Jesus: Titles & Roles

A boy carrying firewood up a mountain asks his father the question the whole Bible will spend two thousand years answering: "where is the lamb?"

"Behold, the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? And Abraham said, God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son." — Genesis 22:7–8, ASV

Then the thread runs. In Egypt a lamb dies per household and the blood on the door is the whole difference: "when I see the blood, I will pass over you" (Exodus 12:13). In Leviticus the lamb becomes daily furniture, morning and evening, without a break. In Isaiah the lamb stops being an animal: "as a lamb that is led to the slaughter... so he opened not his mouth" (Isaiah 53:7).

Four hundred silent years later a prophet standing in the Jordan points at a man walking toward him and says the sentence the thread was built for: "Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29, ASV).

And the thread does not end at the cross. The last book of the Bible puts the Lamb in the middle of the throne, not a picture of weakness but of the wound that won: "a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain" (Revelation 5:6, ASV). Heaven's permanent center is a scar.

Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1706–1721), reads Abraham's answer on Moriah as a word spoken better than he knew: the lamb God provides for himself is finally God's own.

Jesus was born in the tribe of Judah. Priests came from Levi. By the law of Moses he was not eligible to serve at the altar at all, and the New Testament's longest sustained argument about him is that he is a priest anyway.

The argument turns on one strange man and one line of a psalm. Melchizedek walks out of nowhere in Genesis 14, "king of Salem... priest of God Most High" (14:18, ASV), blesses Abraham, takes a tenth, and vanishes. No genealogy, no birth, no death, no successor. A thousand years later a psalm swears an oath about someone else entirely:

"Jehovah hath sworn, and will not repent: Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek." — Psalm 110:4, ASV

Hebrews takes those two texts and builds. A priesthood with no recorded beginning and no recorded end is exactly the shape of a priesthood that never has to be handed on, Melchizedek "abideth a priest continually" (Hebrews 7:3, ASV), and so does the one the oath is about.

The point is not technical. Levitical priests died, so the office kept changing hands; and they offered blood that was never their own. This priest offers himself, once, and stays. And because he wore a body, the intercession is not distant: he "hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15, ASV).

John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), on Hebrews 7, takes "without father, without mother" as a statement about the silence of the record, Melchizedek's line is simply not given, and that silence is the point.

John builds his Gospel out of two matched sets: seven things Jesus does, and seven things Jesus says he is. Read either alone and you get half the book.

The sayings all begin the same way, egō eimi, "I am." Bread. Light. Door. Good shepherd. Resurrection and the life. Way, truth and life. True vine. Each one takes something a person cannot live without and puts a name on it.

Then once, near the end of an argument about Abraham, Jesus drops the predicate and says only the two words:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was born, I am." — John 8:58, ASV

That is not bad grammar. That is Exodus 3:14, "I AM THAT I AM," the name given at the burning bush, spoken in the first person by a man in the temple courts. The next verse records the response: "They took up stones therefore to cast at him." They understood him perfectly.

And John says outright what all fourteen pieces are for: "these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in his name" (John 20:31, ASV).

John Calvin, Commentaries (Calvin Translation Society translation), on John 8:58, presses the same point: the contrast is not between one long life and another, but between everything that came to be and the One who simply is.

Pull any single title out of the constellation and you get a smaller Christ.

Take only Lamb and you get a victim with no throne. Take only King of kings and you get a throne with no cross. Take only Son of Man and you get a man; take only Son of God and you get a stranger; take only I AM and you get a claim with nothing to touch. Scripture never lets a reader do that.

The clearest place to watch it happen is Revelation 5. John hears one title announced and turns to see a different one standing there:

"Behold, the Lion that is of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath overcome... And I saw... a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain." — Revelation 5:5–6, ASV

Heard: Lion. Seen: Lamb. Same person, in the same sentence, and neither cancels the other, the Lion conquers by being the Lamb.

That is why this page is a wall and not a list. Each title opens where it stands, but the confession is the whole wall: one person, seven families of names, and one sentence over all of them, the name above every name (Philippians 2:9–11).