Jesus: Greatest lawyer for mankind!
Legally, Jesus became the last and not second Adam so that he would free men from the terrible effects of sin. He was born into this world to save it and will come back to the world to judge it.
THERE are several theories and explanations on what constitutes a human being: evolution, creation, procreation and re-incarnation. Ceteris paribus, creationist viewpoints show that Jesus became some advocate for the God of the Bible. He is the chief proponent of divine law and his earthly life provides the believer with some important rules and laws on the nature of the divine legal system.
Enter Christmas and misconceptions around it! Year in year out, 25 December is celebrated the world over as the day when Jesus was born. Whether we look at it biblically, religiously or in creedal fashion, unless we are unbelieving (I have belaboured myself with this for long to no avail.
My thoughts criss-crossed from crest to trough on how I can believe something which I did not know) or belong to some movements that follow Arianism, we all like Jesus, don’t we?
It is now set that Jesus Christ was born of a woman and was, as the result follows the cause, referred to as the “Son of Mary” or the “son of a carpenter”.
Forget whether Jesus was born on December 25 or in July, Jesus obeyed his earthly parents because he wanted to show humans how an obedient divine lawyer would through humanity, open a legal door for any human’s communion with his divine Father.
Prayer for Jesus was not simply talking to God, but a simple conversation with God. Like a lawyer making a prayer to the judge or magistrate in terms of a drafted court order, Jesus would use prayer to either miraculously feed the crowds or to raise people from the dead.
Now that we know a lot about what the Bible and world religions teach about Jesus, how might creedal teachings help us to understand Jesus’ humanity and divinity? From what less helpful sources do we try to understand the salvific roles of Christ? Arianism is doubtlessly one of the starting points.
It represents the heretical teachings of a presiding priest of the Baucalis church. Arius taught that since Christ was the “begotten” Son of God, He must have been a created being.
To him, the logical corollary of Jesus’ creation was that he had a beginning and was not coequal or eternal with God the Father. For Arius and his supporters, Christ is neither fully human nor divine. Although Arius’ teachings were condemned as heresy at the Council of Nicea in 325AD, they still appeal to movements such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses who regard Jesus as a created being, particularly synonymous with Michael the angelic fighter.
But most Christians use the Apostolic Creed, whose textusreceptus shows an individual’s “belief in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born from the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and buried, descended into hell, on the third day rose again from the dead, ascended to heaven, sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty, thence He will come to judge the living and the dead”.
Biblically, both the birth and death of Jesus are imbued with legal significance, albeit in a spiritual dimension. The birth of Jesus through a woman made him the prophetic “seed of woman” who was to crush the “head of the ancient serpent” the devil.
Legally, Jesus became the last and not second Adam so that he would free men from the terrible effects of sin. He was born into this world to save it and will come back to the world to judge it. In between his resurrection and second coming, Jesus is playing the role of an attorney who saves the believer from the jaws of eternal death in hell.
While the fall of Adam and all mortals created a chasm between humans and God, the birth of Christ freed humans from sin and reunited them with God. For many in Christianity, the annual Christmas holiday is freely observed as more than a holiday because it is part of the rules of the Christian faith which place importance on the believer’s need to celebrate the salvific character of Jesus.
They locate Christmas within the three-tier philosophical system under domestic law which has: divine law, civil law and the law of reputation or opinion. They choose to focus on divine law which concerns the relevance of biblical teachings and biblically-related creeds on the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ.
Apart from being duty-bound to respect national legal systems, they know that the heavenly legal system is not easily understood the world over. World religions such as African Traditional Religion, Islam, Taoism, Shintoism, Judaism, and so on have different understandings of what constitute the divine. All this is simplified in two words: contextualised belief-system.
It is noted here that Christians or religions which do not celebrate Christmas argue that Jesus was not born on 25 December. Their arguments range from considerations such as the different calendars used in Jesus’ and modern times; climatic conditions in the Middle East and different parts of the world; as well as the divine nature of Jesus.
I am not going to go into detail on the several reasons for not observing Christmas. For long, I also did not understand the humanity-divinity dichotomy, even to the point of choosing between atheism and mere unbelief. My question was simply that: Is there some momentum flux which makes people Christians or love Jesus? Later, I knew that Jesus Christ is the greatest lawyer for mankind because he relates to me in a personal way.
Even when I gleaned through the preamble to the Zimbabwean Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, I noticed that there is a national belief in the Almighty and freedom of religion. If Christianity is considered in this normative matrix,there is nothing amiss in studying Church creeds or rules of faith from a Christocentric perspective.
The good sense of celebrating Christmas as one Christocentric events is chiefly and legally discernible in salvific terms. Mankind had been condemned into sin when he decided to disobey his maker by eating the forbidden fruit of knowledge between good and evil. The birth of Jesus marked the beginning of the human understanding into the redemptive power of Christ — to take men to the tree of life.
At Jesus’ birth, the Magi brought significant gifts which spoke to various salvific roles of Christ — his death represented by myrrh showing the zenith of divine redemption when Jesus would destroy the power of sin over humans. Lawyer Jesus had to be born of a woman, grow in the love and favour both men and God and then die as the “redeemer who lives” — pointing to his resurrection.
As we read through the Bible, we will quickly note Jesus’ legal roles in a special way. The first man, Adam, had opened the legal doors for sin when he disobeyed God by eating the fruits of the tree of conscience (some interpret this literally while others point to an illicit affair between Eve and the Snake). Death became God’s form of punishment that was imposed on humans.
Through universal retribution, Eden of innocence was lost. Humans became terrified by their conscience and were automatically born into the cradle of sin. Biblically, Jesus became the last Adam who graciously freed the whole of mankind from the ruinous power of sin. Legally, he is not presented as a second Adam, which would create the need for some Saviour to come.
At law in different juridical systems, several models of criminal punishment such as retribution, rehabilitation, deterrence and humanitarian are used by lawyers to implore the Courts to impose lenient sentences on their clients.
Before Christ’s birth, the divine legal system was understood using miniature events in religions such as Judaism where retribution was expressed in phrases such as “eye for an eye” or “tooth for a tooth”. In simple terms, tit invited tat and tit for tat became a fair game. Jesus was not received by his own people and Jews still await a political Messiah. The Apostle John, however, records that those who receive Jesus are given the power to become children of God.
Apostle Paul, a systematic letter writer showed takes us in Romans through five stages in salvific grace. Those who Christ foreknew were also predestined, called, justified and glorified. Jesus is a superhuman lawyer. Paul captures this idea in Galatians when he states that: ‘I do not nullify the grace of God, for if justification were by the law, then Christ died to no purpose’. Essentially, Christ can do the above because he is the image of the invisible God. As a divine lawyer, he is the perfect representation of God. God instructed him to redeem mankind and he accomplished this duty with perfect zeal and knowledge.
Lawyers know that criminal punishment serves as a deterrent measure for would-be offenders. Biblical teachings deter believers from lawless behaviour, albeit understood from different doctrinal levels: mainline, apostolic, Pentecostal, Zionist, charismatic or catholic. Jesus’ ecclesiological teaching on Lazarus and the rich man Divas shows how expiation or penitence can urge the believer to obey rules on charity and to choose between two ways: either eternal doom in hell or eternal life in paradise.
Further, punishment may be meant to compensate or restitute the victim. Read the full article on www. herald.co.zw