the human level, I think it is very clear in Scripture that this Father-Son relationship (which is not the whole story; it is not the whole story of the nature of the Christian’s relationship with God), but this Father-Son experience that at our best as fathers and in families and as sons we aspire to and we long for, is potentially just one of the greatest experiences in our lives. And that is why, I think, often the devil seeks to make it go disastrously wrong in our lives, and why it can be such a struggle in our lives. But we aspire to have that kind of relationship – sons, fathers. And those of you who are mothers and daughters watch this, long for it, too. In which we’re just so engaged with each other that it really matter too much what we’re doing, or that we are doing nothing. Isn’t that the kind of quintessence of real friendship, real love?

People say to me sometimes, “What do you do with your wife? What do you like to do in your spare time?” And I say, “Well, actually we don’t like to do anything!” That’s not the really important thing. I just like to sit there and watch her, or listen to her, or just be with her in silence. There’s such a satisfaction in that kind of intimacy of relationship, isn’t there? That is what friendship is. That’s what falling in love often is too, isn’t it? And that is what God was doing. Now, let me say this: I personally could never, ever, ever be a Unitarian. For this simple reason, that I don’t think I could believe in a God who was all dressed up with glorious attributes like love and joy, and was just a bundle of frustration because there was nowhere to go with these things. And what the Bible is saying to us when it says, “The Word was with God”, excuse a little grammar lesson, but the preposition that is used there has kind of the idea that the Word was towards God. This is God and His Son, and their faces are towards each other. They can look into each other’s eyes and, as it were, just communicate through the eyes because of the affection, the love.

And this is what we believe: that the Christian faith does answer the question Augustine was asked, but not with the answer Augustine gave. “This is my Son.” And the marvel of the Christian gospel (as you’ll think if you know the New Testament well), you begin to see how many verses speak about the fact that the sheer wonder of God’s love for us is that it was this Son that He gave for us: it was the Son with whom He had the time of His life that He gave for us. So it tells us something about eternity.

Prophesy←⤒🔗

Second, it tells us something about prophesy. What do I mean by that? Look at the title that Jesus is given here: “I believe in Jesus Christ.” You know, as all of us know, that Christ was not Jesus second name. He wasn’t born into the ‘Christ’ family. Christ is a title that is given to Him. When Peter says, “You are the Christ”, it is not like somebody saying, “You are the Ferguson”, or “the Smith”, or “the Jones”, or “the McDonald”. No, it is a title that is given. What does this title mean? The word ‘Christ’ is a form of the Greek word that has the idea of anointing. It is the same word in Hebrew, ‘Messiah’ – anointing.

When the New Testament says (as it often says) that Jesus is the Christ, one of the things it is thinking about is the fact that in the Old Testament Scriptures, in the old Testament times, God gave His people pictures – promises, yes, of the fact that the Christ would come, but He gave them pictures – of the Christ. There were three of them, apparently. There were three roles, three positions in the Kingdom of God in the Old Testament days for which people were anointed, “Messiah-ed”, “Christ-ed”. There was the prophet; there was the priest; there was the king. Each of these persons would be anointed. Some of you love Händel’s great Coronation Messiah that just bursts out, “Zadok the Priest, and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon King.” And they were able to that because entering into their offices they received an anointing from God.

When we say “Jesus Christ”, what we mean is that. Everything that was given in picture language, in three dimensional picture language, because you could meet these people. They were walking around in the Old Testament days, and they were all, as it were, saying that “The real Messiah, the real Christ, is going to be able to do what all three of us try to do – to rule God’s people, to speak God’s word to God’s people (the king and the prophet), and to make sacrifices for God’s people for the forgiveness of their sins.” You know, if you go to Disney World and you bump into Winnie-the-Pooh or Mickey Mouse – I remember when years ago when Winnie-the-Pooh was complaining that in a hundred degrees in the summer people were trying to stuff honey down his throat, and he was absolutely boiling inside his suit, and there was a strike about this – you know that’s not Winnie-the-Pooh! Just as most of you know when you go to the store that’s not the real Santa Claus. He points to the real Santa Claus that you still believe in. And this is part of the function of these figures. In the Old Testament they were pointed forward.

Now, why did God set things up this way? Here’s the clue (this is really an astonishing thing, and it is wonderful when you understand it): because this is what Adam was meant to be. Adam was meant to be God’s priest who would lead the whole of creation in praise. He was meant to be the worship leader of all creation. He was the only one who really knew the tunes. Adam was the one who was able to express to God as His image, “Lord in our different ways, with our different limitations, we love You, we praise You, we adore You!” And so in that way he was meant to lead the praises of God’s people and to bring creation to worship. Adam was also the prophet. He was the one who named the animals, after all. What is the mark of a genuine prophet in the Bible? It is that his word comes to pass. I just love to think of Adam seeing this strange long legged creature with his enormous neck and saying, “Giraffe.” And the animals say, “Well, if he says so!” It is the idea of the authority of God’s voice ruling creation. Then of course he was meant to be not only the prophet and the priest, but the king. He was given dominion (Genesis 1:26-28) so that he would not only look after the garden, but that he would extend that garden so that the whole world would become a garden. (Transcription of audio file from 25:04 to 25:22 omitted.) And he fell! And so God sent someone the Bible calls the “last Adam”. Prophet to speak God’s Word. King to rule over our lives. Priest to sacrifice for our sins.

History←⤒🔗

And then in a very, very wonderful way we not only move from eternity to prophesy, but to Jesus in history. Do you remember how he did explain the significance of everything that’s said here in The Apostles’ Creed? “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” He is really saying, “You know, I did not come in order preach the gospel so much as I came in order that there might be a gospel to preach!” It is what He did for us on the cross that is of supreme importance. That is why we confess and say, “I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s Son” and not just, “I believe in Christ”, but in Jesus. And every time we say the word ‘Jesus’, every time we read the word Jesus in the church, oh that it would dawn on us that what we are saying is really, “I need a Saviour for my sin.” You don’t call his name ‘Jesus’ because it is a really nice name. I saw somebody in a restaurant the other day. He actually passed by my table, and his name was Jesus. What do you think he would have said if I said to him, “Can you save me from my sin?” There you have the wrong Jesus. You need the Jesus of Matthew 1:21: “He will save His people from their sin.” The gospel is all about how Jesus saves us from what catastrophic circumstances Adam brought us into.

Today←⤒🔗

So eternity, prophesy, history, and then today. Where is today in this statement? Martin Luther used to say, “Real religion always uses the right personal pronouns.” That’s very good, isn’t it? “The Lord is the Shepherd” – while that’s okay, it’s a different thing to say, “The Lord is my shepherd”. “We believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord.” What these early Christian are saying is actually the very same message as we find in John’s gospel. Do you remember the kind of climax of John’s gospel? It begins with this prologue that says, “The One who is coming is the Son of God”, but do you remember how it climaxes with Thomas in John 20? When Doubting Thomas says, “My Lord and My God” to Jesus. And then John says, “This is actually why I wrote my gospel – in order that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, that He is the Son of God, that He is the Saviour of the world, and that you might have eternal life through Him.”

I suppose it must be true that you could believe that Jesus is the Christ and that He is God’s Son and still not be a Christian because you weren’t willing to say, “He is our Lord; He is my Lord.” In some sense, Thomas must have believed when Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” I am sure Thomas was there nodding his head – “You are the Christ. Yes, you are the Son of the living God” – but it was when he said, “My Lord and my God” that life became different. What a great thing to be able to say it. How marvellous when people say, “You know, it troubles me that when we say the Creed there is nothing there about the teaching of Jesus, and isn’t it the teaching of Jesus that is most important?” and you can say, “Well, the teaching of Jesus is very important, but the really important thing is what He is teaching us. And what He is teaching us is who He is, what He has done, and what it means to be able to say ‘our Lord’.”