Article, The Lordship of Christ 1939

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.