Thoughts on the Incarnation

Do the words "God with us" have any meaning for us today?

HARRY W. LOWE, Associate Secretary, General Conference Sabbath School Department

God came down at Christ­mas" is a happy phrase for the festal season, but the whole of the nativity story has become so oversentirnentalized and commercialized that the doctrinal implications of the phrase have little, if any, meaning for the masses today.

One of the remarkable things about Jesus was His repeated use of the title "the Son of man" in reference to Himself. More than eighty times He referred to Himself in this way (31 times in Matthew, 15 in Mark, 26 in Luke, 12 in John). It was His favorite title. The only New Testament mention of this title by another is in Acts 7:56, where Stephen cried: "I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God." The "Son of man" com­ments in Rev. 1:13 and 14:14 I classify with the now ascended Lord's own use of the term.

The Origin of the Title "Son of Man"

Reference to this title in Daniel 7:13, 14 is usually considered as the source of the term: "I saw . . . one like the Son of man." The Revised Standard Version rendering, "a son of man," in this description of the judgment scene has caused some unneces­sary concern. When the prophet saw this tremendous scene in heaven, one being im­pressed him by His unusual form, hence he wrote of Him what some commentators pre­fer to render, "One, human in form." "In Dan. 10:16, 18, we read of 'one like the similitude or appearance of a man'—like an Adam, and yet not an Adam, because not yet incarnate."—R. B. GIRDLESTONE, Synonyms of the Old Testament, p. 47.

The psalmist uses this title in the well-known verse: "What is man ['enosh, weak], that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" (Ps. 8:4). The term "son of man" here is in the origi­nal ben-Adam, meaning "earthly," "frail." It is a generic term indicating that "Christ was not the son of any individual man, but was a partaker of human nature; and this was what He signified by the title 'Son of Man.' Similarly, by the title 'Son of God' He taught that He was a partaker of Deity." —Ibid., p. 46.

In Psalm 49:1, 2 are two phrases of in­terest: "Hear this, all ye people; . . . both low [ben-Adam, son of man] and high [ben-Ish]." The son of Adam denoted the generic weakness of man, and the son of Ish denoted man in his greatness and strength.

It is clear that Jesus took the title ben-Adam, because (1) He was conscious of divine incarnation; (2) He wanted His people to understand His lowliness in or­der that Messiah's conquest through death on the cross might be clear to them; (3) His assumption of human nature was vital to the accomplishment and understanding of the atonement.

"The Son of man" was one of the titles of Messiah in later Judaism, but its impli­cations of lowliness and conquest through death were lost upon them. They were ob­sessed with the idea of a conquering Messiah who would subdue the world and establish their political dominance.

In the "suffering Servant" prophecies, such as Isaiah 52:13 and chapter 53, post-Biblical Judaism invented two Messiahs to solve its dilemma. One they called Ben David (the Conqueror), the other Ben Joseph (the Sufferer). The fainter they doted on, the latter they submerged because the idea was incomprehensible and distaste­ful to them (1 Cor. 1:23).

Christ Gave New and Future Glory to the Title

One of the great providences of God was the preservation of the exact Jewish gen­ealogies till the days of Jesus and the apos­tles. The Temple archives survived among other upheavals, Nebuchadnezzar's con­quest and Cyrus' capture of Babylon. If the irretrievable loss of these records had occurred long before Jesus was born, no unchal­lenged proofs of descent such as we have in Matthew 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-58 could have been written. Some ten years after the evangelists copied what they needed, the Temple and its records were destroyed for­ever.

Matthew, a Jew, writing of Messiah chiefly for Jews, traces the genealogy of Joseph through David back to Abraham. Luke, a non-Jew, writing of Messiah mainly for Gentiles, traces the lineage of Mary back beyond Abraham, ending significantly with the words: ". . . Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God."

The first Adam, though of the earth, re­sulted from an immediate creative act of God, and was thus His offspring (Acts 17:28). The second, or last, Adam resulted from another miraculous act of God: "The power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God" (Luke 1:35).

This combination of titles, "the Son of man" and "the Son of God," is strikingly seen in analyzing some of Christ's refer­ences to Himself. He used this veiled title to unveil the hitherto veiled mystery of His Sonship to God. There was a reason why Jesus used so consistently the title "the Son of man" and veiled, while neither hiding nor evading, His divine Sonship. "His glory was veiled, His greatness and majesty were hidden, that He might draw near to sorrowful, tempted men."—The De­sire of Ages, p. 23.

In Matthew 24:30 the "sign of the Son of man in heaven" is predicted, with uni­versal mourning by the tribes of the earth when "they shall see the Son of man com­ing in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory."

Placed under oath, before the high priest, to declare "whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God," "Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Here­after shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven" (Matt. 26:65, 64). These words of our Lord were declara­tion of His divinity and humanity, as well as of His future glory.

There are two occasions in the New Tes­tament on which we read of Jesus riding. The first was His triumphal entry into Jeru­salem "sitting on an ass's colt" (John 21: 15) to the accompanying proclamation: "Behold, thy King cometh" (Man. 21:5). This was in fulfillment of a Messianic prophecy (Zech. 9:9), a fact not remem­bered by the disciples till after Jesus was glorified. Shortly afterward He declared: "The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified" (John 12:23). The sec­ond occasion is when He comes "riding down the sky" on a white horse, in inde­scribable glory with the armies of heaven, as the Judge of all the earth, the King of kings, and Lord of lords (Rev. 19:11-16). It is the glorified Son of man who comes as earth's great reaper (Rev. 14:14).

The Mystery of the Incarnation

When Jesus asked His disciples, "Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?" Peter uttered one of the two most forth­right New Testament declarations of our Lord's divinity: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Was his pronounce­ment the logic of evidence, or was it God's revelation to man's faith? "Blessed art thou . . : for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven" (Matt. 16:13-17).

There is a tendency for a modernist who tries to rationalize the facts regarding our Lord's earthly life, His incarnation, and nature merely to deify human reason. "The Word of God, like the character of its divine Author, presents mysteries that can never be fully comprehended by finite be­ings. The entrance of sin into the world, the incarnation of Christ, regeneration, the resurrection, and many other subjects pre­sented in the Bible, are mysteries too deep for the human mind to explain, or even fully to comprehend."—Steps to Christ, p. 111.

One chilly night a group of Africans were discussing the new modernist mission­ary's attempt to explain that Jesus repre­sented man's highest efforts to find God. They were wrapping their blankets around them as they prepared to go home, when one said, with the profoundly simple logic of the native mind: "If God didn't come down into this world, how could we know anything about Him?" Another grunted his assent, and added: "Yes! When Jesus came into the world, He drew a blanket around Him, but God was inside!" Was that simple faith very far from a revelation of truth?

When God broke into human history in the form of the holy child Jesus, the hosts of evil were gathered together "against the Lord, and against his anointed" (Ps. 2:2; Acts 4:27). Is there something prophetic of the holy child in Abigail's words to David: "The soul of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of life with the Lord thy God-: (I Sam. 25:29).

The Eternal Import of the Incarnation

Satan's objective is division, separation. "It was Satan's purpose to bring about an eternal separation between God and man; but in Christ we become more closely united to God than if we had never fallen. In taking our nature, the Saviour has bound Himself to humanity by a tie that is never to be broken. Through the eternal ages He is linked with us."—The Desire of Ages, p. 25.

The Son of man is seen in Revelation 1:13, still among those for whom He died, and with whom He is forever identified through His incarnation. He is now "within the veil; whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus, made an high priest forever" (Heb. 6:19, 20). "This man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood" (Het). 7:24).

The incarnation of God's Son as the Son of man is the central point of all Christian hope, the greatest miracle, upon which all else in the plan of redemption depends. "The Incarnation" is the "great objective fact of Christianity. . . . Our Lord's media­tion is built upon His participation in man's nature. For such participation was essential to that one sacrifice upon the cross, on which rests the efficacy . . . of His own intercession at the heavenly altar, so also has His human nature become the channel through which all gifts of grace are bestowed upon men. . . . His incarnation is a central point, from which we may ap­proach the eternity which preceded it, as well as that which follows it."—R. I. WIL­BERFORCE, The Incarnation, pp. 3, 6.

The Exaltation of the Son of Man

One of the statements of Jesus that puz­zled His contemporaries is His assertion in John 3:14 that "as Moses lifted up the ser­pent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up." "Lifted up" meant primarily His crucifixion: "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me. This he said, signifying what death he should die" (John 12:32, 33).

Since there are so many prophecies of the suffering Messiah, it is incredible that so few people acknowledge the coincidence of prediction and contemporary events. Psalm 22, for example, describes the ago­nies of crucifixion with almost medical ex­actness. His cry from the cross (Matt. 27: 46), the scorn of the onlookers (verses 41­43), the morbid, gaping crowds (verse 36), the lots cast for His garments (verse 35)—these and other details are prophesied there in great profusion.

Of the few who were, after the events, to recognize Him, He said, "When ye have lifted up the Son of man, then shall ye know that I am he" (John 8:28). This tragic lifting up reveals a remarkable con­junction and countermanding of conflicting forces. When Psalm 22 foreshadowed cruci­fixion, the founding of Rome was three centuries away, and to the Jews crucifix­ion was an unknown punishment. Calvary was a millennium away. Why this insistence on death by a method then unknown?

In Galatians 3:10-13 we have an answer. Mankind was lost and under the curse of the law, which it could not keep. "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree." Mankind was saved from a double curse by our Lord's crucifixion.

The True Meaning of Crucifixion

Blasphemers who died by hanging on a tree (Deut. 21:22, 23) were cursed of God, and that kind of death signified that they had no hope of eternal life. Jesus was con­demned on a charge of blasphemy (Matt. 26:65). When crucifixion came to Palestine with the Romans, some twenty-five years be­fore Calvary, criminals were left hanging till the birds and sunshine left nothing but bleached skeletons. People then did not admonish the wayward by saying, "You'll come to a bad end," but, "You -will feed the crows on a cross." To the Roman world that death signified the end of all hope of a future life (Vide Virgil's Aenid, Bk. VI).

Jewish law was circumvented, and the Son of man was "lifted up" on a cross. Roman law was broken when Pilate al­lowed the bodies to be removed out of def­erence to Jewish Sabbath laws (John 19: 31). Thus one law countermanded another, even though they combined in His death; and in this interplay of law, and scorn, and hate, a divine hand controlled to the end that the world would forever remember the Son of man, who was lifted up that all who would might be drawn to Him. It was God's answer to the question: "Who is this Son of man?" (John 12:34).

Men lifted Him up and wrote Him off as a fanatic who came to a dead end with no hope of a future life. The cross closed the door. But the divine hand intervened. The angel of the Lord rolled back the stone, and when Jesus came forth, the cross be­came the gateway to heaven. The Son of man was "declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holi­ness, by the resurrection from the dead" (Rom. 1:4).

We should notice six results (taken from The Desire of Ages, pp. 770-777) of Christ's death on the cross: (1) "With the death of Christ the hopes of His disciples perished." (2) The priests and rulers were restless, uneasy all that weekend, but un­changed. (3) The most holy place was open to human eyes for the first time, and an unholy strangeness pervaded the Temple services so stubbornly persisted in. (4) "The very event that destroyed the hopes of the disciples convinced Joseph and Nicode­mus of the divinity of Jesus. Their fears were overcome by the courage of a firm and unwavering faith." (5) "Never had Christ attracted the attention of the multitude as now that He was laid in the tomb. . . On every side was heard the cry, Ve want Christ the Healer." (6) "By men of intel­lect . . priests and rulers were called upon to explain the prophecies of the Old Testa­ment concerning the Messiah, and while trying to frame some falsehood in reply, they became like Men insane."

"Lift Him Up!"

Perhaps the greatest of all the ultimate results of the resurrection was the trans­formation of the apostolic band. "We trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel" implied a sad, "but it was not!" When they were all convinced of His resurrection, then their cry became that "Jesus was Christ!" (Acts 18:28). They were galvanized into action, and they elec­trified the world. They now lifted Him up in testimony, in preaching; they inserted Jesus into men's thinking, and He con­quered their hearts. The cross became, not the death of hope, but the noontide of eternal love.

We have been exhorted to "uplift Jesus as the center of all hope."—Testimonies to Ministers, p. 118. And again: "Of all professing Christians, Seventh-day Advent­ist should be foremost in uplifting Christ before the worIcl."—Gospel Workers, p. 156. In the same book, page 160, is this well-known admonition: "Lift up Jesus, you that teach the people."

After the resurrection the Christian mes­sage to the world was short and dynamic. The believers placed the Messianic proph­ecies beside the life, death, and resurrec­tion of Jesus, and they cried: "This Jesus is the Christ!" (Acts 9:22: 18:28). They made the identification unassailably specific as they spoke of "Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead," and as they declared, "This Je­sus hath God raised up. . . . God hath made that same Jesus . . . both Lord and Christ" (Acts 4:10; 2:32-36).

The Gods of Man's Creation and the Divine Son

In the days of the apostles men wor­shiped gods in the clouds; the sky and the heavenly bodies were all either gods or their abode. There were gods of the moun­tains, the trees, the rivers, the streams, and seas. When men make gods, they make them in their own image (Isa. 44:13), and en­dow them with their own characteristics. The gods and goddesses were subject to anger, passion, love and hate, immorality; they made war, committed rape, robbed, lied, killed and destroyed. There was also a great pantheon of deified men, many of whose lives on earth had been disgraceful.

It was a sickening mythological world that produced hopelessness, cynicism, and suicide among men. Small wonder that many of the best men turned to Judaism and then to Christianity. Some of the New Testament centurions were typical of these disillusioned classes.

Into that world came these Christians exalting the moral virtues of their Godhead —love (John 3:16; 1 John 4:8, 16), holi­ness (1 Peter 1:15), wisdom (Rom. 11:33), mercy (Rom. 9:16), truth (John 1:17). To this they added His great natural attributes —infinity (Rom. 11:33), eternity (Rom. 1:20), omnipotence (Matt. 19:26), omnis­cience (Matt. 10:29), omnipresence (Ps. 139:7, 10; Matt. 28:20), self-existence (John 5:26), immutability (Tames 1:17). They extolled His virtues and proclaimed His transcendent power.

All of these attributes belonged, of course, to the exalted Lord Jesus Christ, one with the Father from all eternity. Which of these attributes appealed most to the world of the apostles is hard to say; but, granted the moral attributes setting forth a God who "so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoso­ever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life," perhaps the unchangeableness of the Christian Godhead makes the most tremendous appeal to hu­man need in all ages.

Hence it was that the church set forth "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever" (Heb. 13:8). Men were at once relieved from the whimsical gods created by erratic human imagination. They could trace this unchangeableness back to the Old Testament Scriptures: "Also the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for he is not a man, that he should repent" (1 Sam. 15:29, compare Num. 23: 19). "The title of the Eternal, here ren­dered 'the Strength of Israel,' would be bet­ter rendered the Changeless One of Israel." —Ellicott's Commentary; compare The Seventh-day Adventist Commentary on this the only Old Testament use of nesach ("to be enduring," "forever").

We close our meditations with the second of the two greatest New Testament con­fessions of the deity of the incarnate Son: "My Lord and my God!" May we ever lift Him up that we may be lifted up in Him!

Oh, my Lord, I love Thee,

Worship and adore, 

God from everlasting,

Man for evermore.


Ministry reserves the right to approve, disapprove, and delete comments at our discretion and will not be able to respond to inquiries about these comments. Please ensure that your words are respectful, courteous, and relevant.

comments powered by Disqus

HARRY W. LOWE, Associate Secretary, General Conference Sabbath School Department

December 1957

Download PDF
Ministry Cover

More Articles In This Issue

The immaculate Christ

How are we to understand the conception of Christ and the role of Mary?

The Theanthropic Nature of Christ

A profound theologian reflects on Christology.

Wonders of the Incarnation

The stately solemnity of the opening para­graphs of the Gospel of John unveils the marvel of the ages—God becoming man.

The Elements of True Success

Condensation of the commencement address delivered at the SDA Theological Seminary, August 29, 1957.

Christianity Vibrant in Charles Wesley's Hymns

The 250th anniversary of Charles Wesley's birth. This article is a commemoration of his life.

An Interview With Artist Harry Anderson'

Harry Anderson, a beloved Seventh-day Adventist artist, has won wide fame for his remarkable paintings of Christ. Readers -will be interested in his answers to the questions of Evangelist Robert M. Whitsett and Pastor Charles Keymer in an interview held in the artist's home in Ridgefield, Connecticut, some time ago.

"Other Sheep Have I"

Living outside the limits of what we Advent­ists would call strictly orthodox theology and Biblical interpretation, there are many whose hearts are honest before God. How do we relate to them?

The Parable of the King in the Slums

Excerpts from Canon Theodore O. Wedel's book The Christianity of Main Street, copyrighted 1951. Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan Company.

Planning for a Joyful Season

These help­ful counsels from a mother in Israel, whose pen was dipped in inspiration, set forth important principles which must not be overlooked under the burden of busy Christmas programs.

Christmas and God's Call to Evangelism

At this season of the year when the minds of Christians everywhere are being directed to the great gift of God in the Babe of Bethle­hem, it is fitting that we study broader plans for the promulgation of His gospel of peace and goodwill to men. Some important recommendations were brought before the annual council here at headquarters, which we are happy to bring to our readers.

View All Issue Contents

Digital delivery

If you're a print subscriber, we'll complement your print copy of Ministry with an electronic version.

Sign up
Advertisement - RevivalandReformation 300x250

Recent issues

See All
Advertisement - SermonView - WideSkyscraper (160x600)