Christ Alone

Christ Alone

“Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)

Salvation is solus Christus, “by Christ alone”—that is, Christ is the only Saviour.

Martin Luther said that Jesus Christ is the “centre and circumference of the Bible”—meaning that who He is and what He did in His death and resurrection is the fundamental content of Scripture.

Our Reformed forebears, drawing on a perspective traceable all the way back to the fourth-century writer Eusebius of Caesarea, found it helpful to think about Christ as a Prophet, Priest, and King.

Christ the Prophet

Christ is the Prophet whom we need to instruct us in the things of God so as to heal our blindness and ignorance. The Heidelberg Catechism calls Him ‘our chief Prophet and Teacher, who has fully revealed to us the secret counsel and will of God concerning our redemption’ (A. 31). “The Lord your God,” Moses declared in Deuteronomy 18:15, “will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your midst, from your brethren. Him you shall hear.” He is God’s Son, and God demands that we listen to Him (Matt 17:5).

As the Prophet, Jesus is the only One who can reveal what God has been purposing in history “since the world began” and who can teach and make manifest the real meaning of the “scriptures of the prophets” (the Old Testament; see Rom 16:25–26). We can expect to make progress in the Christian life only as we heed His instruction and teaching.

— Joel Beeke