The Names of the Saviour

Heb. xiii. 20

“Our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep.” — Heb. xiii. 20.

ORDS, like coins, get worn by use, and lose the sharpness of their inscriptions and images. To most of us, I suppose, the various names by which our Saviour is designated in Scripture are just like so many aliases, indiscriminately used, and all conveying the same impression. But, in truth, they each suggest some distinctive aspect of His nature or relations to us, and in Scripture are never used without at least a sidelong glance to their special significance. The writer’s thought is always tinted, as it were, even if it is not deeply coloured, by the name which he selects.

Now there is no writer of the New Testament who is more sensitive to these different aspects of Christ’s character and work as set forth in His different names than is the writer of this Epistle. I have thought that it might help us to realize more fully and distinctly the infinite sufficiency of what Jesus Christ is and does for us, if I try, however imperfectly, to

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bring before you in this sermon the usage of this letter in respect of the designations of our Lord.

That, therefore, is my subject to-day. And I have chosen the words which I have read as our starting point, because they very strikingly bring together the extreme names; that which expresses lowly manhood and that which expresses sovereign authority — “J esus our Lord,” in the union whereof lie the mystery of His being, and the foundation of our hopes, and by which union alone He becomes “that great Shepherd of the sheep.”

X. — So, then, in the pursuit of this design, I have to ask you to notice, first, the simple, human name Jesus.

Now that designation of our Lord, standing alone, is extremely uncommon in the apostolic writings. The Apostle Paul very seldom employs it, and always with some special emphasis; but it is so frequently used in this letter as to become a characteristic of the writer’s style. And if we glance at some of the instances of its employment I think we shall feel its force. I cannot pretend to offer you an exhaustive catalogue of all these, but must be content in this, as in other parts of my sermon, to select only the salient

points.

So, then, it is “Jesus” who “suffered without the gate.” It is “Jesus” to whom we are encouraged to look as “the Author and Finisher of faith; Who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross. And then there come a considerable class of passages where we might more naturally have expected the other name, “Christ”; in which it is “Jesus” who is represented as fulfilling the ancient covenant, and accomplishing all which law and sacrifice and priest

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and Temple and prophet have dimly shadowed. So we read of Jesus as the “High Priest,” and of “Jesus” as “entered into the Holy Place for us.” And, again, it is “the blood of Jesus” by which “we have access with confidence” into the presence of God. All of which just point to His manhood as the necessary condition of His sacrifice and priesthood, without which it is impossible for men to have relations of friendship with the Father in heaven.

And then, finally, it is “Jesus” whom we are bid to follow with the eye of faith and aspiration as He ascends up on high and is “crowned with glory and honour” at the right hand of God, and passes within the gates of the heavenly Temple, the High Priest of our profession; who for us, as F orerunner, is entered thither.

Massing together, then, these instances, we have weighty lessons. First, let us ever keep distinctly before us that suffering and dying Manhood as the only ground of acceptable sacrifice and of full access, and approach to God. Unless He has borne a true human nature through all the conflicts of life and all the agony of the Cross; unless the Man Jesus, by the offering of His blood, has prejmred an access for us into the presence of God, we must for ever stand without. The true humanity of the Lord is the basis of His work of atonement, of intercession, and recon* ciliation

Then, further, let us ever keep before our minds clear and plain that true Manhood of Jesus as being the type and pattern of the devout life. He is the Author and Finisher of faith, the first Example — though not first in order of time, yet in order of nature and perfect in degree — the Pattern for us all, of the life, which says, “The life that I live I live by dependence upon God.” Christ, too, knows the path of suffering; but, more blessed still, J esus is the Example, for all His friends and followers, of patient faith. His Manhood is sufficient for every human soul to find in it at once the Guide for all life and the Companion in it all.

It is strange and wonderful that the brief fragmentary record of a few years of a Galilean peasant’s life, surrounded by intellectual and social conditions utterly unlike those in which we live, and who Him¬ self never traversed large tracts of human experience which we have to pass through, should yet stand as the adequate Guide and the all-sufficient Pattern for men. He is so, not by reason of the variety of His experiences, for it was a narrow sphere in which His humanity moved, but by reason of the purity of His motives, and the completeness of His self-abnegation. It is not necessary that a rule should supply all the instances to which it may be applied. It is not need¬ ful that a principle should be presented in all the diversity of its possible fields and consequences. Jesus Christ gives us, in the one perfect and continuou surrender of Himself to the will of God, the all-sufficient example for human conduct, as well as the all-sufficient stimulus and power to follow it. “The Breaker is gone up before us.” We have often to tread rough, dreary roads, but He has forced His path across the trackless snow, and amidst the ice-barriers, and we can tread safely in His footsteps. And if we think of Him as we tread, the solitude loses its terrors, and a most real and sweet companionship becomes

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ours — if we are “looking unto J esus, the Author and Finisher of our faith.”

Then, again, let us set clearly before us that exalted Manhood as the pattern and pledge of the glory of the race. “We see not yet all things put under Him,” says the writer, commenting sadly on that 8th Psalm; and true it is that its raptures and exuberant words seem exaggerations and irony rather than the promise of anything that there is any symptom of our ever finding fulfilled. When we think of the vice and sin of the best; of the weaknesses of the strongest; of the decay of us all, the Psalmist’s burst seems to be all unfulfilled and unfulfillable. Where is the dominion over the works of His hands? Where is the crowning with glory and honour? Was it all a dream? “We see not yet all things put under Him,” and the slow¬ footed centuries drag their weary way along, and little progress seems to be made in bringing the ideal any nearer; but, says the writer, “We see Jesus, crowned with glory and honour.” Pessimism shrivels at the sight, and we cannot entertain too lofty views of the possibilities of humanity and the certainties for all who put their trust in Him. If He be crowned with glory and honour, the vision is fulfilled and the dream is a reality; and it shall be fulfilled in the rest of us who love Him.

So, brethren, Jesus has become Man that we may become sons of God like Him. And in the devout contemplation of the reality and the perfectness and universality of His Manhood are rooted the possibility of His sacrifice, the worth of His example, and all our hopes of glory. The name Jesus is the Foundation of all.

II. — Then, secondly, we have the name of office — Jesus is Christ.

Of course I take for granted that we all know that Christ is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Messiah, of which Anointed is the English rendering. And I suppose I may take for granted, also, that we all understand that the significance of anointing in the older system was the communication of God-given power for God-appointed office. And so the Christ, the Messias, the Anointed, is the Person who comes to fulfil all the offices — Prophet, Priest, and King — which that ancient system imperfectly had; to be the true Sacrifice, the true Priest, the true Temple; to be the King of kings and the Lord of lords; to be the fulfilment and the theme of all prophecy, and the answer to the longings of a thousand generations. Judaism, like the aloe, bore, after long years, the single, bright, consummate flower, and then it died. Jesus Christ is the flower, the Man who is the Messias.

Now the use of that name may naturally be expected to be very frequent in a letter the main object of which is to explain how Christianity is indeed the fulfilment and perfecting, and therefore the abolition, of Judaism. And, as a matter of fact, it is frequently employed, most frequently in cases where the main object of the writer is to set forth how all the types of the Old Testament found their realization, and more than realization, in the facts of the life of Jesus Christ. So we read of Him as the “Christ” who is the High Priest; as the “Christ” who is contrasted with Moses, as a son is with a servant; of the “Christ” by whose blood all the imperfect atonement, made by Jewish sacrifices, found its fulfilment

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and its realization; as the “Christ” in whose entering not into holy places made with hands, but into the presence of God in Heaven itself for us, the entrance of the High Priest of old within the veil into the sacred place of the Temple is more than fulfilled. And in all these instances you find this same idea present — viz., that in the whole sweep of Christ’s work regard is had to the former order, of which it is declared to be the accomplishment.

But it is instructive to notice that in several of the instances to which I have thus slightly referred we find the same things predicated of “the Christ” as wo found declared of “J esus.” So, for instance, we read, when one aspect of His atonement is to be made prominent, that it is “the blood of Jesus” whereby we have confidence to enter into the holy place, and thus the Manhood, as the condition of His sacrifice, is brought into our thoughts; and in another place we read that it is by “the blood of Christ,” and not of typical animal sacrifices, that we draw nigh to God, whereby attention is fixed, not so much on the manhood as on the office, and on the contrast between the “blood of bulls and goats,” which had no power, and that of Him who is the substance of which the earlier sacrifices were shadowy prophecies.

In like manner we read at one time of Jesus entering into the Holy Place, and in another of Christ entering there, where similarly, in the one form of expression the humanity is brought into prominence, that our manhood may triumph in it, and in the other the office is emphasized, that the relation of the perfect work of Christ to the imperfect ancient system may be more manifestly declared.

And so, brethren, I come to you with this question: Can you, like that verse that follows my text, put these two names together and think of Him as “Jesus Christ”? Is your Jesus merely the man who, by the meek gentleness of His nature, the winning attractiveness of His persuasive speech, draws, and conquers, and stands manifested as the perfect Example of the highest form of Manhood, or is He the Christ, in whom the hopes of a thousand generations are realized, and the promises of God fulfilled, and the smoking altars and the sacrificing priests of that ancient system, and of heathenism everywhere, find their answer,., their meaning, their satisfaction, their abrogation? Is J esus to you the Christ of God?

III. — Lastly, we have the name of Divinity — Jesus the Christ is the Son of God.

Now that designation, either in its briefer form “the Son,” or in its fuller form “the Son of God,” is, we may say, a characteristic of this letter. The key-note is struck in the very first words. “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.” And then the writer goes on in a glorious flow of profound truth and lofty eloquence to set forth the majesty of this Son’s nature, and the wonderfulness of His relations to the whole world, who “being the effulgence of the Father’s glory, and the embodiment of His essence, and up¬ holding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, took His seat at the right hand of the Majesty on high.” That is the meaning of the name Son of God. It declares timeless being; it declares that He is the very raying out of

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the Divine glory. It declares that He is the embodiment and type of the Divine essence. So much for His nature. It declares that He “upholdeth all things by the word of His power.” So much for His relation to universal creation. It declares that He by Him¬ self purged our sins. So much for the efficacy of His atoning sacrifice and the power of the perpetual communication of His blood. It declares that He sitteth on the right hand of God. There is only one reference to the historic fact of the Resurrection in this letter. It is the point beyond the Resurrection, to which this writer, who hymns the praises of the Son, is ever looking, and that point is the exaltation of the Son of God, and in Him of the manhood of each of us, to the very throne and central seat of the universe. This is the Son to whom we are to look.

Jesus is this Son. Once, and once only, in the letter does the writer buckle together these two ideas which might seem to be antithetic, and at the utmost possible poles of opposition from each other; the lowly manhood and the wondrous Divinity. But they are united in Him who, by the union of them both, becomes the High Priest of our profession — Jesus, the Son of God.

Further, the name is employed in its contracted form to enhance the mystery and the mercy of His sharp sufferings and of His lowly endurance. “Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.” The fuller form is employed to enhance the depth of the guilt and the dreadfulness of the consequences of apostasy, as in the solemn words about “crucifying the Son of God afresh,” and in the awful appeal to our own judgments to estimate of how sore punishment they are “worthy who trample under foot the Son of God.”

In like manner once or twice our letter speaks of Jesus as “Lord,” declaring thereby His Sovereignty, and setting forth our relation of dependence and sub¬ mission. So in the words which I have taken for my text, and so once or twice besides.

And now I have finished this cursory and fragmentary attempt to set forth the various aspects under which this one letter puts Jesus Christ before us, and the upshot of the whole is just this — What think ye of Christ? Can you say — J esus is the Anointed; the Anointed Jesus is the Son of God; Jesus the Anointed Son of God is my Lord? He is Jesus that we may feel a human heart beating near ours with sympathy born of human experience, and that we may have a human life for our perfect Example of goodness, and a human form on the throne of heaven for our Hope and our Forerunner. Jesus is the Christ. Then in Him we each may find the everliving Priest, the perfect Sacrifice, the true Temple, the accomplishment of the promises of heaven and the longings of generations. Jesus Christ is Son of God. Then we may bow before Him in adoration and worship at His feet unblamed. We may be sure of the worth of His sacrifice and the efficacy of His intercession. If He were not Son of God He could not be Christ, and His being named Jesus would be of no avail to us. His Divine nature guarantees the sinlessness of J esus and the redeeming power of Christ. J esus Christ, the Son of God, is Lord. Then we may see His hand moving the magnificence of the universe and the complications of human affairs, and may yield our happy

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wills to His sway, and rest in peace on His sovereign power.

But all these names do not exhaust the depth ol His being nor express the fulness of His grace. For in that final vision in the Apocalypse, when He goes forth in righteousness to judge and make war, though His uttered name be “the Word of God,” and on His vesture and on His thigh is yet another name inscribed, King of kings and Lord of lords,” there, is still beyond these titles another Name, set, as it would seem, in light on the many flashing diadems which encircle His brow, and that Name “no man knoweth save Himself.” We can never fathom, much less exhaust, the sweetness and fulness of this J esus Christ. Only let us ponder the meaning of the names that we know, and with confident heart and unfaltering lips profess our faith in the ancient creed, “I believe in Jesus, the Christ, His only Son, our Lord.”