Devotional 50: The Application of Redemption: The Spirit Applies Christ's Benefits

The Confession Read

Christ, in the work of mediation, acts according to both natures, by each nature doing that which is proper to itself; yet, by reason of the unity of the person, that which is proper to one nature is sometimes in Scripture attributed to the person denominated by the other nature.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 8, Section 7

Introduction

The dust of Bethany still clung to His sandals when He arrived at the tomb. Four days — enough time for the flesh to begin its return to the earth, enough time for hope to be buried deeper than the body. Martha met Him on the road with theology on her lips but a wound in her voice: "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died." And then the strange thing happened. The same lips that had spoken the galaxies into existence began to tremble. The eyes that search the hearts of all men filled with tears. The eternal Word, by whom all things were made, wept. Yet scarcely had those tears wet His beard when those same lips uttered another word — not a sob this time, but a command: "Lazarus, come forth." And the dead man heard, and the dead man rose, and the grave discovered it had no jurisdiction where this Man stood. What was happening in that dusty moment outside a borrowed tomb? The Westminster Divines would later capture it in a single sentence: Christ, in the work of mediation, acts according to both natures, by each nature doing that which is proper to itself. The tears are human: real tears drawn from a real human soul that loved His friend and hated the ruin death had wrought. The command is divine — nothing less than the voice that will one day call all who are in their graves to rise. And yet these are not two persons performing two separate acts. This is one Person, the eternal Son of God, weeping and commanding in the same breath. This is the mystery that the seventh section of our Confession unfolds, and upon it hangs the integrity of your salvation. We have traced the Mediator's journey from the eternal counsel before the foundation of the world, through the wonder of the incarnation, the Spirit's anointing, His willing obedience and bloody sacrifice, and the purchase of reconciliation and an everlasting inheritance. But here the Divines pause to ask a question that the Scriptures themselves force upon us: How does this Mediator actually work? When He saves, whose acts are these — God's or man's? When He dies, who dies? When He speaks forgiveness, whose lips form the words? The answer, simple to state and profound to contemplate, is both. Both natures are fully operative in every saving act. And yet they are never confused, never mixed, never divided in the Person who performs them. This is the grammar of your redemption.

Scripture Foundation

The apostles did not have the Latin phrase communicatio idiomatum in their vocabulary, but they had the reality burning in their hearts and flowing from their pens. The New Testament is saturated with this pattern — human things said of the divine Person, divine things predicated of the man Christ Jesus — and the pattern is not a rhetorical flourish but the grammar of the gospel. To trace this grammar through the apostolic writings is to watch the Spirit Himself teach the church how to speak of her Lord. Acts 20:28 — "Feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood." Read those words slowly and let their strangeness settle upon you. God does not have blood. The divine nature, being simple and spiritual, has no body, no veins, no crimson life to spill upon the ground. Blood belongs to the human nature alone. And yet Paul, taking his leave of the Ephesian elders at Miletus, does not say "the church of the man Christ Jesus, which he purchased with his blood." He says "the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood." The human property — bleeding — is attributed to the Person called by His divine name. The Greek is even more striking: dia tou haimatos tou idiou, literally "through the blood of his own." The blood of that One who is properly His own, the blood that belongs to the Person of the eternal Son by virtue of the human nature He assumed in the womb of the Virgin. The Divines saw this: that which is proper to the human nature is sometimes attributed to the Person denominated by the divine nature. 1 Corinthians 2:8 — "Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory." The phrase ton Kyrion tēs doxēs — the Lord of glory — is an unambiguous title of deity. The Lord of glory is He who inhabits eternity, whose robe fills the temple, before whom the seraphim veil their faces. You cannot crucify glory. You cannot nail omnipotence to a wooden beam. You cannot spike omniscience through the wrists. Crucifixion is something done to a body, a human body, with human nerves and human blood and human breath that finally gives out. And yet Paul says the princes of this world crucified the Lord of glory. Not "they crucified the human nature of the Lord of glory" — simply, they crucified Him. The act proper to the human nature is predicated of the Person in His divine majesty. This is not careless speech. This is the apostles thinking with the grammar of the incarnation. John 3:13 — "And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven." Note the title: ho huios tou anthrōpou, the Son of man. It is the title of His humanity, the name He takes from Daniel's vision of one like a son of man coming before the Ancient of Days. And yet this Son of man "came down from heaven." Human beings do not come down from heaven; they are formed in the womb and born into the world. More than that, this Son of man, standing before Nicodemus in visible, touchable flesh, is simultaneously "in heaven." His human nature sits in one place, speaking with one man, yet the Person who speaks is the eternal Son who fills heaven and earth. That which is proper to the divine nature — omnipresence, heavenly origin — is attributed to the Person called by His human name. This is not a contradiction but the deepest logic of the incarnation: wherever the Son is, there the Son of man is, for they are one and the same Person. 1 John 1:7 — "But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin." Notice the chain: Jesus Christ is His Son. This is not a man who became a son by adoption or by moral achievement. This is the eternal Son, the monogenēs, the only-begotten, of one substance with the Father. And this Son has blood. The divine nature does not bleed. Blood is the property of the human nature alone. But the Person whose blood cleanses is none other than the eternal Son of God. The Divines could not have asked for a clearer biblical warrant: that which is proper to the human nature — the shedding of blood — is attributed to the Person denominated by the divine name — the Son of God. Romans 9:5 — "Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen." Here is the whole mystery in a single breath. As concerning the flesh, Christ came from the patriarchs — truly human, truly descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And yet this same Christ "is over all, God blessed for ever." The human lineage is real; the divine supremacy is real. One Person, two natures, one glorious confession. The apostle does not stagger or qualify. He places the humanity and the deity side by side in the same sentence about the same Person, and then closes with "Amen" — as if to say, this is the faith, this is the Christ, and upon any other foundation no man can build.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly gathered in the Jerusalem Chamber in the 1640s, they were not writing theology in a vacuum. The air of Christendom was thick with errors about the Person of Christ, some ancient and some newly resurrected. The Divines knew that a defective Christology would unravel the whole fabric of redemption. If you are wrong about who Christ is, you will inevitably be wrong about what Christ does. And if you are wrong about what Christ does, you cannot be right about how a sinner stands before a holy God. The first error they faced was the ancient Nestorian tendency: the inclination to so separate Christ's two natures that He becomes, in effect, two persons occupying the same body. In this scheme, the divine Son does divine things and the human Jesus does human things, and never the twain shall meet. The atonement becomes merely a human sacrifice that God happens to approve; the intercession becomes a human priest who happens to have God's ear. The personal union is dissolved into a moral partnership, and the gospel dissolves with it. Against this, the Divines insisted that Christ acts in the work of mediation according to both natures. The acts are not partitioned between two subjects but are the unified acts of one divine Person through the instrumentality of both natures. The second error, equally ancient but opposite in direction, was the Eutychian confusion: the blending of the two natures into a hybrid third thing that is neither truly divine nor truly human. In this scheme, Christ's humanity is absorbed into His deity like a drop of wine into the ocean, or the two natures are mingled to produce something new — a tertium quid, a third kind of being. But a Christ whose humanity has been deified cannot truly suffer, cannot truly die, cannot truly represent us. Against this, the Divines insisted that each nature does "that which is proper to itself." The divine nature does not weep; the human nature does not uphold the universe. The properties remain distinct even as the Person remains one. But there was a third, more subtle error brewing in the seventeenth century, one that would take fuller shape in later Lutheran theology but whose seeds were already present. This was the notion that the communication of attributes meant a literal transfer of properties from one nature to the other, so that Christ's human nature became omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient by virtue of its union with the divine. The Reformed orthodox, including our Divines, recognized that this would destroy the integrity of Christ's true humanity. A human nature that is everywhere present is no longer a human nature at all. The Confession therefore speaks carefully: it is not that the properties of one nature are transferred to the other nature, but that what is proper to one nature is sometimes attributed in Scripture to the Person denominated by the other nature. The communication is not between the natures directly — that way lies confusion — but is a verbal predication rooted in the personal union. We say "the Son of God died" not because deity can die, but because the Person who is the Son of God assumed a human nature in which He truly suffered death. We say "the Son of Man is omnipresent" not because humanity can be everywhere, but because the Person who is the Son of Man is also the eternal Word who fills all things. This distinction may seem like theological hair-splitting, but it is the difference between a Mediator who can actually save you and one who cannot. If Christ's humanity absorbed divine attributes, He is no longer one of us — no longer the second Adam, no longer the sympathetic High Priest who can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. If Christ's deity was diminished by union with humanity, He is no longer able to bear the infinite weight of divine wrath or to give infinite worth to His sacrifice. The Reformed formula preserves both the integrity of the natures and the unity of the Person, and in doing so preserves the gospel itself. Lose this distinction, and you lose the gospel with it. Maintain it, and you have a Mediator in whom God and man are truly and savingly joined.

Theological Depth

When David Dickson, the Scottish covenanter and professor of divinity at Glasgow, expounded the mystery of the two natures in Christ's mediatorial work, he anchored everything in the personal union. In his treatment of the Confession's teaching, Dickson insisted that the union of the two natures in the one Person of the Son is the foundation upon which all Christ's saving work rests. Christ does not merely do divine things and human things alongside each other. The Person who acts is always the eternal Son, and every act — whether performed through the divine nature or the human nature — is the act of that Person. When Christ hungers in the wilderness, the eternal Son hungers. When Christ stills the storm with a word, the eternal Son stills the storm. The value of every mediatorial act derives from the dignity of the Person who performs it, and that Person is God the Son incarnate. This is why the humiliation of Christ has unfathomable depth and His exaltation has measureless height: the Person who descended and ascended is infinite. The Dutch divine Wilhelmus à Brakel, whose Reasonable Service warmed the hearts of the Reformed congregations of the Netherlands, pressed this truth into pastoral service with characteristic tenderness. In his treatment of Christ's suitability as Mediator, Brakel argued that the two natures are more than a theological puzzle; they are the ground of the believer's comfort. Christ must be man, Brakel taught, because only a man can suffer, obey, and die in the place of men. But Christ must also be God, because only God can give infinite worth to that suffering and obedience, and only God can apply the benefits of redemption to the hearts of the elect. A merely human mediator could not bear the wrath of God; a merely divine mediator could not shed blood. But the God-man meets every requirement. "Behold," Brakel would say, "a Surety in whom you may rest your whole soul." The great Dutch Reformed dogmatician Herman Bavinck, writing at the threshold of the twentieth century when the two-natures doctrine was under sustained assault from liberal theology, gave the Reformed church a robust defense of Chalcedonian orthodoxy. In his Reformed Dogmatics, Bavinck demonstrated that the modern rejection of the two-natures doctrine was not a recovery of the simple Jesus of the Gospels but a return to the ancient heresies that the early church had already judged and found wanting. The liberal attempt to find a merely human Jesus behind the layers of ecclesiastical dogma, Bavinck argued, produced not the Christ of Scripture but a figure of the critic's own imagination — a teacher of timeless ethics, a revolutionary, a mystic, but never the Lord of glory who was crucified for our offenses and raised for our justification. Bavinck insisted that the two-natures doctrine is not a speculation imposed upon the biblical text but a summary of what the text itself teaches — the pattern of predication that we have traced in Paul and John and the words of our Lord. Calvin, whom we have heard often in these studies, addressed the communicatio idiomatum with his characteristic clarity in the Institutes. He observed that Scripture sometimes attributes to Christ's deity what properly belongs to His humanity, and sometimes attributes to His humanity what properly belongs to His deity — and it does so freely, without apology, as though this were the most natural way of speaking in the world. Why? Because the Person is one. The ancient church called this allotriosis — the attribution of what is alien, or the exchange of properties. The Greek fathers used a parallel term, antidosis idiōmatōn — the mutual interchange of the properties of the two natures. Calvin warned against two extremes: those who so confound the natures that they imagine Christ's body is everywhere present, and those who so divide the natures that they imagine two Christs. The true path, Calvin taught, is to recognize that the properties of each nature belong to the one Person, and therefore can be predicated of that Person under either name. The practical consequence is immense: it means that everything Christ did in His human nature was done by a divine Person, and therefore carries the weight and worth of deity. Robert Shaw, whose exposition of the Confession has guided generations of Presbyterians, drew a helpful distinction in his treatment of this section. He noted that some things are done by Christ that are proper to neither nature considered in itself but are theandric — that is, divine-human — acts proper to the Person as Mediator. To redeem, to reconcile, to intercede, to judge — these are works that belong to Christ not simply as God or simply as man but as the God-man, the one Mediator between God and men. Shaw saw in this the wisdom of the Confession's phrasing: "Christ, in the work of mediation, acts according to both natures." The mediatorial work itself requires both natures in harmonious operation, each contributing what is proper to itself, while the Person unites both contributions into a single saving work. Louis Berkhof, whose Systematic Theology has shaped seminarians for nearly a century, helpfully distinguished three senses in which the communicatio idiomatum has been understood in the Reformed tradition. The first is the genus idiomaticum: predications in which the properties of one nature are attributed to the Person. "The Son of God died" and "the Son of Man is omnipresent" are examples. The second is the genus apotelesmaticum: predications concerning the mediatorial work itself, in which both natures cooperate, each contributing what is proper to itself, so that the work is truly theandric. Redemption, reconciliation, and intercession fall here. The third is the genus maiestaticum: the Lutheran notion that the human nature receives divine attributes like omnipresence and omnipotence by virtue of the union. The Reformed tradition rejects this third sense as destructive of true humanity, while embracing the first two as biblical and necessary. Berkhof's taxonomy serves more than the academy; it equips the believer to detect error before it takes root in the heart.

Puritan Application

The doctrine of the two natures in Christ's mediatorial work is not a curiosity for the theologian's study. It is bread for the hungry soul, medicine for the wounded conscience, and a fortress for the tempted believer. Let us draw near and taste its sweetness. First, this doctrine assures you that your Mediator is fully able to save you. The human nature of Christ provides everything that substitution requires: a body in which to obey, a soul in which to sorrow, blood to shed, breath to yield up. The divine nature provides everything that infinite justice demands: a Person of infinite dignity whose obedience and suffering carry infinite worth. If Christ were only man, His death could atone for at most one other human being — and even that is doubtful, for a creature's suffering can never satisfy the boundless dishonor done to an infinite God. If Christ were only God, He could not die at all, and there would be no sacrifice. But because He is both, His one offering is sufficient for the sins of the whole world of the elect. Nothing in your sin — no depth of depravity, no length of rebellion, no weight of guilt — exceeds the worth of this Mediator's work. The divine dignity of the Person who suffered gives infinite value to the suffering He endured. Second, Christ's genuine humanity means He understands your weakness from the inside. The temptation that presses upon you this morning, the sorrow that wakes you in the night, the fear that tightens your chest — your High Priest has felt them all, not in appearance only but in reality. The human soul of Christ was not insulated from suffering by His deity. He hungered. He thirsted. He grew weary. He was misunderstood by His own family. He was betrayed by a friend. He wept at a grave. He recoiled from the cup of wrath in Gethsemane with an agony so intense that His sweat became like great drops of blood. And all of this He experienced as a true man, with a true human soul and a true human body. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that He learned obedience through what He suffered — not that He was ever disobedient, but that He tasted the full cost of obedience in the crucible of human experience. When you cry to Him, you do not cry to a distant deity who has never known a human ache. You cry to One whose human heart has beat faster with fear, whose human throat has gone dry with thirst, whose human eyes have burned with tears. Third, the unity of Christ's Person means that His work is an unbroken whole, and so is your salvation. There are not two Saviors — a divine one who forgives your sins and a human one who shows you how to live. There is one Savior, one Mediator, one Lord Jesus Christ. The same Person who died for your justification lives for your intercession. The same Person who obeyed the law for your righteousness now writes that law on your heart by His Spirit. The same Person who conquered death now reigns until all His enemies are made His footstool. The unity of Christ's Person guarantees the unity of His saving work. There is no gap between His atonement and His intercession, no discontinuity between His humiliation and His exaltation, no rupture between what He purchased on the cross and what He applies by His Spirit. Because the Person is one, the salvation is seamless. Fourth, this doctrine teaches you to worship the whole Christ, not a Christ of your own imagining. It is a persistent temptation of the religious heart to fashion a Christ after its own preferences: a Christ of power without humility, a Christ of love without holiness, a Christ of teaching without atonement, or a Christ of mystical presence without lordship. But the Christ of Scripture is not divisible. You cannot have the babe in the manger without the Judge on the throne. You cannot have the gentle Shepherd without the holy Warrior who treads the winepress of the wrath of God Almighty. You cannot have the Friend of sinners without the Lord who commands repentance and faith. The two natures in one Person mean that every aspect of Christ belongs to the whole Christ, and the whole Christ is offered to you in the gospel. Receive Him as He is, not as you would prefer Him to be. The Christ you are tempted to reject — the Christ of absolute authority, the Christ of searching holiness, the Christ who demands everything — is the Christ whose blood cleanses from all sin. To divide Christ is to lose Christ, for there is no salvation in a half-Savior. Fifth, the pattern of the two natures teaches you something profound about your own redemption. Just as Christ's human nature was the instrument through which His divine Person accomplished salvation, so the Holy Spirit now works through the frail instrumentality of your human nature: through your mind as you study the Word, through your will as you choose obedience, through your affections as you love what God loves. The Spirit does not bypass your humanity but works through it, sanctifying it, renewing it, making it what it was always meant to be. The incarnation is both the pattern of your salvation and the pattern of your sanctification: the divine life working in and through the human, not abolishing it but restoring it. As the eternal Son acted through a true human nature to accomplish redemption, so the eternal Spirit acts through your true human nature to apply it.

Prayer

O Lord Jesus Christ, one Person in two natures, very God of very God and very man of very man, we bow before the mystery of Thy Person and the majesty of Thy work. We confess that we have spoken of things too wonderful for us, and yet Thou hast revealed them in Thy Word that we might believe and be saved. Grant us, we pray, not merely to understand the doctrine of the two natures but to rest our souls upon the Mediator whom that doctrine describes. We thank Thee that Thou didst not shrink from assuming our nature with all its infirmities — yet without sin. We thank Thee that Thou didst hunger and thirst and weep and suffer and die, for in all these things Thou wast made like unto Thy brethren, that Thou mightest be a merciful and faithful High Priest. We thank Thee that Thy deity was not diminished in the womb of the Virgin nor obscured upon the cross, but that the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in Thee bodily, giving infinite worth to every act of obedience and every drop of blood. Lord, we are prone to forget who Thou art. We reduce Thee to a teacher, a moral example, a distant deity who cannot sympathize with our weakness. Forgive us for every diminished Christ we have carried in our hearts, and grant us to see Thee as Thou art — the Lord of glory crucified, the Son of Man in heaven, the God who purchased the church with Thine own blood. Comfort Thy people with the knowledge that their Mediator is fully able to save. Strengthen the tempted with the remembrance that Thou hast suffered being tempted. Quiet the fearful with the assurance that He who shed His blood for them will not forsake them now. And grant that we may worship the whole Christ — Prophet, Priest, and King — not choosing what pleases us and discarding the rest, but receiving Thee as Thou hast offered Thyself in the gospel. May we never sunder what Thou hast joined, nor confuse what Thou hast kept distinct. Return, we beseech Thee, Lord Jesus. Come quickly to consummate what Thou hast purchased. Until that day, keep us in the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. And when Thou dost appear, we shall see Thee as Thou art — the Lamb upon the throne, our God and our Brother, our Lord and our Friend, one Person forever. Amen.