"Why did David call him 'Lord'?"

One of the big questions surrounding the life of Jesus is, roughly, "What just happened?" We understand that whatever just happened is large, out-of-the-ordinary. We understand that the answers will affect our view of God, of morality, of whether life after death is a pipe dream or if it's real. We understand that it will take us awhile to wrap our minds around what has happened. And we start with: Who exactly is this Jesus? It's a question that Jesus himself raised with his disciples. 

Some of the questions we have about the nature of Christ have fairly clear answers in Scripture. For example, consider the question "Did Jesus believe that the Messiah was simply a human descendant of David?" For the answer, many Christians are content to find their answer in Jesus own challenge to that thought in his own day: "Why did David call him 'Lord'?" That conversation is recorded in all three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew 22:43-45, Mark 12:36-37, Luke 20:42-44), indicating that all the writers of the synoptic gospels considered it to be both accurate and important. 

In Acts 2:34-36, we have a record of Peter employing that same line of reasoning and the same quote to demonstrate: "Therefore, let all Israel know: God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ." That seems to be a clear demonstration that Jesus is considered to be above us -- and that Peter attributed Jesus' status to God. It is fairly easy to read that quote from Peter as saying that Jesus is important over all the world, that he is in authority over us, and is the Christ. It is fairly difficult to read that quote from Peter and assume that he thought Jesus was either God or part of a triune God. To complicate matters, I can see how those words -- spoken by David, quoted by Jesus, cited by Peter -- are a direct claim not only to Jesus' special status with regard to God, but also at least a hint of his existence long before the human Jesus was born. Whatever is going on, it's not simple. 

The next direction of this series is to review the New Testament writings that are generally argued both for and against the different understandings of Jesus, whether orthodox or unorthodox. I'll skip the book of Revelation, where I find the symbolic elements too prominent for any argument from it to be logically conclusive. At any rate I am not aware of anyone taking an indispensable proof for their position from Revelation. 

To be continued