This article appeared in The Christian Graduate
in October 1939
The Lordship of Christ
DR. D. MARTYN LLOYD-JONES
WHAT do we mean when we
say with Peter that God hath made "that same Jesus ... both Lord
and Christ”? What do I mean when I say that Jesus Christ is "my
Lord"? I put it thus in a personal way, because one cannot deal
with a question like this in any other way. Shall I suggest just two
things which I do not mean?
(1) When I say that Jesus
is my Lord, I do not mean that I do my best and utmost to be faithful
to His memory and His example, and that I give myself entirely to
that endeavour. I think it must be agreed and admitted that there has
been a tendency during the past fifty years or so to emphasise and
stress that particular view of the matter. To acknowledge Christ as
Lord has been spoken of in terms of imitating Christ or following
Him. And to this end, of course, scholarship and research have
concentrated their energies upon the earthly life of Jesus and have
done their utmost to sift and to separate what they regard as being
true from what they regard as being false. They have tried to
re-construct the life, or at any rate, a picture of the life of the
Jesus of history. The Jesus of history is to be our Lord. But,
strangely enough, the more we look at Him the greater the tendency
becomes to call Him Jesus rather than Lord! Why that is we shall see
in a few moments. Let it suffice to say, at present, that all the
efforts of men to make Jesus Lord have clearly failed.
(2) Again, when I say
that Jesus Christ is my Lord, I do not mean that I just take all the
words which He uttered and which we have reported and chronicled, and
make of them a law for my life. There are people who would confine
God's dealings with mankind through Christ to the New Testament
words, and then the New Testament becomes a kind of legal code which
defines everything.
Now, the reason why both
of these conceptions of the Lordship of Christ are erroneous, seems
to me to be clear and obvious, and that by definition. The
relationship involved in the word "lordship" is obviously
and clearly a living relationship between two persons. Moreover, the
slave waits for his lord's command and just asks, "Lord, what
wouldst thou have me to do?" He doesn't even engage himself to
his master for his own profit - he belongs to his master! Now judged
by that standard, the two conceptions of the lordship of Christ which
we have considered are obviously false, and fail in that they do not
provide a living Person to take part in the relationship with me. A
memory, however dear, is not a living person and cannot command me
and dictate to me in the present. I cannot talk and pray to an ideal.
I cannot cast myself in my helplessness and my woe upon my hero who
was buried some twenty centuries ago. Besides, where I am the sole
living person involved, it is obvious that I alone really count ; and
though I set up a certain standard and decide to be governed by it,
it is I who set it up. I count most of all and there is, in reality,
no lord outside myself.
Therefore, and in order
to hasten on, I say with the apostle: "Yea, though we have known
Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him no more."
I deal no longer with the Jesus of history, but with the Lord in
Glory. I look not back to a memory but into the Face of the Living
Christ. I cease to paint beautiful pictures of Jesus of Nazareth and
to sentimentalise with vague generalities about beauty, truth and
love, and begin rather to "know the terror of the Lord,"
and to feel it to be my bounden duty "to persuade men" to
flee from the wrath to come and to see that their gentle Jesus is to
be the Judge of the whole world. He, as my Lord, is everything, and,
in a sense, there is nothing else that really matters. The immediate
problems of 1939 no longer concern me most of all ; the needs of
mankind, great though they are, are not the field of my real enquiry.
What I desire to know is what my Lord would have me to do. Conditions
next year may be entirely different, and in twenty years' time still
different again, but my Lord's lordship can never change - "He
is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever."
But, having said all that
in order to get clear the true conception of lordship ; having
stressed and emphasised the truth that it is only the Lord from
Heaven who can be my Lord and not the earthly Jesus and His memory
alone, I am reminded of my quotation of St. Peter's words at the
commencement, those words which tell us that it is that same Jesus
Whom God hath made "both Lord and Christ." The same Person,
but not as He was, but as He is. He was the Servant, He is now the
Lord. He is the same, but His offices are different. We do not
pray to "the Servant," but to "the Lord." On what
grounds do we do so? Or, to put the same question in another way, we
may ask with reverence what are Jesus of Nazareth's rights and title
to His lordship? Two main answers are given to that question in the
New Testament.
(1) There is, first of
all, what one may perhaps best call the purely theological answer, by
which I mean an absolute, essential answer apart from you and me and
our experiences. Jesus Christ is Lord as it were in His own right,
because He is the Son of God. He is the Eternal Word. " He is
the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature, for
by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in
earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, dominions, or
principalities, or powers : all things were created by Him and for
Him. And He is before all things, and by Him all things exist."
Do not look back for your Lord. "By Him all things consist"
- now! But in the well-known passage in Philippians ii, the apostle
seems to give as the main ground of our Lord's lordship His
exaltation by God as a reward for His self-humbling and perfect
obedience - " Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him, and
given Him a name which is above every name. That at the name of Jesus
every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and
things under the earth. And that every tongue should confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." "God
hath highly exalted Him." The lordship is a fact in spite of us
and whether we recognise it or not! Nay, more than that, a time is
coming when we shall have to recognise it whether we will or not!
Though we try to rob Him of His Deity, though we try to confine Him
to Jesus of Nazareth, though we would make of Him a mere memory and
not a living Person, though we would thus crucify Him afresh - the
fact remains.
(2) But all that, as I
have said, is in a sense, in spite of my experience and outside of
it. Yet any fair reading of the New Testament and of the lives of the
saints shows clearly that the lordship of Jesus Christ is not
something purely objective and theological. It is not only something
that I recognise, but also something that I feel. If He is my Lord,
He of necessity, takes up every part of me, intellect and feeling
alike, head and heart, the entire man. On what ground is Christ my
Lord How is this great Cosmic Person related to me? How can I claim
Him as my Lord? And how can I know that He is? Well here again, the
great apostle answers the question by telling us "that no man
can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost." What does
he mean by that? That no one can truly unfold the Person and
character of Jesus Christ to me, save the Holy Ghost.
I may look at Jesus
Christ with my own eyes and with my own mind and powers, and see in
Him Someone to be persecuted, Someone to be mocked, Someone Who has
claimed too much for Himself. Or I may look at Him and just see a
great man whose principles I like and admire, and whose life appeals
to me. Yes, I may look at Him with my own natural and unenlightened
eyes and see many, many different things, none of which make me feel
that He is my Lord. But when the Holy Ghost deals with me and
convicts me of my sin ; when I see myself estranged from God with
that irremovable barrier of my sins between me and Him ; when I see
myself as lost and without any life and without God in the
world—when, seeing all that and feeling that there is no hope for
me, the Holy Ghost grants me to see by the eye of faith that Jesus
Christ the Son of God came from heaven, was made flesh, lived for
thirty-three years on earth, and when He died on Calvary, died for my
sake and for my sins, and rose again to justify me before God, and to
purchase my pardon and forgiveness, when I see all that, what can I
say, but:
"Love so amazing, so
divine Demands my soul, my life, my all"?
If He has done all that
for me, if He has so saved me, nothing that He can ask is too great.
He gave Himself for me, I give myself to Him. His love demands it!
But I see something else
which goes even further than Isaac Watt's great hymn. It is not
merely that Christ's love "demands" my entire allegiance
and submission. In a sense I have no choice. I do not decide that
Christ shall be my Lord. He is my Lord, by right. I was the slave of
sin and of Satan, and, try as I would, I could not obtain my freedom.
I was never a free man. "I was born in sin and shapen in
iniquity." A slave! And there I would be now, were it not that
Christ came and "bought me with a price." What follows? "Ye
are not your own!" I am still not free! I have been bought by a
New Master! ,I am the slave, the bond-servant of Christ! He is my
Lord for He has bought me. He does not" demand my soul, my life,
my all" ; He has bought them, they are His.
I am His, because He is
my Lord, because He owns me, because He has bought me with His Own
precious blood.
