If Jesus is not God, as John asserts and Jesus himself declares, and if he is not “my Lord and my God” as Thomas exclaims, then we have no hope. We have no gospel. Jesus is able to die in our place and reconcile us to the Father precisely because he is the divine Son of God, worthy to atone for the sins of all who would believe in him.
I usually don’t care to debate the theological opinions I hear on the radio. This is mostly because I believe Christian radio hosts are simply trying to love Jesus, love people, and do some encouraging things in the world. Furthermore, they do not seem to offer their opinions as though they believed they were the official teachers of the church universal.
Every now and then, however, someone says something that causes me to say, “No!” In my head, this is usually followed by a little bit of debate with whoever said what they said. In this hypothetical interaction, I often attempt to offer a bit winsome correction. To be honest, though, this is simply an exercise that helps me get my own head around why I think what I just heard is out of theological bounds.
The other day I was driving down the road and listening to a Christian radio station somewhere in Wisconsin. I do not remember what song had just played and, honestly, I do not recall much of what was going on. However, at one point the host said something along these lines:
“When we spend time with Jesus, by proxy we meet with God.”
When I heard that, I paused. I immediately knew something was off. But I wanted to be sure, so (at the next stop), I looked up the dictionary definition of proxy to see if it meant what I thought it meant. Here are the definitions of proxy via Merriam-Webster.
First, Webster provides the “essential meaning.”

A person who is given the power and authority to do something (such as vote) for someone else;
Power or authority that is given to allow a person to act for someone else.

Then, a fuller meaning is provided. The problematic language within the “essential meaning” and the “fuller meaning” is simply that a “proxy” acts as a “substitute…for another.” The idea of being a proxy is that the proxy represents and acts for someone else, for someone they are not. For instance, imagine if it were legal to allow your spouse to vote in your place during an election. I might give my wife the right to cast my vote if I’m unable to do so due to sickness, travel, or any other unforeseen circumstance. She acts on my behalf yet she is not me. Or, perhaps, imagine I have given power of attorney to her so that she can sign a document for me. She again acts on my behalf but she, again, is not me. We are not the same person.
If that is the meaning of proxy, then the host of the radio show has said in essence that when you meet with Jesus, you meet with God via someone who acts on God’s behalf but is not God himself. At least this is the implication of the words, even if this was not the intent. He did not say that when you meet with Jesus, you meet with the Father via proxy. There is perhaps a way we could nuance that to make it work, since the Son is not the Father, though they are one in essence. But, even there, the Son and the Father, along with the Spirit, are without division. To meet with the Son is to be with the Father and the Spirit. However we might have parsed out that idea is beside the point. The host said that when you meet with Jesus, you meet with “God via proxy.” That does not work, because to meet with Jesus is to meet with the God of the Cosmos.
The Bible is abundantly clear on the identity of Jesus Christ. He is no mere mortal. Jesus is God of very God, while also being fully human. When we talk of Jesus, we speak of the one in whom perfect deity and complete humanity are joined together without mixture or confusion.
The Gospel of John paints the picture as clear as any portion of the Bible. As soon as John opens his Gospel, the deity of Jesus flies off the page.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:1-5)
In the context of John, the Word is a reference to Jesus (John 1:14). John opens by pointing to the creation account in Genesis, letting the reader know that this Jesus, though recently born of a woman, was there when the world was created. He was with God at the start and, in fact, “was God.” Being God, he is the agent of creation and had life in himself. He was, then, the a se Word (from where we get the idea of aseity).

Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
The Old Testament is coming alive before our eyes. Suddenly Sodom and Gomorrah seem more real, do they not? Nothing will subvert the new sexual order more than singing joyfully the Songs of Zion in the midst of the nations raging against the King (Ps. 2).

It was only a matter of time. There is a story on CNN about the the 2019 publication of a LGBTQ hymnal, Songs For The Holy Other: Hymns Affirming the LGBTQIA2S+ Community. This collection is published by the Hymn Society, which is a century old this year.
The story begins with an acknowledgement of the affective power of singing. The first interview is with a Lesbian who chafed at being “tolerated” in the church. She wanted her Lesbian sexuality be affirmed even as she wanted to retain her Christian faith. She sought to synthesize Christianity with feminism as she studied music and “fell in love” with her “now-wife.” She contributed two hymns to the collection.
The title is a play on words. Theologians often speak of God as “wholly other” as a way to characterize his transcendence. The title uses a homonym but applies it to homosexuals in the church. They are the “holy” other. According to CNN, the hymnal was compiled by people from “seven denominations and a wide range of sexualities and gender identities.”
The contributors are explicit about their aim: “It is important for churches to explicitly state who is welcome there. It is important for members of our community to hear their names spoken—and sung—in their houses of worship…”. One authority contacted for the piece identifies as “pansexual.” “Queer people,” she says, “are longing to be heard,” she says “The church was supposed to protect them and love them and teach them about God. It has made a lot of mistakes, and we have a lot to make up for.”
Analysis
We are in the midst of the third phase of a great sexual revolution in the last century. The first, a century ago, was about the role of women in secular society and in that revolution women gained the freedom to drive and to vote. In the second phase, in the 1970s, women left the house for full-time careers, gained no-fault divorce, and abortion on demand. In the third, the very definition of marriage has been turned on its head and the heterosexual hegemony—grounded in nature since time immemorial—is being overturned in favor of queer, pan-sexual neo-paganism. It turns out that Pandora’s Box is pan-sexual chaos. It is so radical that even some third-wave feminists and advocates of homosexuality and homosexual marriage are complaining about being marginalized.
In the face of this revolution Christians have two choices, to try to co-opt the culture (or be co-opted by it) or to resist it. Of course, the mainline churches (e.g., the United Churches of Christ, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Episcopal Church USA et al) will try to incorporate the radical new sexual ethos in a sad attempt to remain relevant, but after giving up the Scriptures as the un-normed norm, what else can the seven sisters do?
For our purposes, the question facing the confessional Presbyterian and Reformed (P&R) churches is this: is there a rule of worship or not? It is the unquestioned assumption of this hymnal and its advocates that it is the function of the church and her hymns to affirm and to express the religious experience of the church. As the church changes, so must the hymnal.
The confessional P&R churches, however, do not begin with that assumption. They begin with the assumption that it is not the function of singing in worship for us to say whatever we want to God but to repeat God’s Word after him. The role of a song in worship is not for us to say to God what is on our hearts but for the congregation to say to God what is on his heart.
This is how the classical Reformed churches understood the function of singing. They understood worship to be a dialogue in which God speaks and his people respond but the Reformed all understood that God’s people are to respond with his Word. This is part of what they understood sola Scriptura to mean: God’s Word is sufficient for the Christian faith, the Christian life, and public worship.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, as religious subjectivism swept through the Modern church, first under the influence of Pietism, and then under the influence of the liberal children and grandchildren of the Pietists, God’s Word was gradually marginalized in favor of Watts’ paraphrases of the Psalms and then, finally, hymns. Eventually, in virtually every quarter of the church (and even in most P&R churches) the hymnal completely routed the Psalter.
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When I speak of the means of grace, I have in my mind’s eye five principal things,—the reading of the Bible, private prayer, public worship, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and the rest of the Lord’s day. They are means which God has graciously appointed, in order to convey grace to man’s heart by the Holy Ghost, or to keep up the spiritual life after it has begun. JC Ryle, Practical Religion, 14.

And enjoy him.
We all know the phrase. Our chief end is to glorify and enjoy God. This is the Presbyterian way.
Do we enjoy him? Do you enjoy him?
Do we enjoy the means given to us that allows us to know him, glorify, and enjoy him? These are important questions. This past week I was convicted by JC Ryle (as I often am) as he challenged his hearers on whether they are enjoying the means that God has given to them. I thought I would share a portion of that with you under this question:
Do you enjoy the means of grace? Ryle says,
When I speak of the means of grace, I have in my mind’s eye five principal things,—the reading of the Bible, private prayer, public worship, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and the rest of the Lord’s day. They are means which God has graciously appointed, in order to convey grace to man’s heart by the Holy Ghost, or to keep up the spiritual life after it has begun. As long as the world stands, the state of a man’s soul will always depend greatly on the manner and spirit in which he uses means of grace. The manner and spirit, I say deliberately and of purpose. Many… people use the means of grace regularly and formally, but know nothing of enjoying them: they attend to them as a matter of duty, but without a jot of feeling, interest, or affection. JC Ryle, Practical Religion, 14.
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