REFORMED WITNESS
Volume V, December 1997, Number 12
JESUS
"...and thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins." - Matthew 1:21
Chapter 9 from the book The Mystery of Bethlehem by Herman Hoeksema
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Jesus, Jehovah-Savior! What a delightful charm, what sweet loveliness, what soul-enchanting delectableness there is in that Name!
Do you know its fascination, its depth of riches, its amazing mystery of love, its peace-affording power?
In the name of Jesus, the God of your salvation stands before you in all the attractiveness of His covenant-love.
For the name means: Jehovah-Savior.
A common enough name it used to be among the old covenant people. Joshua, the Captain, appointed to lead the people of the Lord into the promised rest, and Joshua, the high-priest, were types and shadows of the Captain and Finisher of our faith. But among them all Jesus stands alone and unique. No one ever bore that Name as He. All the Joshuas and Jesuses that were before Him could be called by that Name only in a very remote sense of the word. But Immanuel is Jesus. He is in His very Person the God of our salvation, come to save His people from their sins. His name is Jesus, because Jesus He is; because He can stand before us in all the beauty of His grace and say: I am Jehovah-Savior.
And as He is, so is His work and the purpose of His coming. For the angel was dispatched from heaven to Joseph, who was worrying about his espoused wife, to deliver the message: and thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins!
To many in the world of today, the name Jesus possesses a charm, they say, because He came to reform, to change conditions, to make this a better world to live in. Other are under the spell of that name, they say, because He is such a wonderful teacher, and He left us His marvelous instruction with respect to right living before God and before the neighbor. Still others just adore the name Jesus, they claim, because He makes us better men and women, not only by His profound instruction, but also by His heroic example; and they just love to follow in His steps. And there are even those who find sweet music in the name Jesus, because it is their conviction that He saves from hell eternal, and that because of His coming all men might now safely lay down their heads in the hour of death, knowing that all is well...
But these all are strangers to the real charm of the name. He is no world-reformer, He does not merely teach us how to live, He is not pleased with our pretension that we will walk in His steps, He does not make us mere better men and women...
And surely, He saves from hell...
But only, because He saves us from the hell of hell, the death of death, the misery of misery: sin. He does not improve, but radically changes; He does not make us better, but other, men and women. He will and surely shall snatch His people from that deepest of all evils: He is called Jesus, because He shall save His people from their sins.
Are you acquainted with the misery of that evil?
Then you may know the charming loveliness of that Name.
Jesus, Jehovah-Savior!
* * * * *
From what horrible evil He saves!
For He saves His people from their sins.
This, surely, deprives Him of His attractiveness for the natural man, whose carnal mind is enmity against God. As soon as he but correctly understand the true significance of the name Jesus, to him it loses all its beauty and charm. He may sing of the lovely Jesus, and appear to be devoted to His Name, he may be with the people of God to burn incense of adoration for the Man of Galilee as long as he is left to his own fancy about Jesus. But the music of the name loses its charm for him the moment it begins to chant of sin and guilt and deliverance from it. He desires to be saved, but not from sin. He wants a Jesus, but not the One in garments sprinkled with the blood of the accursed tree...
The Jews sought after a sign, a sign of power and of an arm of flesh. They knew that they were miserable, but the misery they felt was the humiliating and oppressing yolk of Roman bondage. And the Jesus they hoped for was the Strong Man, Who could blow the trumpet from Mount Zion and lead the hosts of Israel to victorious conflict with the legions of the emperor...
And the Greek was in quest after wisdom. His nation was conscious of misery, too And their great men philosophized in search for the life of greatest possible bliss. But the Sufferer of Golgotha was foolishness to them. Not the suffering Servant, but the brilliant thinker they followed to lead them through the dark night of misery to the dawn of perpetual bliss...
And the world of today seeks after both: power and wisdom. They will have a Jesus, for they realize that somehow the world is in misery. There is misery of disease and suffering, misery of hunger and poverty, misery of war and conflict, hospitals, asylums, battlefields...
The deep groan of agony pressed from the world's bosom they hear and seek to silence...
And they need a Jesus.
A wise man, to solve the problem of this misery and show the way to deliverance and bliss, they need.
A strong man, to overcome this power of oppression and to lift the heavy hand of Death and Misery from the human shoulder, they desire.
And as long as they may fancy that Jesus of Nazareth is this Wise and Strong Man of the world, they will unite to sing His praises, they will bow before Him in loving adoration and they are charmed by the loveliness of the Name. And they follow this fancied Jesus and rally to His cause. But when the angelic messenger interprets the Name as signifying that He will save His people from their sins, their love is quenched, the fire of their devotion is extinguished, and the same flame that burned incense for Him now kindles the fires of hatred and persecution against the humble Nazarene.
How different this becomes when our eyes are opened for the real and horrible character of our misery, sin! When in our deepest heart there is created the realization that God is the Highest Good and that to live apart from God is death: when the earnest desire to dwell in God's covenant communion is kindled in our soul; when we see in horror how waves of transgression and streams of iniquity separate us from that covenant friendship; when we have struggled with these waves and battled with the flood till in despair we are overwhelmed; and when then through the dark night and over the turbulent sea that covenant Jehovah comes approaching us in human form, full of grace and beauty, and extending His strong hand to lift us from the deep, whispers to us: I am Jesus, Jehovah, Savior!
How charming is then the Name!
And clinging still to His mighty arm as He leads us to the Father, and looking back upon the black deep that well-nigh swallowed us up into hell, how we stammer in gratitude:
"Jesus, Jehovah-Savior, from what awful misery Thou didst save me!"
"My Lord, and my God!"
* * * * *
He shall save His people.
How certain is Jesus of His victory!
His is no doubtful contest, no mere earnest attempt to save. The outcome is established from the beginning: He shall save His people from their sins.
For He is not willing that any should be lost of those whom the Father hath given Him.
And He is powerful to save them all.
And He saves them completely. The work of salvation is entirely His. At no stage of this work is He dependent on anything outside of Himself. When He approaches a sinner, wallowing in the mire of sin and held in bonds of death and hell, He is sure to lift him out of his misery and to save him till he is placed safely in glory with the Father.
Jesus He is for His people.
For them He willed to be Jesus in the eternal counsel of redemption among the Three Persons of the Divine Family. For them He was ordained Mediator and Head. For them He was born of a woman and became life unto His brethren in all things sin excepted. For them He appeared in the form of a servant and deliberately chose the way of reproach and shame. For them He crawled in the dust of Gethsemane's garden, His soul exceedingly sorrowful even unto death. For them He was dumb as a sheep before its shearers when He was beaten, buffeted, filled with scorn and reproach, spit upon, cruelly scourged, crowned with thorns. For them He accepted the sentence of death without protest, dragged the accursed tree to the Place of Skulls, and became a spectacle to all the world. For them He bore the wrath of God and entered into that amazing depth of dreadful suffering and darkest hell from where we hear Him cry: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" For them Sheol is closed upon Him by the heavy stone in front of the rock-hewn sepulcher in Joseph's garden. And for them He breaks the shackles of death and issues forth from the grave, victor over death and hell; ascends to the Father and receives the Name above all other names. For them He intercedes and reigns. For them He sends His messengers into all the world with the glad tidings of redemption and deliverance upon their lips. For them He comes again, to deliver them completely and give them a place in His eternal kingdom, in the new heavens and the new earth in which righteousness shall dwell.
But this is not all.
He is also Jesus in them.
Of little avail, indeed, would be all the work of Jesus for us, were He not also Jesus within our hearts. For had he washed our guilt away by His blood, and had He merited our righteousness by His obedience, and had He revealed His Name to us by proclaiming it through His Word, thus presenting Himself to us in His fulness of grace and truth and calling us to come unto Him and to believe in His Name and be saved; and did He not give us eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to obey - then the latter end of us would be worse than the first beginning. Never would we see our own misery, never would we behold His beauty, never would we hear His voice and never would we obey His summons nor grasp the hand extended for our salvation, except for the gracious work of Jesus within us. Holden by the darkness of sin are our eyes so that they cannot see; stopped by the filth of corruption are our ears for that they cannot hear; enslaved by the foolishness of iniquity are our minds so that they cannot understand; perverted by the power of enmity are our wills so that they cannot will to obey. Obstinate perversion is our spiritual name and we are lovers of the very misery from which Jesus came to save...
But He shall save His people from their sins!
He is Jesus within us.
For He became the quickening Spirit. And He knows how to enter into the heart of the most obdurate sinner. He opens the eyes of the blind, He gives hearing ears to the spiritually deaf, He breaks the heart of the very hardest into shivers of contrition and humbles all our pride; He establishes a living connection between Himself and our hearts, makes us lean on Him, comforts us by the assurance that our sins are forgiven, heals our broken hearts and leads us into the light of God.
And He is Jesus through us.
For He abides in us.
And when we, leaning on Him and saved by His Name, love Him and keep His commandments, confess Him and walk in the light, it is Christ Who lives in us, He works within us to will and to do of His good pleasure and thus we work out our own salvation. All glory solely to Him, Who is Jesus for us, Jesus within us, Jesus through us.
That no flesh should glory in His presence.
He shall save His people.
Jehovah-Savior.
* * * * *
He shall surely save.
We have His precious blood as a testimony of His great love.
And His resurrection speaks to us with undoubted testimony of His almighty power.
Shall we, then, not believe? Shall we not just simply lean on Him alone, and casting away all that is of self, of works, of men, of anything outside of Him, put all our confidence in Him alone, in Him, so mighty, so full of love and grace, so sure to save, so unchangeable, yesterday and today and forever the same?
Ah, our wistful heart, so prone to wander, is so inclined to divide the honors between Jesus and other little jesuses of our own invention! By nature we do not want to be saved merely by grace. Now it is our own free will we like to bring to Him as a condition of acceptance with Him, now it is part of our own righteousness through which we desire to be saved. We are so apt to decrease Jesus and to increase self. We may perhaps in sorrow over the past join in with the song:
Oh, the bitter pain and sorrow,
That the time could ever be,
When I proudly said to Jesus:
"All of self and none of Thee."But so often we do not advance beyond the stage of spiritual development in which we confess:
Yet He found me; I beheld Him
Bleeding on the accursed tree;
And my wistful heart said faintly:
"Some of self and some of Thee."But in that spiritual attitude we do not experience the full charm of the name Jesus. For He is an only Savior and there is none besides Him. His is the only Name given under heaven whereby men are save. All that is not of Him must be cast away as a basis on which we stand, as a ground on which we plead, as a comfort in which we rest. All our own righteousnesses must be cast away, all the little rocks of salvation of our own invention must be rolled from under our feet. And thus, relying solely on Him in life and death, with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, for time and eternity, living because of Him, through Him, for Him, we taste the deep love of that only Name and may sing:
Higher than the highest heavens,
Deeper than the deepest sea,
Lord, Thy love at last has conquered:
"None of self and all of Thee."Thus we shall never be put to shame. For He shall surely save His people. Save them, He shall, till He shall have brought them all into God's eternal tabernacle, where there shall be night no more.
For His name is Jesus, Jehovah-Savior!
Did you call Him this?
The book The Mystery of Bethlehem, by Herman Hoeksema, is available from the Reformed Free Publishing Association.
From The Heidelberg Catechism, Lord's Day XI, Questions and Answers 29 and 30Why is the Son of God called Jesus, that is a Savior?
Because he saveth us, and delivereth us from our sins; and likewise, because we ought not to seek, neither can find salvation in any other.
Do such then believe in Jesus the only Savior, who seek their salvation and welfare of saints, of themselves, or anywhere else?They do not; for though they boast of him in words, yet in deeds they deny Jesus the only deliverer and Savior; for one of these two things must be true, that either Jesus is not a complete Savior, or that they, who by a true faith receive this Savior, must find all things in him necessary to their salvation.
The Trinity
From The Valley of Vision
A collection of Puritan Prayers & Devotions
Three in one, one in three, God of my salvation,
Heavenly Father, blessed Son, eternal Spirit,
I adore thee as one Being, one Essence, one God in three distinct Persons, for bringing sinners to thy knowledge and to thy kingdom.
O Father, thou hast loved me and sent Jesus to redeem me;
O Jesus, thou hast loved me and assumed my nature, shed thine own blood to wash away my sins, wrought righteousness to cover my unworthiness;
O Holy Spirit, thou hast loved me and entered my heart, implanted there eternal life, revealed to me the glories of Jesus.
Three Persons and one God, I bless and praise thee, for love so unmerited, so unspeakable, so wondrous, so mighty to save the lost and raise them to glory.
O Father, I thank thee that in fullness of grace thou hast given me to Jesus, to be his sheep, jewel, portion;
O Jesus, I thank thee that in fullness of grace thou hast accepted, espoused, bound me;
O Holy Spirit, I thank thee that in fullness of grace thou hast exhibited Jesus as my salvation, implanted faith within me, subdued my stubborn heart, made me one with him for ever.
O Father, thou art enthroned to hear my prayers,
O Jesus, thy hand is outstretched to take my petitions,
O Holy Spirit, thou art willing to help my infirmities, to show me my need, to supply words, to pray within me, to strengthen me that I faint not in supplication.
O Triune God, who commandeth the universe, thou hast commanded me to ask for those things that concern thy kingdom and my soul.
Let me live and pray as one baptized into the threefold Name.
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