Are Jesus and God two different people?

Rev 1:1  The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show to His servants the things that must soon take place. He made it known by sending His angel to His servant John,

 

In 451 AD, the Council of Chalcedon was called together to answer a key question that Christians were facing, what nature does Jesus have?  Was He a great man, filled with the Spirit of God?  Merely empowered by God as His finest creation?  Was He God alone?  His apparent humanity just an act to help Him relate to us better?  The answer goes to the core of who the church says Christ is and who we worship.

The Council’s Answer

Fortunately the Council got the answer correct.  Jesus Christ is God, existing for all eternity, omniscient, omnipotent, having all the power of God and at His Incarnation He added to His Divinity, humanity.  He is still God but now He is also man having both the nature of God and the nature of man and these two natures are perfectly united but not co-mingled.  In other words, Christ’s two natures do not fight against themselves but they do remain separate.  This why sometimes in the Scriptures, Jesus acts like any man and sometimes He acts like only God can.  For example, as a man He prayed to the Father (Jn 17), as God He allowed people to pray to Him (Acts 7:59).  As a man He was tempted (Mt 4) as God He is sinless (Heb 4:15).  As a man He grew in wisdom (Lk 2:52) as God He knows all things (Jn 21:17) and so forth.

How does God give Jesus revelation?

This is why in our verse today we see God giving something to Jesus as if He were a separate person.  This is the Father giving revelation to the man Christ Jesus.  While on the earth Jesus “emptied Himself” and “made Himself nothing”, (Phil 2:6-7) one of the things He emptied Himself of was complete foreknowledge of when the end would come.  When He entered triumphantly into Heaven all the fullness of God now dwells in Him including exact foreknowledge of His triumphant return. (Mt 24:36)  This verse shows that this revelation was given to Him by the Father, the reasons for which we will look at next.

Christ had to have two natures to save you

The good news is that Jesus’ two natures is exactly why we have salvation.  The perfect sacrifice had to be man because it needed to represent man and it needed to God because it had to be infinitely good to bear the weight of our infinite evil.  No mere man could meet these requirements, God Himself had to come to Earth in the form of a man to die for us so we could live with Him and (Praise God!) that is exactly what He did!

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