Sermon
Who Do Men Say That I Am?
December 19, 2004
Pastor Donald Sheley

When I was a little boy a long, long time ago, in Sunday school I learned a chorus and in recent weeks I've been singing this chorus to myself in my office and as I drive down the street, and it goes like this:
Let's talk about Jesus,
The King of kings is He,
The Lord of lords supreme,
Through out eternity;
The great "I Am," the Way,
The Truth, the Life, the Door,
Let's talk about Jesus more and more!

Sing it with me:
Let's talk about Jesus,
The King of kings is He,
The Lord of lords supreme,
Through out eternity;
The great "I Am," the Way,
The Truth, the Life, the Door,
Let's talk about Jesus more and more!

With that thought and that hymn ringing through my mind and my heart, in recent weeks we've decided that for the next 14 or 15 Sundays, the Lord willing, we're going to talk about Jesus because it's important what we believe in Him and what we believe about Him, what He came to do and who He is. In fact it's probably one of the most important aspects, if not the most important aspect, of our Christian faith.

Take your Bible. In John chapter 8 there is a passage, the words of Jesus which really ignite my heart and give me reason for this series of lessons that we are going to be studying in the weeks to come. John chapter 8 verse 24; look at what Jesus says: "Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for if you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins." And what Jesus is simply saying is if we deny in any aspect the teachings of Scripture as to the deity of His person and His ministry, we're still sinners, and that at the very crux of our Christian faith is our confession and our belief in who Christ is and the ministry He came to perform on this earth 2000 years ago.

Now let's take our notes. It's a conversation that Christ had with His disciples. And it took place it tells us, it says, When Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, "Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?" So they said, "Some say John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?"

Simon Peter answered and said, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Jesus answered and said to him, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Then He commanded His disciples that they should tell no one that He was Jesus the Christ.

Now we'll follow our notes and I'll at times depart from them, but we begin by stating two very penetrating questions: "Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?" and the second question, "Who do you say that I am?" Now these questions were asked as Jesus was nearing the end of His earthly ministry. His time was short; His days in the flesh were numbered. He had come to a very, very important moment in His ministry. The applause and the crowds were behind Him. They are silent now. There is a contract on His life. They want His life; they want to kill Him, and Jesus now leaves the sound and the applause of the crowd behind Him. He sets His face towards the cross. It's a climatic moment in His earthly ministry.

And I note here, the problem was...were there any who, when He was gone from the flesh, would carry on His work, the labor of His kingdom? And obviously it was a crucial problem. To put it bluntly, it involved the very survival of the Christian faith! If there were none who had grasped the truth, or even glimpsed it, then all His work was undone; if there were some few who realized the truth, His work was safe. So Jesus was determined to put all to the test and to ask His followers who do they believe Him to be.

It is the most dramatic interest to see where Jesus chose to ask this question. There can have been few areas with more religious associations than Caesarea Philippi. For on a beautiful site on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, Caesarea Philippi was located about twenty-five miles north of Bethsaida on the slopes of Mount Hermon. It was Mount Hermon and the streams that flowed off of Mount Hermon that flowed eastward down into the Sea of Galilee, and then the Sea of Galilee flowed into the Jordan River, and then the Jordan River further down flowed into the Dead Sea.

And so it was the city laid in that territory and it was ruled by Philip who is mentioned in Luke 3:1. The influence of Greek and Roman culture was everywhere. The city was primarily non-Jewish, known for its worship of Greek gods and its temples devoted to the ancient god Pan. And also the area was scattered with temples of the ancient Syrian Baal worship.

Thomson in his book 'THE LAND OF THE BOOK' enumerates no fewer than fourteen such temples in the near neighborhood. The reason why I place that in there is as you know that Palestine was ruled by the Romans, and as rulers would come in they thought that was a very lovely place up there along the Sea of Galilee and that's where they settled down and had their summer homes, and that's why you find such a conglomeration of the various gods and the various worships-the worship in that area.

Now here then indeed is a dramatic picture and setting for Jesus to ask those two penetrating questions as to His identity. Here is a homeless, penniless Galilean carpenter, with twelve very ordinary men around Him. At the moment, the orthodox people, those are the religious people, of His day are actually plotting and planning to eliminate and to destroy Him as a dangerous heretic. He stands in an area that's littered with temples of the Syrian gods; in a place where the ancient Greek gods looked down; in a place where the history of Israel crowded in upon the minds of men; where the white marble splendor of the home of Caesar-worship dominated the landscape and compelled the eye. And there, of all places, this amazing carpenter stands and asks men who they believe Him to be, and He expects the answer...The Son of God.

It is as if Jesus deliberately set Himself against the background of world religions in all of their history and in all of their splendor, and He demanded to be compared with them, and to have the verdict given in His favor. There are few scenes where Jesus' consciousness of His own divinity shines out with a more dazzling light.

So then at Caesarea Philippi Jesus determined to demand a verdict of His disciples. He must know before He sets out for Jerusalem and for the cross if anyone has even dimly grasped who and what He is. He did not ask the question, you notice, directly, He led up to it and He began by asking His disciples, what are people saying about Me? Who do they say that I am?

Now the disciples give Him three answers. They said Jesus, some of them are saying that You are John the Baptist. Now John the Baptist had been killed by Herod, but Herod when he met Christ, he said, really this could be John the Baptist who has come back from the dead.

John the Baptist was the final great prophet and he held a very high position at that time of Christ, and they, some of them, felt that he would come back from the grave and that was Herod's position. So that's why the disciples say, some are saying that Jesus, You're John the Baptist and You've already come back from the dead.

Then they said Jesus, others are saying that You are Elijah. And in doing so they were saying two things about Jesus; they were saying that He was as great as the greatest of the prophets, for Elijah had always been looked on as the summit and the peak and the prince of the prophetic line. And so they were also saying that Jesus was the forerunner of the Messiah.

And then the disciples said but there is another person, Jesus, that some people are saying that You are Jeremiah. John the Baptist, Elijah, but some are saying Jeremiah.

I'm at the top of page 3. Jeremiah had a curious place in the expectations of the people of Israel. It was believed that before the people went into exile, that was back before they went into Babylonian exile, that Jeremiah had taken the ark and the altar of incense out of the Temple, and had hidden them away in a lonely cave on Mount Nebo, and that, before the coming of the Messiah, he would return and produce them, and the glory of God would come to the people again.

That was an interesting thought. Jeremiah, they say, aware that they're going off into Babylonian captivity runs into the Temple, grabs the altar and the table of incense, and hurries off to Mount Nebo and hides them in a cave. And their feeling was that before the Messiah returned that Jeremiah would return, go get those articles that fit in the Temple of worship, and bring them back to Jerusalem and the glory of God would once again be upon the people of Israel.

Now when the people identified Jesus with Elijah and with Jeremiah they were, according to their lights, according to their understanding, paying Him a great compliment and setting Him in a high place, for Jeremiah and Elijah were none other than the expected forerunners of the Anointed One of God. And it was believed by the Jewish people that when they arrived the Kingdom of God was very near.

Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am? Let's take just a moment and go through the Scriptures to see what men of the Scriptures said about Jesus.

Luke writes concerning Jesus: Now when the days of her purification (speaking of Mary) according to the law of Moses were completed, they brought Him (that's Jesus) to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, "Every male who opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord"), and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the law of the Lord, "A pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons." And behold, there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man was just and devout, and he's waiting for the Consolation of Israel. The Consolation of Israel would be the coming, the fulfillment of the prophecies concerning the Messiah.

And the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. So he came by the Spirit into the temple. And when the parents brought in the Child Jesus, to do for Him, according to the custom of the law, he took Him up in his arms and blessed God and said: "Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace, according to Your word; For my eyes have seen Your salvation which You have prepared before the face of all peoples, a light to bring revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of Your people Israel."

So Simeon gives Christ four designation titles. He says He's the Consolation of Israel, He's the Lord's Christ, He's our salvation, and He is the light that will bring revelation. That was Simeon's confession and his witness concerning the Christ.

John the Baptist declares Jesus to be the Lamb of God. The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, "Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." And if we read that passage on in John, John says now I'm going to bear witness to this fact; I was there, I heard the voice, and I saw this spectacular moment (speaking of the baptism of Christ) and he said I want to leave this witness, Jesus Christ truly is the Son of God. So John the Baptist leaves his witness, if asked, who was Christ?

Nicodemus is referred to in John chapter 3. He is a ruler of the Jews and he comes to Jesus by night and he says, "Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with Him." So Nicodemus leaves his witness for all mankind. He calls Him a teacher sent from God. That's the witness, that's the confession that Nicodemus leaves for us.

When Jesus was in Samaria, that's chapter 4 of John, it says that "...many of the Samaritans of that city believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified, "He told me all that I ever did." So when the Samaritans had come to Him; they urged Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days. And many more believed because of His own word. Then they said to the woman, "Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.""

These Samaritans had invited Jesus to stay at their village for two days; they had listened to Him, they had sensed His presence, and they said Jesus, they tell us, Jesus, we believe that You are the Christ the Savior of the world. That was their witness left for us.

After preaching His great sermon recorded in John chapter 6, stating that He was indeed the Bread of Life, you remember His congregation walked out on Him. And it says, From that time many of His disciples went back and walked no more with Him. Then Jesus said to the twelve, "Do you also want to go away?"

But Simon Peter answered Him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also, we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." So again Peter stands forth and he answers the question...You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

But Jesus had His critics. You go to John chapter 8 and you come across a very confronting discussion that Jesus has with His religious critics, and they call Him a child of fornication and they also said: "Do we not say rightly that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?" Now they are extremely critical.

You see, there was a story going around about this time and these religious leaders were referring to it. They say You are a child of fornication. You see it was believed that up in Nazareth there was a Roman guard stationed there and that Mary was impregnated by one of those Roman soldiers, and thus, they got the story going around that Jesus was a child of fornication. And then they went a little further -- they said You are a Samaritan. Now I don't know if we have a word or a phrase that we could use in our language but they believed, the Jewish people believed, the Samaritans were the lowest of the lowest of the lowest. You couldn't get any lower. They were a mixed race. And so when they said Jesus You are the lowest of the lowest...and then they went a step further and they said You've got a demon.

I've often wondered every time I read that, why didn't God just strike them dead? I mean, to make the accusation of our blessed Christ that He was demon possessed. And Jesus very graciously responded and said I don't have a demon. But here were His critics -- that's the witness they left for all mankind.

Now one of the interesting things folks, is as you study the Scriptures you come to the Colossian passage and you find that infiltrated into the church was the Colossian teachings of Gnosticism. And one of their teachings was that Jesus didn't have a physical body. When He walked He didn't even leave footprints. So Paul's got to deal with that and that's the reason why the book of Colossians is written.

There's such a strong defense in the book of Colossians for the deity of Christ. What I'm suggesting, from the very onset of Christianity there has always been the attack on the person of Christ. If they can diminish Him or if in any way they can twist or distort the biblical teachings of Christ, they come up with a heresy, and thus the origination of many cults. It's the twisting, it's the distortion, of what the Bible teaches about the person of Christ.

So I pulled just three men out of history. I'm at the bottom of page 4. Men down through the centuries of human history have responded with the answer -- who is this man called Jesus? In the fourth century there was a man by the name of Arius. He was the presbyter of Alexandria. That's up on the northern shores of North Africa. And he began to propagate the view, now remember he's a leader in the church, that Jesus, though the Son of God, could not be co-equal with His Father and that He must be regarded as external to the divine essence and only a creature.

And so immediately they are saying He's a creature not the Creator. You see as soon as you move Christ away from being the Creator and make a Him the creature, you've shattered the teachings of His preexistence and His deity.

And in the fourth century there was Apollinaris, bishop of Laodicea in Syria. He wrote against Arianism and other heresies. Zealously wishing to maintain the true error of denying Christ's full humanity, he declared that Christ had a human body but did not posses a human spirit. Thus the complete true proper humanity of Jesus was denied.

Then in the fifth century, Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, taught that Christ was both God and man, but that the Godhead was one Person, and manhood another. Instead of a union of two natures with distinction, the Nestorians taught that there were two persons in the person of Christ.

Now what I suggest to you is false teachings concerning Christ exist even to this day, the attack on the divinity, the deity of Christ. And so I have just picked out three religions that all of us are fairly familiar with, and suggested that if you ask a follower -- I'm at the top of page 5 in our notes -- of the teachings of Christian Science, this would be their answer as to who Jesus is.

Now think this one folks:
"Jesus is the human man..." Now I have copied this right out of their writings so these are not my words. These are their words. They say that..."Jesus is the human man, and Christ is the divine idea. The virgin mother conceived this idea of God and gave to her ideal the name of Jesus. Jesus was the offspring of Mary's self-conscious communion with God." Now that's about as far out as you can get folks, but that's what they believe. Distorting the biblical teachings of the divinity of Christ.

If you ask the followers of the teachings of Jehovah Witnesses, this would be their reply to the question...Who is Jesus Christ? And I have copied this. I'm sure Doug sitting here, Doug who spent many years, would have much more to add to this, but I just pulled a few lines. They say, He was "Not Jehovah God, he was the first son that Jehovah God brought forth. He is the first creation of God." You see immediately they make Him a creation and not the Creator. They totally set aside His divinity.

"At the baptism of Jesus, He was anointed to be the Messiah. He showed His subjection to God by humbling Himself to a most disgraceful death on a torture stake. God raised Christ, not in flesh, but with a spiritual body." So they deny the resurrection, the physical resurrection of Christ.

Now if you should ask the followers of the Mormon religion this question, who is Christ? this would be their answer as to who Jesus Christ is. This has taken right from their text: "Among the spirit children of Elohim, the firstborn was and is Jehovah or Jesus Christ, to whom all others are juniors. By obedience and devotion, He attained to the pinnacle of intelligence which ranked Him as a God..."

A terrible error. He is God, not a God.

"...even in His pro-existent state. Jesus Christ was the executive in the work of creation, aided by Michael, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Peter, James, John, Joseph Smith, and..." any other name you want to add to it.

Implied -- that the Scriptures are not correct where Jesus says very clearly that Jesus is the Creator. Now let's go there. Let's go to Colossians just so we read it. Colossians 1. Let's see just exactly what the Bible says about Jesus. Verse 15 says: He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created, that are in heaven, and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created through him, and for him.

He is the Creator not the created, and He is before all things and in him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all [things] he might have the preeminence.

Notice chapter 2 verse 9: For in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And you are complete in him.

So when we read the Scriptures and we see that we have these distortions, the questions is often asked, are these religious people Christians?

Well, if the Bible tells...if Jesus says, if you deny who I am, and He claimed to be God, because we're going to get to that in just a moment, if you reject that, if you reject My deity, then you are still in your sins and sinners who die in their sins go to hell. So if I create or conjure up in my mind some concept of what I think Jesus is, that's what cults do and that's what these faults teachings are. They create their own Christ and they define Him as they want to define Him, and as you do, you do not have the Christ of the Scriptures anymore as your Christ. And only the Christ of the Scriptures is the Savior of the world, and if you rejected the Christ of the Scriptures you've rejected the Savior of the world and there is no salvation, no matter how religious you are.

Jesus said if you deny or reject who I am, you are still a sinner. You know folks, when I read that Scripture passage it just...I've been thinking about it all week. I drive down the street and I go by a Mormon Church and I see all those people out there and realizing that their concept of Jesus is not even a biblical concept. They have a distorted Christ. And to realize that they are not Christians; they are not Christians even though they say they are, because what makes us a Christian is that we believe in the Christ of the Bible not a distorted concept about Him.

And we are Christians because Christ to us is the divine Son of God; God who came to this earth and took upon Himself human flesh and became our Savior and He died. He's the God eternal. We believe Him to be the Son of God, the Son of the living God. We believe Him to be God.

Now in our notes I suggest that we see just for a moment what Jesus said about Himself. Look at the bottom of page 5. Jesus said -- it's in the Gospel of John -- Jesus refers to Himself as YHWH, and you'll notice that in the Hebrew it's only four letters. It's Y-H-W-H, and what it stands for is "I AM" or if you say it in the Jewish language it's "Yah-weh."

Now the name Yahweh was so sacred that devout Jews would not even pronounce it. Yahweh is the I AM of Exodus 3:14, the name that God called Himself. Let me give you some background. Moses has been called by God to go down to Egypt and to deliver the children of Israel from their land of bondage. And Moses is having a conversation with God and he says, God, when I get there and they ask me the question, who sent you? Who shall I tell them sent me to deliver them? And God said you tell them the I AM has sent you.

So God in that ancient past gave Himself the title the I AM. And what we find is that Jesus Christ picks up that title to identify Himself as the God of the Old Testament.

Down at the bottom of the page, John 8:56-59 Jesus claimed to be this I AM: "I tell you the truth...before Abraham was born, I AM." Now that phrase appears over and over that title appears over and over in the Gospel of John. Jesus says I AM the truth. He uses the title of God. I AM the way. I AM life. I AM the door. I AM the good shepherd, and He always uses that title of God to identify Himself.

Never -- it's interesting when you go through all the text of the Scripture, never once in the moments of Jesus' ministry did He ever question His identity of a deity, never once. He declares it constantly throughout the Scriptures. You get to His prayer in John chapter 17 and He is praying, Lord Jesus, you know, as I have now manifested Your glory here on earth receive me back that I may be with You where I was before the beginning of the world. Always He is identifying Himself in deity.

I'm at the top of page 6. Jesus used the name Yahweh at other times as well. And this is where we come to the verse we started with. Jesus said, "I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I AM (there's the title again for God) the one I claim to be." If you don't receive that you will indeed die in your sins.

I was reading this week one of the great theologians, and I'm not really too prone to be comfortable with him but his name was Barth, K. Barth, who was a great theologian, and he says that at the very threshold of Christmas we are met with a miracle, and the miracle is the divine birth of Christ; supernatural, wherein God demonstrates or manifests Himself in human flesh in the person of Christ. Now he said, listen, if that becomes offensive to you don't go any further in your search for Christianity. Because if you're not going to deal with the supernatural birth of Jesus Christ and His deity, how are you going to handle the miracles? How are you going to handle the Mount of Transfiguration? How are you going to handle every aspect of His life?

If you deny Him right up front His deity, you might as well quit as far as trying to be a Christian. That is the absolute essential. We must believe Jesus, who He said Himself to be, who He claimed Himself to be, and Jesus said if you reject that you are a sinner.

Now when you say it as clearly as Jesus did, here is what's going to happen. On that eternal day when the millions stand in the presence of an eternal Christ who is this judge, they will stand there thinking all the time that what they believed was right. Jesus had something to say in His Sermon on the Mount where He said, if the light that is within thee is darkness, how great is that darkness. What He's implying is if what I believe is not true and all the time I'm thinking that I'm believing truth, and I come to that eternal moment and I realize that which I thought was truth was darkness, Jesus went on to say how terrible is that darkness.

The Bible says that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess. The day will come when all mankind will stand before Him, and isn't that going to be a tragic moment when people who went to church every Sunday; they thought that what they were being taught; they had this idea of who the Christ was, and all the time all they had was darkness -- how great is that darkness.

What a tragic moment to wake up in eternity and realize you have believed in a lie in time. Now you understand, folks, why this subject is such a crucial subject and we're going to talk about...when you take the whole subject of Christology and all the teachings of Christ it becomes very intricate theology. So what I'm going to do is just slowly Sunday after Sunday move us through verse after verse so we can grasp the great teachings of the Scriptures concerning Christ. But my prayer is that when we finish with our study we'll all have a deep, biblical understanding of who Jesus really is. Our Christ, our wonderful God, God who manifested Himself in the flesh in the person of Christ, who became our Savior, who died on the cross to forgive us of our sins, and that we have a strong firm faith.

And my prayer is that we'll be able to explain in some detail to those who are still in darkness as to who Christ is. We come to this Christmas season and I would like to join my voice with all of its strength with Peter and say Jesus You are Christ the Son of the living God.

You remember Thomas? He couldn't believe that Jesus had risen from the dead and when he met with the disciples he says I won't believe until I can put my hand in His side that I can put my fingers in the nail prints, and one week later Thomas didn't miss church that Sunday and Jesus was there. And Jesus walks over to Thomas and says, Thomas, here's My side and here are My hands. You thrust your hand into My side, and old Thomas fell before Jesus and said, my Lord and my God.

My Lord and my God, and what he was saying, You're the Lord of my life, You're the Lord of creation, You're the Lord of salvation and I worship You; You are my God. That's the confession that should come from all of us. Jesus, You are my Lord and my God and I believe everything the Scriptures say about You. It's true. Amen?

Jesus, we want to know You better and as we study the multiple Scriptures from the text of the Bible in the weeks to come, may we fall more deeply in love with You, and may we be able to explain our faith more clearly as to how and what we believe about You, our wonderful Savior and our Lord. We really do want to grow in the grace and in the knowledge of You dear Jesus.

On this beautiful Sunday we bow our hearts before You, dear Jesus, and we worship You as our God, our Savior, our King, and our Lord. We worship You dear Jesus. Amen. God bless you folks. God bless you