LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1965, Page 31

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DOCTRINAL-DEVOTIONAL ESSAYS 31

nor like unto Eusebius Number Two with his pussy-
footing, but give us an Athanasius who can say, ‘Here
lies the truth.’ ”

Christ, the Sender, Is Net the Christ of Calvin

There came the Middle Ages, in which the struggle
for the truth was heightened in its intensity. An eccle-
siastical empire had been developed that held both,
keys and swords. This spiritual empire blocked every
pathway that led back to the citadel of truth. Hun-
dreds of thousands died in the struggle. Some lived to
find the truth. Others lived to find only a half truth.
Calvin was one of the latter. ’Tis true, he was a theolo-
gian of no mean capability. Calvin said, “I know who
the Sender is.” But then he started out with the prop-
osition: “The finite is incapable of the infinite.” That,
he said, is basic.

This principle he then applied to Jesus Christ. In
that body of Christ there could not live “the fullness of
the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9). The Man, Christ Jesus,
because He was a man, because He was a human being
with flesh and blood, was finite. Therefore all the
attributes which are predicated of the Deity could not
be enclosed in His human body. This Jesus, although
He was the Son of God, had His limitations. This was
Calvin’s position. And so he never came to understand
the real Sender, who was possessed of all the attributes
of the Deity during the days of His flesh. After the
days of His humiliation He was still that God-man
who could fulfill the promise: “I am with you alway,
even unto the end of the world.”

Therefore, because Calvin believed that the finite
is incapable of the infinite, he could not agree with
you that from that altar last night we received the
visible elements of bread and wine, and at the same
time, as Paul says, there was a sharing, a communica-
tion of something that only God could give us, Christ’s
holy body and His holy blood. Calvin rejected the real
presence of the body and blood in the Eucharist.

And so we say to Calvin, “Calvin, your Christ is
too small.” The Christ of the Scriptures is the God-
man who claimed that while He was in the room with
Nicodemus, He was at the same time, as He said, “the
Son of Man, which is in heaven” (John 3:13). Here’s
the Sender —in the room with Nicodemus and at the
same time the Son of Man, who is sitting at the right
hand of God the Father. Calvin never grasped this.
The result of his position was that he never reached
the right Biblical understanding of the doctrines of
grace.

Christ, the Sender, Is Not the Christ of the Modernist

Who is the Sender? We answer finally, it is not the
Christ of the modernist. The Christ who sent us into
the world is He who claimed to be equal with God
the Father. The modernist wants a Christ who can be
squeezed into a test tube. Nothing else will satisfy him.
He wants a Christ who can walk on land, but he won’t
take a Christ who can walk on water. He wants a
Christ who will eat fish, but he won’t accept a Christ

who with two small fish can feed many thousands. He
wants a Christ who can be judged by a Gentile Pon-
tius Pilate, but he doesn’t want a Christ who will judge
all mankind, Jew and Gentile, at the end of time. He
wants a Christ who can die, but he doesn’t want a
Christ who can rise again.

The True Nature of the Christ

What kind of Christ have we then? If He is not
the Christ of Arius, if He is not the Christ of Calvin,
if He is not the Christ of the modernist, what is He
then? He is what His Word spells Him out to be.
Briefly:

He Is “Immanuel”

“They shall call His name Emmanuel” (Matt. 1:23).
Isaiah said it, and Matthew says that Isaiah said it.
“Immanuel!” Now that’s not English. That’s Hebrew.
And that Hebrew word means: “God is here — with us.”
Who is that baby lying in the manger at Christmas?
That’s God. Who is the teen-ager in the temple, an-
swering and asking questions? That’s God. Who is
the carpenter who with calloused hands saws timbers
for houses and barns in Nazareth? That’s God. Who
is the teacher gathering people to hear sermons on
the mount and sermons on the plain? That teacher
is God. Who is that physician who makes the blind
eyes see, the withered hands work, the lame feet walk,
diseased and leprous bodies once again function? That
physician is God. Who is that dead man on the cross
who comes to life by His own will? That man is God.
Who is that man of whom the Scripture says three
things? “He made the world! He redeemed the world!
He shall judge the world!” That man is God. Let this
convention without equivocation tell the world, even
though the world may hate us, that we still know the
answer to the question, who has sent men to men to
win them for God? Who is the Sender? He is none
other than God in Christ Jesus. Furthermore,

He Is the Messiah

He is the Messiah of Israel, the Messiah who said
of the holy books of Israel that they were written about
Him. He points to the Pentateuch, and He doesn’t say
that there were four authors of those books. What does
He say? He says: “Moses... wrote of Me” (John 5:46).
Note the emphatic order of the words in the original
Greek, “For it was of Me that he wrote.” Now either
He’s right or He’s wrong. And Jesus will not fall into
that trap of theological accommodation where he used
terms that were common among people, employing
them in the sense in which the people understood
them, knowing full well that people had an altogether
false conception about hermeneutics. When Jesus said:
“Moses wrote of Me,” He meant to say, “I am that
Prophet. I am that One who was to come. I am that
One who was to redeem the world from its guilt and
sin. I am the only One standing between God and
man to bring lost man back to God. Moses is My
biographer. He wrote these things of Me.”

Caiaphas asked Him, and with Caiaphas the church