The stately solemnity of the opening paragraphs of the Gospel of John unveils the marvel of the ages—God becoming man. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth" (John 1:1-14).
And so the Word has breath, and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought.
The marvelous facts surrounding the history of the birth of Christ reveal, not the birth of a unique man, but a momentous event in the eternal life of God when "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16). With awesome wonder a world enshrouded in darkness beheld "the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God" (2 Cor. 4:4).
No human pen can portray, or human mind fathom, the depths of "the mystery of godliness," which centers in the wondrous fact that "God was manifest in the flesh" (I Tim. 3:16). Yet, only as we grasp in a measure something of the marvel of this entrance of God into human experience for the redemption of man, can we appreciate the infinite love of God and the glorious achievements of the plan of salvation. There are many aspects of the incarnation that are extremely rewarding subjects of study.
1. The Wonder of Christ's Union of Divinity and Humanity
Christ the God-man of the incarnation by His virgin birth united heaven and earth in one divine-human personality. He thus became and ever shall be both God and man. This veiling of divinity with humanity will always remain the incomprehensible mystery of God's marvelous love. In Christ the saving love of God reaches man and the answering response of humanity reaches God.
Who can tell of the loving longing in the heart of the Eternal One, who could not be satisfied in eternity without the loving fellowship of redeemed man? "Jesus did not consider heaven a place to be desired while we were lost."—The Ministry of Healing, p. 105. What folly and blindness for man to desire earth without Christ—the Christ who could not desire heaven without man.
In Matthew I:I-17 we have "the book of the generation of Jesus Christ," which reveals an ancestry as completely human as ours in so far as his earthly mother was concerned. Every link of that long chain is human. He is the promised seed of the virgin, the Son of Mary, and the Son of Adam. He was of Jewish ancestry of the "seed of Abraham" (Heb. 2:16). He was "the Son of David" (Matt. 1:1). Gentiles were also included among his forebears, such as Rahab the Canaanite, Ruth the Moabite, and Bathsheba the Hittite (Matt. 1:5, 6). In Christ a man is neither Gentile nor Jew, but a redeemed personality.
His was a royal ancestry of kings and a lowly ancestry of shepherds and herdsmen, a holy ancestry of the only begotten Son of God and an imperfect ancestry of sin-stained human beings, a mortal ancestry of men and an immortal ancestry of God. By uniting human nature with deity He perfected its character in His own life. By uniting mortal man with immortal God He immortalized redeemed human nature in His resurrected life. What an ancestry in which to achieve the mighty works of redemption! "By His divinity He lays hold upon the throne of heaven, while by His humanity He reaches us." —The Desire of Ages, p. 312.
We must ever keep in mind that "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." —Ibid., p. 25. In Him our humanity is forever united with God, and the righteousness of God's divine nature is imputed and imparted to penitent man. Christ did not merely use manhood as the medium of divine self-revelation, but He made human nature His very own and lived in it, causing it to receive and assimilate the divine nature.
Christ is both perfect God and perfect man. In Him the nature of divinity and the nature of humanity unite in one person without any confusion or opposition between the two; they are wholly united in will, in purpose, and in righteousness. And of Him we may very well say:
So closely art Thou in God's heart,
And God so close in Thine;
I marvel which is human part,
And which is Thy Divine.
By His divinity He is one with God—ever remaining the second person of the Trinity; by His humanity He is one with man—ever remaining the second Adam of the human race. What tremendous implications are involved in the incarnation! How can sinful man exalt and magnify himself before the God who humbled Himself as a little child before men? What a price He paid to unite the nature of man with the nature of God. We could never hope to be exalted so high, had not God stooped so low.
In Christ the family of earth and the family of heaven are bound together. Christ glorified is our brother. Heaven is enshrined in humanity, and humanity is enfolded in the bosom of Infinite Love.ibid., pp. 25, 26.
2. The Wonder of God's Humility and Love as Revealed in the Incarnation
It is very difficult for many to believe that God could have sacrificed Himself to the uttermost for such a sinful race as ours, to conceive that God can really love man as much as the New Testament says He does. No one, however, can study the marvelous truths of the incarnation without realizing that God loves us far more than we thought He did.
The incarnation, of course, involved supreme self-sacrifice on the part of both the Father and the Son—the Father in making the surrender of His Only Begotten, and the Son in performing the supreme act of utter self-emptying of which Paul speaks in Philippians 2:5-11. God's great love is demonstrated in this unprecedented gift in which God has sacrificed Himself to the uttermost for us (John 3:16).
The apostle calls us to meditate upon the nature of Christ's humility in the incarnation. It was a voluntary humility. "He humbled himself" (Phil. 2:8). He was willing to stoop for us —nay more, He chose to do so of His own accord. This is why His vicarious experience is so acceptable to God and so appealing to man. Whatever limitations He had were self-imposed limitations. When He "took . . . the form of a servant" it was His own voluntary act. It is an awesome fact that in condescending to unite Himself with an inferior nature God Himself was humbled.
Moreover, the degree of His humiliation was even beyond that of merely becoming man, as overwhelming as such a condescension must be. He humbled Himself to become "obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." All history witnesses to the utter self-abnegation required to accept such a shameful death. He came to be "numbered with the transgressors" (Isa. 53:12).
His vicarious death on Calvary ever remains the masterpiece of eternity. It was not only in the great dramatic public moments of His life that He drew hearts to Him by the tie of human sympathy and divine love freely bestowed. Throughout His entire earthly ministry He ever was "the unwearied servant of man's necessity." —Gospel Workers, p. 41. Men shall never cease to marvel at the wonder of the loving service of the incarnate God, the Lord Jesus, who "knowing. . . that he was come from God, and went to God; . . . girded himself," and "began to wash the disciples' feet" (John 13:4, 5).
3. Wonder of God's Identification With Man and With Human Suffering
Only eternity will reveal all that was involved in God's marvelous act of becoming man. In His incarnation Christ was "found in fashion as a man," which indicates His complete identity with human life as it is experienced in human flesh. "Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same" (Heb. 2:14).
He did not make a mere transient appearance in human flesh, but "he took on him the seed of Abraham. Wherefore in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people" (Heb. 2:16, 17).
Christ "took on" humanity without abandoning deity. By thus taking on Him the real nature of man, He brought it into personal union with His divine nature. It was necessary that these two natures should be united in one being to bring about a perfect cooperation of both natures in the mediatorial work of Christ.
In Jesus Christ the God-man we behold the permanent indissoluble union of the two natures—the human and the divine. A finite glorified and immortalized human nature is now eternally united with the second person of the Godhead. Christ the God-man is the second person of the Deity. The virgin birth of Christ assures us that He is indeed the second Adam of the human race, in whom every man can find salvation if he will. In his discussion of Christology in his Dogmatic Theology, William G. T. Shedd observes: "The trinitarian personality of the Son of God did not begin at the incarnation, but the theanthropic personality of Jesus Christ did."—Volume 2, p. 269. Before Bethlehem He was God. At Bethlehem He became man. Since Bethlehem He is both God and man.
Furthermore, when Christ made Himself the head of our race by the incarnation, He took a position by which He could know all human experiences and feel all human sorrows and temptations by sharing in them Himself, and, in becoming sin for us by the marvelous mystery of the transactions of God, He was able to feel all human sin and suffering as though it were His own, yet He Himself shared no evil in so far as His own character was concerned. He is thus "touched with the feeling of our infirmities," though He experienced none of our sins.
It was the Son of God who was born of the virgin Mary and who lived and worked and suffered and died for our sins, and all the human experiences of Christ were the experiences of God's Son. God's Son was hungry, weak, tempted, insulted, crucified, deserted. God's Son in human flesh was righteous and holy, perfect and loving, and victorious.
Because Christ willed for our sakes to experience human suffering and triumph, it is, therefore, for all eternity a part of the consciousness of God Himself.
4. The Wonder of Perfected Human Nature
In Christ's sinless life we behold the amazing reality of the complete perfection of human nature. We see it fully conformed to the holy laws of God and completely diffused with divine love. We see God's ideal of human perfection. He who came to conquer all of man's sin must Himself be sinless and spotless, holy and undefiled. "He is a brother in our infirmities, but not in possessing like passions. As the sinless One, His nature recoiled from evil."—Testimonies, vol. 2, p. 202.
It is wrong to assume, as some do, that Christ was born in sin as we are, and gradually fought His way out of it so that He actually did no sin at all. As E. L. Strong in his lectures on the incarnation of God observes: "Such an example would only drive us to despair. If one only of all the sons of men, who was born in all respects as we are, sin not excepted, had become sinless, His example would have almost no effect on us. We should be obliged to say, The example of that one man out of all the millions does not give me any ground for encouragement or hope that I can be like Him, the one great exception."—The Incarnation of God, p. 21.
Christ came to this world as the spotless Son of God. Although tempted in all points like as we are, His pure and holy nature never knew, nor did it ever surrender in the least to, the inroads of sin. He became the great champion of the whole human race, the sinless head, the second Adam, through whom man can receive life eternal. With such a perfect Saviour the representative of the human race, whose imputed and imparted righteousness is provided for "whosoever will," man can be filled with hope.
Christ demonstrated the wondrous formula of salvation: "The Word was made flesh," that all flesh might become instruments of the Word. Christ redeemed human nature by making it Godlike.
No sacrifice could be acceptable as the atoning sacrifice except it be the sacrifice of sinless perfection—the Lamb of God without blemish and without spot. The price Jesus paid for us was all that it cost Him to live that sinless life of perfect obedience to God in our human nature.
On this point a comment from E. L. Strong is worthy of note: "Thus at His death human nature existed, which was absolutely sinless and which sin could never hurt. His was not the sinlessness of innocence which had never been tried, but sinlessness which was the complete triumph over all that sin could do to Him, in all parts of His human nature: striving to get in, in vain, through every avenue. There was, therefore, no longer anything to hold his human nature back from perfect union with God in heaven, for with the whole of it He had done God's will. His Resurrection and Ascension were inevitable, that which was outward in them being merely the outward signs of the inward and spiritual union which His human soul had with the Godhead."—Ibid., pp. 65, 66.
Herein lies our hope that temptation and sin assaulted every avenue of our Lord's human nature and failed to make the slightest entrance into His life. Sin could not be made attractive to Him by temptation. He was utterly faithful to His God. He could not be induced to make any bargain with anything that was not God's will.
How pitifully absurd every self-righteous attitude appears in the light of the absolute perfection of God's character of love as demonstrated in all the acts and attitudes of Christ. The righteousness of God can be possessed by man only because man through Christ is brought into union with God. Jesus Christ alone made man's perfect response of human love and obedience to God's revelation of love and grace. He was both God's saving act and man's saving response. For man He achieved the image of God in human nature.
To this standard of sinless perfection no other being who has ever lived has attained. But this is the only righteousness recognized as such by God. This matchless life, which we see in Christ who alone was the Master of life, is the perfect human life, which God the Father puts to the credit of the repentant sinner.
It is this perfect human life that is to be continuously imparted to us by our daily experience in Christian living, that it may eventually be our own. This is not to say that man attains unto the perfection of Christ, but it is to say that the perfection of Christ is imparted to man through faith and that perfection alone can overcome the imperfections of his nature. "He took our nature and overcame, that we through taking His nature might overcome."—The Desire of Ages, pp. 311, 3/2.
5. The Wonder of the Achievements of the Incarnation
It is the marvel of the incarnation that it enables man to become forever what God originally meant him to be, a sharer with Himself in the life of Paradise. This complete healing of body, mind, and soul in the re-creating of man in the image of God is the divine purpose of the God-man. The more one considers the ravages of sin, the degradation of man, and the matchless holiness and glory of the Omnipotent God, the more one marvels at the achievements of the incarnation.
In Christ, man's response to God was complete and God could give man, through Him, all He had been longing to give all of us since He first made us.
The dire results of Adam's sin are far eclipsed by the marvelous results of Christ's righteousness. Jesus not only canceled the effects of the fall but brought great added blessings to the whole human race. The life that Jesus gives replaces the death that resulted from Adam's sin. E. L. Strong observes, "Through the fault of Adam death began its reign; but after Christ's resurrection the life which has conquered death began its reign."—Op. Cit., p. 67. The whole human race is potentially, through Christ, the recipient of this life, for Christ's human nature is united to us all. What it becomes actually is experienced only as the presence of Christ becomes a living reality in our lives. "He bids us by faith in Him attain to the glory of the character of God."—The Desire of Ages, p. 312.
Ah, dearest Jesus, Holy Child, Make Thee a bed, soft, undefiled Within my heart, that it may be A quiet chamber, kept for Thee.
--MARTIN LUTHER
George Whitefield once said of Isaac Watts, "He was a bit of Christ." O to become a bit of Christ, to manifest the spirit of His loving service for the redemption of mankind, to have imparted into our own lives a portion of that wondrous life of the incarnated God.
It was the living portraits of Jesus reproduced in the hearts of His early disciples that made them an irresistible power for the kingdom of love. His Holy Spirit transforming human character as the Word again becomes flesh in us by the impartation of the incarnated divine-human life of the Son of God, is the personal miracle of the incarnation in which every redeemed child of God can fully share. The incarnated "Christ in you," friend, is your "hope of glory" (Col. 1:27). His rebirth in the hearts of man is this world's greatest need.
Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born;
Until He's born in me, my soul is still forlorn.
The purposes of the incarnation foreshadowed the consummation of the eternal plan of the ages (Eph. 1:4-10), achieved the crowning disclosure of God's love to man (John 1:18; Heb. 1:2), provided lost man with adequate means for his redemption and restoration (Heb. 2:9-15), and made the Christ a merciful and faithful high priest, who, because of His own experience, "in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, . .. is able to succour them that are tempted" (Heb. 2:18).
6. The Wonders of the Future Glories of the Incarnation
The infinite marvel of "God . . . manifest in the flesh" indicates that there is nothing too wonderful to be anticipated in the expectancy of the great things that will come to glorified man in a world made new. Miracle transformations are taking place in this life, in human characters who accept the incarnate God as their personal Saviour. What then shall be the future glories of man when fully re-created in the image of God!
The incarnated life of Christ reveals how much God had meant that man should be in His original creation, and how much God plans for man to be when His re-creation of redeemed man is complete. In Christ we see the wonderful capacity of human nature when it is complete, wholly and unreservedly controlled by the Spirit of the living God.
Christ is perfect man just as He is perfect God. Thus, in Christ alone can humanity fulfill its divine destiny. In spite of man's fall and its dire consequences, the incarnation is a guarantee that this destiny will yet be realized. The purposes of man's original creation added to Christ's infinite possibilities betoken a glorious future beyond all human imagination for redeemed man. In the person of Christ glorified human nature has been received into the highest heaven.
Of the wonders of the incarnation, the incomparable marvel of redeeming grace, "the half has never yet been told." We have much to learn concerning that moment when God Himself was born as a babe in a stable, His bed a manger of hay, and of the subsequent incarnated life of God in human flesh.
What words mark His epochal life on earth! —a star in the East, a stable, a carpenter shop, a baptism, a personal encounter with the devil, a hillside sermon, a healing touch, a fisherman's boat, a resurrection voice, a waving palm, a last supper, a foot-washing service of love, a midnight prayer, a bogus trial, a flashing scourge, a cross, an empty tomb, an ascension cloud!—God Himself in human flesh, the Creator and creature united in one, the Eternal God, the man Christ Jesus (1 Tim. 2:5).
"And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory" (1 Tim. 3:16). Such love shows us the greatness of our misery by revealing the greatness of the remedy we need. Its matchless wonder is that nothing less is completely worthy of God and nothing less is capable of man's redemption.
