Session 3 - Jesus & Salvation | Core Testimony

Christians believe that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human.

Throughout history, the church has wrestled with understanding both who Jesus is and what He accomplished through His life, death, and resurrection. While Christians have described Christ's saving work in different ways, each perspective helps us appreciate the depth and richness of God's salvation.

This session invites us to consider not only what we believe about Jesus, but how His life continues to shape our own.

Transcript

A Squirrel And A Sure Answer

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I was thinking about a pastor who had a great relationship with the children in his ministry, and he regularly gathered them to the front of the worship space to talk with them about important things in the language and life of children. One time he was trying to help the children think about planning ahead. And so his focus, like God did in the book of Job, taking those examples from the animal world and the physical world and applying them to Job's situation. The pastor took the idea of a squirrel, a squirrel that lives in trees, that gathers nuts, that plans for the future. And so he wanted the children to think about this. And so he said at the start of his little message to them, I'm going to pretend I'm someone today, and I want you to tell me who I am. I have a bushy tail and I have a little nose that twitches, and I scamper out trees. Well, there were no takers yet, and so he tried to think of ways he might further describe what a squirrel was. He said, I gather the nuts to store them for the winter time, and I am brown and a little bit furry, sometimes I'm gray and sometimes I'm black, but there are a variety of ways in which people see me. Finally, one little girl raised her hand and she said kind of tentatively, I know the answer is supposed to be Jesus, but it sounds like a squirrel to me. And I think of that story, and I think of the way in which we present ourselves often in Christianity, that Jesus is the answer. Andre Crouch sang that beautiful song. And it's true, Jesus is the answer. But exactly what else happens around Jesus and who is Jesus and how is Jesus the answer? We jump quickly to other perspectives and other ideas, or we talk about Jesus without really understanding what it is that Jesus did or who it is that Jesus is. I think of the way that Don and Carol

Into The Rainforest With The Sawi

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Richardson experienced this. They graduated from Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills, Alberta, Canada, back in 1961. They were at the part of the great mission movement of the church, Ralph Winters and others, the unreached peoples, seeking to bring the gospel to those who didn't have access to some of the earlier movings of the church through its missions. Where were the peoples that were more hidden? Where were the tribes and the peoples that didn't have direct access to media or whose languages were not yet connected to the global mainstream of communications? And in their studies, they had determined that one of the unreached peoples was a tribe in Papua New Guinea, tribe named the Saui people. And so they went to Papua New Guinea and they set up the beginning of a mission among the Saui people. Now, tropical rainforest. The people lived in homes that were generally around 40 feet up in the trees because the floor of the rainforest was really too wet to live in it regularly. And because of the large amount of mosquitoes, the houses were built in the trees to get above the mosquitoes. Mosquitoes generally stay at about 30, 35 feet off the ground. So if you could build your house at 40 feet in the heights, it would lessen the amount of mosquitoes that would be available. So there were the Saui people living in the trees. And when Don and Carol, with their son Steph Stephen, who is just a year old, moved into their community, the Saui people helped them to build a home in the trees. Now, Don wanted to take the Saui language, learn it enough, and distill it to writing. It had not been distilled to writing, and then begin to translate the stories about Jesus, the stories from the gospel into the Saui language, which he did with the help of some others over time. The Saui people were hunters-gatherers. They fished and they hunted animals in the forest. They gathered roots and berries and things like that. And so Don and Carol fell in with them into that kind of lifestyle. In the afternoons, there were two sort of huts in the trees, one in which the women gathered and talked about womenly things of Unbasawi, and one in which the men gathered and talked about menly things of Angasawi. They would, the men would repair their spears and their knives and their nets, and they would talk about family and life and things that they were going to do. Well, Don would use that opportunity to take the bits and pieces of the stories of Jesus from the Gospels, having translated them into the Saui language and in his halting Saui communication, begin to speak to them these stories about Jesus. But the men never listened to him. They didn't listen to him at all. They had no time for him. They were busy chatting with one another

Why Judas Wins The Applause

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and busy with their repairs and the stuff that they were doing with their hands. Until one day, Don had come to the part of the story of Jesus, where Jesus had his best friends, his disciples, the twelve, and Jesus was heading toward a kind of crisis in Jerusalem, and one of his good friends, Judas, decided that he needed to prod Jesus along, and he created the scenario. And Don, for the first time, felt all of the eyes of the Saui men focused on him. They didn't have time for this before, but suddenly not one of them was moving their hands. They were all staring at Don while he was relating this story from the life of Jesus. And when it came to the part of the story where Judas betrayed Jesus, they got very excited and they murmured their approval of Judas. And Don was really scared. So he asked them, why do you think Judas is the primary figure here? Why is Judas the good guy? Why do you approve of what Judas did? And the Saui men began to tell him about killing the fatted pig. It was a tradition going all the way back in Saui history, where if a Saui man really wants to be a big man, someone of significance in the community, the Saui man has to grow in all of the disciplines of a manly existence, of course. But then there's one other thing that the Saui man can do. He can kill the fatted pig. Well, what does that mean? He can make friends with someone from another clan or tribe, and they can become best of friends and they can walk through the jungles together, they can go hunting and they can go fishing together, they sit down, they have meals together, and they talk together, they become best of friends. And then at the point where that friendship is really tight, then the sawy man can invite his friend over to his mother's house in the sky in the trees, and she will prepare a big meal for the two of them, and they'll sit across the table from one another. They'll eat and they'll enjoy themselves and they'll talk and they'll laugh. And then at one point during this wonderful meal, the sawy man will reach under his thigh and he'll take out his knife that he's hidden there and he'll reach across the table and he'll grab the hair of his friend, pull him across the table, jab the knife into his friend's chest, cut out his heart, drink the blood, and then he'll cut the head off the top of that Saui or that friend man, and he'll scoop out the brains, and his mom will cook these and he'll eat those, and she'll cook some fresh bread and he'll touch it to the man's genitals, and he'll eat that too. And Don is sitting there thinking, whoa, what's going on here? And they explain to him that to be a real Saui man, to be a great Saui man, is to become really two men, yourself and your friend. You draw all of your friend's life into your own self. You take the essence of him, his brains and his art and his sexuality, and you eat them and you take them into yourself, and now he is a real Saui man. So Judas was the great man of the story. Jesus was the friend, he was a good man, but Judas is the great man in the story. And when Don tells Carol about this, they get really nervous because the Saui have treated them as friends, and they're wondering what's on the communal menu for tomorrow. Is it us? But they stayed and they decided they would carry on with their desire to bring the news about Jesus to the Saui people. It was quite unnerving. And I'd like you to think about that for a little bit and think about how

Who Jesus Is In The Gospels

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do we present Jesus? Who exactly is Jesus? The things that the gospels tell us are that he was miraculously born, that his mother and her spouse were not yet married, that Jesus was able to do miracles, heal diseases, restore legs for people who couldn't walk. He was able to open the eyes of the blind and even raise people from the dead, that Jesus uniquely had access to God in understanding who God is and what God is all about, that Jesus had an incredible awareness of the scriptures and the history of Israel and the theology of the Jews, and that Jesus eventually was the one who died an undeserved death, cruelly executed as the worst of criminals on the cross. And no one could figure out a good reason for this. There was no clear trial that said, yes, you have to die. Everybody said, well, well, no, not really, but let's do it anyway. And that even those who executed him were shaking their heads and scratching their hair and saying, this shouldn't have happened. This doesn't seem right. And the skies grew dark and Jesus died. And then a couple of days later, everybody that knew him said he was back alive again. And people talked about seeing him and talking with him and having a meal with him and meeting with him. So there were a lot of things about Jesus. Now, how are we supposed to think about Jesus? This was Don and Carol Richardson's difficulty as they were communicating with the Saui people for the first time, hearing stories about Jesus. Now, in the history of the Christian church, there were two major

Creeds And The Fight For Clarity

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questions that had to be answered by those early Christians, and they linger with us to this day. And the Apostles' Creed is in part one of the responses to those questions, but even more fully, the Nicene Creed is a response to those questions. The first of those questions is this we know this guy, he's a man among us. Was he, is he truly divine? That's the first question. And there were several different responses that early Christians gave. Some who were called the Ebionites, and these were primarily poor Jewish people who had early on received Jesus as their Messiah and Savior, they were not sure that he was divine. They believed he was their savior in much the same way that Samuel in the Old Testament was a savior to the people, that Moses was a savior to their people. That is, a truly human person who had unusual access to the mind and understanding and mission and power of God, who was able to do miracles, even the possibility, like Elijah of raising people from the dead, and who was himself blessed in a unique way, maybe even resurrected, so that God would say, I really count you as a special messenger of mine. Was he divine? No, he was not divine. That's what the Ebionites said. There were other ways in which people answer this question. The Ebionites said he was one of the great heroes, one of the great messianic heroes like Moses and Samuel and Elijah those. But there was a second way in which people answered this question. They said, well, he was truly man. We know that. He ate with us, he lived with us, and all of that. But he was infused with a special measure of the divine spirit. He could not have done what he did or said what he said unless God uniquely infused him with the divine spirit. And they even talked about ways in which that shows up in the Gospels. For instance, when Jesus is baptized by his cousin John, what happens? John says, I'm not worthy to do this. Jesus says, you have to do this. They go into the water. John baptizes Jesus. And when they come up from the water, the heavens open, the voice of God speaks, the dove-like thing comes out of the heavens. We have this sense that Jesus is being uniquely presented and prepared for a kind of ministry that only God himself could do. And what the people who held to this idea, they're called adoptionists, they held that Jesus was truly a full human person, but that at some point Jesus was infused with the divine spirit in a way that exceeds what any of us, the rest of us, can have, so that Jesus could do all of these things and know all of these things. And then several years later, when the crisis came and Jesus was on the cross, what did Jesus say? Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. And then the divine spirit left him because God cannot die, but a human can die. So that was the adoptionist way of dealing with it. And there was a third way that the early church wrestled with this. And we know this primarily through a pastor's name. His name was Arius. And we have come to talk about this as Arianism. It's the way in which Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons to this day understand Jesus. When Arius, Arius was a tremendous pastor, he wrote songs for the children, helping them to learn Bible verses. People said he communicated the gospel effectively. And Arius wanted to do two things at the same time. He wanted to preserve the unity of the one God. We are monotheists. And at the same time, he wanted to highlight the uniqueness of Jesus. Now, how do you do this? Preserve the oneess of God and highlight the uniqueness of Jesus. And Arius' solution was this. He said that while Jesus is not God, Jesus is the first creation of God. And in that sense, Jesus is Godlike. He is like the Father in every way, except for one thing. Jesus has a beginning and time moves from there. Whereas God existed before time. He created a scenario in which the monotheism of historic Israelite, Judaism, Christianity is preserved, and the uniqueness of Jesus is given honor as well. Jesus is the first creation of the Father, and therefore he is God, not eternal, but everlasting. And therefore, Jesus is able to do the work of God as God, but he is not the same as God because he has a beginning. The Son has a beginning. That was Arius' solution. And it hit the church quite hard. All three of these were wrestled with in the early church. Is Jesus a great messianic figure like Moses and Samuel and Elijah? The Ebionite idea of a person who is a great hero of faith, the subordinate or the adoptionism idea that the Gnostics used, that Jesus received, he is human, but he received the power of God in a unique way to show us the ways of God, or subordinationism, that the Son is like the Father in every way, except that the Father did not have a beginning, but the Son had a beginning. And all three of these were bandied about and they were discussed, and they were theological arguments that gave rise to the counsels of the churches. And in the Nicene Creed, in particular, all three of those are pushed aside as not being the true message that we gain from those who knew Jesus, those who wrote the gospels. Jesus was fully God and fully human. So is the man Jesus God? Yes, that's what the church said, and rightly so, according to the testimonies of the apostles, Jesus' own words, and the words that we find in the scriptures. But that led to a second kind of controversy, and that was the controversy: if Jesus is truly God, truly divine, what was the way in which he became human among us? Was he actually fully human? That's the second question. First question, is the man Jesus fully divine? The second question is, is the divine Christ fully human? And so again, there were different possibilities there. There were those who, for instance, said that Jesus is kind of an extraterrestrial. He's sort of a space agent. He comes from the other side and he enters into our world, but he's like one of these divine creatures that shows up and he tries to put on the garb of humanity, but he's not really fully human. He's that space creature. That was basically Sibalius. And then there were two who lived at the same time, and they were kind of polar opposites of one another. There was Eudychus and there was Mistorius. And they had two different ways of looking at how we should understand Jesus. For Eudychus, it was this kind of thing that Jesus had two natures, the divine and the human, but it was a lot like water and wine. He used images from his own experiences. He said, wine is not water. But if we take one drop of wine and we drop it into the ocean, how much does it affect the color of the ocean? And we would say, not at all. Exactly, he would say. The divinity of Jesus is the ocean. The humanity of Jesus is the drop of wine. And while the two are both real, in effect, what happens is that the divinity absorbs and overwhelms the humanity. And so we can really talk about Jesus as being this kind of amalgam, this mixture, but it's the divinity that wins out. Well, Nestoria. Nestorius pushed back against that. He said, and Eutychus then used the term God-bearer for Mary, the mother of Jesus, that she actually gave birth to God. And Nestorius said, wait a minute, she didn't give birth to God, she gave birth to a human baby. And so Nestorius said it's more he would love what we have today in the comic books and the movies, the Marvel movies about Superman. He would say it's much more like Superman, where there's the true character of this person from another planet, this Superman, and there's also this seeming full human Kent Clark. And the two of them are living in the same body, but they are not intermixed. People know Clark Kent and people know Superman. And even though we might think they look a lot alike, if the one puts on glasses, you won't even be able to see Superman at all. You'll just think Clark Kent. So the two live kind of side by side, sharing the same space of the body. And that's the way that Nestorius did. In his way of thinking, Mary was not the God-bearer, but Jesus, uh Mary was the mother of the Christ, the Christ-bearer. So that Jesus' fullness as a human was present, and the fullness of divinity was also present. Well, the church argued these things, and people had different nuances of words, and you can look at these things of the early church councils, but again, getting back to the Nicene Creed, the Nicene Constantinople Creed, what happens as the church thinks about these things and wrestles with them and talks about them and debates them and gets back to the scriptures and the testimonies of the first disciples, everything points in this direction. Jesus is fully divine. Jesus is fully human. And these two natures, while they exist with one another, are not to be confused with one another or to be absorbed into one another. And that's where the church continues to speak. And the Nicene Creed speaks of that: God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, like the Arians said, of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made, who for us and for our salvation became fully human, was incarnate in the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit, and was made man. So the full testimony of the church is that, yes, the man Jesus was fully God, and yes, the divine Christ was fully human, both needing to play a part in this salvation that becomes our way of understanding life. That leads us then into questions about how

Three Ways To Read The Cross

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indeed should we think about what it is that Jesus did. So we have churches wrestling with who is Jesus, but that only is the beginning of the question of then what is it that Jesus does? And over the centuries, there have been three primary ways in which the work of Jesus has been sort of captured or understood or described. One and what I imagine coming from this is imagine Jesus on the cross, and we see this figure on the cross, and we know that we hear Jesus' last words. Woman, here's your son, John, here's your mom, I thirst. Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit. Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. It is finished. We hear these words. And the questions that we ask about this is who primarily does Jesus die for? And there are really three different ways that question has been answered, sort of a long way down the road. Now, what I'm going to suggest is that we can look at all three of these ways and understand that they're really part of a bigger thing that's going on. But the first of those possibilities is what we generally call ransom theory. And this was big already in the early church. It has to do with the idea that evil had so captured us as humankind that someone needed to release us from the power of the devil. That on the cross, Jesus was face to face with the devil, that Jesus was being gleefully taken by evil and destroyed, but the devil couldn't hold Jesus. Origen put it in this way, using the idea of baptism. He compared us all to being little fishes. Imagine that you're a great fisher person, that you sometimes fish in rivers and creeks and ponds, maybe even small lakes. But once in a while you go to the big lake or to the ocean and you get out there and you fish to your heart's delight. And imagine you're in your little boat one day and you're out on the big body of water and you've got this line and you're throwing it in, and it's one of those beautiful days when the sun is shining and everything is just right and the fish are biting. In fact, before you can get a lure to the water, it's almost like they jump out of the water and grab hold of it, and you're fishing and you're pulling them in one at a time. Now, if you have a fishing license, you're limited to the number of fish you can take. But this is one of those days and you know how to get your boat back to shore, and you've got lots of friends who need fish to eat, and so you're thinking, I can get as many as I want today. And in fact, in a short while, you keep fishing and those fish keep biting, and the fish are brought into your boat, and your boat, your little boat, is getting heavier and heavier until it's just barely above the surface of the water. You say, I can't handle any more fish. So you turn on your motor and you start heading back towards shore. But being the good fisherman you are, you can't let this opportunity go to waste. And so you throw one more line out the back and you're trolling and you've got the lure out there. And you're close to shore when all of a sudden the line shoots out, and you know you've got a fish, and you stop in the water and you start playing the fish, you reel it in, but your fish line is only 10-pound weight. You can't get this big fish in. You quickly know it's a really huge fish. So you reel it in and then you let it out. You don't want your line to break. You reel it in, you let it out, you tire the fish, you keep playing the fish, pulling it closer and closer to the boat. And finally, you get it close to the boat and you look down into the water and you see, whoa, this is the mother of all fish. This is the biggest fish you've ever seen. My, this fish is going to be such a huge thing for you. You're probably going to have your picture in the news, on the newspapers, in the magazines. People are going to interview. You might get a prize for this fish. Of course, first you have to get the fish into the boat. Now, here, you only have your gaff hook and your nets, and boy, this fish is huge. And then you realize I've got my boat full of fish already. I can't take this fish into my boat and have all of these little fish there. What am I going to choose? Am I going to go back to the shore with all of these little fish or am I going to go back to shore with this one big fish? Wow, you know what a fisherman's answer is. By your hands, you quickly scoop all of the little fish out of the boat. Let them go away. They fly away through the water. And then when your boat is lighter again and completely empty, you take your fishing line, you reel the fish in, you get your gaff hook and you get your net, and by Jiminy, you get this thing and you turn it over the edge of the boat and into your boat. You have got the largest fish that's ever been recorded out of this body of water, and you're slowly going to shore, and you can already dream what great fortunes you're going to have and what people are going to think of you. You did it. You got the biggest fish in the world. And about 50 feet offshore from the dock where you are going to take this fish and show everybody, the fish in your boat goes with its tail and it throws itself back into the water. And when you get to shore, all that you're left with is a good fish story. Now that's basically the way Origen talked about it. He said that we are all fish in this seas of this world, and we are enticed by the lures of the devil. And we're so attracted to the lures of the devil that the devil catches every one of us and puts us in his boat, and you know where he's headed with us. And then along comes Jesus, and Jesus is the biggest fish possible. And the devil says, These or that one, these or that one. And the devil says, Of course that one. And the story of Good Friday is all about the devil catching the biggest fish of all time, nailing that fish to the cross, sending that fish to perd, and getting rid of the story, and then he can go back fishing and getting all the little fish. But unbeknownst to the devil, Jesus cannot stay in the boat. Jesus cannot be nailed to the cross indefinitely. Jesus is the greatest fish of all time. And Jesus gets the devil to release the other fish. And then Jesus releases himself, and the devil goes away with nothing. Now, that may seem to be a strange story, but it's actually one that's been repeated a number of times over the years. For instance, C.S. Lewis wrote that wonderful story, The Lion Witch in the Ward wrote, were the four children in London during the time of the Second World War and the Blitz that the German bombers were doing on London. The parents said you got to get out of town, sent them to their uncle who lived out in the wild someplace in this big old house where they had to be very quiet because he was a professor and they had to play upstairs and be very quiet about it. And then playing hide and seek, they went through the back of the wardrobe and they came into this place called Narnia, where it was always winter but never Christmas. And there was a lamppost standing near the gate into us, and there was war going on because the white witch had taken over and made it a cold place, and everybody was shivering or turning to ice or to stone. But the promise was that Aslan would soon come, and Aslan would come, and he did, and he was like a lion, and he freed everybody. But before he had a chance to win back Narnia, the white witch said, But you can't do that because you need the help of the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve, Peter and Edmund and Lucy and Susan, who had come in through the wardrobe, but she already owned Edmund's heart because Edmund had gone in by himself and had been enticed by the Queen's Turkish delight, and he had eaten it and eaten it and wanted more, and it never made him full. It was the personification of evil. And so now the white witch owns Edmund. How will Aslan win back Narnia if one of the sons of Adam is a child or a prince of hers? And that's where they meet together in the pavilion. And Aslan comes out, and Edmund is safe. But that night, as Lucy and Susan hid behind a bush, they saw on the top of the hill this stone table with writing and magic all the way around. And the forces of the white witch tied down Aslan to that stone table. And they sheared his mighty mane. And they poked him and prodded him until the blood flowed. And then with a shriek, Aslan died. And Lucy and Susan were in desperation. What could happen now? Their friend, their confidant, the one who owned this world, had died. And they cried together until finally they fell asleep. And then suddenly, as dawn came, there was this mighty crack. And they looked up at the hill. And in the early light, they could see that the stone table had broken in two. And Aslan wasn't there. And then suddenly Aslan was bounding toward them, looking larger than he had ever looked before. So much so that he frightened little Lucy. And she said to Susan, Is he safe? And Susan said to her sister, he is never safe, but he is always good. And that's the way that C.S. Lewis talked about the victory of Jesus, that ransom to the devil. That the white witch had taken Aslan and thought to kill him, but she didn't know the magic that went back before the beginning of the world that she was ultimately defeating. That has lingered throughout history, this idea that when Jesus died, he defeated Satan and then comes back in a variety of ways. And one of the big expressions of that is the Christus Victor idea, where Jesus in his death goes to hell itself, not to be the one who receives torment from the evil one or from God, but instead to declare his victory over evil so that never again can it rise up. That's the ransom idea. A second major idea is one that emerges through the Middle Ages. It's been present all along. It becomes eventually what we call substitution. And here the idea is that Jesus takes what is wrong in this world. And although he's not guilty for what's wrong in this world, he steps in and he makes it right. Anselm gave expression to this in his idea of the Jesus satisfying the honor of God. Many of us have history lessons in our cultures about roughly what we call feudal times in which there were various levels of society, and each level of society had the power over a lower level of society, but also had to be subservient to the upper level of society. I mean, it's a thing of human history. And those systems can get very nasty so that the overlords can be very harsh on those below them, and those under them can be very rebellious against those over them. And what Anselm said is that we have grown up in that kind of world. After all, didn't Jesus himself talk about that? Remember his main story when he came into Jerusalem in what we call Passion Week. One of the first stories recorded that he tells, one of his parables, is of the bad tenants, where the owner of this large estate has many people working for him, but then he needs to travel. And he leaves them in charge. And when he's away, he sends messengers to see how things are and to collect the rent and produce from the harvest. And every time they just ignore them or they beat them up or they kill them, they send them away, they won't do anything. They are bad tenants. Finally, the master says, How are they going to do something right? What is it going to take? So he decides to send his only son, and his son comes, and then the tenants say, Hey, here's the son, the heir. If we get rid of him, look, there's no one to inherit the estate, and it comes to us. So let's kill him. And Jesus talked about this just four days before he was killed himself. And everybody understood what the story was all about. God is the great estate owner and manager. God is at a distance. God sends prophets to speak and to get the tenants to act properly, but they don't, and they kill them and they ignore them and they send them away. And finally, God sends his son, and he is the one who they kill. They dishonor him. But the story that Anselm told is that what saves the whole event is that in spite of Jesus' own ability to play the game, he chooses not to play the game. And in his righteousness, even unto death, he satisfies the honor of God. And so should we. Now, later on, that would be changed into something even more legal, the idea of satisfying Jesus or God's justice. And we have racked up debts because of the sinful deeds that we do, and we no longer have the capacity to pay off our debts. And Jesus, the one who is without debt, comes in and he pays off the debts because of his superior perfect life, which does not owe anything. And so even within the Roman Catholic Church to this day, there's the treasury of merit in heaven, which is largely the good deeds that Jesus did, which then are so overwhelming that they supply for the lack on our part. And that's what happens when Jesus dies at the cross. And a way in which that's extended a little bit further is the idea that Jesus is the substitute for humanity. You see that in Paul's writings where we have the first Adam and the second Adam, that we are somehow all in the first Adam and have lost our ability to be one with God. And Jesus becomes the substitute Adam, and the entire family of Adam is transferred into the new family headed by Jesus, the second Adam. And so Jesus takes over that. That's all the substitution ideas of what Jesus did. The third way in which the work of Jesus is often talked about historically is the idea of example or influence. So we have the ransom, and then we have the substitution, and then we have the example. You might say that Jesus on the cross, in the ransom theories, is staring down the devil. In the substitution theories is looking toward God and changing the heart of the Father. And in the influence theories, Jesus is looking at humans and saying, you can do better than this. Basically, what happens? Irenaeus, for instance, says, you know, we live lives of maybe around 50 years. That was considered to be the average lifespan during his days. And we live for about 50 years, and you know, we we we fail so often. We cry as babies, and we are bad children, and we're rebellious teenagers, and we try hard to be good adults, but we do devious and dishonest things, and even as older adults, we have impure thoughts. And what we find in Jesus is that Jesus comes along and he actually relives the whole life of the human person. In fact, that's why Irenaeus said we Jesus had to live to be at least 50, because he had to go through all of the stages of human life and show us how to live each one better. So he became the great example of how to be a child, a teenager, a young person, a person of courage and strength in adult years, and even how to die well. And we should look to Jesus because he's our greatest example of these things. Now, others along the way have taken that and have amplified on that in a variety of ways. Well, he's the sinless one. And he grieves at the way that we have lived our lives, but in his example, we have learned a better way to live. I mean, didn't even Jesus' right-hand good friend Peter talk about it that way? 1 Peter 2, verse 21. He has left us an example that we should follow in his steps. And so the idea of Jesus being the moral influence or the one who shows us the way to live properly, that becomes also part of the way in which people have attempted to describe who it is that Jesus is and what it is that Jesus has done. So those are the three major ways that people have talked about the work of Jesus. Ransom, we are sold out to sin, but Jesus buys us back and makes us free. Or substitution, that there is a debt to be paid to the Father, and we can't pay that debt. And so Jesus pays that debt courtroom scene where the gavel comes down, we are accused, and we are judged as being having done our crimes, but our lawyer for the defense, Jesus, steps in and he pays on our behalf. And thirdly, example that Jesus is the one who gives us a sense of what it truly means to be human, to be fully alive, to experience life as it was intended to be. And if we follow in the footsteps of Jesus, we will gain a better sense of ourselves. Now, we as theologians continue to argue among these things, and there are good reasons we do, because it seems that any one of these three major moves is somewhat limited and fails to take into account some of the other things that are also mentioned in the New Testament. All three of these are probably part of a larger kind of story. What it is that Jesus does, but something that we can't fully comprehend by saying, well, here's the exact answer. Within my tradition, within the Calvinist tradition, Calvin loved the way that Anselm got it started, and he really made a lot of progress on this idea of satisfaction of the justice of God, a penal substitution, it's called. And I think you can't deny that because Paul talks about Jesus that way, and Hebrews talks about Jesus that way. But there's again the idea that Matthew brings in his gospel that Jesus relives the life of Israel, and where they failed, Jesus gets it right. And Peter's saying, I have Jesus has left us an example that we should follow in his steps. And Paul says, take the example of Christ and learn from him. And there's also the very truth that, for instance, in the book of Revelation, among other things, there is this eternal battle between good and evil, between right and wrong, between the forces of heaven and the forces of hell. And the reality is that Jesus gives himself into the kinds of powers that evil has. And that leads me back to the story of

The Peace Child Changes Everything

SPEAKER_01 48:42

Don and Carol Richardson. So they're working with the Saui people and they weren't eating. They weren't cannibalized by the Saui people. No one invited them to a meal and then killed them an ape. So Don and Carol are living there, and they're aware that they have to try to communicate the gospel effectively. But exactly what does that mean? How are they going to communicate this thing about Jesus that seems at first glance to raise up Judas as the hero of the story? Well, with changing climates and weather conditions, one of the things that Don and Carol Richardson experienced was that the rains didn't fall for a long season. And the little creeks began to dry up, and the bigger rivers began to narrow, and there were not as many fish around to be caught. And the nets came back empty and they couldn't spear as many fish. And the game moved off in other directions. And so the hunters had to go further and further to find game to feed their families. And some of the berries were missing because there wasn't enough water. And some of the foliage didn't grow, and some of the uh plants that they had planted for food, they didn't produce as much food, and people were going hungry, and the men were traveling further to fish and to hunt, and they would run into people from other tribes and other villages, and they would have scuffles and arguments and fights, and sometimes they'd take weapons against one another, and they would harm one another and they would kill one another. Sometimes people came limping back to their compounds, missing hands or limbs, and sometimes they didn't come back at all. And now the talk in the afternoons in the hut for the men up in the trees 40 feet above the ground, it turned ominous. Instead of this gibber-jabber of men enjoying what they're doing, enjoying one another's fellowship, enjoying the tasks that they were engaged in, they would start arguing with one another at the level of conversation rose and intensity and noise until people were shouting things at one another. And one of the things that Don began to pick up in this kind of antagonistic, this uh difficult setting was that some people were starting to talk about a peace child, a peace child, a peace child. And so he asked them, What are you talking about when you talk about a peace child? And so they began to tell him the story of what had happened several times in their remembered and pre-remembered history. They talked about the times when things like this had happened before, where game was scarce and the fish were found in the rivers or bodies of water, where the children were dying because of hunger and starvation, where the crops were wilting and things were going very bad, and there was anger between villages. And sometimes when things got so bad that we were in danger of attacking and killing them, they were in danger of attacking and killing us for what little we had in storage. Sometimes a wise chief would grab the newestborn young boy baby from among his village. He would take that child and grab it right out of the hands of the wailing mother and start running away with that baby. And she was there wondering and crying and shouting and yelling for the baby to be brought back. But he wouldn't listen to her. He would go instead across the area between the villages. And when he came to the village of the enemy, the people that were trying to kill him, kill him and his people, he would thrust that newborn baby child, that male child, into the hands of a young woman in the other uh village. And suddenly all enmity stopped, and everybody knew that we were no longer at war with one another. Don said, What are you saying? And they said, Well, this is the peace child. He said, What do you mean by a peace child? Well, they said someone who is us was given to one of them. And as long as that child exists, they are us and we are them, and there is peace between us.

SPEAKER_00 53:43

Oh, said Don. Very interesting. And then he asked him another question.

SPEAKER_01 53:52

He said, What would happen if someone down the road, while that peace child was living with the other group, would play the game to kill the fatted pig? And there was this sense of horror that just went through the room, said Don. Everybody said, No, no, no. They raised their hands, they shook their heads, they were murmuring great opposition to that. Don said, What's going on? They said that would never happen. No one will harm the peace child.

SPEAKER_00 54:39

And Don said, hmm. Let me tell you a story.

SPEAKER_01 54:45

And he said, Once upon a time, a long time ago, the tribe of heaven was at war with our tribe. We had done some bad things, but we were now antagonistic to the tribe of heaven. And the battle was raging, and there was no seeming conclusion to the battle, to the warfare between our tribe and the tribe of heaven. And in the middle of the hostilities, the chief of the tribe of heaven grabbed his one and only son, and he brought his son across the void between our two tribes, and he thrust his son into the arms of one of our women.

SPEAKER_00 55:29

And there was peace between our tribe and the tribe of heaven. And then many years went by.

SPEAKER_01 55:39

And one day, one day, one among us decided to kill the fattened pig. No, they tried to kill the peace child. No! And there was a great murmur of disappointment. Who would try to do that? How could anybody think of trying to kill the peace child?

SPEAKER_00 56:06

And then Don said, Well, the man's name was Judas, and the peace child was Jesus.

SPEAKER_01 56:19

And that was the day that virtually the entire tribe of Saui on what we call the island of Papua New Guinea became Christians. A few years ago, after Carol had passed on,

What We Can Say With Humility

SPEAKER_01 56:37

Don took several of his sons and went back to visit the Saudi people. He was welcomed like a conquering hero. When a seaplane came down on the river, literally both sides of the river were lined with thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Saui people. The church was the mainstay of Saui identity. And the structures of Christian life were the ways of the Saui people. And they received Donald back. And he, of course, said, it's not me, it's the Peace Child. The story has been written down by Don. It's a book called Peace Child. And I think it has something to say to what we still wrestle with today. No, we can't fully understand who Jesus was. We do make testimonies about Jesus. He's truly one of us, fully human. But he is also truly God, fully God. How is that possible? I don't know. But that's the reality of it. There are things I will not understand. And what is it that Jesus did? Well, well, he's the substitution. Yeah, but is it more than that? Well, he's the example. Yeah, but is it more than that? Well, yeah, he's the ransom, yeah, but is it more than that? And yeah, it is a whole lot more than that. It's all of these things and much more combined. He is truly the peace child sent from the other side back into our world and our side in order to make us have peace once again with God. And we'll talk more about that next time.