First, the believer is making a confession in the person Jesus Christ. The Creed will go on to confess the uniqueness of his birth, his suffering death by crucifixion, he descent into hades, his resurrection, and his ascension and session at the right hand of God. We begin by confessing his identity: his name is Jesus.

“I believe…in Jesus Christ, his [God’s] only Son, our Lord”

So every believer confesses and so it is found in the Apostles’ Creed. Let’s unpack four things that we find in this phrase of the Creed: (1) Jesus; (2) Jesus Christ; (3) God’s only Son; (4) our Lord.

First, the believer is making a confession in the person Jesus Christ. The Creed will go on to confess the uniqueness of his birth, his suffering death by crucifixion, he descent into hades, his resurrection, and his ascension and session at the right hand of God. We begin by confessing his identity: he name is Jesus. Both Mary and Joseph were told that this is what his name should be:

Luke 1:31-32 And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David,

Matt. 1:21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

Jesus is a real person, the Son of God incarnate. We confess his name. He was real and was born of the virgin. Jesus was not a mythical figure, like Hercules. From the very beginning the church understood and confessed this. The work of God is manifest within history and so too the activity of the Son of God takes place in space and time as the Word becomes flesh. We are putting our faith and trust in a person, his name is Jesus.

Second, Jesus is the Christ. It is not as if we are confessing that “Jesus” is this person’s first name and “Christ” is his last name. No. Jesus was known as “Jesus of Nazareth.” Christ is the title that Jesus was given by the Father. Christ is the Greek word for Messiah, which means Anointed One.  The concept of anointing goes back into the riches of the Old Testament where God would often anoint prophets, priests, and kings to mark them and set them apart for his service.

The Messiah, or the Christ, was the promised King from the line of David. It was promised that one day an anointed one would come and be the true King. So, we are confessing something that is deeply rooted in the Old Testament. Even as the Christian faith moved from Jerusalem and Jewish believers into the Greco-Roman and Hellenistic world, Christian never stopped confessing that Jesus was the Christ. He was the Messiah, God’s anointed. Sent, as Matthew says “to save his people from their sins” and as in Luke, God has given to him “the throne of his father David.”

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