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The one who saves us is our God, and the one who is our God is our Savior. Which means, by way of application, if God saves you, you are saved indeed.

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What a glorious truth that is it. If God saved you, you were saved indeed. Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and welcome to the Sunday edition of Renewing youg Mind. Has anyone ever challenged you when you've said that Jesus is divine? Perhaps one of the cults, or simply a non Christian who doesn't understand the doctrine of the Trinity? Well, as we start a short series in 2 Peter today, RC Sproul will consider one of the clearest New Testament texts that attributes deity to Christ before we hear today's sermon. If you'd like to study both first and second Peter, we'll send you Dr. Sproul's hardcover commentary to thank you for your donation in support of renewing your mind@renewingyourmind.org don't skip over these shorter epistles and instead study them in depth when you request today's resource offer. Well, if you have your Bible, it's time to open it to two Peter, because here's Dr. Sproul

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Simon Peter, a bondservant and apostle of Jesus Christ to those who have obtained like precious faith with us by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ, Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, as his divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the Divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. As the Apostle Paul frequently identified himself in his letters, so Peter identifies himself here with a twin appellation, namely, that he is Peter, a bondservant and apostle of Jesus Christ. The lowest possible layer or stratification of society would be that of a slave, and in the Christian community the most elevated office, save for the office of Jesus himself, is the office of apostle. Because to the apostles were given by Jesus his own authority to such a degree that he announced that those who receive you receive me. Those who do not receive you, do not receive me. So here Peter is claiming in one part of this phrase, the highest authority that anyone could claim in the early church, that of being an apostle. But like the Apostle Paul, at the same time he identifies himself as a slave. He is at once and the same time the highest level and the lowest level of Christian society. And the word here that Peter uses, the same one that Paul uses in Romans, for example, is the word doulos, a slave who has been purchased. And in fact, you'll see the close connection in the Scriptures between the word doulos and the word kurios. A kurios is a lord or a master, and one cannot be a kurios in the sense of being a master unless he had slaves that were part of his possession. And to carry the metaphor even further, the Apostle Paul tells us, we are not our own. We've been bought with a price, even the purchase price of the blood of Christ. So it's not only Peter and Paul who saw themselves as slaves of Christ, but that that idea extends to every person who has been purchased by Jesus. That extends to me. That extends to you. So we are all bond servants to Christ. The supreme irony is that Jesus comes to set us free from slavery. And he tells us, if the Son sets you free, then you are free indeed. But those who are delivered from the slavery of sin take on a new kind of slavery, being slaves to Christ. And again, the irony is you can't be free unless you're a slave. And if you think you are free outside of bondage to Christ, your freedom is so much slavery we have to lose our lives to find them. We have to give them away to get them back. But he goes on to say here to those who have obtained like precious faith with us by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. Now, that second part of verse one is worthy of the writing of at least 10 books because there's so much packed into this. Listen again to what Peter says to the very beginning. He's addressing this epistle to those, that is, people who's identified with, who have obtained, or more specifically, received the same kind of faith that we all have by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. So at the beginning, he talks about addressing this epistle to people who are believers such as himself. But he doesn't just say, I'm addressing this to fellow believers, but he's saying, I'm addressing this letter to all of you who, just like we have received faith. But notice what adjective he uses to describe that faith that we have received. It's a precious faith. We know that that which is called precious is that which has an exceedingly high value. We understand the difference between rocks and gems. Gems we call precious stones because they're so much more valuable than gravel. And when Peter talks about having received the same Faith that all the saints have received from the hand of God. He describes that faith by which we are saved as a precious faith. Is there any possession that you have more precious than that faith which links you to Christ and delivers to you his entire inheritance, that precious faith that is called the pearl of great price, that the wise person would divest themselves of all that they had in order to possess that precious reality? And so Peter says, I'm writing this letter to those of you who, like us, have received this precious faith by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. There's a little awkwardness here in the way in which this second sentence is structured, that we've obtained this precious faith by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. When Paul speaks of our justification by faith alone and when he speaks about the righteousness of God in that context, you will recall those of you who studied through Romans with us that that righteousness of God by which we are justified is not that righteousness by which God himself is righteous, his own internal righteousness, but rather the righteousness that he gives as a gift to all who believe, which is the transfer or the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to the account of all who put their trust in him. And again, dear friends, there is no doctrine more precious than the doctrine of the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to the account of the believer. Because the only righteousness by which you will ever be saved before God is not your own, but the righteousness of Christ, which God counts for you if you put your faith in him, this precious faith that we have obtained by the righteousness of our God and by the righteousness of our Savior, Jesus Christ. No, no, no. Here the structure is abundantly clear. Peter is talking about that gift that comes to us by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. So here in this text, Peter is referring to Jesus not only as the Messiah, the Christ not only as our Savior, but as God himself. There are precious few texts in all of the New Testament that are as clear as this one in its attributing deity to Jesus. We considered the text in the Gospel of John where Jesus appeared to Thomas, the twin who had resolved not to believe on the basis of the testimony of his fellow disciples. But he said, unless I can put my finger into the imprint of those nails and put my hand in the wound at his side, I will not believe you. Remember that. And when Jesus appeared to him, stretched forth his hand, and he said, here it is. Go ahead, Thomas. Put your finger in my hand. Put your hand in the wound in my side. Come on. And I mentioned at that time that the Bible doesn't tell us whether Thomas actually did extend his hand and do that. I don't think he did. I think as he saw Jesus standing before him, that was enough. And you recall that then Thomas fell to his knees and he made the great confession. My Lord and my God. Now, that confession of the full deity of Jesus is already set forth in the prologue of the Gospel according to John, where we read in that prologue, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Now, for the first 200 years of Christian reflection on the person of Jesus, that Logos concept of the prologue to the Gospel of John dominated the thinking of the greatest minds of the early church fathers. They couldn't get away from the clarity with which the apostle John had declared that the Word was God, not a God, not like God, but was God. Again, the grammar of that text makes a clear identity with that verse between the Word and God. So it's not by accident that the early church, from the beginning days, professed the deity of Christ. But there were those who emerged in church history who struggled with the doctrine of the deity of Christ, and they couldn't understand how one could be faithful to the monotheism of Old Testament Judaism that said, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one. How could you hold to the oneness of God and at the same time ascribe deity to the Son and to the Father and to the Holy Spirit? So the question of the nature of the Trinity came under attack, and at no point more critically than in the 4th century with the teaching of the heretic Arius, and without getting into the technical theology of Arianism, what Arius taught was that Jesus is worthy to be worshiped despite that he is a creature, despite that the worshiping of any creature is utterly repugnant to the Word of God, no matter how exalted that creature is. Nevertheless, Arius taught that Jesus was the first creature that God made, and then through this exalted creature, the worlds were made, and that Jesus was the creator of the universe, worthy of all honor and all praise, but not God. Because the Bible uses language about Jesus as being begotten of the Father and being the first born, born of all creation, as the author of Hebrews calls him. And so Arias said in the Greek language, the word to beget, genao or ginomai means to be, to become, or to happen, that is, to have a starting point in time that only God is eternal. And the first qualification of any creature is that that creature is something or someone, that at some time in eternity past did not exist. And since Jesus was begotten, that would mean there had to been a time when he was not. And if there was a time when he was not, he could not be eternal. If he's not eternal, he can't be God. And if he's the firstborn of creation, no matter how exalted that level is, still falls short of Deity. You can't imagine the intensity of the controversy that follows in the wake of the teaching of areas which culminated ultimately in the Council of nicaea and in 325 the decisions and decrees of the Council of Nicaea, which produced the Nicene Creed. And in that creed the Church affirmed that Christ is homoousios, one essence with the Father of the same being and co eternal. And then this striking phrase, begotten, comma, say it not, made with respect to the Jewish reference to Christ, begottenness, does not have the same simplistic understanding that it did among the Greeks. And you get a hint of that even in the prologue of John, when after John tells us that the Word was God, he refers to Christ as the Monogenes, the only begotten that nobody else who's ever been begotten of God is begotten in the sense in which Christ is begotten because he's not begotten at a particular period in time. The second Person of the Trinity has no birthday, but he is eternally begotten, so that whenever there was the Father, the Father was always generating the sun. And as the controversy played out, often the debates were not carried out by articles in journals or on television debates. But the debates were often carried out through slogans and through the composition of simple songs. It would be like our jingles that we use to advertise products in the marketplace. Jingles have a way of capturing your imagination and allowing you to remember things for long, long, long periods of time. Some of you here with snow on the roof may remember D U Z D U Z Put does in your washing machine See your clothes come out so clean D U Z does everything remember that rinse a white tides in dirts out. You know, remember that stuff from 65 years ago? That's how powerful little jingles are like that to communicate ideas. And so what the Arians would do is that they would compose these jingles that were ribald and slanderous and ugly, and in a mocking, taunting way would Sing them against the Christians. They would stand on one side of the river and hurl these insulting jingles against the Trinitarians. And to combat them, the Trinitarians composed a jingle of their own. And it went like glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Take that, you Arians. Really, the Gloria Patra originally was a fight song for Trinitarians. What happened at that council, and again a little over 100 years later at Chalcedon in 451, is that the Church affirmed the full deity of Christ. And they affirmed it not on the basis of philosophical speculation, but on the basis of biblical exegesis. That's the thing. You have to understand that the teaching of the deity of Christ is not the invention of theologians. It's the clear teaching of the Word of God itself. And here you have one of those marvelous texts that speaks of Jesus Christ as our God and as our Savior. The one who saves us is our God, and the one who is our God is our Savior. Which means, by way of application, if God saves you, you are saved indeed.