CP 191 Our dumbed-down "Jesus".

CP 191 Our dumbed-down “Jesus”?

Whenever I ask people to nominate their favourite hymns there are two hymns, apart from ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’, which occur in almost everybody’s list. They are ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’, and ‘Jesus loves me, this I know’. This is no surprise. Such hymns give us a wonderful way to express our sense of God’s heart and our experience of the relationship between him and us. It is Jesus the Son who reveals the Father-heart of God.

However, in recent years I have found myself increasingly troubled about the way we say things like, “God saved us through Jesus’ death on the cross”, or “In Jesus, God accepts us”. Let me explain why I’m troubled.

Those phrases would give any non-believer the impression that Jesus and God are two entirely separate beings. There is God and there is Jesus. God and Jesus are not the same. I am certain that is not what we mean, but that is how it comes across. As a result I began to look at the way the Old Testament writers, and also the Apostles and other New Testament writers, referred to the Almighty.

In the Old Testament the most frequent names for the Holy One are ‘God’ and ‘Lord’, and those two names / titles are very often used together. So when Moses is given the 10 Commandments he is told, “I am the LORD your GOD who brought you out of the land of Egypt…” In Genesis 2 we read that, “…the LORD GOD formed man from the ground…” We use exactly that combination in another favourite hymn, “O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder…” Do you remember Thomas’ words when he met the risen Jesus? “My Lord and my God!”

Now the Gospels are always referring to ‘Jesus’. But after Jesus is fully revealed as Lord through the resurrection something changes remarkably. Look at Paul’s greeting to the Roman Church: “Grace to you and peace from GOD our FATHER and the LORD JESUS CHRIST”. (Romans 1:7) Do you see that? Through the Gospel the LORD GOD is now revealed as GOD the FATHER and the LORD JESUS CHRIST.

Now here’s the thing.  Every single greeting in Paul’s 13 letters has the identical combination of GOD and LORD. The Apostle Peter uses the exact same words to describe the Lord God in a new covenant way in his two letters. For the Apostles, when they refer to ‘God’, they always mean God the Father. In the same way, when they refer to ‘The Lord’, they expect us to know that they are speaking of Jesus Christ! Even then, what surprises me as much as anything is that I can count on my ten fingers the number of times Paul and Peter between them refer just to ‘Jesus’ as a stand alone name.

Allow me to give you an example. In the letter to Rome how does Paul the Apostle refer to the one who was born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, had a ministry for 3 years around Judea and Galilee, and who was crucified in Jerusalem? Here are some figures:

·        32 times he refers to him as CHRIST.

·        5 times he refers to him as LORD JESUS.

·        7 times he refers to him as LORD.

·        19 times he refers to him as JESUS CHRIST.

·        10 times he refers to him as LORD JESUS CHRIST.

·        Only once does he use the name of JESUS on its own, and even then CHRIST JESUS is in the same sentence!

You will find the same thing in all the letters. Even James, his own half-brother, does not call him simply Jesus. He names him thus: “…you hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory.” Having discovered this about the Apostles I keep asking myself what we have lost in our lazy ‘Jesus this… Jesus that’, dumbed-down naming of the Saviour.

What changes if we use Jesus Christ’s full names and titles? Here are some thoughts and suggestions:

• We recover a sense of respectful awe, of the holy and sacred, in our relationship with him.
• We acknowledge and confess that he is merciful and forgiving.
• We live with increased awareness of his Lordship over our lives. He may call us friends in a Kingdom sense, but we cannot claim him as an Aussie sort of mate.
• Our faith is confessed in our use of those names and titles.
• The Good News is carried in the way we name our Lord, and the proper ‘offence of the Gospel’ is carried in those names and titles.
• The spiritual powers of darkness are confronted and assaulted every time we call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ in faith. “…every knee must bow… and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phillipians 2)
• We retain our conviction and knowing that “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
• And good old Martin Luther: “I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, Son of the Father, and true man, born of the virgin Mary, is my LORD!”

What I have tried to do here is get you thinking about your Lord Jesus the Christ, and about God your Father, and how you and I represent him in the community of faith and in the world. And it might change the way we formulate our prayers!

Fred

PS  When we sing hymns and songs which do not clearly confess our Lord and God it drives me nuts. It’s even worse when the hymns and songs don’t name him at all! It might all sound holy and pious but it’s soppy religious guff, and it can only leave us empty!