Jesus Christ had a Human Body

Colossians 1:21-23

COL-173

2 Timothy 3:16: "All Scripture is inspired by God, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work."

Ephesians 4:30-32: "And do not grieve the Holy Spirit by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. And be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you."

Romans 12:17-21: "Never pay back evil for evil to anyone. Respect what is right in the sight of all men. If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine. I will repay,' says, the Lord. 'But if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in doing this, you will keep burning coals upon his head.' Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."

This morning, we devote our attention to Colossians 1:21-23. Our subject is "Reconciliation of the Colossians," segment number 18.

We have seen that, in their unsaved days, the Colossians were godless. They were imbued with the arrogance that comes from human viewpoint. They were enslaved to their sin natures, and they were, worst of all, the enemies of God. This was because they knew little about God. They didn't understand His moral laws. They scoffed at His judgments, and furthermore, they didn't care. They viewed the Scriptures which were revealed to them as a mass of contradictions, and as being unintelligible, and being nothing more than the mere recordings of non-binding opinions of religious people from previous times. Their minds were alienated from God and they were hostile in spirit. And they found great satisfaction in doing the very things that the God of Scripture condemned as evil. They thumbed their nose at God, and acted as gods themselves. And in that, they followed the crowd. This was the way the Colossians used to be.

The saddest part about the Colossians pre-salvation condition was that they were spiritually blind to their eternal peril in the lake of fire that loomed before them. Furthermore, they were unable to do anything whatsoever to escape it. That is the condition of every unbeliever to this day. The best of human works are contaminated by the sin nature from whence they come, so they cannot pay for the unsaved person's moral guilt in order that he may enter heaven. There's no way he can pay for it. The lost, by the best and the most sincere of their efforts, cannot satisfy the justice of God for sin, nor achieve the divine standard of absolute righteousness which is required for life in heaven.

So, they are confronted with an impossible condition. They cannot pay for their sin to satisfy the justice of God (the penalty of death). Nor can they do anything to merit and secure His absolute standard of righteousness. Therefore, only God the Father Himself could solve the human dilemma, and bring these lost Colossians securely into heaven. The lost needed to satisfy the justice of God, which demands the death penalty for sin by someone who himself is sinless and spiritually alive. Man is not that, so man cannot pay for his sins. The lost needed to have their sins forgiven by one who would pay the penalty of death as a sinless Lamb of God. The lost needed to receive absolute righteousness so they could be adjusted (reconciled) to God, in order to live in heaven. No lost, sinful human being could meet these demands. So, God the Father sent His Son as a sinless God-Man (Jesus Christ) to pay the penalty of death for all mankind.

In Romans 5:8-11, this good news is declared in this way: "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life." Our secure destiny is heaven: "And not only this, but we also exalt in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through Whom we have now received the reconciliation." Only God could come up with a solution that could take a total sinner, condemned to the lake of fire, and change his destiny to eternal life in heaven. Most of you willingly accept that. Most of you willingly believe that. Most of you know that that is what the Word of God (the Bible) teaches. Yet, that is the very thing which is under threat today. This is the very thing that, in very subtle ways, we find being challenged.

Those who believe God's promises to save them from the lake of fire, and to send them into eternity in heaven on the basis of Christ's death for them, will be saved. And those who come some other way, they will not be saved.

Billy Graham

Recently, the famous evangelist Billy Graham was interviewed on CNN and in it he was asked what his attitude was in relationship to the pope. He said, "Oh, I have good relationships with the pope. I have no problems with the pope. He has counseled me and given me good advice." And the whole impression was that what the pope teaches, and what his followers believe, is all well and good. But what the pope teaches, in the way of a salvation, which is based on the merit of Christ plus the payment of your own temporal sin guilt, is a combination that contradicts the Word of God. And the Bible not only says that this is not the way you get to heaven, but the Bible says that it'll keep you out of heaven. But Billy Graham says, "The pope is a great guy. He was asked about Mormonism. He said, "Oh, the Mormons do a very good work." He has very good friends who are Mormons, and he just was laudatory of the Mormons. What do the Mormons believe? The Mormons believe that Jesus Christ was the product of a sexual act between God the Father and the virgin Mary. The Mormons believe that they someday themselves will become gods, and have a world of their own to create. And Mormonism is OK? It's just another way to heaven?

Now, you have to stop and think and wonder: what is going on here? And how do we understand people have such great notoriety such that people can't wait to fill a stadium to listen to, and then to be told that all is well in approaches to God which he himself condemns in Scripture? There's only one way. It is faith in Christ, on the basis that He did it all, and you don't add anything to it. It's entirely grace, and it is by faith in Jesus Christ. That's the only method of salvation.

What does John 6:47 say, for example? "Truly, truly," Jesus says, "I say to you: he who believes has eternal life." Do you realize how important that verse is. "He believes has eternal life." That's it. It's an act of faith in Christ Jesus as the One capable, and who actually did pay for one's sins. And God the Father is not lying when He says, "Accept what My Son did for you, in your place, as your sacrifice in death, and you will be saved, and I'll take you to heaven. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved." That's is the principle: "Truly, truly, I say to you: he who believes has eternal life."

Yet, even in some very good Christian circles, and some very good Christian leaders, we're being told that salvation is not an appropriation, but a commitment. Nothing could be worse. Salvation is an acceptance of what God has done. It's the acceptance of a gift. It's the appropriation of a gift. Yet, the lordship salvation people say it's a commitment, and if you don't live right, you don't go to heaven. If you don't live right, you do not have salvation. Now that is totally false if this verse is true. Yet, the names who teach that ring with great notoriety: "I say to you: he believes has eternal life." You can't add anything to that.

That is certainly reinforced by Acts 16:31: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shall be saved."

It is certainly reinforced by John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life."

John 3:36: "He who believes in the Son has eternal life, but he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him." How do we obey the Son? By believing in Him, and trusting in Him, to provide salvation as a gift.

Ephesians 2:8-9: "For by grace (a gift) you have been saved through faith. And that salvation is not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not as the result of works, so that no one should boast."

Mormon salvation is unabashedly declared to be the result of their good works. Roman Catholic salvation is unabashedly declared to be by their good works. The salvation of most cults and religions has no hesitancy in declaring that their salvation is the result of human effort. Yet, by the Word of God, these Colossians, one day, in a terrible condition as the enemies of God, were enlightened by God. There was no reason in them. There was no deserving in them. And they had no right to salvation. They were all in exactly the same position that all of us were one day. And God looks down, and we were part of that mass of lost humanity. And He reached down there, and He pointed to you. And He said to the Holy Spirit, "I want him in." And the Spirit of God came crashing into your life, and brought conviction into your heart, and suddenly you realize what your status was; how condemned you were; and, how impossible it was to be saved. And somebody gave you the true gospel of the grace of God. Then the Holy Spirit kicked in the capacity to believe. And you did. And into the heavenly realm of the royal family of God, you entered.

Some of you were fortunate because you were reared in a Christian family, so that you didn't have to grow up with a lot of stupidity and scars. Others of you, who were going to be saved in spite of the fact you grew up in a Christian family, and you decided to be stupid and scar up your life anyhow, because you thought the devil's way was better. No human good works or any religious rituals are required to go to heaven. And that's what the Colossians discovered when they trusted in Christ as Savior. So, they were suddenly reconciled to God standard of absolute righteousness. Their sins were forgiven. And they were a totally different species of human being than they once were.

You cannot add to the grace of God any of your works. If you do that, then you counter what John 14:6 says. And that's what the religions of the world do: "Jesus said to him, 'I am the Way; the Truth; and, the Life. No one comes to the Father but through Me.'" And if you come on the basis of what you think is faith plus some insurance of good works, what you have done is ensure that you will not go to heaven.

Romans 11:6 is a very sobering caution about this: "But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works. Otherwise, grace is no longer grace." They are mutually exclusive. You cannot do as the Roman Catholics say: have your moral guilt removed by the death of Christ upon the cross, and then you remove your temporal guilt by your own human effort. And if you don't have both of them, you cannot go to heaven. That is salvation by works. It is exactly what this Scripture condemns.

God's provision to satisfy His own justice and preserve His absolute righteousness is perfect. His program needs nothing added to it. It can take no readjustment. It can never be undone. This salvation that God provides could never be undone by the believer so that he could be lost again. It's entirely a work of God and a gift of God. And that's really great. Otherwise we could never have any peace. And anybody who doesn't understand that salvation is something that you appropriate as a gift, but that you do it by means of a commitment is always scrounging around to try to act a little better, and a little better, to be sure that you qualify.

Efficacious Grace

Jesus said, "Let me make this clear once and for all." John 10:27-29: "Jesus said, 'My sheep hear My voice. And I know them, and they follow Me.'" Who are His sheep? Those that God the Father looks upon, among the mass of humanity, and says, "I'll take her. I want him. Bring them in." And, boy, does He do that! He brings them in. We theologians call that efficacious grace. It means that it just blasts you into the family of God. You can't stop yourself. You can't resist it. You can't stay out. Efficacious grace is grace that works.

Verse 28: "And I give them eternal life. I give eternal light to them, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of My hands. My Father, Who has given them to me, is greater than all. No one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hands. And I have had people that I've shown these verses to, to hopefully comfort them, and to give them assurance of their salvation, come back when they are when they are simply determined not to believe what the word the Scripture says. They say, "Yeah, but you can take yourself out of the Father's hands." No one can take you out of His hand once you're in there. So, no indictment is ever again possible against a born-again believer, no matter how Satan accuses him.

Heaven

However, it does raise that question (that phrase from the Old Testament): "How then shall we live?" How then should we live? It is a perennial question with this kind of salvation; with this kind of a grace of God provision; and, with everything that lies before us, we can't even imagine what heaven is going to be like; what it's going to be like to live in that new Jerusalem; or, what it's going to be like to be in your full capacity as a human being, with everything working perfectly, and fully capable of enjoying the presence of God, and all of the things of God's creation, like you wouldn't believe, and like it was once possible for Adam and Eve to do. That's where our destiny is.

Yet, we want to muddle around in this filthy, dirty, lowlife world that we live in? Christians increasingly our hatred, and our country is under attack, to be able to rub out its memory of its Christian heritage? And we go along with it, as Christians, because we just can't wait to be part of it. And if there's a conflict between an activity of God and an activity of Satan's world, we'll go with the world? And if somebody challenges all the things we've ever been taught, of the principles of righteousness that are found in Scripture, and our people of the world question those principles, we'll go with their doubts?

You would think that after somebody read the story of Adam, and particularly of Eve and her fall into sin, which was entirely because she went along with the doubts of the devil, people would never again doubt anything that the Word of God has said just because someone in the world challenges those things.

Our world is, by the hour, now being prepared for the antichrist. And most of us are totally oblivious to how fast that's happening, and how quickly the end is coming upon us. I have access to information that people bring me – things even from circles of the government, that I wouldn't even bother putting out, because i would so overwhelm you. But I can tell you the bottom line of it is that the devil is in high gear, and this world is collapsing in on itself faster than you can believe. And you better start thinking, as Scripture says: "Looking above, not on the things of this world." You better start taking your life seriously, and make it count for the eternal glory, and benefit, and rewards, and enrichment that God is so eager to give us.

Colossians 1:21 told of the terrible condition of the Colossians before they were saved: "And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds." Now, as soon as these people were saved, in came one heretical group called the Gnostics. That's from the Greek word for "knowing." And they said, "We know something a little more than what Paul has taught you. His Bible is good, but ours is better. We have something more; something more; something more. That is a key phrase the devil uses. It's what traps charismatics into the horrible lifestyle of trying to chase rabbits, and of spiritual experiences that don't exist. These Colossians were immediately attacked by false teachers (by heretics). Some of these people simply followed Paul, and moved in when he moved out.

In verse 22, we have the great contrast with that old pre-salvation condition: "Yet, he has now reconciled." The word "yet" is "de" in the Greek Bible. And it's an emphatic word, put right there in the Greek Bible, to indicate that there's a great contrast with what he's just said. Something has dramatically changed. And then, to make it really powerful, he adds the word "now." This is the ordinary word for now: "nun" in the Greek. But he uses the intensified form, which has an "i" at the end: "nuni." So, he has also the word "now." In the English, you don't catch that. But in a Greek Bible, it's like a sledgehammer has hit you between the eyes, because the Holy Spirit takes these words and says, "Now listen, I want you to be very serious about what I'm telling you. I want you to pay close attention."

That's how it was in verse 21. But it's not like that anymore. So, stop living, talking, acting, dressing, and using up your time as if you were just alienated and hostile in mind against God, and full of evil deeds? This is the strongest expression of the current stage of God's dealing with the Colossian believers. And what has he done? In contrast to the way it used to be, at this point in the Colossian Christians' experience, they now stand as those who are reconciled. And here again, the Holy Spirit comes back in with a sledgehammer.

This next word is so long that I can hardly even write it on the scope. Count how many letters that is: "apokatallasso." Ordinarily, the word for "reconciled" is "katallasso." It means "to bring back" or "to readjust." But the Holy Spirit kicks in this little preposition "apo." And that intensifies the word, and it means "adjusted to the divine standard completely and irrevocably." The English never tells you that. Remember that word. If you want to talk about security of salvation, it's right there in "apo." It's absolute and irreversible once you're accepted in the family of God, because you came the right way, on the basis of faith in the Lord Jesus. It means to adjust you to God's standard of absolute righteousness, and to do it completely and irrevocably.

Forgiveness of Sins

It refers to these Colossians Christians, who, at the point of their salvation were adjusted to God's absolute righteousness. How was that done? The righteousness of God was imputed to us. Every one of us, and every one of them, suddenly possessed the righteousness of God. Yes, they had their sins forgiven. That was done by the death of Christ, and they immediately had all their sins forgiven: past; present; and, future. But you won't get to heaven because you have your sins forgiven. That's the negative factor. You have to be like God. You have to have His righteousness.

Absolute Righteousness

Those in the terrible moral condition of verse 21, in Colossae, God has reconciled to His absolute righteousness in verse 22. The grammar tells us something about "apokatallasso." It's in the tense which is called the aorist tense. That tells us that this took place at a point in salvation.

Purgatory

Roman Catholicism says, "No, salvation (justification) is this: a line, and you get better and better, and you keep trying, and you keep pumping at it, and you keep working at it. Suddenly, you hit the end and you die. You don't go to heaven. You go to the midway point (to the dry-cleaning plant) known as purgatory. So, you start suffering there until everything else is flushed out, and you're ready to go maybe to heaven someday. But who knows when?

"Christ, our hope of glory," the Scripture says. Is that a hope of glory? Is there any joy in that? This word tells us, by its very tense, that it happened at one little place in time, when the Spirit of God convicted you of sin, and you said, "I believe." When you did that, in came all of the marvelous readjustments to the divine standard through reconciliation.

This is in active voice, which tells us that God did it. It is very important to I know that this is an active voice word. You could not do this. Nobody else could do it for you. God alone could do it. It's indicative. It's a statement of a divine fact.

Now, if all this is true, this statement would also imply: how then should we live? And you come and tell me why Christians live like pigs and dogs. You tell me why Christians have this kind of an attachment (this absorption – this attraction) for the world – to be able to imitate, and to be like the world. What is the world's expression but rebellion against God our father? Some Christians have never accepted King David's statement: "Those who are the enemies of my Lord are my enemies too." Amen, David. Those who are the enemies of my Lord are my enemies. And the people I associate with in Satan's world system, these unbelievers, and these carnal Christians, they are my Lord's enemies, that makes them my enemies. Therefore, I don't take my clues from them. I don't want to be associated with them. I don't want to be in enterprises with them, and I don't have anything that I want to learn from them. I want to let them carry the burden of their own responsibility for their own choices.

Jesus Christ had a Human Body

"Yet now." This is an emphatic change: "He (God the Father, through God the Son) has reconciled (readjusted) you in." This is a preposition indicating the means of Christ's death, by which reconciliation was affected– "in His fleshly." The word "fleshly" is the word "sarx." Sometimes the word "sarx" refers to the sin nature. It's a sinful factor, but it's what is associated with what is physical. It doesn't mean that the body is sinful. Not at all. It says His "fleshly," having to do with physical substance, with matter – living matter that makes up the what? The "soma" – the body. This is living material, specifically composing the human body. We may translate this as "the body of His flesh," referring to the human body of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is a redundant phrase. You don't have to say both. If it's fleshly, it's a human body. It's a body. It's a human body. It is saying the same thing twice: "the body of His flesh." It is saying it again for emphasis.

The body of the Son of God, received through the incarnation in Bethlehem, was totally human, minus the sin nature. So, what the apostle is doing here, for some reason, is coming down very emphatically on the point that salvation came to us through the physical body of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was the physical body of Christ which bore His sufferings on the cross for sin, by which we secured our reconciliation.

Hebrews 5:7 says, "In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears, to the One able to save Him from death. And He was heard because of His piety. When did this just take? It was not in Gethsemane. It was on the cross. It was in the body of His flesh, when He was going under the intense physical suffering of bearing the sins of the world – the tears running down the face of Christ, and his praying, calling out to the Father, and supplication to help carry Him through; to relieve the suffering; and, to help Him to carry this through to death, as the Lamb of God, to pay for the sins of the world.

The whole last part of Psalm 22 describes in detail, 800 years before it happened, the death of Christ on the cross. Then he switches to the future. What is it that carried Him through while the tears were on His cheeks, and the sorrow of having to bear the filth of the sins of the world, and the physical agony that He's going through? His mind falls back on doctrine. God the Father said, "If You do this; if You carry through; and, if You execute this, this is what will happen. There will be a multitude of human beings who will come. They will follow you. They will come after you. The whole result would be something so magnificent that, for all eternity, you and I will rejoice in it.

In Psalm 22, he goes through the first part, and describes how terrible is the suffering He's going through, and what people are doing to Him. Then he gets to verse 22, at the end of the chapter. He starts mulling over in His mind doctrine. The mind of God becomes His thinking: "I will tell of Thy name to my brethren. I'm going to be resurrected. But in the midst of the assembly, I'll praise You. I'm going to be resurrected. You who fear the Lord praise Him. All you descendants of Jacob glorify Him, and stand in awe of him, all you descendants of Israel, because before your eyes, the Lamb of God is solving the problem begun in Eden. People will be in heaven because of this day's enterprise.

"For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted. Neither has He hidden His face from Him. But when he cried to Him for help, He Heard. The Father was in agony too, with the Holy Spirit. And they watched this scene on Calvary's Hill. They knew what was going on, and they helped all they could, but He had to carry it through.

"From Thee comes My praise in the great assembly. I shall pay my vows before those who fear Him. The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied. Those who seek Him will praise the Lord. Let your heart live forever. These people are going to have good times who are sinners condemned to the lake of fire. Many of them, through the Old Testament, have been saved on credit. They've been saved on the basis that God was someday going to pay for their sins. But they hadn't done it yet. But because they looked forward, they were on the list. These people are going to have days of great joy. Jesus said, "If I hang on here, and if I stay with this, I'm going to carry through. And at the right point, I'm going to lay down my life, and the deed will be done.

"All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord (speaking of Himself)." That's what he was thinking about. "And all the families of the nation will worship before Thee." That's what he was thinking about in the millennial kingdom." For the kingdom is the Lord's. He rules over the nations. All the prosperous of the earth will eat and worship. And all those who go down to the dust will bow before Him, even he who cannot keep his soul alive. Posterity will serve Him. It will be told of the Lord, to the coming generations." The Lord Jesus Christ is going to have a vast posterity. It's not going to end there at the cross. And He's looking forward to when it's all over,

"They will come and will declare His righteousness to a people who will be born – that He has performed it:" "I've done it." They're going to declare that Christ did it. It is finished. So, His fleshly body took a beating, but it was a critical part of the whole saving process. And this was through death – through the death of that body. All of this was so that He could secure for us salvation.

Now, this reference to Christ bearing the sins of mankind on the cross is what is behind the statement in 1 Peter 2:24: "And He Himself bore our sins in His body" – His fleshly body. There's the human body again on the cross: "That we might die to sin, and live to righteousness. For by His wounds, you were healed." Reconciliation was achieved for the believers through the real body of Jesus Christ being sacrificed in death on the cross. A Christian is reconciled to a Holy God through the physical death of Jesus Christ as the sacrifice paying for the penalty of death for all of us. He is the Lamb of God." The sphere of God's reconciling work was the physical body of Christ. That was the instrument of His death.

Thus, the believing sinner is positionally adjusted (he is reconciled) to God's required standard of absolute righteousness. This is put so clearly in 2 Corinthians 5:21: "He made Him (God the Father made God the Son) who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf. He carried our sins. He carried our transgressions that we, who are guilty and deserve to die, might become the absolute righteousness of God in Him." That's how it happened. He took our sins, and He gave us His absolute righteousness. That was the deal.

Now, the apostle Paul has reason to insert so forcibly the fact that Jesus Christ had a physical body. You would think, "Well, yes, He did." But I'll tell you that before the apostle John died, the heresy was already afoot that He didn't. What do you think the devil would do with this doctrine? What do you think Satan would try to do immediately, but to undermine the fact that this was not a real human being? This was not somebody who is connected to humanity and to God? This was not a God-Man? The devil went right for it, because he knew that this was the linchpin. Destroy this, and nobody, believing this, will get to heaven.

Early in the history of the New Testament church, there was the denial of the reality of the humanity and the physical body of Jesus Christ. He needed a genuine human body to offer in death as the Lamb of God for the sins of all mankind.

Hebrews 9:22: "And according to the Law, one may almost say all things are cleansed with blood, and without shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness." He had to have a body from which to shed His blood to die, to pay for the sins of the world: For Christ, as God, to redeem mankind, He Himself had to be the connecting link between God and man. God cannot die. He had to also be man, so that He could die, and so that He would be the connecting link between God and man, in paying the penalty for sin. He had to be a God-man.

Hebrews 2:17: "Therefore, He (Christ) had to be made like his brethren, in all things that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. If he's going to make satisfaction to the justice of God for human sin, He had to do it by the shedding the blood of His body. He had to be a physical sacrifice, and that required that He have a real human body.

1 Timothy 2:5:4: "There is One God, and One Mediator also, between God and man – the Man Christ Jesus."

In came the heretics. In came the false teachers. And they moved right into Colossae, and one of the first things those people were undoubtedly hit with was: "Now, listen. We have a little better understanding. We you have the Scriptures, but we have Greek philosophy. And Greek philosophy has given us a great understanding. We have a great insight. Greek philosophy has made it very clear that matter is evil. Anything material is evil. Jesus Christ could not have had a human body, because He would have then been evil." Therefore, the challenge was immediately put by these Gnostics that Jesus Christ really didn't have a human body, because only spirit is pure and sinless. He had to be a Spirit Being, like an angel first.

1 John 4:2 undoubtedly addresses this very issue: "By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God." John cut right to the heart. Everybody who says, "Jesus Christ was the Son of God – a Spirit Who came and joined a human body in Bethlehem, and became the God-Man so that He could die as the Lamb of God, the perfect sinners Lamb of God, without blemish, for the sins of all mankind. The early heretics taught, since matter is inherently evil, it had to be some kind of spirit being caused reconciliation. That's why they even extended Jesus to being a super angel, so that they could press this same false doctrine.

So, they claim that the body of Jesus Christ was not real, in order to secure our salvation. The Bible never teaches that material matter is evil per se. It is false to say that the human body is evil per se. It is not. What the human body has, is the injection of the virus of the sin nature, done to us by Adam. And the result is that the sin nature uses the perfectly sinless body to do terribly gross things. There's nothing wrong with the human body, and there's nothing wrong with exercising, within the parameters of God's guidelines, all the functions and desires of the human body. These people were wrong. Matter is not inherently evil. The Greek philosophers were wrong. And there was nothing wrong with the physical human body of Jesus Christ. The truth of the matter is that the Lord Jesus Christ did have a human body.

Hebrews 4:15 says, "While it is said: 'For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things, as we are, yet without sin (singular) – a sin nature. He's got all the temptations. He's been hit with all the things of Satan's world. He's had all the appeals, and all the glamor, and everything shoved at him. The one thing He doesn't have – He doesn't have internal sin nature appeals, but the rest is just as intense. He had a human body that could respond to those things – to those sensual things, and all the evil things that Satan was throwing at Him.

Hebrews 9:14: "How much more will the blood of Christ, Who, through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?" He served Himself as a Lamb without blemish. It is the blood of Christ Who, through the work of the Holy Spirit, has covered our sins." You have to have a human body to do this.

Finally, 1 John 3:5 says, "And you know that He appeared in order to take away our sins. And in Him there is no sin."

Well, the Bible is quite clear, then, that Jesus Christ was the Son of God (a Spirit Being), Who, in Bethlehem, through the virgin Mary, and the supernatural conception of the Holy Spirit, took upon Himself a human body. And that human body formed the God-Man which was the basis upon which God could fulfill His promise to send the final Lamb so that death could pay for the sins of all. This was a sinless person, spiritually alive, fully qualified to pay that penalty. If He did not have a human body, this could not be done. And if Jesus of Nazareth was not the God-Man, then we're all headed for the lake of fire. This is a very serious, heretical concept. It's a very serious error. It came in immediately. Satan didn't waste any time undermining the reality of the body of Christ. And, of course, with the body, there was the humanity.

This greater as a theological name. Let's get acquainted with it: "docetism." "Docetism" is a theological term. It comes from the Greek word "dokeo," which means "to seem." Please join me tonight. I'm going to teach you what these people said that created a stir even when John was still alive, and raged for three centuries, about whether Jesus Christ really had a real physical body, or whether He was some kind of a phantasm (a ghost), such that, if you went up and touched Him, they said, your hand would go right through Him. And then I'm going to lead you into a collection tonight from all of the Scriptures of the doctrine of the humanity of Christ. When you get through, you'll know what God thinks, and you'll know what the world thinks. Is "docetism dead? No. This highly influenced Muhammad, concerning teachings about Jesus Christ in Islam to this day. It was enormously influential in Mormonism, about the teachings of Christ this day.

So, Satan has not given up this basic concept. And that's why when you talk to Mormons, you suddenly get the strange realization that they speak about angels and human beings interrelated as if they were the same thing. They have no distinguishing between a spirit and a physical human being. Satan has done a great job of deception. I'm show you what this heresy consisted of. Then we're going to walk through the whole Bible, and show you what God says about the humanity, and the reality of that humanity, of the God-Man Jesus Christ.

Father, we thank You so much for the fact that the Bible has informed us.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1995

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