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The Deity of Christ and the Limits of Fellowship

The question has sometimes been proposed to me: “How it is that those of us who hold the deity of Christ manifest what is called uncharitableness towards those who deny him?”

We do continually affirm that an error, with regard to the deity of Christ, is absolutely fatal. A man cannot be right in his judgment upon any part of the gospel unless he thinks rightly of him who is personally the very center of all the purposes of heaven and the foundation of all the hopes of earth.

Nor can we admit of any leeway here. We extend the right hand of fellowship to all those who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity and truth; but we cannot exchange our Christian greetings with those who deny him to be “very God of very God.”

If Christ were not the Son of God, his death, so far from being a satisfaction for sin, was a death most richly and righteously deserved. The Sanhedrim before which He was tried was the recognized and authorized legislature of the country. He was brought before that Sanhedrim, charged with blasphemy, and it was upon that charge that they condemned him to die, because he made himself the Son of God.

It is his being verily God that frees him from the charge of blasphemy. It is the fact that he is God and that his Godhead is not to be denied that makes his death an unrighteous deed at the hand of apostate man, and renders it, as before God, an acceptable sacrifice for the sins of all the people whom he redeemed with his most precious blood.

There is no folly in the world so mad as the folly of denying the deity of Christ and then professing to be his followers. No, beloved:

“Let all the forms that men devise,
Assault our faith with treacherous art;
We’ll call them vanity and lies,
And bind the gospel to our heart!”

 

~ Charles Spurgeon