Who Is Jesus Christ? The Christology of Providence Community Church

This pulpit keeps returning to one irreducible claim: Jesus is fully God and fully man — and everything about your salvation, your humanity, and your future depends on getting that right.

Fully God, Fully Man — And No Less Than Either

The church confesses that Jesus is 'fully God and fully man, two whole, perfect, and distinct natures inseparably joined in one person, able to be our all-sufficient savior and the only mediator between God and man.' ^[SF] That is not a compromise between two half-truths — it is the whole, non-negotiable claim. And the moment the church has ever flinched from it, heresy has rushed in to fill the gap. ^[2]

The ancient error was elegant: Jesus starts as a mere man, the divine Spirit descends at his baptism, and then abandons him before the cross so that 'he suffers again the cross as a mere man, no longer indwelt by the divine.' ^[2] The appeal is obvious — it resolves the mystery. The problem is that it destroys the salvation. If the one dying is not the eternal Son, nothing has been accomplished. What the church has always confessed, and what John's letter defends, is that the descent and the suffering and the death belong to one undivided person. ^[2][SF]

And the incarnation itself carries infinite mystery — 'there is infinite mystery involved in what's going on in the Incarnation,' ^[19] which means no single sermon, no single page, exhausts it. The categories the Bible gives us are inexhaustible: 'in Christ there is infinite highness and infinite condescension, infinite justice and infinite grace, infinite glory and lowest humility, infinite majesty and transcendent meekness, deepest reverence and equality with God, absolute sovereignty and perfect resignation, self-sufficiency and complete trust.' ^[9] That's not paradox for its own sake. That's the actual texture of who he is.

The Original Image — Not a Copy

When Paul says Jesus is 'the image of the invisible God' (Col 1:15), he is not putting Jesus in the same category as the rest of us. The argument runs in the opposite direction: 'Jesus is the original image, and we, mankind, male and female, are likeness. We're the derivative images. Our image bears a partial reflection of the full and perfect image Christ makes of God.' ^[20] Adam is not the original; Adam is the copy. 'When he created Adam, he did so in the likeness of Christ who would one day be born in human flesh. Christ did not come following the pattern of Adam. Adam is following the pattern of Christ.' ^[5]

This matters practically because it tells you what you are looking at when you look at Jesus. He is not a religious teacher who happens to display some godly qualities. He is the one being in the universe of whom it can be said, without qualification, that to see him is to see what God is actually like. 'If there were only someone who was the image of the invisible God, an exact imprint of his nature. Friends, that's what Jesus is for, to show us what God's like.' ^[7] Hebrews 1 calls him 'the image of the invisible God the exact imprint and radiance of his glory.' ^[6] He is the answer to every question that begins, 'But what is God really like?'

The Descent: From Self-Sufficiency to Condescension

'God made him a little lower than the angels. Philippians 2, 6–7, who though he was in the form of God did not account equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.' ^[8] The sequence matters: you have to start with aseity — Jesus 'did not need us. He did not come in order to acquire something he lacked.' ^[8] The descent is therefore entirely an act of love, not of need. He had everything, and he came anyway.

'In the Incarnation, God revealed himself most fully and dwelt among his people in the most personal way possible through his Son, Jesus Christ: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14).' ^[15] And John's prologue presses the point further: 'He who comes after me ranks before me because he was before me — from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace, course upon course of God's richest blessing served up to you by the master of the universe, Jesus Christ.' ^[17] The one who stepped down is the one who was there before everything.

When the eternal Son takes on flesh, something remarkable happens to the very category of freedom: 'The preeminent Son of God, the one enjoying all of His sovereign freedom from all eternity, takes on our enslavement.' ^[14] He becomes 'the one truly free being in the entire universe' precisely by stepping into a world where no one else is free — 'and all of Adam's descendants are stripped of that liberty.' ^[14] He did not come to escape the condition of fallen humanity from a safe distance. He entered it.

The New Adam: The First Fully Integrated Human

Here is the diagnostic that this pulpit returns to again and again: 'when Jesus appeared on the earth, he's the first fully integrated human that's not full of inner chaos and disintegration.' ^[4] Every other human being in the Gospels — including the disciples who walked with him daily — is, to one degree or another, thinking poorly, understanding poorly, riddled with competing desires. 'Jesus is like the backbeat of the entire cosmos. He's the one thing that is rhythmically progressing without error.' ^[4]

He comes as 'the new Adam... the final Adam... the perfect Adam,' ^[3] the one who recapitulates the human calling and actually fulfills it. 'Jesus is the fulfillment of everything God hoped humanity would be. He is the perfect man. He's the only one who lives up to this huge calling to reflect majesty, to extend dominion, to be crowned with glory.' ^[18] The mechanism is unexpected — he arrives at the crown through suffering, not around it. 'It was fitting that he should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.' ^[3] The very thing that appeared to disqualify humanity from its calling becomes the path by which the one true human accomplishes it.

And the implication for everyone who belongs to him is staggering. J.I. Packer puts it this way: 'in Jesus the Christ, God became the second Adam, not so that they could escape from their humanness, but on the contrary, that they could become human, since Christ was the perfect example of all that humanity was meant to be.' ^[11] To follow Christ is not to become less human. It is to become, finally, the thing Adam was supposed to be.

The Cross and Resurrection: The Center That Holds

The church confesses that on the cross, 'Christ bore our sins, took our punishment, propitiated God's wrath against us, and purchased our redemption.' ^[SF] The preaching here keeps returning to that with direct, unhedged gratitude: 'Thank God, thank God, thank God that Jesus was ready to be broken, so we could be forgiven. Thank God that Jesus was ready to bleed and die, so we could be washed clean.' ^[1] He 'took on human form. He was obedient to God, ultimately to suffer and die for us.' ^[1] The obedience and the suffering are not incidental — they are the whole point of the descent.

And the resurrection is not an appendix to the story. It is 'the ultimate example of God's spiritual triumph over the physical realm' ^[12] — and it is the first of many. 'Jesus is the first harvest of what will become many sons and daughters physically resurrected to stand before Him in glory.' ^[21] The confession is equally concrete: 'He was buried and arose bodily from the dead on the third day, ascended to heaven, and is now enthroned at the right hand of God, reigning over all things and interceding for his people as their Great High Priest.' ^[SF] He is not merely remembered; he is enthroned.

The historical case for this is not a theological retreat — it is a claim staked in public history. Crucifixion leads to death '100% of the time.' Many 'claim to see and interact with Jesus after his death,' including 'skeptics whose entire lives and careers and reputations were built around the idea that Jesus was not God, but who later became convinced by encountering Christ that he had indeed raised from the dead.' ^[13] And the message was 'taught immediately.' ^[13] The resurrection is not mythology retrofitted onto history. It is the event that explains everything else.

His Resurrection Power, Now at Work in You

The arc of Philippians 2 does not end at the cross. 'God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that in the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God, Father.' ^[1] The humiliation and the exaltation belong to the same person — and the exaltation is total.

And here is what that means for everyone who is in him: 'Thank God that Jesus was ready to rise from the dead, so that all his resurrection power, all his resurrection power, could be at work in us. So that he could grant us all the power we need to walk in the works that he has privileged us to fulfill. His resurrection power in us, empowering us.' ^[1] The doctrine is not abstract. The same power that emptied the tomb is the power that is at work in you, right now, for the ordinary work of obedience. That is not an exaggeration. That is exactly what the text says. ^[1][SF]

This page synthesizes what Chris Oswald has preached on christology at Providence Community Church. Every claim above traces to the cited sermons — follow any citation to read the full sermon, listen to the audio, and see the surrounding context. Minute marks are approximate, estimated from each sermon's transcript.