The Excellency of Christ

There is a tendency lodged deep in the human heart: to want God, but not on His own terms. Fallen man has no trouble at all speaking of spirituality, of transcendence, of divinity; his problem is with the living and true God as He has actually revealed Himself. From the beginning, the sinner tries to pull God closer, moved less by reverence than by a wish to domesticate Him. What he wants is a god who can be molded, one the senses can grasp and who fits neatly inside human expectations. This is exactly what Israel did at the foot of Sinai. While Moses was on the mountain, the people demanded a visible representation of the divinity, and Aaron made a golden calf. Then they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4).

The sin there did not amount merely to worshiping “another god” in the shallowest sense of the phrase. It lay in the attempt to represent the true God through an image fabricated by the human imagination. It was a religion shaped by man, an effort to shrink the glory of the Lord down to a form that was acceptable, visible, and under control. Idolatry always works this way. It is not content to replace God; it distorts Him, trading the divine majesty for something lesser, easier to handle and comfortable to the rebellious heart (Exodus 32:4).

But what man could never do for himself, God accomplished perfectly in His Son. Man tried to create an image to represent God; God gave us Christ, who is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15). Here is the glorious contrast of the gospel. On one side stands the false image produced by the sinner; on the other, the perfect revelation given by God Himself. Christ is the full and holy self-revelation of God, not a religious projection of humanity.

Hebrews declares that the Son is “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3). That is to say: to know Christ is truly to know God. To know Him not exhaustively, since God remains infinite in His majesty, but truly, faithfully, and savingly. In Christ, God was not shrunk down to fit into human categories. On the contrary, He made Himself known perfectly without ceasing to be who He is. The Son reveals the glory of the Father with no distortion, no corruption, and no falsehood.

This is why the excellency of Christ cannot be treated as a doctrinal detail. It stands at the center of the Christian faith. Christ is excellent because in Him we behold the glory of God and see the divine holiness with no deformation at all. Excellent, too, because in Him shines everything the human heart could never invent: perfect righteousness, absolute truth, spotless purity, sovereign grace, and the majesty of God Himself (Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3).

And this excellency is not only ontological, as though we were saying merely that Christ is divine (which is gloriously true). It is also moral. The eternal Son became man and, in His perfect humanity, lived without sin, without stain, without corruption. Scripture affirms that we were ransomed “with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Peter 1:18-19). The value of that blood is tied to the excellency of His person. Only an absolutely holy Savior could offer Himself for sinners, and only a Lamb without blemish could purify the stained.

This brings us to the heart of redemption. Christ came for far more than to speak of God: He came to reconcile us to God. Hebrews says that, after making purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high (Hebrews 1:3). The same Christ who perfectly reveals the Father is the one who completely purifies His people. He who is the image of the invisible God is also the Lamb who takes away sin. His glory does not distance Him from the cross; it is precisely what makes the cross effective. His divinity confers infinite value upon His sacrifice, and His holy humanity qualifies Him as the perfect substitute.

Here the soul finds rest. We were not purified by gold or silver, nor by human merit, religious effort, or external ceremony. We were purified by the precious blood of Christ (1 Peter 1:18-19). The golden calf was the work of human hands, and it led the people into corruption. Christ came from the hands of the Father, and He leads His people into purification, into reconciliation, into life. The idol is born of sin and deepens bondage; Christ comes in holiness and truly sets free.

It is then that the pastoral application becomes profoundly beautiful. The Bible teaches us that eternal life consists in knowing God and Jesus Christ (John 17:3). The greatest good of man, then, is not simply to escape hell, nor merely to enter heaven as a place. It is to know God in Christ. Paradise is not, first of all, geographical; it is relational. The glory of eternal life is to see, know, love, and enjoy the triune God through the Son. Heaven is heaven because Christ is there, and eternal life already begins now, in true communion with Him (John 17:3).

If this is true, the believer must cultivate a holy anxiety to know Christ more. A real spiritual hunger, not a merely intellectual curiosity or a surface-level religious interest. The regenerate heart desires Christ because it recognizes that in Him lies the fullness of the revelation of God, and the fullness of salvation as well. The more one knows Christ, the more one knows God; and the more one knows God, the more the soul finds its true rest (John 17:3; Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3).

And here, unavoidably, the commitment to biblical reading enters. If Christ is the perfect revelation of God, and if the Scriptures are the inspired, sufficient, and infallible means by which God testifies of His Son, then no one can claim to love Christ deeply while setting aside the Word of God (2 Timothy 3:16-17). The desire and the hunger for Christ must lead us to Scripture, to the Bible. And the love for Christ must produce spiritual discipline, devotional constancy, and reverent submission to the revealed truth.

Scripture is more than an accessory of the Christian life. It is the only infallible rule of faith and practice, the true and sufficient source of the revelation of God for the church (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Apart from it, man does not know the true Christ; he only creates caricatures of Him. Without Scripture, we soon stop beholding the Son as God has revealed Him and start carving more acceptable versions of Jesus. A domesticated, sentimental Christ, powerless before sin, adjusted to the sensibilities of culture and the tastes of the natural heart. In other words: whenever we abandon the biblical revelation, we begin to build new golden calves.

This is a necessary warning for our days. Idolatry still exists, even when it does not take the form of a carved image. Every time we try to fit God into human patterns, we repeat the spirit of Exodus 32 (Exodus 32:4). When we accept only the attributes of God that please us and reject the ones that confront our pride; when we want a Christ who consoles but does not reign; who forgives but does not demand repentance; who saves but does not govern, what we are really doing is remaking God according to our image. This is not true devotion; it is sophisticated idolatry.

Christ, however, cannot be reduced to the molds of man. He is the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Him (John 14:6). It is not for the sinner to define how God must be known, nor for culture to determine who Christ is. Still less is it for the human heart to set the terms of revelation. God has spoken, and He has spoken fully in His Son (Hebrews 1:3). The church is not called to update, soften, or reinvent Christ; it is called to behold Him, proclaim Him, and submit to Him.

Therefore, the church's most urgent need is biblical contemplation, not religious creativity. New symbols to represent God will not serve us; what is ours to do is look with faith to the Son of God revealed in the Scriptures. A spirituality shaped by autonomous emotions will not suffice either; we need hearts surrendered to the Word. And we do not need a god adapted to modern psychology. What we do need is the excellent, holy, glorious, sufficient, and immutable Christ.

May the Lord deliver us from fabricating images of God according to the fallen imagination. May He destroy our refined idols, our reduced conceptions, and our religious projections. And may He, by grace, grant us eyes to see the beauty of Christ, hunger to know Him, and perseverance to seek Him in the Scriptures. For eternal life is to know Him, and Christ is the image of the invisible God. For only the Lamb without blemish can purify sinners, and there is no true glory for the soul apart from Him who is the way, the truth, and the life (John 17:3; Colossians 1:15; John 14:6; 1 Peter 1:18-19).

We conclude that:

• To know God in Christ is the greatest good of the soul and the very essence of eternal life (John 17:3).
• The sincere desire for Christ must produce a real commitment to the reading, meditation, and obedience of the Scriptures (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
• Every attempt to mold God according to human criteria is idolatry, even if it uses religious language (Exodus 32:4).
• Christ is the perfect revelation of God and the only mediator through whom one comes to the Father (John 14:6; Hebrews 1:3).
• The blood of Christ purifies because He is the Lamb without blemish, holy and perfectly sufficient to save (1 Peter 1:18-19).

Prayer

Lord our God, deliver us from unworthy thoughts about You. Guard us from reducing Your glory to the measures of our fallen mind. Grant us grace to behold the excellency of Christ, to love His person, to rest in His blood, and to seek His face in the Scriptures. Produce in us a holy hunger for Your Word, reverence before Your truth, and joy in knowing Him who is the image of the invisible God. In the name of Jesus. Amen.