And the Word became 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 1:14
Dear People Who Keep Company with God,
The person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ are at the heart of everything we believe about God and have staked our lives on. There is no salvation apart from the Word becoming flesh and the Incarnate Son of God living with us and dying for us. There is no hope for the world. But God, in the incarnate form Christ, walked our paths as a man. He entered the darkness of human history to give us His very life. He took on our brokenness to heal us of everything that separates us from Him so that we may call Him Abba, Father, and be children of God. The Incarnation is the highest revelation of God’s unprecedented love for us.
There is no denying that the Incarnation is paradoxical. It is challenging, if not impossible, to grasp how a person could be at the same time fully God and fully human. Yet the Apostle John masterfully describes it in three words: became, flesh, and dwelt. Jesus was not human until He became a first-century Jew. Became does not mean that Jesus ceased to be God. In becoming man, He did not forsake his divine nature. His Incarnation is an act of addition, not subtraction. It means that He became man by taking on human nature, in addition to His divine nature. One of the glories of the Incarnation is that divinity and humanity are not mutually exclusive. Jesus didn’t have to pick between being God and being a man. He was both at the same time.
John’s use of the word flesh isn’t merely a reference to the human body but the entirety of what makes up being human. Jesus had a human body, mind, emotions, and will. He was born (Luke 2:7), grew up (Luke 2:40, 52), experienced fatigue (John 4:6), thirst (John 19:28), and hunger (Matthew 4:2). Our Lord became physically weak (Matthew 4:11), and He died (Luke 23:46). The Son of God didn’t only become like a man. He became truly and fully human. Jesus is like us in every respect except for sin. Although He experienced every temptation, He never sinned. (Hebrews 4:15)
The glory of God was revealed to us when Christ became flesh and dwelt with us as one of us. He did this not with the splendor of a king, subjugating the world with His majesty, power, and wealth, but with the humility of a child birthed into poverty and oppression. Isaiah captures this so well. “He grew up before him like a tender shoot and like a root out of the dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” (Isaiah 53:2-3)
The wonder of this is that Jesus Christ is still a Man. “For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Just as He never stopped being God when He came to earth, Christ Jesus will never stop being a Man in heaven. A Man sits on the Throne of God in heaven. Since His resurrection, the only difference is that He is a glorified Man, one who can walk through walls, appear, and disappear, and ride on clouds. According to 1 Corinthians 15:42-49, we too will be raised from the dead by Christ with a glorified body like His. Yet, we will never stop being men and women. In becoming man, Christ made Himself a gift for humanity. He took on our humanity to give us His divinity. He has given us the glory God the Father gave Jesus Christ (John 17:22).
Many Blessings, BW