What the Humiliation and Exaltation of Jesus Mean for Us by Jonty Rhodes (Wheaton: Crossway, 2021)
The author of Ecclesiastes felt the weariness of living in a world with too many books. But there aren’t enough books about Jesus. There are plenty of books about the Christian life, about the Bible, about prayer. But not many good books about Jesus himself. Jonty Rhodes has taken some of the most difficult Christological doctrines and discussed the mystery of Christ in a way that everyday Christians can understand. If you’ve struggled to comprehend how Jesus can be one person with two natures, how he can be God and man without having a split personality, what is meant by Jesus’ active obedience and his passive obedience, and did Jesus have infallible knowledge about everything, then you will be very interested in what Rhodes has to say. By reading this book, you not only learn theology, you are given an opportunity to draw closer to Jesus. The gospel doesn’t just offer you the many benefits of Christ (such as justification), it offers you Christ himself. Jesus’ exaltation to the right hand of God teaches us many things, but one thing it does is assure us that in Christ we are on the right side of history. The world may mock us for our beliefs about marriage, gender, and life beginning at conception, but the fact is that Jesus is presently ruling as King of kings, and he is bringing history to a conclusion that will be satisfying to him.
I was learning things for the first time in reading this book: to think that Jesus is the only truly normal human who has ever lived, because he was without sin and therefore his entire life, from conception to ascension, is the true human life! I had never considered that the ugliness of my sin is described in the Bible in four different ways: alienation from God, darkness, fuel for the fire, and vomit. I had never contemplated how the answer to the question of that old hymn – “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” – is both yes and no. Yes, because Jesus is my representative and since by faith I’m united to Christ, I was crucified with Christ. But the answer is also no, I was not there, for Christ is my substitute, and He was there so that I wouldn’t have to be there. Rhodes isn’t saying anything new in this book. He’s often expanding on quotations from the early church fathers, and then from Calvin, Owen, Bavinck, Warfield, and Stott. Here’s a line from Berkhof that I just loved: Jesus’ “burial, did not merely serve to prove that Jesus was really dead, but also to remove the terrors of the grave for the redeemed and to sanctify the grave for them.” But Rhodes contributes real value himself by making the case that not only the New but even the Old Testament is the Word of Jesus: “In one sense Jesus never ‘quotes’ the Old Testament; rather, he repeats what he said earlier.”
Whether we want to admit it or not, most of us walk around with a little bit of heresy and a lot of theological confusion. Don’t believe me? Next time you’re in a Bible study, just ask people whether it was possible for Jesus to sin. The biblical answer is to insist that Jesus was impeccable, that he could not sin. And yet his temptations were genuine. Rhodes gives you clarity on the hypostatic union: “Because he’s the Son of God, he could not sin. But he resisted Satan not according to his divine but according to his Spirit-filled human nature. After all, what we need is human righteousness, not divine.” This book doesn’t give you a narrative exploration of Jesus. For that you might pick up Rebecca McLaughlin’s excellent and brand-new Confronting Jesus: 9 Encounters with the Hero of the Gospels. What Rhodes does give you is Christology for laypeople. And even the professionals will be glad they read it.
