Question 21: What sort of Redeemer is needed to bring us back to God? 

Answer 21: One who is truly human and also truly God. 

The issue… we need to be brought back to God. We need reconciliation. We are born in sin and are rebels against God. We are born with hostility toward God in our hearts and our desperate need is for reconciliation to the Father. 

The kind of Redeemer we need to bring us back to God is “one who is truly human and also truly God”. And this is precisely the sort of Redeemer we have in Christ. Christ is truly and fully human and truly and fully God in one Person. He is God from all eternity. Always has been, always will be. And he took on himself a human nature in the incarnation. This of course is a great mystery. One that we cannot fully understand. But one that we are to believe, affirm, and rejoice in because the scriptures teach it, and because he is the sort of Redeemer, the only sort who is able to bring us back to God. 

In John 14:6 Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one can come to the Father except through me.” This is talking about reconciliation to the Father. 

Council of Chalcedon (AD 451). This council was formed to combat and did eventually condemn, especially the error of Nestorianism. This was the error, named after Nestorius, which stated that Jesus Christ was essentially two separate persons - one divine and one human. But we believe that the scriptures clearly teach that the incarnate Christ is the same Person who existed from and is none other than the eternal Son of God. I want to read a portion of the creed that was developed from this ecumenical council. Here’s what it says,

[He has]… two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one person and one subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ;

You see in this statement the truth of two natures in one Person. I don’t know about you, but I am grateful that men labored together before God with open bibles to think through the issues of what was at stake. Of course, eternity is at stake. There is only one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. 

Isaiah 9:6 - For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall rest upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.