If Jesus is the Christ (God’s chosen Saviour of the world, who will deal with sin and return God’s mob to rest), God’s only Son (and so the right ruler of the world who gathers God’s mob home), and our Lord, then how is this all achieved?
The next phrase of The Apostles’ Creed asserts the historical truth of the actions of Jesus, their means, and by implication, their efficacy and purpose. It is here that we publicly state that the death of Jesus was not a wasted life, but the final sacrifice of the only man who could stand in for sinners like us. In this statement, we believe that Jesus paid for our sins – once and for all.
We must keep remembering that The Apostles’ Creed speaks to the world we live in. And the world we live in is marked, defined, by restlessness. This is the absence of rest – and the dominance of searching for rest – in work, in leisure, in experience, in self-discovery.
It is against this backdrop that we must understand the next part of The Apostles’ Creed – ‘I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary…’. The Incarnation – the birth of Jesus as THE God-man – is the only answer for the restlessness of our world. And this is because our restless lives are the expression of sin, and its judgement… and only someone who is both fully God and fully man can deal with our sin.
Each week, we publicly state what we believe, as we gather as God’s mob. Each week, we publicly state that we believe certain truths about God – about His nature, about His actions, about His community, about His interactions with this world. In fact, as an Anglican Church, we are part of a denomination that states we hold to three ‘creeds’, three summary statements about what we believe about God – the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicaean Creed and the Athanasian Creed.
Each creed emerged in response to certain questions – about the nature of God, about the nature of the Trinity. But the earliest was the Apostles’ Creed, a summary of the truth of the apostles, originally created for baptisms. In fact, to have such a creed – a summary – is following in the footsteps of God’s word – just look at Deuteronomy 6:4, or Romans 10:8-9, or Philippians 2:5-11.
