Make Your Calling Sure

The one who saves us is our God, and the one who is our God is our Savior,

which means, by way of application, if God saved you, you are saved indeed.

What a glorious truth that is. If God saved you, you were saved indeed.

Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and welcome to the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

Has anyone ever challenged you when you've said that Jesus is divine? Perhaps one of the

cults? Well, simply a non-Christian who doesn't understand the doctrine of the Trinity.

Well, as we start a short series in Second Peter, today, RC Sproul will consider one of the

clearest New Testament texts that attributes deity to Christ. Before we hear today's sermon,

if you'd like to study both First and Second Peter, we'll send you Dr. Sproul's hardcover commentary

to thank you for your donation in support of Renewing Your Mind at RenewingYourMind.org.

Don't skip over these shorter epistles, and instead study them in depth when you request today's

Rizal Salfa. Well, if you have your Bible, it's time to open it to Second Peter, because here's

Dr. Sproul. Simon Peter, a bond servant and a puzzle of Jesus Christ, to those who have obtained

like precious faith with us by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord,

as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the

knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us

exceedingly great and precious promises that through these you may be partakers of the divine

nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. As the Apostle Paul

frequently identified himself in his letters, so Peter identifies himself here with a twin

appellation, namely that he is Peter, a bond servant, and a puzzle of Jesus Christ.

The lowest possible layer or stratification of society would be that of a slave.

And in the Christian community, the most elevated office, say for the office of Jesus himself,

is the office of a puzzle because to the apostles were given by Jesus,

his own authority to such a degree that he announced that those who receive you receive me,

those who do not receive you do not receive me. So here Peter is claiming

in one part of this phrase the highest authority that anyone could claim in the early church

that of being an apostle, but like the Apostle Paul at the same time, he identifies himself

as a slave. He is at once in the same time the highest level and the lowest level of Christian

society. And the word here that Peter uses, the same one that Paul uses in Romans, for example,

is the word do-loss, a slave who has been purchased. In fact, you'll see the close connection

in the scriptures between the word do-loss and the word curious. A curious is a Lord or a master.

And one cannot be a curios in the sense of being a master unless he had slaves that were part of his

possession. And the carry the metaphor even further, the Apostle Paul tells us, we are not our own.

We've been bought with a price, even the purchase price of the blood of Christ. So it's not only

Peter and Paul who saw themselves as slaves of Christ, but that that idea extends to every person

who has been purchased by Jesus. That extends to me. That extends to you. So we are all

bondservants to Christ. The supreme irony is that Jesus comes to set us free from slavery.

And he tells us if the sun sets you free, then you are free indeed.

But those who are delivered from the slavery of sin take on a new kind of slavery,

being slaves to Christ. And again, the irony is you can't be free unless you're a slave.

And if you think you are free outside of bondage to Christ, your freedom is so much slavery.

We have to lose our lives to find them. We have to give them away to get them back.

But he goes on to say here, to those who have obtained like precious faith with us

by the righteousness of our God and save your Jesus Christ. Now that second part of verse 1

is worthy of the writing of at least 10 books. Because there's so much packed into this.

Listen again to what Peter says to the very beginning. He's addressing this epistle to those

that is people who's identified who have obtained or more specifically received the same kind of

faith that we all have by the righteousness of our God and save your Jesus Christ. So at the

beginning, he talks about addressing this epistle to people who are believers such as himself.

But he doesn't just say, I'm addressing this to fellow believers. But he's saying, I'm addressing

this letter to all of you who just like we have received faith. But notice what adjectives he uses

to describe that faith that we have received? It's a precious faith. We know that that which is

called precious is that which has an exceedingly high value. We understand the difference between

rocks and gems. Gems we call precious stones because they're so much more valuable

than gravel. And when Peter talks about having received the same faith that all the saints have

received from the hand of God, he describes that faith by which we are saved as a precious faith.

Is there any possession that you have more precious than that faith which links you to Christ

and delivers to you his entire inheritance? That precious faith that is called the pearl of great

price, that the wise person would divest themselves of all that they had in order to possess that

precious reality. And so Peter says, I'm writing this letter to those of you who like us

have received this precious faith. By the righteousness of our God and Savior,

Jesus Christ, there's a little awkwardness here in the way in which this second sentence is

structured that we've obtained this precious faith by the righteousness of our God and Savior,

Jesus Christ. When Paul speaks of our justification by faith alone and when he speaks about the

righteousness of God in that context, you'll recall those of you who studied through Romans with us

that that righteousness of God by which we are justified is not that righteousness by which God

himself is righteous, his own internal righteousness, but rather the righteousness that he

gives as a gift to all who believe, which is the transfer or the imputation of the righteousness of

Christ to the account of all who put their trust in him. And again, dear friends, there is no

doctrine more precious than the doctrine of the imputation of the righteousness of Christ

to the account of the believer because the only righteousness by which you will ever be saved

before God is not your own, but the righteousness of Christ which God counts for you if you put your

faith in him. This precious faith that we have obtained by the righteousness of our God

and by the righteousness of our Savior Jesus Christ, no, no, no. Here the structure is abundantly

clear. Peter is talking about that gift that comes to us by the righteousness of our God and Savior

Jesus Christ. So here in this text, Peter is referring to Jesus not only as the Messiah, the Christ,

not only as our Savior, but as God himself. There are precious few texts in all of the new testament

that are as clear as this one in its attributing deity to Jesus. We considered the text in the gospel

of John where Jesus appeared to Thomas the twin who had resolved not to believe on the basis of

the testimony of his fellow disciples, but he said, unless I can put my finger into the imprint of

those nails and put my hand in the wound of this side, I will not believe. You remember that and

when Jesus appeared to him, stretch forth his hand and he said, here it is, go ahead, Thomas, put

your finger in my hand. Put your hand in the wound in my side. Come on. And I mentioned at that time

that the Bible doesn't tell us whether Thomas actually did extend his hand and do that. I don't

think he did. I think as he saw Jesus standing before him, that was enough. And a recall that then

Thomas fell to his knees and he made the great confession, my Lord and my God.

Now that confession of the full deity of Jesus is already set forth in the prologue of the gospel

according to John where we read in that prologue in the beginning was the Word and the Word was

with God and the Word was God. Now for the first 200 years of Christian reflection on the person of

Jesus, that low-goss concept of the prologue to the gospel of John dominated the thinking

of the greatest minds of the early church fathers. They couldn't get away from the clarity with which

the Apostle John had declared that the Word was God, not a God, not like God, but was God. Again,

the grammar of that text makes a clear identity with that verse between the Word and God.

So it's not by accident that the early church from the beginning days professed the deity of

Christ. But there were those who emerged in church history, who struggled with the doctrine of the

deity of Christ, and they couldn't understand how one could be faithful to the monotheism of

Old Testament Judaism that said, hero Israel, the Lord, our God is one. How could you hold to

the oneness of God and at the same time ascribe a deity to the Son and to the Father and to the

Holy Spirit? So the question of the nature of the Trinity came under attack and at no point

more critically than in the fourth century with the teaching of the heretic Arius.

And without getting into the technical theology of Aryanism, what Arius taught was this,

that Jesus is worthy to be worshipped, despite that he is a creature.

Despite that the worshipping of any creature is utterly repugnant to the Word of God,

no matter how exalted that creature is. Nevertheless, Arius taught that Jesus was the first

creature that God made. And then through this exalted creature, the worlds were made.

And that Jesus was the creator of the universe, worthy of all honor and all praise,

but not God. Because the Bible uses language about Jesus as being begotten of the Father,

and being, quote, the first born of all creation as the author of Hebrews calls him.

And so Arius said, in the Greek language, the word to beget,

Gennaro, or Gino, my means, to be, to become, or to happen, that is, to have a starting point in time.

The only God is eternal. And the first qualification of any creature

is that that creature is something or someone that at some time, in eternity past, did not exist.

And since Jesus was begotten, that would mean there had to have been a time when he was not,

and if there was a time when he was not, he could not be eternal. If he's not eternally,

he can't be God. And if he's the first born of creation, no matter how exalted that level is,

still fall short of deity. You can't imagine the intensity of the controversy that follows

in the wake of the teaching of Arius, which culminated ultimately in the council of Nicaea.

And in 325, the decisions and decrees of the council of Nicaea, which produced the Nicaea

creed. And in that creed, the church affirms that Christ is homo-useos, one essence with the Father

of the same being and co-eternal. And then this striking phrase, begotten comma, say it.

Not made. That with respect to the Jewish reference to Christ, begotten this does not have the same

simplistic understanding that it did among the Greeks. And you get a hint of that, even in the

prologue of John, when after John tells us that the word was God, he refers to Christ as the

mono-ganace, the only begotten. The nobody else, who's ever been begotten of God, is begotten in the sense

in which Christ is begotten. Because he's not begotten at a particular period in time, the second person

of the Trinity has no birthday. But he is eternally begotten, so that whenever there was the Father,

the Father was always generating the Son. And as the controversy played out, often the debates were

not carried out by articles and journals or on television debates. But the debates were often

carried out through slogans and through the composition of simple songs that would be like

our jingles that we use to advertise products in the marketplace. Jingles have a way of

capturing your imagination and allowing you to remember things for long, long, long periods of time.

Some of you here, with snow on the roof, may remember the UZ, the UZ, put does in your

Boishi machine, see your clothes come out so clean, the UZ does everything. Remember that?

You remember that stuff from 65 years ago? That's how powerful little jingles are like that,

to communicate ideas. And so what the Arians would do is that they would compose these jingles that

were riballed and slanderous and ugly in a mocking, taunting way would sing them against the

Christians. They would stand on one side of the river and hurl these insulting jingles against

the Trinitarians. And to combat them, the Trinitarians composed a jingle of their own. And it went like

this, glory be to the Father. And to the Son. And to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning

is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Take that, you Arians.

Really, the glory of portrait originally was a fight song for Trinitarians.

What happened at that council, and again a little over a hundred years later at Chalsadon in 451,

is that the church affirmed the full deity of Christ. And they affirmed it not on the basis of

philosophical speculation, but on the basis of biblical exegesis. That's the thing you have to

understand, that the teaching of the deity of Christ, because not the invention of theologians,

it's the clear teaching of the Word of God itself. And here you have one of those marvelous texts.

Let's speak of Jesus Christ as our God and as our Savior.

The one who saves us is our God. And the one who is our God is our Savior, which means,

by way of application, if God saves you, you are saved in the

The one who saves us is our God. And the one who is our God is our Savior. Now that's a line to

chew on all day, isn't it? We really should never tire of hearing the good news, preaching it to

ourselves often, and hearing it preached from the pulpit in our own local church. Today's sermon

in 2 Peter was the first in a series walking through the entire letter, and it formed a basis

for Dr. Sproul's commentary on both 1 and 2 Peter. It's an easy way to dig into these letters of

Peter and grow in your understanding of God's Word. So if you'd like a copy, we'll send you the

hardcover commentary to thank you for your gift and support of this daily outreach.

Simply make your donation at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes

and we'll send a copy your way. And if you live outside of the US and Canada,

the ebook edition is available for you at renewingyourmind.org slash global. Thank you for making

renewing your mind possible. We truly couldn't produce this podcast 365 days a year without your

generosity. Before we close, I do hope that I'll have the opportunity to greet you next month

at Ligonier's national conference in Orlando. Thousands of Christians will gather for three days

of teaching on the theme crucial questions. It's a highlight of the year for the staff of Ligonier,

not just because of the guest speakers that join us and all the teaching, but because we get to see

you face to face. Please, if you haven't already, consider joining us. You can learn more and register

at Ligonier.org slash 2026. As believers, Peter will go on to remind us that we have been granted

precious and very great promises. And that's what Dr. Sproul will explore next Sunday here on renewing

your mind.