A Portrait of Christ

A Look at Who Jesus Is and What He Is Like from the Gospels

Ramsey

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621896142
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is Jesus like? What kind of a person is he? Is he emotional or stoic? Is he proud or humble? Is he aloof or friendly? This book attempts to answer these types of questions. After demonstrating that Jesus is the promised Christ and that he is both divine and human, this book examines Jesus' personal characteristics as they are displayed in the four Gospels. The four Gospels are clearly not a typical biography of Jesus. Nonetheless, they do provide an informative account of his life here on earth, from which we can discover what he is like as a person.

1 / The Promised Christ

A number of well-loved books share a common theme: an epic battle between good and evil. In The Lord of the Rings, for example, Aragorn and company wage war against the powerful but evil Sauron; and in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan the lion battles the White Witch.

These great stories also share a number of other elements that make them gripping and intriguing. One is that their battles have universal and grave consequences. If Frodo fails in his mission to destroy the ring, and if Aslan does not come to conquer the Witch, then all is lost for everyone. There is a do-or-die element to these stories.

Another common component is the oppression of people by an evil tyrant. Times are tough and desperate. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the citizens of Narnia live in constant fear of their ruler, the White Witch, who makes it winter all year round, but never Christmas. The story is somewhat different in The Lord of the Rings, as the evil Sauron is not quite in control of Middle Earth, but he is rapidly gaining strength and is on the brink of complete domination.

Still another theme, which binds together many of these well-loved stories, is the presence of a promised hero who will save the oppressed. This is especially the case in Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Many of the Narnians have lived in hope for a very long time, because of the prophecy that one day the great and mighty Aslan will come to Narnia and right all wrongs and turn winter into spring. Aslan’s victory, according to another prophecy, will happen when two daughters of Eve and two sons of Adam arrive in Narnia and sit on the four thrones at Cair Paravel. This is why when Mrs. Beaver meets Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy for the very first time, she exclaims, “So you’ve come at last! At last! To think that ever I should live to see this day!”1

Good versus evil, oppression, deliverance, powerful enemies, promised saviors, and do-or-die battles are all components that wonderful epic stories have in common. Yet, there is something else they share: to one degree or another, they reflect reality. Perhaps this is why such stories are so popular. They express truth in the form of art, which we can relate to, and which we long to experience ourselves.

While we may be unaware of it, there has been a cosmic battle between good and evil since the time of Adam and Eve in the garden. Since the entrance of the first sin into the world, humanity has been enslaved and oppressed, subject to all sorts of misery, including death. Against this background, God has promised to send a savior to rescue his people.

The four Gospels teach that Jesus is this promised savior. Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary, is no ordinary man. He is the one the Old Testament prophets said would come to deliver God’s people.

The Need for a Savior

Evil first entered God’s good universe when an angel opposed God and subsequently was cast out of heaven. The Bible tells us very little about the fall of Satan, but it does seem that pride was a root cause of his rebellion. Also, it is clear that he took many angels with him. Fallen or rebellious angels are commonly called demons.

In his hatred for God, Satan sought to destroy the apex of God’s creation, human beings, who are made in the image of God. The evil one cunningly tempted the first two human beings, Adam and Eve, to rebel against God by eating the forbidden fruit (Genesis 3). Tragically, Satan was successful. Adam ate the fruit, bringing sin and its consequences into the world (Romans 5).

The situation in Narnia under the White Witch somewhat captures humankind’s situation since Adam’s fall into sin: living under an evil tyrant in a place where it is always winter and never Christmas. The Bible teaches that all men are by nature living under the tyrannical rule of Satan (Eph 2:2; 1 John 5:19). Furthermore, the Bible teaches that all humans are sinners, and are therefore under God’s wrath and curse and are “liable to all miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever.”2

Our own experience confirms these truths. This world is full of suffering, evil, oppression, and death: infanticide, betrayal, rape, murder, genocide, and abuse. We do not have to look outside ourselves, however, to see these things. We have personally suffered misery and pain to one degree or another. We have caused others to suffer by our words and actions. And what is more, we are all going to die.

Appreciating the need for a savior can be obscured, however, by God’s goodness. We have good jobs, great marriages, healthy children, and nice homes. Who needs saving? When life is good, we should enjoy it and praise God for it. But the fact remains, we live in a sinful, fallen world, and sooner or later, our world will crash in on us. We lose our job, health, or family. Then all of a sudden, we are reminded that all is not well here. We are awakened to the fact that we need a savior. We need someone to deliver us from sin, misery, death, and Satan. We need a hero to make all wrongs right and to turn winter into spring.

Thankfully, God, in his goodness and incomparable love, has promised to save us from sin and death. He did so right after the fall, when he said to Adam and Eve, in Genesis 3:15, “I will put enmity between you [the devil] and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” In this verse, God promises that a descendent of Eve will one day come and destroy the devil: “he shall bruise your head.”

The Battle between Good and Evil

Undoubtedly, Satan wasn’t too pleased when he heard about God’s promise to send someone to crush him and take away his newly acquired minions. His displeasure, though, was translated into action. He decided to fight back. The battle lines were thus drawn, and the war over humanity began in earnest between God and Satan.

Throughout the period leading up to the fulfillment of God’s promise, if we would have pulled back the curtain to peer into what was going on behind the scenes, we would have seen the devil doing his best to eradicate the seed of the woman. He began with the ungodly Cain murdering his righteous brother Abel. Yet, the hope carried on in Eve’s third son, Seth. Satan changed tactics and used marriage between the godly and the ungodly to wipe out the godly seed (Genesis 6). This approach nearly worked, as the newfound alliance diluted the true religion, causing humanity’s wickedness to flourish, to the point where God decided to destroy humanity from the face of the earth. There was, however, one righteous man, Noah. God delivered him and his family from the flood, thereby keeping the hope of a future savior alive.

From the numerous peoples that came from Noah, God chose Abraham. The promised deliverer would be one of his descendents. A difficulty arose, however, in that Abraham’s wife, Sarah, was unable to have any children (a consequence of the fall). As nothing is impossible with God, Sarah conceived and gave birth to the promised child, Isaac, in her old age. Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, also had a hard time conceiving, yet God is faithful, and she eventually gave birth to twin boys, Esau and Jacob.

The promise carried on through Jacob. He had twelve sons, so the question of an heir was not an issue. Survival during the seven-year famine, however, was. To keep them and the promise alive, God used the wicked actions of ten sons to send one son, Joseph, to Egypt, so that he might be in a position to save them all from the severe famine. With Joseph being Pharaoh’s right-hand man, Jacob and his family moved to Egypt, where after a long period of time, his family turned into a nation, containing as many people as the stars in the heavens.

At this juncture, Satan executed a violent assault on Israel in order to nullify God’s promise. We learn in Exodus 1 that Pharaoh first enslaved the entire nation of Israel and then ordered the killing of all Hebrew male babies. Killing all the males would have effectively destroyed the nation, as the remaining girls would have been assimilated into the Egyptian culture and people. The continuing line leading to the coming savior would have then been wiped out. God countered this attack through the Hebrew midwives who refused to carry out Pharaoh’s orders, and by raising up Moses to lead his people out of Egypt.

While in the promised land, God chose Jesse’s youngest son as the one through whom the savior would come. The Messiah would be a son of David. For a time, things went fairly smoothly, with just a few bumps in the road; but a tense moment occurred after the death of Ahaziah, the seventh king after David. Upon his death, Ahaziah’s mother, Athaliah, killed all the royal heirs—that is, all the sons of David. She murdered all of them, except one. Unbeknownst to her, little Joash was rescued from among the king’s sons who were being put to death. Satan was again frustrated after another close call. But though he lost another battle, he was far from giving up the war.

During the reign of Ahaz, Syria and Israel combined forces to blot out the house of David and set up their own king in Jerusalem (Isaiah 7). God promised to Ahaz that their attempt would fail: “It shall not stand, and it shall not come to pass” (Isa 7:7). To confirm his promise, God gave a sign: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Isa 7:14).

Further attempts were made by Satan to wipe out the line of the promised one: the exile due to the people’s apostasy, the mixed marriages of the Jews who remained in Jerusalem, and the decree to exterminate the Jews during the time of Esther. All of them were unsuccessful, which set up a climactic battle, wherein Satan launched another violent assault to destroy the one who was supposed to destroy him. We will turn to this in a moment.

The point to be grasped is that there is a cosmic battle between good and evil. The Bible often describes it as the battle between two kingdoms: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness. When we speak of the kingdom of God we do have to distinguish between God’s kingdom in a redemptive sense and his kingdom in a providential sense. God is and always will be king and ruler over the world. As Nebuchadnezzar acknowledged, God’s kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and he rules over all (Daniel 4). This is God’s providential kingdom. But God’s kingdom is also used in a redemptive sense, and it is this kingdom that is contrasted with the kingdom of Satan or darkness. This kingdom refers to God in time and history securing redemption and breaking the power of evil in this world.

In The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits live blissfully unaware of the great battle to save Middle Earth from the evil Sauron. Many people are like hobbits and do not understand or see the great battle waging between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan, a battle over the allegiance of people’s hearts and lives. But though they do not know it or admit it, the battle goes on. This is why believers must put on the whole armor of God daily: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12).

Jesus is the Promised Savior

The climactic battle between the two warring kin...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1 / The Promised Christ
• Chapter 2 / The Divine-Human Savior
• Chapter 3 / The Compassionate Christ
• Chapter 4 / The Compassionate Christ, Part 2
• Chapter 5 / Christ the Friend
• Chapter 6 / The Anger of Christ
• Chapter 7 / The Humility of Christ
• Bibliography
• Study Guide