A Body He Made for Himself
This article is a response to the fifth session of a Church Age Book curriculum taught by Trevor Emond on December 16, 2018, covering Lessons 8 and 9.[1] All timestamps refer to that recording. The teaching begins at approximately [32:44].
A Body He Made for Himself
For about half an hour, this is some of the best preaching in the whole series to date.
Trevor Emond takes his congregation through the Ten Commandments one at a time and asks the same question after each: are you a sinner? He does not let anyone sit outside it. He tells them at [45:44] that if they want to be thinking "this is me" later in the sermon, they had better be thinking it now.
Then he handles the objection that a loving God should simply overlook sin, and he handles it well. A drunk driver kills your child. The judge says he is loving and lets the man go. What do you think of that judge?
Because he's not just. There's no justice. You see, God is a just and loving God ... To be loving, to be truly loving, there has to be justice.
And then 2 Corinthians 5:21, which he preaches with real warmth. Christ became sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God. His application at [1:12:30] is that if sin is not a big deal to you, then being made God's righteousness will not be either.
That is the historic Christian gospel, preached plainly to people who need it. I would not change a word of it.
The trouble starts when he explains how it works.
The problem he sets himself
Emond notices something that most preachers slide past, and he stops for it.
At [1:02:54] he reads the cry from the cross: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me. And he asks the obvious question [1:03:04]:
Because Jesus, the man, is crying, you've forsaken me. Was God there?
If Jesus is the Father, who is he calling out to?
His answer comes from William Branham [1:03:07]:
Brother Branham teaches us that God left him in the garden of Gethsemane, that Jesus went through those trials for you and I and he did it without God being there with him.
And then, honestly, at [1:03:22]:
So even though this man was God but yet God's not there, and we go, whoa, how does this ... now the things start getting real and we start going, I don't get it. How do we understand this?
It takes some nerve to say that out loud from a pulpit. He has walked straight into the hardest question in Christian theology and admitted that his framework will not answer it.
The argument for Oneness from justice
What follows is the most interesting argument in the entire curriculum, and it needs to be examined carefully before anyone answers it.
At [1:04:08], Emond puts himself in God's place and his son Zion in Christ's:
If I were God and I were to say, Zion, you have to go die for everyone else's sins, is that just? Now he's my son. Is that just? I've made these laws, you've broken these laws, he's sinless, but I'm sending him to die for you. Is that just? No. Because then God took someone else and made them die for you when there was no penalty upon them and they had every right to go free.
So if the Father and the Son are two persons, the cross is God punishing an innocent third party, and God is not just.
So if God and his son Jesus are the same as me and Zion, then God is not just by sending Christ to die for us. But Jesus was God's body. God created that body that would be his body. [1:04:48]
The conclusion at [1:06:38]:
If you make Jesus like the Jews and the Jehovah's Witnesses would like to make Jesus, and that is he is a distinct separation from God himself, that Jesus is just a man, that Jesus is just a prophet ... then is his blood any good? And does God's justice work in that scenario? No. God had to come himself.
That is a serious argument, and it is worth saying that his instinct is right. God did have to come himself. Anything less than God on that cross leaves us unredeemed.
Three answers
The Son was not conscripted
The Zion analogy contains its own answer. Trevor Emond's son has no say in the matter. In the story, the father decides and the son is sent.
That is not what the Gospels describe.
Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. (John 10:17-18)
And the writer of Hebrews puts Psalm 40 in the Son's mouth as he comes into the world: "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God" (Hebrews 10:7).
A judge who sentences an unwilling bystander is unjust. A judge who steps down from the bench and pays the fine himself is not. The second is what Scripture describes, and it is why Paul can write that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself (2 Corinthians 5:19).
The Son is not a third party
The argument only works if the Son is someone else, in the way that Zion is someone other than his father.
That is exactly what the church denied at Nicaea. The Son is of one substance with the Father, which is what the word homoousios was chosen to say. Not a separate being who was volunteered. God himself, in the person of the Son, bearing what God's justice required.
Which produces an awkward result for this curriculum. In Everybody Confused Yet? we saw Trevor Emond teach his class that Nicaea was where the corruption entered, and also teach that "Jesus has been created." The doctrine he was taught to reject is the one that answers the objection he is now raising, and the doctrine he holds is the Arian one that makes the objection unanswerable.
His own solution creates the injustice
This is the part I would most like a Message reader to weigh carefully.
Emond's problem is that punishing someone other than God would be unjust. His solution is that God left Jesus in the garden and Jesus faced it "without God being there with him."
Follow that through to the cross.
If God departed at Gethsemane, then the one who was scourged, and mocked, and nailed, and who cried out at the ninth hour, was a man alone. Not God bearing it. A man, abandoned, dying under a penalty he did not incur.
That is precisely the injustice the argument was constructed to avoid, and it is worse, because now there is no divine person present to make the sacrifice worth anything.
Emond feels this, and says so at [1:07:03]: "God had to come himself." He is right. But he has just finished explaining that God left.
The Trinitarian answer keeps God on the cross. The Message answer removes him from it at the decisive moment, and then calls the blood divine anyway.
The kinsman redeemer
A second problem arrives ninety seconds later, in the same passage.
At [1:05:13] Emond explains why the body mattered:
He had to be a kinsman redeemer. He had to be just like you and I were. He had to be capable of sinning but yet not sinning.
Good. That is the doctrine of Leviticus 25 and the book of Ruth, and it is essential. The goel who buys back a lost inheritance must be a blood relative of the one who lost it.
Now hold that over and against what he says at [1:05:50]:
He wasn't God and Mary's child. He was God's. This was God's body that he created for himself ... That's why he had to create it and put that right there in Mary's womb.
If the body was manufactured and placed in Mary, never conceived of her, then Jesus took nothing from Mary, nothing from David, nothing from Abraham, and nothing from Adam. He is not our kinsman. He is a visitor wearing flesh that was never ours.
Hebrews will not allow it:
Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same ... Wherefore in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren. (Hebrews 2:14, 17)
Partakers of the same. In all things made like his brethren. That is the argument of the whole chapter, and its conclusion is that he is therefore a merciful and faithful high priest.
Paul says the same thing about the ancestry: Christ came "of the seed of David according to the flesh" (Romans 1:3), and "when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman" (Galatians 4:4). Made of a woman, not merely inside one.
Trevor Emond needs the kinsman redeemer and he needs the manufactured body, and he cannot have both. The doctrine that makes the blood divine is the doctrine that makes it not ours.
The lesson that begins by ruling out study
One more thing, from the quiz at the start of the evening.
The class works through review questions, and this one comes up at [33:43]:
We will get the true meaning of scripture if we study and compare the scripture texts really, really hard. True or false?
The answer given, at [34:04]:
That is false. Absolutely. You can study really, really hard all you want. But the true meaning comes from revelation.
The students write it down.
Consider what has just been established in a classroom. The proposition that careful study yields the meaning of Scripture has been marked false, and it has been marked false on the authority of a book they are studying, in a course whose whole method is study.
The same evening also holds its last group recitation of a memorized paragraph from that book [35:17], which the class has been reciting weekly since the first session.
I do not think Trevor Emond intends any of that as control. He is trying to say that information alone does not change a person, and he is right about that. But there is a difference between saying that study is insufficient and teaching a class to answer "false" when asked whether study reaches the truth. The second closes a door the first leaves open.
The Bereans studied. Luke says they searched the Scriptures daily to check an apostle, and he calls them more noble for it (Acts 17:11).
Conclusion
I have spent most of this article on about four minutes of a ninety-minute lesson, and that is the right proportion, because those four minutes carry everything else.
Trevor Emond preached the law and the wrath and the cross and imputed righteousness, and he preached them better than many pulpits manage. His congregation heard that they are sinners, that God is just, that Christ took their place, and that they have been made the righteousness of God. All of that is true.
Then he explained the mechanism, and the mechanism cannot hold what he has put on it.
Who was Jesus crying out to from the cross? The lesson asked and could not answer.
A distinct Son would make the cross unjust, he argued, and then adopted a view in which God abandoned the sufferer before it began.
Christ had to be our kinsman, he said, and the body was made rather than born.
The older answer holds all of it at once, which is why the church arrived at it. One person, two natures, fully God and fully man. Truly our kinsman, born of Mary, of the seed of David. Truly God, so that the blood is of infinite worth. Willingly laid down, so that no one was conscripted. And God was in Christ the whole way, including the darkness, so that nobody had to be abandoned in a garden for the arithmetic to work.
Trevor Emond told his people that God had to come himself. He was right. He should follow that sentence all the way to the cross.
Footnotes