J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

The Teaching of Jesus

The Seventh in a Series of Radio Addresses Broadcast on the Westminster Seminary Hour During the Fall of 1936

By the REV. J. GRESHAM MACHEN, D.D., Litt.D.

IT WILL be remembered that we are now dealing with one of the three offices which Christ executes as our Redeemer—namely, Christ’s office of a prophet. That office is, as we observed just at the close of the last talk, very comprehensive indeed. It is not confined even to what Christ has said and done after He became man, but includes even what He said and did before that time. Even in Old Testament times Christ was not only the substance of the gospel but also the author of it. He sent the Holy Spirit upon the Old Testament prophets that they might testify beforehand of Him. But, after all, it is the post-incarnation work of Christ as prophet of which we are most apt to think when we speak of Christ’s prophetic office, and it is that postincarnation work of which I want to talk to you this afternoon. I want to talk to you of that part of His work as a prophet which Christ our Redeemer carried on after He had become man. In a majestic passage at the beginning of the Epistle to the Hebrews the coming of the Son of God is put as the climax of that long progress of revelation which has been carried on through the Old Testament prophets:

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son . . .

“In these last days God has spoken to us by His Son”— here this great epistle plainly has in mind that part of Jesus’ execution of the prophetic office that came after the incarnation. At the start we observe that it may plainly be divided into two great divisions. In the first place there is that part of it which Christ accomplished by His own words and deeds during His earthly ministry, and in the second place there is that part of it which He has carried on after His ascension into heaven through the commission that He gave to His apostles and through the Holy Spirit whom He sent upon the apostles and upon the church. I want you to examine now the former of these two divisions. I want you to examine that part of Christ’s work as a prophet which He carried on during His earthly ministry. It is customary to speak of that part of Christ’s prophetic work as “the teaching of Jesus,” and there is unquestionably a sense in which this designation is justified. Undoubtedly Jesus did appear to His contemporaries as a teacher, and often when they spoke to Him they addressed Him by that title. In the form of His discourses, in the way in which He impressed what He said upon the minds and hearts of His hearers, He used a truly pedagogic method. It is not surprising, therefore, to discover that in the Gospels the followers of Jesus are commonly called “disciples,” which in the simplest sense of the word means “learners.” Jesus certainly did appear, when He was on earth, in the position of a teacher surrounded by scholars in His school.

But even when He was most clearly a teacher He was also a prophet. In other cases teaching may be contrasted with prophecy, but not in the case of Jesus. Even when He spoke most quietly, even when He sought to impress upon the minds of His hearers, by patient repetition, the great, simple, fundamental truths regarding the Kingdom of God, He was speaking with a truly supernatural inspiration. He was speaking even then as the direct spokesman of God. He was speaking even then words which God the Father had given Him in supernatural fashion to speak. He was speaking, therefore, as a prophet in the high supernaturalistic sense of that word. At this point we ought to notice the vast difference between Jesus on the one hand and all other prophets on the other. Other prophets spoke as prophets sometimes; Jesus spoke as prophet always. In the case of other prophets the gift of prophecy was bestowed only in temporary and partial fashion; in the case of Jesus it embraced His whole life upon earth. Other prophets were to be heard at some times as being truly God’s spokesmen; their words were at some times to be treated as being truly the Word of God. At other times they appeared just as fallible men, and their words at those other times were full of the errors that infest all ordinary human speech. In the case of Jesus no such limitation prevailed. His words were not merely sometimes but always true. They were not merely sometimes but always to be received as the Word of God. In His case there is no distinction between words spoken in some private capacity and words spoken with prophetic inspiration. In His case, every word that was uttered was to be received as a message from God. It is with that understanding that we approach the teaching of Jesus as it is recorded in the Gospels. As we do so, we observe that two opposite errors have affected the treatment of the teaching of Jesus by modern men. In the first place, there is the error of those who have regarded the teaching of Jesus as the sole basis of the Christian religion. We have transcended the Old Testament, they say; and we cannot agree with the doctrinal constructions of the New Testament epistles. But we are Christians because we have taken into our souls the blessed teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. We refuse to let any man interpret that teaching authoritatively for us. We refuse to let even the Apostle Paul do so. His epistles may be helpful here and there; even his doctrine of the cross of Christ may contain a kernel of truth for us if we can only translate it into the forms of thought proper to the age in which we are now living. But, after all, what we ought to do ever anew is to go back to the fountain-head. And the fountain-head is found in the teaching of Jesus Himself. We must return to that fountain-head ever anew for the refreshment of our souls, in order that we may not be dragged down to some lower plane of thinking and of living either by the antiquated legalism of the Old Testament or by the well-meant but mistaken theological interpretations of the Apostle Paul. Such is a very common way of thinking today. It is one of the commonest forms in which the unbelief of our day manifests itself. We pointed out one difficulty with it when we dealt two years ago with the subject of the inspiration of the Bible. It is refuted by that very teaching of Jesus to which it itself appeals. The plain fact is that Jesus believed in the full truthfulness of the Old Testament, and put that belief quite at the foundation of His teaching, so that if you reject the Old Testament you cannot possibly make good your claim to be true to what Jesus said. Moreover, if Jesus looked back to the Old Testament, He also looked forward to the New. He appointed apostles and invested them with a truly supernatural authority, in virtue of which they gave the New Testament books to the church. Be perfectly clear about one thing, then: If you reject the authority of the Bible, you cannot possibly hold on to the authority of the teaching of Jesus. To reject one and try to hold on to the other involves a sheer contradiction in which a man cannot possibly rest. In view of that fact, it is not surprising to find that those who profess to believe in the teaching of Jesus alone, as distinguished from the Bible, do not really believe in the teaching of Jesus as a whole. They believe some things that Jesus says and reject others. They pick and choose within the teaching of Jesus. In other words, it is not Jesus Himself who is their authority, but some criterion that they bring with them to the study of Jesus in order that they may determine what in the teaching of Jesus is true and what is false. Thus the first thing that is wrong with this exclusive use of the teaching of Jesus, as over against the rest of the Bible, is that it is untrue to that which is rendered by the teaching of Jesus itself. The other thing that is wrong with it is that it treats Jesus as being simply a teacher. There have been other great religious teachers, and their followers have been called by their names. So we are called Christians, say the men who have adopted the way of thinking that we are now dealing with, because we are the followers of Jesus. We have made Him our guide in the religious life. There are many divergent ways of thinking about God, and there are many divergent types of religious life; but we have chosen to think of God as Jesus thought of Him and we have chosen to live the type of religious life that Jesus lived. That is the reason why we can be called Christians. Jesus was the first Christian, and we are Christians because we are following in His footsteps and are guided by His directions. Two years ago, in the series of talks which I was then giving, I pointed out how erroneous is this way of looking at the matter. I pointed out in particular how untrue it is to the teaching of Jesus Himself. Jesus Himself presented Himself as far more than a teacher and example. He presented Himself as a Saviour. He presented Himself, not as one who came just to say something to men, but as one who came to do something for them. He presented Himself as one who came to give His life a ransom for many upon the cross. But if that is so, it follows that the teaching of Jesus is not to be put as more necessary to the Christian than the teaching of the Holy Spirit through the apostles. If Jesus came to save us by something that He did— that is, by His death and resurrection —then naturally the full meaning of what He came to do would not be fully unfolded until the thing was actually done. That is the reason why the eighth chapter of Romans is just as precious to the Christian as is the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels. Jesus did proclaim beforehand the meaning of His death. It is a great error to say that He did not. Especially did He proclaim it in the institution of the Lord’s Supper. But He left a great wealth of revelation about it to be brought afterwards through the apostles whom He chose. A man who depreciates the teaching of the apostles, ostensibly in the interests of the teaching of Jesus, is really degrading in terrible fashion the teaching of Jesus itself. He is degrading it by taking it out of its rightful place in the grand sweep of revelation contained in the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. And if he is degrading the teaching of Jesus he is also degrading Jesus, the author of the teaching. He is degrading Him by regarding Him merely as a teacher. He is degrading Him by denying to Him His rightful place as Redeemer and Lord. That error we must, if we are Christians, certainly avoid. We certainly cannot take the teaching of Jesus out of its connection with the rest of the Bible, as though the teaching of Jesus exclusively could be our authority. To do so is to be untrue to the heart of the teaching of Jesus itself. But there is also another error that we must avoid. If we must avoid attending to the teaching of Jesus to the neglect of the rest of the Word of God, we must also avoid relegating the teaching of Jesus, or any part of it, to a secondary place. It may seem strange that any Christian men should have fallen into this latter error, but certainly some Christian men in our day seem to have fallen into it, and the reasoning by which they have fallen into it is fairly clear. Since Jesus, they have said to themselves, came into the world to die on the cross and rise again for the redemption of sinners, since those events of the death and resurrection were epoch-making events, does it not follow that what lies back of those events belongs to an era out of which we have now passed? Can we therefore take the words uttered before those epoch-making events, even the words of Jesus, as being intended directly for our guidance? Must we not regard them as belonging to a by-gone era, and must we not take, instead of them, for our direct guidance only the teaching of the epistles that were written after the redeeming work of Jesus had already been done? With regard to that argument, it may be said, for one thing, that it runs directly counter to the example of the early Christian church. If one thing is clear to the historian it is that the words of Jesus were treasured by the early disciples, after Jesus' death and resurrection, because they provided direct and authoritative guidance for the church. Modern skeptical historians have sometimes made wrong use of that observation. They have argued that, because the early church cited words of Jesus for a practical purpose— namely, for the purpose of settling disputes and providing comfort and giving guidance—therefore it was not citing those words with historical accuracy so that we cannot trust the record of Jesus’ words which we find included by the early church in our Gospels. I cannot follow that reasoning at all. I cannot for the life of me see why, just because the early church had certain needs with regard to which it sought the guidance of Jesus, therefore it must have put words into Jesus’ mouth for the satisfaction of those needs instead of simply treasuring up the words that Jesus really uttered. But certainly those skeptical historians are right in holding that the early church did regard anything that it held to be a word of Jesus as possessing an immediate authority for the guidance of the church. That is clear in a number of ways. It is clear, for example, through what Paul says and implies about the authority of words of Jesus. From the very beginning the Christian church had, as the completely authoritative guide both of its doctrine and of its life, not merely the Old Testament Scriptures but also the teaching of Jesus. If we now adopt a different attitude toward Jesus’ words we are falling into a vagary of a very deadly kind indeed. In His words recorded in the Gospels, including, for example, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is telling us—us of the present dispensation— what we must believe concerning God and also how we must live. If we hear His words and do not do them, we also, as well as those to whom Jesus spoke on that mountain in Galilee, are like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand. Only if we hear Jesus’ words and do them now are we like the wise man who built his house upon the rock. Jesus’ words in the Gospels are certainly intended for the immediate instruction and guidance of His church. Well, we have been considering Jesus as exercising during His ministry on earth the office of a prophet. Certainly it is true that He spoke always during His earthly ministry as one who was spokesman for God. He was truly a prophet. It is very important that that should be observed. But if it is important that that should be observed, it is still more important that something else should be observed. If it should be observed that Jesus was a prophet, it is even more important to observe that He was infinitely more than a prophet. The prophets spoke for God; Jesus was God Himself. No difference could possibly be greater than that. That difference appears all through the Gospels. It appears all through Jesus’ recorded words. It appears in the peculiar authority with which He spoke. The prophets said, when they came forward, “Thus saith the Lord”; but no prophet could say, “I say unto you,” as Jesus said it in the Sermon on the Mount. The deity of Christ appears also in direct utterances of Jesus, not only in the Gospel according to John but also in the Synoptic Gospels. Even where it is not made the subject of express exposition, it shines through. Everywhere Jesus is really presenting Himself not only as truly man but also as truly God. The truth is that Jesus revealed God not only by what He said but also by what He was. The prophets had a message given them about God and from God. They spoke the truth about God. But Jesus was Himself God. He was God come in the flesh. No man hath seen God at any time. But Jesus revealed Him. Men saw Jesus. They saw Him with their eyes. And the one whom they saw was God. What a revelation was there, to be sure! We too as we read the Gospels have a detailed picture of the life upon earth of one who was truly God. What a wonderful thing that is! How wonderful it is that God should have been pleased to reveal so much! But that revelation is not given us merely in order that we may know what we otherwise could not have known. It is given us in order that we may be saved. What must we do to be saved? The Bible gives us the answer: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” But how shall we believe on the Lord Jesus Christ unless we know Him? How can we trust Him unless we know that He is trustworthy? Well, the Bible answers these questions for us. It answers these questions for us by the account of Jesus which it gives in the Gospels. In His recorded words and in His recorded deeds, Jesus is presented as one who is indeed trustworthy. There is where the true uniqueness of the words of Jesus—even within the Bible—is found. The words of the apostles and prophets are true. They are inspired by the Holy Ghost. They are just as much part of God’s Word as are the words of Jesus. They present things that are just as important for us to know. But the words of Jesus are unique because the speaker of the words was unique. By every recorded word of His and by every recorded deed, we have presented to us the one who is presented to us as the object of our faith. We are not asked in the Bible to believe in one about whom we know nothing. But we are asked to believe in one who is presented to us in the Gospels in rich and glorious fullness as one who is worthy to be believed. Ah, surely such an one can be trusted! If only He were here with us today, how gladly would we lay before Him all our troubles! How gladly would we trust Him when He offers to bring us to God! Well, my friends, we have Him with us today. His prophetic work is not limited to what He said when He was on earth. After His redeeming work was done, through the cross and the resurrection, He continued to proclaim His gospel through the apostles whom He appointed and whose inspired writings we have in the New Testament. He continues to proclaim His gospel today by the Holy Spirit whom He has sent. Christ is the substance of the gospel. The gospel sets Christ forth. It presents Christ as Saviour. It tells of His death upon the cross to redeem us from our sins. It tells of His glorious resurrection. It tells of the promise of His coming again. But Christ is not only the substance of the gospel. He is also the proclaimer of the gospel. He does not leave it to others to offer Him as Saviour. No, He offers Himself. Whatever human instruments He uses, it is He who proclaims the good news of the salvation that He wrought for us at such infinite cost. Will you hear Him, my friends? Will you hear Him this afternoon when He offers Himself to you as the Saviour of your soul?