Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ is God, the second person of the Holy Trinity. He is the I AM revealed to Moses (Ex. 3:2-14). He is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6). He is the God before the ages who came to Earth as a little child. He and the Father are one (John 10:30), because He is of one essence with the Father. During His suffering and death on the cross, one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh.

As described in the Gospels, Jesus Christ was born of a woman - the Virgin Mary - as a real human child. He grew into a full-grown man. He preached, healed, taught His disciples, died in physical reality on the cross, and then rose bodily from the dead on the third day. He then ascended into Heaven (Acts 1:9) and sat down at the right hand of the Father (Mark 16:19). Of all mankind, He alone is without sin.

Jesus is the Theanthropos, the God-man. He is not half God and half man, nor is He a hybrid of the two. Rather, He is fully God and fully man, perfect in His divinity and perfect in His humanity. He has two natures, joined together in the Incarnation without mixture, division, or confusion. This is the doctrine of the Incarnation, that God became a man while still remaining God. He is the Messiah, the Christ - the Anointed One of God, foretold by the prophets of the Old Testament.

His work on Earth was for the purpose of saving mankind, for the life of the world. Everything He did was for our salvation, whether it was being baptized, teaching in parables, healing the sick, or His glorious death and resurrection. Because of who He is and of what He did for us, we have the opportunity to become by grace what He is by nature, to the fullness of the stature of Christ (Eph. 4:13). We can put on the divine, becoming partakers of the divine nature (II Pet. 1:4).

That’s Who Jesus is and what He came here to do. But who are we? What is mankind? And what’s wrong with the human race?

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