Three things are clear: man cannot save himself, God has undertaken to save him, Jesus Christ is the means. The question follows: What method would God use in salvaging the wreckage wrought in humanity? Would He try to repair the ruin in the old creation or would He replace it by a totally new creation? Would He reestablish the old order of humanity or would He inaugurate a radically new order?
The race had been ruined through a man, therefore it must be redeemed through a man. The first man had failed to fulfill God original intention in creation so a second Man must come forth who would succeed in fulfilling it. The old order of which the first Adam was the head had gone down in ruin so a new order of redeemed men under the headship of the last Adam must be started. The sentence of death had fallen upon all mankind through the first Adam's disobedience; it must be lifted through the obedience of another Adam, whose work would be so perfect that He could be rightly called "the last Adam" for none other would ever be needed. The redemption wrought through the last Adam is set in sharp contrast to the ruin accomplished through the first Adam in Romans 5:12-21.
The Necessity of a Mediator
God, then, will redeem man through a Man. What then would be required in a Redeemer? Remember that sin has caused a terrible breach between God and man. God is unable to have fellowship with the sinner and the sinner is morally unable to have access to God. If any real reconciliation is to be effected between them there is need of a Mediator, one who would stand between God and man. Such a Mediator must needs be one accepted and trusted by both parties, one who partakes both of God's nature and of man's nature, one who in the work of reconciliation would represent both God and man equally, one who would satisfy every claim of God upon man and of many upon God. In other words a true Mediator must be a God-man. The Saviour of men must be a God-man. Christ Jesus, the Mediator, is the God-man. He is not the man-God. He is not a man who became God but God who became man. He is not a man who for a special purpose and at a special time was invested with Deity but He is God who for a special purpose and at a special time was invested with humanity. He always was God: He became man.
Hebrews 1:1-3, "God who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high."
No words could teach more clearly that Christ Jesus, the Saviour, the God-appointed Mediator, is God. He is the eternal Son, the Heir, the Creator, the upholder of the universe and all therein. He is the Son who is the commencement, the continuance, and the consummation of all things. He is the Son, the effulgence of the Father's glory and the very essence of His Person. He is the eternal Son who said of Himself, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58); who declared "I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again I leave the world, and go to the Father" (John 16:28) and on the eve of returning to His Father, prayed, "And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was" (John 17:5).
Only God could represent God in this mediatorship. As in creation so in redemption the Father works in and through the Son. "God in Christ was reconciling the world unto himself." Christ Jesus, the Mediator between God and man is God, the eternal Son, "the Lord from heaven."
But where could God find one who would qualify as the God-man? Most surely not among the sons of men on earth, nor among the angelic hosts of Heaven for they are neither God nor man. One and only One even in Heaven itself could ever be thought for such an exalted task - the eternal Son of God.
But how could even He be a Mediator for man? It is easy to see how the Lord from Heaven could represent an holy God but could He be a just, righteous, impartial representative for sinful man? If such a reconciliation demanded a divine-human Mediator how could He quality who had been throughout all the eternity of the past the holy Son of God?
Just here we come to the place where the human mind has to acknowledge its finiteness, where human reasoning is silenced, where human comprehension confesses defeat, for we are lifted above all that is human, earthly and natural, up - up - up - into the realm of that which is divine, heavenly and supernatural, to the wondrous grace of God. Nothing but the grace of God could have provided such a divine-human Mediator, could have conceived the thought of a God-man.
Again we are driven back in thought to that which took place in the eternal councils of the Godhead as the Omniscient Father, Son and Holy Spirit looked out upon the universe they were to make, upon the man they were to create, and foresaw the tragedy in Eden with all its terrible consequences. Then and there the Triune God looked from eternity to eternity and compassed fully in thought and plan all that would take place between, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1) and "I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away" (Revelation 21:1). It was then and there determined that the eternal Son of God, the Alpha and the Omega, "the beginning and the end, the first and the last" (Revelation 22:13), should lay aside for a brief space of time His essential glory, and "be made in the likeness of man": "to become obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross" (Phil. 2:6-8) that He in returning to glory "might bring many sons unto glory" (Hebrews 2:10), to be forever with the Lord. There in the glory of eternity the grace of God fashioned the wondrous plan of redemption by which the eternal Son of God would become the incarnate Son of Man; the divine-human Mediator; the God-man whom both God and man would need when sin entered into the human race and separated man from God. Christ Jesus is the divinely provided Mediator.
1 Timothy 2:5, "For there is one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus."
In no book of the Bible is the person of Christ Jesus, the God-man and His work as the divine-human Mediator more clearly set forth than in the Epistle to the Hebrews. In it we can trace back to glory the unfolding of truth regarding His glorious person and follow from Heaven to earth and from earth to Heaven again His gracious work as Redeemer.
~Ruth Paxson~
(continued with # 2)
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