Loveland Protestant Reformed Church

709 East 57th Street; Loveland, CO 80538
Services: 9:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. (7:00 p.m. June through August)
Pastor: Rev. Garry Eriks Phone: (970) 667-9481

Vol. 7, No. 18

Homepage on Internet: http://www.prca.org

Contents:
Jesus' Soon Coming
Jesus' Sorrow Over Jerusalem's Sins (2)
Is God Incarnate Immutable?

Jesus' Soon Coming

What does Christ mean when He says, "Behold, I come quickly?" (Rev. 22:7, 12, 20). This question is especially urgent as we enter the beginning of another millennium and are reminded that it is nearly 2000 years since Christ made this promise.

The ungodly and scoffers see this long time as evidence that He will never come (II Pet. 3:3, 4). Nevertheless, believing Him to be the Son of God who cannot lie, we continue to watch and pray for His coming. Yet, lest we grow discouraged, it is good to examine what He meant when He spoke of His soon coming.

There is a sense, as we have seen, in which Christ comes quickly in that He is always coming, through judgments, through the preaching of the gospel, through the work and presence of the Holy Spirit, and through death. In all these different ways His reward is with Him and He gives every man according to His work (Rev. 20:12).

Nevertheless, as Revelation 22 makes so very clear, He is referring especially to His final coming when He speaks of coming quickly. In that respect, too, He keeps His promise to us to come quickly.

That promise of a quick coming means first of all that He will not tarry or linger one moment longer than necessary in order to bring His people to Himself. The very moment all is ready He will come in all the glory of His Father to make all things new.

This must be looked at, however, in the light of God's purpose. God has sovereignly foreordained all things, including the time of Christ's coming. In harmony with that, He has also foreordained it that all things should reach their appointed end at the very same moment.

At the same moment of history, God's purpose with His elect will be finished, and the last of them gathered in (II Pet. 3:9), but also His purpose with the ungodly and unbelieving. When the elect have all been saved then also the ungodly will have filled up the measure of their wickedness and will be ripe for God's judgment (Gen. 15:16; Ps. 75:8; Rev. 14:10, 15-20).

At that moment Christ will come. He will not come a moment sooner, for that would be too soon, but neither will He come a moment later. Even in this, we must remember, it is His meat and drink to do the will of His heavenly Father.

But He also comes quickly in this respect, that He comes at the end of history, and that history of the world is not long, especially in comparison to God's everlasting years. The ungodly speak of billions of years past and future, but we know that a few thousand years are all there are to the history of this world. Finally, He comes quickly in the sense that He comes too soon for the wicked to accomplish all their evil designs. Always throughout history their work has been interrupted and their purposes defeated by God's coming in judgment, and this will be true also at the end. May His coming never be too soon for us! Rev. Ronald Hanko

Christ's Sorrow Over Jerusalem's Sins (2)

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Matthew 23:37.

A reader asks: "Will you please re-explain this passage?" I am happy to do that because it is an important and interesting passage which has often been misinterpreted. Apparently, I explained the passage in an earlier issue, but that was long ago and it will not hurt to look at the passage once again. Note that a parallel passage is found in Luke 13:34.

* * * *

In the article in the last issue, I pointed out that this passage was often used as proof for the well-meant offer of the gospel. (If you have that issue handy, it would be well to take a moment to re-read it.)

I made two comments at that time. One was that the doctrine of the well-meant offer was a thoroughly Arminian doctrine. The second was that the well-meant offer defender has to misread the text in order to use the text to support his contention.

I need to say a few more things about this verse if we are to understand it properly.

* * * *

In all fairness to well-meant offer defenders, we must, first of all, point out that they have another appeal to the text in support of their position. They say, in effect, "We will concede that the text makes a distinction between Jerusalem and Jerusalem's children, and that Christ expresses a desire to save only Jerusalem's children. But the fact of the matter is that Christ expresses sorrow over Jerusalem. That is implied in the very wording of the text. And if Christ is sorrowful over Jerusalem because of its unbelief, then that can only be true if Christ truly desires Jerusalem's salvation."

I am not going to answer this objection here, for it is better to postpone an answer until we are sure about a couple of other elements in the text. To those we now turn.

* * * *

The first question is: What does Jesus mean by "Jerusalem" when He addresses it in this figure of speech called "personification?"

The obvious answer to that question is that the nation of Judah is being addressed by the name of the city which was Judah's political capitol and center of Judah's ecclesiastical life. It was Judah's capitol because the throne of David was there -- although the nation was now under the political control of Rome. It was the center of Judah's ecclesiastical life because the temple stood on Mt. Moriah as the place of worship.

Thus Jerusalem was the center of Judah's life as it constituted a theocracy, the old dispensational church, the people of God whom God had formed into His own covenant people. And the city itself was representative of the entire nation and therefore, of the church in the old dispensation.

That the city of Jerusalem is itself identified with the church in the old dispensation is evident from many different texts. As examples one can look up Isaiah 3:1, 8; 4:3, 4; 30:19; and such passages as Ps. 48:1, 2, while not mentioning the name Jerusalem, obviously refers to that city as a picture of the church.

In the days of Christ the nation had become apostate. The apostasy of the nation did not mean that God had not preserved His elect in the nation, for we know from Scripture that many believed in Christ during His earthly ministry and after He poured out His Spirit on the church.

But the nation, in its outward manifestation and in its official form, was apostate. The scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees, who were in control of Israel's ecclesiastical life -- and political life insofar as Rome permitted this, were wicked men. The throne of David was no more. The temple was served by wicked priests and Levites under the control of a monster of sin, Caiaphas the high priest. The majority in the nation were wicked and showed their wickedness in their rejection of Christ. In fact the nation was coming closer to that terrible moment when it would crucify the very Christ of Whom all the institutions in Judah were types and pictures.

That city of Jerusalem had children. Such children were spoken of, e.g., in Zech. 9:9: "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem…." Jesus addresses these daughters of Jerusalem on His way to the cross: "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children .. . (Lu. 23:28). Jerusalem's daughters were the covenant mothers in Israel who were apostate along with the rest of the nation.

But the clearest passage is found in Gal. 4:22-27. I think it best if we quote the entire passage, but I am going to wait with quoting it until next time because I have some remarks to make about it. But if you look up the passage now, you will discover that the old Jerusalem is described as being in bondage with her children, while the Jerusalem which is above is free and is the mother of us all. Those are significant words and have a great deal to do with our text that we are considering.

Prof. Herman Hanko

---

Is God Incarnate Immutable?

A correspondent has asked: "What bearing does the hypostatic union have upon the immutability of God? How are they reconciled?"

First of all, a word of explanation. In theology, the hypostatic union is the union of the divine and human natures in Christ. The word "hypostatic" is from a Greek word that has come to mean "person" in theology, and refers here to the fact that the two natures of Christ are united in one Person. The word "immutability," as most will know, refers to God's unchangeableness (Mal. 3:6; James 1:17).

The question, then, is this: How can God remain unchangeable if He in time unites Himself to our human natures in Christ? Is that not a change in God? And, also, the question is, if we understand it rightly: How can God be united in Christ to our changeable human nature without Himself becoming changeable?

This is a question that the church dealt with early on in her history. After defending her faith both in the true and complete divinity of Christ and in His true and complete humanity, other questions arose which forced the church to explain, as best she was able, how the divine and human natures were united in Christ. The church's answer to these questions, an answer based on Scripture itself, was set down in the Creed of Chalcedon, which says that the two natures of Christ were united "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation" in our Lord.

The church was forced to come to this confession over against the attacks of heretics who were motivated by Satan Himself. Satan knows that if He can destroy the church's faith in Christ, he has won the battle against the church. Our faith in Christ as God and man in one Person is the foundation for all we believe. Indeed, there is no salvation in Him if He is not true God and true man in one divine Person.

The truth concerning Christ is, therefore, that in the union of these two natures, which took place at the time of His incarnation, either nature was changed. The human did not become divine (unchangeable, everywhere-present, all-knowing), nor did the divine become human (changeable, limited, mortal). So too, the two natures were not confused or mixed together, so that Christ is half God and half man, but remains fully God and fully man at the same time and in the same Person ("without division, without separation").

Christ, therefore, though one Person, is and remains at the same time as far as these two natures are concerned, both the unchangeable God and changeable man. Indeed, His coming again to judge the living and the dead will involve a change of place as far as His human nature is concerned, for He shall come, from Heavens, not only to judge, but to take His people to Himself forever.

How can it be that Christ is both man and God, "equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood?" The only answer is that it is a work of God Himself, and therefore wonderful in our eyes. As with all God's work, it is something that transcends our understanding. It is the great mystery of godliness, that GOD was manifest in the flesh (I Tim. 3:16). In Christ dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily (Col. 2:9). Yet, while confessing that we do not fully understand, we are certain that if Christ is not at the same time the unchangeable God and yet a real man, there is no salvation in Him.

Rev. Ronald Hanko

---

Last modified: 02-May-2002