Identity in Christ
But who is he?
[This post oringally appeared last year as an exclusive to the Substack IM Writers Forum. Visit and find great Christian writers! Enjoy!]
[This is Creation Reformation’s newsletter. Will you subscribe? (It will make our day!) Enjoy!]
If your good friend wrote a novel with you as a character, how would he describe you? A talented author would develop a picture in words describing your outwardly visible looks, your inwardly evident attributes, and possibly some relevant quirks and idiosyncrasies. Your family history and national origin, as well as your occupation and hobbies, might help to color a full description. But would the author’s characterization of you provide indications that you are “in Christ?”
For the sake of fully living in our true identity, it’s time to take back the creation narrative.
If you are a Christian, upon believing the truth of the Gospel message, a miracle happened: Your identity immediately changed. By God’s grace alone, your fundamental identity changed from that characterized by the death of sin to that of new life “in Christ.” Being alive “in Christ” becomes the most meaningful and consequential component of any Christian’s being, and it should be evident to others. Everything else pales in comparative eternal significance.
But who is Christ? Is Jesus the miraculously incarnate God-man, God the Son sent from heaven to earth as Emmanual—God with us—born of a woman? Or is Jesus merely an evolved animal in a long chain of evolved animals, all of whom trace their meaningless ancestry back to a first, primitive, chance life form on earth? To borrow a phrase, was Jesus a liar, a lunatic, or Lord?
The question of Jesus’ true identity must be answered to determine if our identity “in Christ” carries any genuine, rather than imagined, meaning.
When framed in terms of the most eternally consequential aspect of being human, determining Jesus’ identity becomes more than a mere academic exercise. His identity makes or breaks our hope on earth and in eternity. If Jesus arrived on earth as nothing more than evolved matter flung out from the Big Bang, the Gospel is a farce, God is a fiction, and humanity lives a purposeless, hopeless existence.
If evolutionary theory’s materialistic foundation is reality, then Christians have been duped by a liar or a lunatic. Because between “liar, lunatic, or Lord,” Lord is impossible; no conglomeration of mere atoms can make a “Lord,” and the very notion is foreign to a materialistic reality. In a universe of bare matter in motion, there is no God, no supernatural, no purpose, and no meaning. In such a universe, Jesus evolved like every other animal. His body consisted of nothing more than the temporary chance location of some bits of matter that burst forth long ago in the Big Bang.
We find that if Christianity—and our identity in Christ—has any meaning, the question of Jesus’ nature demands far more consideration than that allowed by scientists beholden to naturalistic, materialistic philosophy. When scientists practice naturalism, the idea that natural processes alone must explain the existence and nature of Jesus, they impose materialism’s philosophical assumptions on the question. And the assumptions of materialistic science driven by philosophical naturalism answer the question before it is asked: Jesus could not be who He claimed to be.
But what if materialism’s demand for naturalistic explanations rests on wrong assumptions? Can we legitimately apply a different presupposition—that a supernatural creative God exists—to reasonably understand Jesus’—and our—existence differently? And does this different presupposition permit the scientific evidence we see around us to lead naturally to different explanations for human identity as well as Jesus’ identity?
The answer to the last two questions is a resounding yes, and yes. By freeing our minds from the assumption-driven constraint of philosophical naturalism in science, we find we can freely use our minds, reason, and logical thinking to understand the evidence on earth differently. And when viewed without self-imposed limitations, this evidence clearly points to a scientific basis for embracing the Bible’s triune God as creator. And evidence of our creation by God in His image also fulfills a theologically necessary condition, without which we lose the gospel. Without creation by God first, there is no sin, no need for redemption, and no need for the necessary nature of Jesus as the fully God and fully human savior.
The effective hope of Christians’ identity in Christ rests on recognizing that rightly answering the question of our existence is far more than a scientific endeavor. A right view of our creation becomes a theological necessity for Christians. In short, if evolutionary theory is true, the Bible’s account of our creation in God’s image is not true: No Adam ever existed, sin is a human construct, and redemption becomes a meaningless abstraction. And Jesus? Well, he simply evolved as another “mud man” without any divine breath of life. Life itself reduces to a mere difference in category among all of nature’s meaningless mass of molecules.
Christians, consider the question of Jesus Christ’s identity—and by his grace, our identity—carefully. If scripture is true, then evolutionary explanations for our existence must be false.
For the sake of fully living in our true identity, it’s time to take back the creation narrative. Only by recognizing that science supports the Genesis account of creation as true history can we fully live “in Christ” as our living Lord and savior. Because the Bible’s account of creation not only aligns with modern science, it describes God’s gracious redemptive plan leading to life, and life more abundantly, in Christ.
To God be the glory!
(C) 2025 Creation Reformation. Roddy Bullock is the founder of Creation Reformation and author of several books related to creation and evolution. For more information, visit www.creationreformation.com, or visit (and follow!) us at Facebook.
Please send editorial comments, including indications of typos and grammatical errors to info@creationreformation.com. If you want to know why there are typos, see my post On the Origin of Pieces by Means of Natural Correction. Enjoy!
And finally, our latest video. It’s long, but good (put it on 1.25 speed :)):
