His Only Son, Jesus’ Divine Nature

            In the earliest days of the church, believers grappled with Jesus divine nature. That He had been human seemed straightforward and obvious enough. Take a look at the Nicene Creed for evidence: look how much time the Nicene Fathers spent explicating how it was that Jesus was divine.

            It strikes me that in our day we have the opposite experience. We instinctively think of Jesus as divine and struggle to understand Him as fully human.

            But the Apostles’ Creed boldly confesses Jesus as fully God and fully human. Yesterday we saw how His human nature made Him a fully appropriate substitute for us. As we think through His divine nature, we recognize that that makes Him a fully sufficient substitute. I don’t know if you remember high school English, but I had to read Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, in which the hero takes the place of another man at the guillotine during the French Revolution. The two men are virtual look-a-likes, and the other man has more reasons to live. So, the hero dies in his place. Think about that for a second, and you will realize that the hero can only take this course of action once. A human life can only substitute for another human life once. Wasn’t it the Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale who famously said, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country”?

            If Jesus were just a human, His substitution wouldn’t get us very far. But the One who died on the cross was also in His very nature God—eternal, inexhaustible God. So, His death counts not just for one person, but for all people. His death is limited in no way. It is sufficient to forgive the sins of a whole race, to rescue every last human being from death.

            So, as we reflect on the two natures of Christ, we see they are both integral to God’s project of saving humans—each and every one. And if we can see that God has redeemed humans in the God-man Jesus, we can take comfort in this one fact: God has redeemed me.