Month: October 2016

The Word was with God and the Word was God … and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. (Jn 1:1, 14)

Lord, I look at the Incarnation and marvel. Praise You!  

The radical claim of the Christian faith is that God became a man. Christians call this the Incarnation, which means something like “in the flesh.” For a time on Earth, God had skin and bones as you and I do.

Some people say that’s crazy, and I suppose, in one sense, they are correct. Reality often is crazy. But if Jesus is God, as He claimed, then rejecting Him is crazier. The Incarnation raises the stakes in Jesus. He is not just a good teacher. He is not just a noble man. He is not one choice among many. He is not someone you can listen to only if you feel like it. He is God, and He has every right to demand your allegiance. But many people have problems with the idea that they must yield to Jesus. I understand. I’m as human as you are. I don’t like yielding any more than you do.

Sometimes people will say that the problem they have with the Incarnation is intellectual. They will say that the idea of God being a man is a logical impossibility, for God cannot be limited. It is interesting that they then put a limit on God by telling us something God cannot do. Why can’t God enter history? Isn’t He God? Why limit Him if He can’t be limited?

Of course, what they mean specifically is that the omnipresent, omnipotent God, cannot at the same time take on a human body and be finite, weak, and physical. When Jesus is physically in Capernaum, He cannot also physically be in Rome. If Jesus gets tired, He cannot then have all power. Other similar issues exist, but if you think along these lines, you’ll begin to understand the intellectual issue.

I do not pretend to have the final answer to every question. In fact, I think it OK that I do not fully understand God. But perhaps some pictures will help us travel toward an understanding. First, one must remember that the Biblical doctrine of the Trinity allows God to retain all of his attributes while still being human. You see, in one sense, the eternal God may have died, but in another sense, the eternal God never died at all. What happened to Jesus happened to God, and yet God was still above what happened.

Second, the doctrine of the Incarnation is that in Christ God voluntarily set aside certain prerogatives (Ph 2:5-8). Think of the story The Prince and the Pauper. In the story, the Prince of Wales, Edward Tudor, son of Henry VIII exchanges places with a pauper boy. In doing so, he never ceases to be prince. In fact, he often tries to convince the people that he is the real prince, but no one will believe him. He is fully prince and fully pauper at the same time. Now this story does not correspond exactly to what Jesus does in the Incarnation, but it does give a helpful picture. Jesus was a king who for a time became a peasant. Though He was God, He emptied himself and took the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men. (Ph 2:6-7)

When Jesus became a man, He did not cease to be God any more than Edward ceased to be Prince while he was a pauper. Jesus retained all of His rights and attributes as God, though we might say that He freely chose to hide some of them for a time in order to accomplish a special purpose. He may have been divine, but he did not appear such to the people. He was, thus, fully king but also fully peasant. This is not logical contradiction, but it is, nonetheless, beyond comprehension. And it is marvelous.

Now the The Prince and the Pauper is just a picture, not an explanation.  The Scripture says, “The Word was with God and the Word was God … and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Creed says that Jesus was fully God and fully man.  God became a man. I cannot fully explain how that is the case any more than science can fully explain (at this writing) the workings of the atom. But I do not see that logic demands of us an either/or choice. Reality, wherever we look, is far more complex than we often imagine. This reality is no different. The scientist lives with tension on many issues. So must the people of God. The scientist must have faith that as more information is uncovered, the mystery will subside. God’s people must have faith that more information is coming.   For Earth, real as it is, is but the laboratory for heaven, and while we can learn much in this laboratory, we can never quite reproduce the conditions of heaven. It is not until we get there and are able to see God in the field (so to speak) that we will be able to understand some of the depths of his nature, and how it is that he can become flesh and dwell among us. But then, I suppose, when we get there the question itself will be rather trivial. Who cares about philosophy when you are gazing at glory?

I am the way, the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.  (Jn 14:6)

I sat in an enclosed patio at an inn in Eagle Harbor, Michigan. Enormous picture windows surrounded me on three sides, and Lake Superior was right outside those windows. The morning sun was bright and dancing on the water. It was one of those peaceful times when you get away, and I was enjoying my time alone looking out over the endless blue of the water and the rocky jetty with spruce trees popping out of it. My Bible was in my lap, and I was intermittently reading, then gazing at the lake, then reading, then gazing at the lake. I like doing that. I don’t know if it’s that I love nature or that I get easily distracted. Probably both.

A young woman entered the patio area and sat down at a couch opposite me. She noticed that I had a Bible and asked me some question or other about my reading. We spoke for a bit before I asked her, “Are you a Christian?”

“I’m a Unitarian,” she said.

“Do you read the Bible much?” I asked.

“No, not really. But I like Jesus.” We talked for a short while and she then opened up. “I don’t really understand my church,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, a lot of the leaders in my church get violently upset if we talk about Jesus. I mean, we can read from many books in the church and we can even read from the Bible and talk about it. But what we can’t do is read or talk about Jesus without these people getting upset. I really don’t understand it.”

“I understand it,” I told her and then asked her, “Have you ever read what Jesus said about himself?”

“No, not really.”

“Jesus claimed to be your Lord. He said that He was the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through Him. He called Himself the Son of God. He said that unless you believed in Him, you would die in your sins.

“I think these leaders are angry at the name of Jesus not because they misunderstand him but because they perfectly understand him.”

Jesus has always divided the people. In His own day, some people worshiped him while others crucified him. It is no different today. Jesus was and always has been a lightning rod. His claims offended many people.  Those who think that all religions say the same thing must ignore the central claims of Christ to do so, for He spoke of Himself in a way that no sane man talks, and, in doing so, He founded a faith that is like no other religion on earth.

Nowhere in any religious system will you find anything that approaches the Christian concept of the Incarnation. Scripture says that God paid a visit to earth. This visit, however, is nothing like Zeus or Apollo coming and going and taking on various forms to suit their pleasures. It is far beyond Allah reigning with authority and justice from heaven. It is contrary to the nature gods of Hinduism or the impersonal forces of Buddhism. Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses scorn it; Hindus trivialize it; philosophers denounce it as nonsense. No one understands it. It is distorted, then criticized, but when not distorted it is still not fully comprehensible. The radical claim of the Christian faith is that, for a period of about thirty years, the eternal and transcendent God walked around on earth, ate, slept, wept, spoke, died. The central claim of the Christian faith is that there was a man who was God.

If this claim does not strike you as somehow shocking, you do not understand it. It is the central reason why people reject Jesus. As long as we talk about turning the other cheek or loving your neighbor or forgiving as God has forgiven you, people are with us. They like Jesus. He taught many good things. To some people, Jesus is like a big teddy bear. But when this good teacher begins to say that he and the Father are one or that the Son of Man shall return on the clouds of glory or that he has the right to give and take life, we squirm. The authorities in Jesus’ day squirmed, too. His claims were a large part of the problem they had with him. He said, “before Abraham was, I am” and they picked up stones to stone him. They knew what he was saying.

And so do we. In fact, that’s the problem. If we somehow thought that Jesus was saying something different, we would not squirm so. Nor would we devise so many elaborate ways to circumvent His claims. You know. “Jesus’ claims were just legend,” or “what he really meant was…” These efforts betray a lack of faith. A follower of Jesus does not spend time debunking what Scripture plainly says. The real problem people have with Jesus’ claims is not intellectual.  It’s that his claims get in the way with how we live. If Jesus was God on earth, then He really does have the right to be the center of our lives. He has, as He claimed, “all authority in heaven and on earth.” That is the sticking point.

Jesus says He gets to run your life.  Indeed, He gets to run the universe.  You can reply, “How dare he say that!”  Or you can bow your knees.

… for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin.” (Heb 4:15)

Lord, we rejoice that you understand our plight, that you were one of us and one with us.  We glory in your weakness, for your weakness is power.

Jesus was a man, and because He was a man He can represent you and me. That’s what we discussed last week. Consequently, we who follow Jesus derive much comfort from His humanity, “for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin” (Heb 4:15).

People long to have someone understand them, and when we see a person who has been through what we go through, we instantly relate to him. We see that we are not alone. We see a friend.

Corrie Ten Boom is one of my favorite Christians to read about. I would have loved to have sat and had coffee with her and talked for hours. She is so simple and pure and deep all at once. I relish the opportunity to see her in heaven. During World War II, she spent time in a Nazi concentration camp called Ravensbruck. She and her family were put there for hiding Jews and helping them flee the country from the Germans. Though she herself survived the concentration camp, her father and sister did not. She saw hell on earth. After she was released from Ravensbruck, she traveled the world and spoke of God’s love in Christ. One day she spoke in a prison in Ruanda, Africa. She spoke of the joy of the Lord that one can have even in prison, but she knew that many of the inmates were thinking, “After you talk you can go home, away from this stinking prison. It is easy to talk about joy when you are free. But we must stay here” (Tramp For the Lord, 80). She then told the prisoners about Ravensbruck — about roll call at 4:30 AM, about standing in the icy air shivering for three hours, about seeing the woman in front of her getting beaten because she could no longer stand on her feet, about looking at the smokestacks of the furnaces where the prisoners were burned, and about God reminding her of His presence in the midst of all this.

She said, “I looked out at the men who were sitting in front of me. No longer were their faces filled with darkness and anger. They were listening — intently — for they were hearing from someone who had walked where they were now walking.”

This is what Jesus has done by taking on flesh and blood. He has walked where you are now walking. He knows what you struggle with — better than you know it yourself. He became one of us.

This act of Jesus taking on humanity is the greatest sacrifice the world has ever seen. For all the power Jesus had, He chose to voluntarily set aside certain divine rights and become weak. He still had these rights. He simply chose to hide them. He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross (Ph 2:8). It is God’s way. When we are weak, then we are strong (II Cor 12:10). The weakness of God is stronger than the strength of men (I Cor 1:25). When we are weak we are becoming more like Jesus, who emptied Himself in order to take on the form of a man. We see the glory of God more clearly in the sufferings of Christ than we do in all the pomp and power of this world. Unfortunately, most people pursue the pomp and power and never see the glory.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1:14)

For there is one God and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (I Tim 2:5)

Lord, you became flesh to redeem flesh.  Praise Your Name.

Jesus was a man. That doctrine is central to Christianity. The creed says He is “fully man.” The Scripture says “He became flesh” (Jn 1:14) and calls Him the “man, Christ Jesus” (I Tim 2:5).   This basic Christian belief about the ordinary humanity of Jesus is not unique. Atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Taoists, Sikhs, you name it — all of these would agree that Jesus was a man. Sometimes, however, people think that Christians miss this idea, that Jesus’ followers deify Him to the point that He ceases to be human.

Quite the opposite is the case. Any attempt to make Jesus purely spiritual — as certain types of Gnosticism did in the first century — is not and cannot be Christian. Such attempts fly in the face of too many plain Scriptural references to the humanity of Jesus. Jesus, simply put, was one of us.

We too blithely pass this over. We think it nothing more than a nice doctrine. “Yes, yes. Jesus is human. So what?” We may not consciously say it that way, but that’s how we live. We don’t comprehend the depths of the humility involved in the humanity of Jesus. Or the love, which it so plainly shows. We think the doctrine quite ordinary and pat ourselves on the back for being reasonable folks. In reality, it is perhaps the most extraordinary sacrifice the world has ever seen. The weakness of Jesus is one of the greatest displays of the glory of God we will ever know. And we miss it. We miss it because He is so like us. We see humanity every day. We’re surrounded by it. We don’t think it glorious. So we don’t understand what is going on with Jesus.

When I was in elementary school, the teacher sometimes would have a little contest to give out some privilege.

“OK class,” she might say. “We just went over multiplying fractions. Now, I want one boy and one girl to come to the board. OK Marcus, you’re the boy. And Bethany, you’re the girl. Now get ready. I’m going to give you one problem to solve. If Marcus gets it right first, the boys get to leave for lunch first. But if Bethany gets it right first, the girls go to lunch first.” The fate of the entire group rested on the representative.

Something like that has gone on in history. Jesus is human; therefore, He can represent humans. His death can free you and me because He was like you and me. The power of His resurrection is for us because He was one of us.

The first man became the head of the race and brought sin into the world. In the same way Jesus has become the head of a new race and has brought righteousness into the world. Since the ultimate source of sin goes back to the head of the race, God’s ultimate solution must fix the head of the race. God does this by providing a new head of the human race. In Christ, God is undoing what Adam did. Or maybe we could say He is redoing Adam. God is saying, in effect, “Let’s start this human race all over.” But to do that, God must have a human.

Jesus is the human head of the new human race. The old race is characterized by sin. The new race is characterized by righteousness. We are members of the old race by birth. We are members of the new race by new birth. We inherited the nature of the old race from its founder. We inherit the nature of the new race from its founder. The humanity of Jesus makes all of this possible. Strip Him of His humanity, and you strip Christianity of its redemptive power.

The humanity of Jesus is not just a reasonable Christian doctrine. It is essential to many other Christian doctrines and central to the work of Christ.