Alistair Beggs and Sinclair B. Ferguson: Name Above All Names. Wheaton: Crossways, 2013.
This is a devotional tract, not a scholarly tome, one animated by the desire “to think long and lovingly about the Lord Jesus.” It is, however, far from lacking in scholarship, as the authors criticize Christian churches today for preferring “action” or good works to “meditation.” The authors invite Christians to rebalance pious works with thoughtful faith, urging them to begin by considering the several names by which Jesus is called in the Bible, “begin[ning] in Genesis and end[ing] in Revelation.” The Apostle Paul tells his fellow Christians at Philippi “to live is Christ.” Who is the Christ in whom Christians seek to live? His names provide the best means of approach to His regime.
The first name of, the first title for, Jesus is “the Seed of Woman.” Beginning, then, in the Book of Genesis: God tells the Serpent that He will put enmity between the Serpent and the woman, between the Serpent’s “seed” or offspring and hers. In arguing with the Serpent, Eve “assessed the significance” of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil “through her eyes rather than through her ears”; that is, “instead of listening to what God said about it, she thought about it only in terms of what she could see on it,” and concluded that its fruit looked good. “She had not grasped the divine principle: believers ‘see’ with their ears, not with their eyes, by listening to God’s Word” and obeying it. God punishes both Serpent and Woman, allowing the Serpent to crush the heel of the woman’s seed and ordaining that the seed of the Woman will crush the head of the Serpent. The seed of the Woman will turn out to be Jesus, harrower of the Serpent’s regime and eventual destroyer of it. The Bible “is a library of books that traces an ages-long cosmic conflict between the two ‘seeds.'” One might add that the conflict may be ‘cosmic’ insofar as it takes place in the cosmos created by God but it is political insofar as it addresses the question, ‘Who rules?’
The final book of the Bible reveals the end of this conflict. “John sees a great red dragon that devours humanity. This is the ‘ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world.'” But the dragon is itself defeated and Christ comes to rule a new Heaven and a new Earth—a new cosmos under a renewed divine regime. Prior to this, readers see similar conflicts, such as that between Cain and Abel, wherein “jealousy and murder result as the seed of the Serpent (Cain) seeks to destroy the seed of the woman (Abel),” or in the conflict of what the authors carelessly call “the Jews” and Jesus, leading to His crucifixion. (This is a dangerous formulation and an inaccurate one, inasmuch as it was rather the rabbis of Jerusalem who called for Jesus’ death on the basis of alleged blasphemy, not Jews generally—some of whom were the first followers of Jesus, Himself born of a Jewish woman.)
The authors show the link between the Genesis story and the life of Jesus by calling attention to the fact that Jesus never addresses his mother as ‘Mother.’ At the wedding in Cana he calls her “Woman,” and near the end of His life “he says to her, “Woman, behold, your son!” “Eve” means “Woman”; Jesus is identifying her as a ‘type’ of Eve, Himself as the seed Who will crush the head of the Serpent. “Jesus, the last Adam, had to conquer in the context of the chaos the first Adam’s sin had brought into the world,” including the “onslaught of demonic activity in the Nazareth synagogue” and a series of temptations offered by Satan himself. “The reason there is so much demon possession in the time period recorded by the Gospels is not—as is sometimes assumed—that demon possession was commonplace then,” that it was a feature of a particular ‘historical epoch.’ “In fact it was not. Rather, the land then was demon-invaded because the Savior was marching to the victory promised in Genesis 3:15,” and “all hell was let loose in order to withstand him.” This new Adam differed from the old Adam in one crucial respect: “Where Adam conceded victory to Satan, Jesus resisted him. Total obedience to his Father marked the whole course of his life.” Adam disobeyed when it would have been easy to obey; Jesus obeyed an infinitely harder command, the command to go to the Cross.
More, “when the second Man was brought to the Calvary tree, he faced a reversed mirror image of the first man’s temptation: “an accursed tree” with “repulsive fruit.” “Jesus had NOT to want to eat the fruit of the tree with his whole being, and yet be willing to eat.” In so willing and doing, He “unmasked Satan’s lie” to Eve, that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was harmless, even good. Satan had insinuated that God did not want the good for His creatures, that He wanted to deny them a good thing, despising not loving His creatures. On the contrary, God so loved His world and especially the human beings He made and gave life to in that world that he “sent his only Son to die on the cross in our place and for our sins.” “It is the cross alone that ultimately proves the love of God to us—not the providential circumstances of our lives.” Human beings are not clever rats in a maze seeking a reward at the end; they do seek rewards, not only on earth but in Heaven, but they receive the highest rewards through obedient love for and gratitude to God, rewards they cannot obtain through their own natural capacities.
All of this was God’s response to the regime change or revolution Satan and his rhetoric effected. “God wanted Adam to exercise his dominion by expanding the garden,” to “‘garden’ the whole earth, for the glory of the heavenly Father.” In failing, Adam, “created to make the dust fruitful…himself became part of the dust.” Upon His resurrection, Mary Magdalene sees him but doesn’t recognize him, “supposing him to be the gardener.” She mistook his identity but not his purpose. “He is the second man, the last Adam, who is now beginning to restore the garden,” re-founding God’s just regime on earth. “In the closing scenes of the Book of Revelation, John saw the new earth coming down from heaven. What did it look like? A garden in which the tree of life stands.”
As the author of the Book of Revelation, John stands as the Bible’s final prophet. He is not the Bible’s preeminent prophet, however. “Prophet” is another of Jesus’ names or titles, numbering among the three modes in which Jesus is “anointed” or granted full authority by God the Father (the other modes are priest and king). The necessity of anointing Jesus as prophet consists, first, in the fact that “our fallen condition requires us to have Jesus as our prophet,” given the intellectual and spiritual confusion resulting from sin. “Man’s heart and mind are now skewed in the wrong direction,” leading to the ignorance rebuked in the famous phrase, “The fool says in his heart, there is no God.” Absent revelation from ‘outside’ himself, man “turn[s] in upon himself,” producing idols out of his own imagination to worship, or by worshipping nature in the form of pantheism. “This is why we need a prophet who is able to dethrone our ignorance.” To dispel some of man’s “internal darkness,” man receives enlightenment in the form of revelation by God’s chosen prophets, among whom Jesus is preeminent; that is, “it is only by God’s grace that [man] discovers eventually that there is no intellectual road to God,” by which the authors mean a natural road. Proofs of God’s existence demonstrate probabilities; they are not apodictic. For truthful certainty, only the intervention of the Holy Spirit will produce the needed noēsis.
The necessity of anointing Jesus as prophet also entails the need to recognize Him as such. “Jesus is not only the revealer,” as other prophets are; “he is the revelation.” None of the other prophets claimed to be the culmination of all previous prophets. All claimed to show the way, the truth, and the light but none claimed to be the way, the truth, and the light. This being so, how shall Jesus’ office both as prophet and prophecy be realized? The authors cite John Calvin: “He received anointing,” Calvin writes, “not only for himself that he might carry out the office of teaching, but for his whole body that the power of the Spirit might be present in the continued preaching of the gospel.” God’s “body” is now His Church or assembly of the faithful. “There is a vast difference between simply conveying information to people, which can be cold and ineffectual, and true preaching and witness”—a “personal, passionate plea” as the Christian scholar John Murray termed it. The passion of Christian speech has nothing to do with libido dominandi or any other human desire; it is rather compassion or agapic love, “genuine empathy.”
The letter to the Hebrews explains Jesus’ office as “the Great High Priest.” Christian Hebrews had been disinherited and excommunicated. “No longer did they catch sight of the high priest—the only man who, once a year, on the Day of Atonement, was allowed to enter the sacred room [in the Temple] to seek God’s forgiveness for the people.” Nor could they receive the priest’s blessing, when he emerged from the inner sanctum to assure them of God’s forgiveness. The letter to the Hebrews argues that Christian Hebrews still have a High Priest, greater than any other because He has delivered Christians both from their bondage to Satan and from the wrath of God. Like a priest, He offered an acceptable sacrifice to God, but in this case the sacrifice was Himself, and forgiveness is comprehensive, as “for believers death is no longer the wages of sin but has become the entrance into everlasting life.” Only now, now that “we are delivered from that great fear—the fear of death and judgment—will other fears become trivial.” God’s just anger with His human creatures makes death a thing to be feared because it is the prelude to God’s just punishment for human sin. “By nature”—that is, by human nature as corrupted by sin—we “are under his wrath” and “deserve to be.” Only with Jesus’ self-sacrifice—whereby “the Lord Jesus, as our high priest, went into the holy place, the very presence of the holy God, and there experienced the awful unleashing of divine judgment”—can human beings be spared the just wrath of the Father. Jesus’ agony on the Cross wasn’t only physically torturous but spiritually so. Only “when the resurrected Jesus revealed himself to his disciples” could he address them with the word Shalom, proclaiming, “Now at last you may have peace with God.”
This freed Jesus for the unfinished portion of His priestly work, living in spirit among His people, His assembly, continuing to minister to them as their priest. “You don’t come to believe in Jesus Christ until you have heard him. Until then he is simply a character in a book.” As a Christian, you listen to the Word of God in the sense not only of understanding it but of heeding it. With his Word, Jesus “begins a dialogue with the soul” of the faithful. In doing so, he educates His people in the root meaning of the word, leading His people closer to God the Father.
Jesus’ third and final office is King of kings, Lord of lords. The Kingdom of God “is a central theme in his message.” God’s regime is a monarchy—a good monarchy or kingship, not a bad monarchy or tyranny, to put it in Aristotle’s terms. While a tyrant rules his subjects for his own ‘good,’ at least as he (mis)conceives it, a king rules his subjects for the sake of their own good, rightly understood. Like all regimes, the Kingdom of God has not only a personal, ruling element but a way of life—what the authors, appropriating contemporary lingo, call a “lifestyle.” To learn about their Ruler and the way of life He prescribes for his consenting subjects, a Christian should begin with wonder, asking himself what he can learn from the portion of the Word he is reading. Only then will he open his mind to the Spirit of God, conveyed by God’s Word, deepening his consent to Jesus’ legitimate, just, kingly rule.
Some of the kings who ruled the Israelites were true kings. Some were tyrants. “But none of the kings fulfill[ed] their expectations; none of them [was] able to bring real salvation.” Hence the Israelites’ yearning for a Messiah. When Jesus entered Jerusalem, “the jurisdictions of Annas and Caiphas the Jewish high priests, and of the Jewish ruling council, and of Pontius Pilate the governor who represented all the might of the Roman Empire,” Jesus did not deny the accusation that He claimed to be King of the Jews. Working in tandem, the high priests and the governor supposed that they had disproved this claim, bringing his ministry to “an ignominious end.” They failed to understand that ignominy in their eyes might be triumph in the eyes of God. His kingship did not put an end to their rule in Jerusalem; it overthrew the far greater tyranny of Satan, Prince of the World, which the Father had allowed as an instrument of punishment for all human sinners—that is, all human beings. In the words of the letter to the Colossians, Jesus “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth,” including all rulers and their dominions. Moreover, “he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” “The universe was made by Him, is providentially sustained by Him and is utterly dependent on Him.” This is what such writers as Dante mean to say when they describe agapic love as the bond of the universe. It is why Enlightenment philosophes took Newton’s elucidation of the force of gravity to refute Scripture, although Newton, a firm Christian, thought no such thing.
To say, then, that Jesus is Lord isn’t to make “a statement about my attitude to Jesus; it is a statement about who Jesus is.” The Apostle Paul calls him the Kurios, which is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton, YHVH. And “since Jesus is Lord and God, King and Savior, this impacts all of life,” leaving human beings with “no right to develop convictions or practice a lifestyle contrary to my King’s words,” inventing “new views of marriage” or “reengineer[ing] human sexuality.” Human beings are entitled to rule nature, but only on the terms set down by the ruling Creator of nature.
Such offices as prophet, priest, and king bring out Jesus’ authority over human beings and indeed all of creation. But God is also a Son, indeed “the Son of Man,” and even a suffering Servant. Jesus rules but also serves. How is this possible?
The authors begin their explanation of the title, Son of Man, with the Book of Daniel, where the prophet says “there came one like a son of man: and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him,” then given the one kingdom that shall not be destroyed. In the Gospels, the phrase “Son of Man” is used “fifty or so” times, and only by Jesus.
There are three elements in Daniel’s prophecy. First, there is “a prophecy of the coming reign of God” following a final war between the Kingdom of God and “the powers of darkness.” “The kingdom of God will overwhelm all other kingdoms” and “endure forevermore.” Second, Daniel prophesies “the coming judgment of evil.” Third, “given this background in Daniel 7, there is more to Jesus’ use of the title ‘Son of Man’ than a simple stress on his humanity in distinction from his deity.” The authors observe that this title appears most often in the Book of Ezekial, “in the context of God personally addressing the prophet.” His sonship reflects his subordination. But he isn’t just any subordinate; “he is a faithful man, a real man,” as distinguished from any man called a “son of destruction.” To destroy typically implies insubordination, contradiction of the maker’s design. With respect to Jesus, “the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing.” To be a Son of Man, then, “means to be made in God’s image and to fulfill the divine destiny that would lead to a world ordered and completed as God’s garden, extending to the ends of the earth.”
Jesus refers to Himself as the Son of Man in three ways: as the founder of the Kingdom of God; as a sufferer; and as reconqueror of the earth, reestablishing His Kingdom. As founder, He undergoes baptism, indicating that he joins in “fellowship with sinners” in order to redeem them as subjects of the Kingdom; as founder, He undergoes Satan’s temptation to rule the world without suffering crucifixion, becoming the first man to reject one of Satan’s offers, in contrast to Adam; as founder, He proclaimed His Kingdom, calling His people to repentance prior to their entry into that regime; as founder, He showed his ruling power by performing miracles, signs of “the final regeneration and resurrection of the cosmos; and finally, as founder, He teaches His people the way of life that they will undertake as subjects of his regime. As He takes these founding actions, He consistently shows interest in the consent of His people to His rule, his reputation among them, asking Peter, “What are people saying about the Son of Man?”
To become the Founder by the Father’s authority, the Son of Man must suffer as if He were a sinner. As the prophet Isaiah says of the Messiah, before he is exalted he must endure torture, his face “marred beyond human semblance” (Isaiah 52:14). As Jesus “is covered in our sin, God no longer sees his own reflection in his Son.” To “repair” human sin, the authors write, Jesus “needs to experience this terrible sense of disintegration—to be treated as sin, to bear the curse, to become ‘a worm, and not a man’ in order to bring about a new integration and a new humanity.” Jesus was innocent of the charge of blasphemy brought against Him by the Sanhedrin, innocent of the charge of treason brought against Him by the Romans. “What is the underlying meaning of all this? It is very simple. The crimes are not his.” Human beings are the ones who “have blasphemed against God by making ourselves the center of our world and the lord of our own life. We have committed treason against God’s rightful authority by refusing his will.” Jesus took the punishment for us.
As the Son of Man, Jesus will reconquer the earth and bring His founding to completion. Having proclaimed the new regime, having suffered for the sake of His subjects, Jesus “has been exalted at the right hand of God and has asked his Father to fulfill his promise.” As Son of man, Jesus “will take the kingdom he has purchased.” “Incarnate in our humanity, he is our representative, mediator, substitute, savior, and king. He leads us to God’s throne in worship.”
Despite the Gospel emphasis on the humanity, and especially the bodily form of Jesus, it “contains no physical description of Jesus.” The portrait of Him at Gethsemane instead reveals His inner life, “the depths of his humanity in a way we otherwise would never see.” He “expresses himself in ‘loud cries and tears,'”; or, as Thomas More famously remarked, in the whole account of his life He wept several times but never laughed even once, at any time. The description of Jesus as the Man of Sorrows not of laughter points to His task of what theologians (including the authors) call his “substitutionary atonement.” Without understanding that, we will make “the New Testament’s teaching of Christ” “entirely incomprehensible,” at best “a tragedy of misguided heroism.”
“Somehow in the vastness of the economy of God in eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit entered into a covenant” whereby “the Father would plan salvation, the Son would come to procure it, and the Spirit would be sent to supply it.” Merely to descend from Heaven and live on earth with spiritually deformed human beings was a substantial sacrifice. But knowing what He had come to do, “Jesus [was] almost beside himself with horror.” At the Cross, “the symbolism of his water baptism at Jordan into his people’s sins [would be] fulfilled in the reality of his baptism in blood at Calvary.” If He had not asked the Father to spare Him this torture, “he would have been less than truly human.” Who has not experienced punishment meted out when he has done nothing to deserve it? Jesus, innocent not only of the crimes of which He was accused but of all sin, must taste “the Father’s wrath falling on his holy soul.” Human parents tell children whom they have punished mistakenly, ‘That’s for all the times you disobeyed and got away with it.’ As Son of Man and of God, Jesus never disobeyed at all, and His Father knows it. Nevertheless, both Son and Father go ahead, for the sake of all their other children.
The authors emphasize this character of Jesus as the sorrowing Son of Man because the Church or assembly inclines to waver “between diminishing the divinity of Jesus and diminishing his humanity.” Since the Enlightenment, “liberalism has diminished Christ’s divinity, and orthodoxy, partly in reaction, has run the risk of diminishing his humanity.” Speaking to the orthodox, they urge that “in our insistence that Jesus is Lord, that he is the divine king—which we unreservedly affirm—we must never fall into the error of having a less than human, or more than human, Christ.” On the contrary, “he is a real man in this real garden among real friends who fail him just when he is facing this real onslaught.” He is about to sacrifice himself for the sake of human beings, but in doing so He is utterly deserted by men; the only one to minister to him is an angel “commissioned from heaven”—a being for whose sake He is not suffering. “It was partly in the light of this intense passion of the Savior that Martin Luther developed his deep concern about the state of the church in his day. It had become materially strong and was awash with its own sense of power, glory, and triumphalism. It had what Luther called a theologia gloriae—a theology of glory, its own glory. What it needed was a theologia crucis—a theology of the cross.” The feel-good Church of today, in the West, amounts to a democratized and lax version of the monarchic theologia gloriae Luther deplored. “Our smiles of superficial triumph repel rather than attract those who are wrestlers” with human troubles. Yes, Christians triumph, “but the prize is waiting on the other side of suffering.” “We all want a Jesus who does all the suffering, don’t we?”
This is why Jesus’ final title is the Lamb of God. In the Book of Revelation, John sees that the Lion of Judah “conquered by becoming the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” The fierce, wrathful God triumphs by making himself into a gentle, self-sacrificing God, shedding His own blood not the blood of others—becoming a ‘Lamb King’ not a ‘Lion King.’ Whereas Jacob had prophesied that “a lion-like figure” would “come through the line of his son Judah” and reign over Israel, the Book of Exodus records a deliverance that “came through the sacrificed Passover Lamb.” The Lamb of God has seven horns and seven eyes: “The horns speak of power and majesty; the eyes remind us that Christ has sent his Holy Spirit into the World, with all of his omniscience, perfect understanding, and wonderful discernment. And the fact that there are seven horns, eyes, and spirits simply expresses numerically the idea of fullness and perfection.” The symbolic numerology continues in Revelation 10, where readers learn that 144,000 will be saved. “There are 144,000 because that is the square of twelve”—twelve symbolizes the twelve tribes of Israel—multiplied by the cube of ten. “It is a kind of ‘perfect number’ of enormous proportions,” signifying that God’s subjects in His Kingdom encompass what John calls “a great multitude that no one could number.” As with all regimes, God’s Kingdom has a purpose: “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore,” and “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
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