Transcript
Podcast Host (0:04)
Welcome to Gospel and Life. Who is Jesus? The Bible says he's fully God, the creator of the universe, and at the same time, fully human. Lose one of those and you lose Christianity. Join us for today's podcast where Tim Keller explores the person and promises of Jesus Christ.
Tim Keller (0:29)
Everybody. Every January and June, the pastors get together and we do a short series together on some theme or subject and what we're doing here in the month of January. And actually, if you want to see how the subject's divided and how all the assignments have been divvied out, you can find that on the very back page of the bulletin. It tells you what we're doing in January. We're speaking about talking about how to understand Jesus. Now, that means that somebody might say, but aren't you always talking about how to understand Jesus? And the answer is, every so often, it's a good idea to give people a helicopter ride in a comprehensive way. A look at the biblical doctrine of Christ. The biblical doctrine of Christ means a look at all the various facets of what the Bible teaches about Jesus. The Bible teaches us about Jesus person. He is human and he's divine. And in the Scott last week in the morning and evening service dealt with that. And it's very, very important, you see, at certain points to take a look at the two sides of what the Bible teaches about Christ's personage. Because if you only see him as human and not divine, or only see him as divine and not human, you get into some tremendous trouble and you have a distortion of what it's not Christianity. Whatever you come up with is not Christianity unless you keep that together. And the Bible, besides teaching those two great things about his person, the Bible teaches three great things about his work. All of the things the Bible tells us that he has done fit into three basic categories. He's a prophet, he's a priest, and he's a king. And it behooves us to spend a month in which we basically take a survey of those three aspects of his work. Now, let me just put the whole thing in context for you for a moment. When I say that there's three things. Everything that Jesus does, everything that he says or does anywhere in the Bible can fall into one of those three categories. And those categories are used because they are so crucial. If you leave out any one of those three things, if you see him as two of those and not the third, if you see him as one of those and not the third, it gives you a distortion. It distorts your view of Reality, it certainly gives you a concoction that's not Christianity and it's spiritually poisonous if you take it into your system. Let me just give you a couple of examples. There's plenty of people when we say prophet, priest and king. By prophet we mean he's a revealer. He communicates truth. He's the revealer of God, who God is and what his will is. He's a prophet. And secondly, he's a priest. That means he's a redeemer, he's a representative. That is, he comes to stand in our place. You see, as a prophet he comes actually representing God. But as a priest, he represents us as a prophet, he comes and speaks to you and me for God. But as a priest, he comes and speaks to God the Father for us. He's our stand in. He died in our place. See, he brings us to God. He's our advocate, he's our representative, he's our redeemer. So first, he's a prophet, revealer, secondly, he's a priest, redeemer. And thirdly, he's a king, a ruler. He commands us. We owe him our utmost allegiance. He is the supreme authority in our lives. So there he is, prophet, priest and king, revealer, redeemer and ruler. Now let me just show you what happens if you leave any of them out. There are plenty of people that I have run into in New York and I've been thinking a lot about this because I've been reading a book, I'll refer to it again about. It's called New York in the 50s by Dan Wakefield, who was a Columbia University student in the early 50s and stayed in Greenwich Village and became part of the Beat Generation, the bohemian scene and, you know, was a writer. And anyway, one of the things that I have noticed, I was reading the book and I realized that I've met so many people who've come to New York City from middle America and out in middle America they had in many cases fairly orthodox kind of Christian upbringing. But they come to New York and they completely leave it behind. They disdain the religion of their childhood along with the values of middle class America and the values of the great homogeneous American. They dive into the intellectual and cultural and ethnic diversity of New York and they think of themselves as kind of a superior race now to where they've come from. And very often I'll talk to these folks and you know, who you are and what they'll say is, you know, I don't go to church and I pretty much have lived the way I feel like I should be living. And I don't know what I believe anymore, really. But I know this, that when I was a little girl, when I was a little boy, I made a decision for Christ. And I still somehow believe that he's really for me. I really somehow believe he's still with me. In other words, I've come here and my feelings and my experience and my emotions are now my king, and they also are my prophet. In other words, I bring my own truth. I decide what's true for me, and I decide how to live. But I still want the idea somehow of a Jesus who's a redeemer. I don't want him as a king and I don't want him as a prophet. I don't want him to tell me what's true, and I don't want him to give me any commands. But somehow I just like the idea that he loves me and he forgives me and he's always with me. That's not Christianity. That's something, but it's not Christianity. You can't have Jesus only as priest and not prophet or king, only as redeemer and not revealer and ruler. You know, I'm Timothy James Keller, and if somebody says to me, come in, James, stay out, Timothy and Keller, I'll be in a pickle. I say, well, you know, I'm sort of a whole thing. I don't know what part of me is the James part. Maybe it's my left arm. Maybe you can have that. It doesn't work that way. You know, I'm all Timothy, I'm all James, and I'm all Keller. And he's all prophet and all priest and all king. You just can't have one piece of him. Or let me. Another example, but I'll be more brief, is there are plenty of groups, and I guess I'd say churches, but there's plenty of groups that love the idea of Jesus. They've really got a very developed view of Jesus as the king and the commander. But their understanding of him as being a redeemer, their understanding of him as being an advocate, is very underdeveloped. And in those legalistic groups, you know, you're hit over the head with Jesus says, and Jesus says, and Jesus says. It's very vivid. It's put across in a very imaginative and vivid way. But any discussion about his redemption and about his grace and about his love is all an abstraction. Jesus as king without Jesus as prophet and priest is a terrible, terrible place to be. However, it's not really Jesus. Or now one more example. Just as the legalistic groups like him as king and not as a priest, and just as like licentious people like him as priest, but they don't like the idea of him as king or revealer. So there's an awful lot of folks today then intellectually like the idea of Jesus as a prophet, but not as a priest and a king. In other words, they say, I believe Jesus was a great teacher. I believe he revealed to us a great deal about God. But I just can't buy in this whole idea of him being a divine savior and a divine king and so on. Now one of the most famous. I'll just refer to it here. One of the most famous passages in all of modern Christian literature has got to be that chapter in mere Christianity where C.S. lewis points out that that's the one thing you can't believe, that he's only a prophet. He says, the problem with this prophet was that Jesus Christ the prophet came and he said, I'm God, you have to worship me. I alone can forgive your sins. What you think of me will determine where you spend eternity. So this man comes along with all these unbelievable claims. You know the saying that he's God and saying that he's a. That he's got to be the final authority in your life and so on, and you are the stone on which he's the stone on which you will either rise or fall and so forth. So Lewis says something very obvious. He says if this is true, that he claimed all these things, then he's either much more than a prophet or much less than a prophet. But he can't just be a prophet. Either he's far more than a prophet because he claimed to be, or else he's crazy, or he's a liar and he's a fool and he's much less than a prophet. Either he's more than a prophet or else we can't believe anything that he says. But the one thing he will not allow you to believe is that he's only a prophet and not a priest and a king. Don't you see? If you try to hold onto one, if you either have one or two and reject the others, or if you even just have a grasp on one and a kind of vague understanding of the others, it will introduce distortions into your life. In fact. In fact, I think that it would be possible, though I don't think I can go into it right now, it would be possible for me to create a grid for myself as A pastor to help people understand what's wrong with their Christian lives. I'm talking about Christians here. I think in most cases, if we look at our Christian lives and we say, what's wrong? Where do we need to grow? Where do we have stress fractures in our Christian life? Where is there crumbling? Where is there deterioration? Where is there weakness? Ordinarily, you'll be able to do it by looking at this grid. Very often we're really good. We have a good grasp on Jesus as one of these things and not on Jesus as one of the others. Some of you are really great into Bible study. The idea of Jesus as prophet's great. You love to study his teachings and you know very, very well. And yet you're not being obedient to him as king. Some of you are being very, very obedient to Ms. King. And yet you're just full of guilt and anxiety and burdened. And you're burdened down with a horrible view of yourselves because you just really don't have a good grasp of Jesus as redeemer and priest. Don't you see these three things? That's why we're spending a couple of weeks on each, a couple of sermons on each. He's the prophet, he's the priest, he's the king. Now, having said that, and I just sort of set the context for the entire month tonight, I would like to say, even though he's far more than a prophet, he is a prophet. And what does that mean? Let me read. Believe it or not, I have a scripture text. Yes, let me read from Acts, chapter 3, verse 17 to 26. I just gave you the introduction to the month. Now Acts 3, 1726. Read it. And there's two basic things that we want to draw out of this that tells you something about Jesus as the great and ultimate prophet and revealer of God to us. In Acts 3, it reads, Start in verse 17. This is Peter preaching. He says, now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance as did your leaders, but this is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Christ would suffer. Repent then, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out and that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ who has been appointed for you, even Jesus. He must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything as he promised long ago through his holy prophets. Moses said, the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people. You must Listen to everything he tells you. Anyone who does not listen to him will be completely cut off from among his people. Indeed, all the prophets from Samuel on, as many as have spoken, have foretold these days. And you are heirs of the prophets and of the covenant God made with your fathers. He said to Abraham, though your offspring, through your offspring, all peoples on earth will be blessed. And when God raised up his servant, he sent him first to you to bless you by turning each of you from your wicked ways. Now, what do we see here? First of all, we see the obvious, and that is that Jesus Christ is a prophet. It says Peter, says Moses had prophesied the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet, like unto me, said Moses, from among your own people. You must listen to everything he tells you. Anyone who does not listen to him will be completely cut off. Now, what Moses is saying is you think I was a good prophet. There is a prophet to come to beat all prophets. He'll be like me, and yet he will be so supreme in his authority, so seminal in his authority and his truth, that your relation to him will completely determine whether or not you're accepted or cut off. And Peter says, this is Jesus. Jesus is the one who's coming. And, you know, what does this teach us? All right, first. First of all, the fact that Jesus is a prophet, not just a priest and a king, but a prophet, shows us that we have a God who speaks to us. Now, I want you to know that ever. Ever since the beginning of time, it seems like human beings have wanted desperately to have a universe that talked to them, to have a universe that talked back to them. If you read our literature and you look at our songs, from the very beginning, we have been always imagining talking trees and talking animals. And even in our science fiction, we imagine other races, you know, from other planets. We're desperately afraid of the idea that maybe we're the only speakers in the world, that maybe it's an impersonal and silent universe. Maybe at bottom, there's nobody to talk to. There's no rational. There's no rational other. And the Bible says that's not true. The reason you believe that there is. The reason you want so desperately to have someone else to talk to is because there. One of the things I loved about Leonard Bernstein was he said, you know, I don't believe the Bible. I don't believe that sort of thing. And yet, remember, he says, when I listen to Beethoven, remember the great quote? I don't. That's why I'm reading It, he says, when I listen to Beethoven, he says, beethoven leaves us with a feeling that something is right in the world, that something checks throughout, that something follows its own laws consistently, something we can trust, something that will never let us down. In other words, he says, you know, I don't believe in absolute truth. I don't believe in internal, a body of truth that's internally coherent, that's absolutely consistent to its own inner laws. That's something that we can trust, that will never let us down, that checks throughout. And yet when I hear Beethoven, I feel like it must exist. And the Bible says the reason that you want to believe in talking trees, the reason you want to believe there's a universe out there to talk to, that there's a rationale center that can talk back to us, is because there is the reason that you, even when you intellectually say, I reject the whole idea of absolute truth, I reject the idea of a God who speaks to us. When I listen to Beethoven, I know that there's something else. That we're not all alone rational in an irrational universe, personal, in an impersonal universe, speakers in a silent universe. I can't believe that. Well, the Bible says the reason you can't believe it, the reason in fact you want to believe it. Where did you get the idea? It's because it's true, because you know it. Because there is a God who speaks, and he speaks through Jesus. When Jesus was transfigured, remember the transfiguration on the Mount of Transfiguration, the apostles who were there saw Jesus, and they saw Moses on the one side and Elijah on the other, prophets and Jesus standing in the middle. And a voice came down from heaven. Remember what it said. This is my Son, says God. Hear ye him. Hear ye him. You cannot relate to Jesus Christ as some kind of mystical figure. He is a teacher. He is a prophet. He brings truth. And you have to. Your relationship with the Father is through a prophet. And that means that your relationship with God is not just a mystical kind of oneness. It is a relationship based on communication and an acceptance of that communication. It's rational, it's orderly. There's a body of truth that this prophet brings, and that's the basis of your relationship. You can't just commune with God by going out into beautiful spots of nature and just kind of feeling his presence. That's not the way you relate to God as a father. This is my beloved Son. Hear ye him. He's a prophet. Now, the two things I'd just like to Talk about just the two aspects is what it means, what a prophet is. Anyway, what does the Bible mean when it talks about prophets? So first of all, what are prophets? And then secondly, why is Jesus the ultimate prophet? Why is he the final? The Bible teaches he's the final prophet. That's a big difference between Christianity and other religions. Islam will tell you Jesus was a prophet, but they will not grant that he was the final prophet. And there's a lot of other religions that will say Jesus was a prophet, but they will not grant that he was the final prophet. That's the place where Christianity diverges from others. They say that Jesus Christ reveals God in an unsurpassable way and brings a disclosure of God that can't be topped. And here's the reasons why. But anyway, let's take a look. These two things. What are prophets? What does the Bible teach us about prophets? And why is Jesus the ultimate prophet? Number one, what are prophets? You see, it says the word is mentioned a number of times in the passage. Jesus is the prophet that Moses was talking about. But it also tells us a great deal about what prophets did. Look, in verse 18, if you have something to look at, it says, this is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets. Now you see, if you want to know what a prophet is, a prophet is a mouthpiece for God. God foretold these things through the prophets. Doesn't say the prophets foretold. Sometimes it does, but it tells us that whatever the prophet says is what God says. Now, if you want the best definition, biblical definition of prophecy and what a prophet is, you can go back to an interesting place where Moses is being told by God to go and speak to Pharaoh. And Moses says, you don't understand. I'm very inarticulate. I don't like crowds. I get scared when I get up on a platform. I can't take it. So what does God say? He says, fine, Aaron's better at speaking than you. So he says, quote, this is in Exodus 7, I will make you like God to Pharaoh and Aaron like a prophet to you. So whatever you say, Aaron will say, see, now, modern people don't believe what the Bible says about prophecy. Modern people will say, okay, here are the prophets and they have written what the Bible says the prophets have written. Here's Isaiah and here's Hosea, and here's Obadiah, and here's all these prophets. Well, how do we regard them? We say, those are men who have interpreted. They have interpreted. They're giving us their interpretation of who God is. And that's great. We might learn from them. But of course, we all have the right to make our own interpretations about what God has said, too. And so the idea is sort of like this. Let's just say Shostakovich has written a new symphony, but I don't think he can. Isn't he dead? But anyway. But let's just say he has. I think he's dead. Or if he's not dead, he's certainly probably not writing any symphonies anymore. So you're a critic for the paper, and you go to hear this symphony, and you listen and you're all done. You sit down, you write your column, and you say, well, you know, I think that the first movement is a man in bondage, yes, A man in slavery. And I think the second movement is a man in liberation, a man liberating himself from bondage. And so you write this down and so on. And that's how many people say we should understand prophets. Prophets are people who wrote in the Bible, like Isaiah and Hosea and people like that, and they wrote down their interpretation. They say, well, I think God is like this, and I think God is like that. Well, everybody has a right to their own interpretation, right? However, what if you asked Shostakovich to write the. The review of his symphony for the paper and you said, Mr. Shostakovich, tell us, what were you trying to say in the first movement? What were you trying to say in the second movement? And he writes it down. And you see, that's a very different thing than when the critic interprets it. Here you have the author saying something, and it kind of gets rid of the whole idea. You know, how can you debate what Shostakovich had in his mind when he wrote the first movement of that symphony? You can't debate it. Debate's over. Okay? We have it right from his mouth. Now, do we understand when the prophets write something in the Bible, should we understand it as a critic interpreting what the composer meant? Or do we interpret really as nothing more than the very ideas and words of the composer simply through the mouthpiece of the prophet? And the Bible says very clearly, it says, especially in 2 Peter 1:13, no prophecy of Scripture is by the prophet's own interpretation. But prophets spoke from God, not of their own will, as they were moved by the Holy Spirit, period.