The Greatest Event in History
Two Paradoxes in the Death of Christ - John Piper
Not surprisingly the greatest event in the history of the world is complex.
1) For example, since Jesus Christ is man and God in one person, was his death the death of God? To answer this we must speak of the two natures of Christ, one divine and one human. Ever since AD 451 the Chalcedonian definition of Christ’s two natures in one person has been accepted as the orthodox teaching of Scripture.
The Council of Chalcedon said,
We, then, . . . teach men to confess . . . one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly,
unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of the 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, nor parted or
divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God, the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.
The divine nature is immortal (Romans 1:23; 1 Timothy 1:17). It cannot die. That is part of what it means to be God. Therefore, when Christ died, it was his human nature that suffered death. The mystery of the union between the divine and the human natures, in that experience of death, is not revealed to us. What we know is that Christ died, and that in the same day he went to Paradise ("Today you will be with me in Paradise," Luke 23:43). Therefore there seems to have been consciousness in death, so that the ongoing union between the human and divine natures need not have been interrupted, though Christ, only in his human nature, died. More » |