The Doctrine of One Lord (3)

We’ve been examining the fourth of seven doctrinal truths in Ephesians 4:4-6 that form the very essence of Christianity and therefore unite all true believers—one Lord.

Concluding our look at the meaning of one Lord, when we examine Scripture, we can only come to one of three conclusions about Jesus. He was either a liar, the biggest fraud who ever lived, or He was a lunatic because He ultimately died for His false claim to be God, or He was exactly what He said He was—Lord. Time and again He spoke of His equality with the Father (Jn. 5:23; 8:19; 12:45; 15:23).

To this we should also add that according to Jewish law, only God could forgive sins, but this is precisely what Jesus did in Mark 2:5: “When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.” Once again the religious leaders were horrified and asked, “Doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only?” (v. 7), to which the Lord Jesus asked, “Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk?” (v. 9).

So, to answer that pastor’s statement we mentioned last time (“It’s too bad the Bible just doesn’t say, ‘Jesus was God”), that’s precisely what It does say. To the Jews’ ears, Jesus’ statements were just as clear as the words “Jesus was God” are to ours. They knew exactly what He was claiming, and they went berserk; likewise many are still doing so today because they refuse to admit Jesus was God. Paul well summed it up when he wrote to another pastor: “Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Truly we have unity in one Lord.

Second, there is the application of one Lord, which is, unity can only exist with a proper view of Christ. Christianity is Christ, so how we view Him is absolutely essential. As noted earlier, when used of Jesus in a confessional way, Lord clearly refers to His divinity. To argue that point is total folly and blatant apostasy.

Countless cults and false religions, for example, deny the Deity of Christ. To one cult, Jesus was not equal to Jehovah and was not God in human flesh but was rather a created being and was actually Michael the Archangel in his preexistent state, having a brother named Lucifer who rebelled against God. To another cult, Jesus—like all men, in fact—was a preexistent spirit who took his body at birth in this world; He is “set apart from the rest of us only by the fact that He was the first-born of God’s spirit-children.” Other cults illustrate why they are all defined as “a cult,” namely, because they deny the deity of Christ or in some way pervert that doctrine.

But all that is nothing new in Church history, but is simply a revival of the ancient heresy called Arianism. Arius, a 4^th Century parish priest in Alexandria, taught that Jesus was not coequal with God and was, in fact, a created being. A popular book called The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (Doubleday, 2003) is another graphic example. While seemingly just another thriller novel set in the present-day, it has a hidden agenda that makes it far more. Starting with the murdered curator of a Paris museum, the hero and heroin of the story must decipher the clues left behind by the murdered man and thereby uncover an ancient and sinister plot. And what is this ancient secret? The supposed “true” story that Christianity has been trying to hide for 1,600 years, namely, that Jesus was just another man who actually ended up marrying Mary Magdalene.

This serves to illustrate a consistent practice of unbelievers, namely, they must distort history to deny truth. Why? Because history, as the old expression goes, is “His Story.” It is what God is doing in the world, what He is accomplishing. So to escape the plain truths of God’s Word, men must revise the facts, reinterpret events, and rewrite the history books. Another example in our day is the rewriting of American history. To escape the fact of America being founded on Biblical and moral principles, revisionist historians totally ignore the godliness of many of our Founding Fathers.