The Dual Nature of Christ: Gethsemane and Beyond

This morning I’m going to depart from my normal method of preaching, which method is called expository preaching, where I look at the text and try to unpack the text for you in a verse-by-verse sequence. That is the style of preaching that I believe that we are called to and that I pray that would happen in every pulpit in America that people might be fed on a regular basis by an exposition of the Word of God. [00:03:44]

And so the couple of questions that I want to address today with you are these that come out of this record. First of all, what is going on when Jesus goes into the garden and prays earnestly that that cup would be removed from Him? Questions come out of this text like this. If Jesus is God incarnate, how do we have God pleading with God to change the decree of God? [00:05:22]

He said in verse 32, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Do you feel the difficulty of that, where here Jesus says, “Even though I may predict My coming, even though I may predict the destruction of Jerusalem, even though I may predict the destruction of the temple, even though I may predict with uncanny accuracy the denial of Peter, the betrayal of Judas; nevertheless, there are some things I don’t know.”? [00:06:58]

This really vexed Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor of the Roman Catholic Church and one of the most brilliant and astute theologians the world has ever known. Aquinas came to this text where Jesus limits His own knowledge, and he said of it, “That can’t be. This is the God Man, that the divine nature and the human nature are in perfect unity. Jesus had to know the day and the hour.” [00:08:16]

Now, in the fifth century, the year 451, the church called a great ecumenical council at Chalcedon, one of the most important ecumenical councils of all time. That council was called to combat several heresies, and the most significant heresy that was facing the church in the fifth century was what was called the Monophysite heresy. [00:11:48]

The Monophysites claimed that Jesus did not have two natures, a divine nature and a human nature, but He had only one nature. So far so good, you understand everything? Not so hard. One nature, one nature only. Now that one nature was neither completely divine or completely human. It was a single nature that involved, however you look at it, a deified human nature or another way to look at it, a humanized divine nature. [00:12:56]

Now here’s the difficulty, how do we understand the union of a human nature with a divine nature? Going back to the Scriptures, the Bible says that in the incarnation, God or the second person of the Trinity, the Logos, took upon Himself a human nature. Now when the Word took upon Himself flesh, a human nature, He didn’t deify that human nature. That human nature remained human. [00:14:32]

Now at Chalcedon in dealing with the mystery of the incarnation, affirming the two natures of Jesus, the church said that the two natures, divine and human are perfectly united in such a way that they’re not confused or mixed, divided or separated. Let me say it again, that the two natures are without mixture, confusion, division or separation. [00:16:44]

And then the kicker, those four negatives of Chalcedon are further qualified by this phrase, “each nature retaining its own attributes,” that is in the incarnation God does not surrender any of His attributes. The divine nature is still eternal. It’s still infinite. It is still omniscient. It is still omnipresent. It is still omnipotent. It is all those things that belong to deity. [00:17:47]

If we understand that we distinguish between the human and the divine nature, it is obviously the human nature that is going through this agony at Gethsemane. It is the human Jesus praying to the divine for relief from this agony, and yet at the same time indicating His perfect commitment to obeying the Father’s will. The two natures without mixture, confusion, separation, or division remain intact, but there are certain things that manifest the divine nature, other things that manifest the human nature. [00:23:06]

Now having said that, we don’t know all there is to know about the mystery of the incarnation. Notice that what happened at the Council of Chalcedon is that Chalcedon drew the boundaries. They set the limit of our speculation. They said, “If you go over this boundary, you’re going to end in the Monophysite heresy. If you go over this boundary, you’re going to end up separating the two natures as Nestorius had done.” [00:24:49]

The God Man dies on the cross, but the divine nature doesn’t die on the cross. Good heavens. If God actually died on the cross, what would that mean? Not only would Jesus die, but the Holy Spirit would die, the Father would die, the cross would perish, Jerusalem would fall into oblivion, the whole universe would cease its existence because the universe depends for its moment-to-moment existence by the upholding hand of God. [00:26:11]