THE INCARNATION

11-13 Mar 2024

We have been looking at Luke 2:1-21 in our study in the DG group. Various ones shared that the ‘Christmas story’ of the birth of Christ has become so familiar that we may miss the true meaning of the birth of Christ.

As we studied this passage, I was brought to meditate on the INCARNATION. The birth of Christ was and is unique; and we need to know what takes place in the incarnation to help us to realise how much God has done for us in his Redemption plan and salvation plan.
In the Old Covenant, God knows that his children in their sin and frailty are unable to fulfil his covenant, and so he provides for them a way of covenant response and fulfilment which was but a pointer ahead to the actualisation of the covenant in the very being and life of man. That would take place when God provided from within Israel, and from within man’s actual existence and life, complete and final fulfilment of the covenant both from the side of God and from the side of man. This is what takes place in the incarnation.

God not only fulfils his promise of love in the covenant in giving himself to humanity in complete and utter grace, but he accomplishes for man, and from within man, man’s fulfilment of the covenant, man’s appropriation of God’s gift of himself. But the fulfilment of the covenant will of God to give himself to man is also the fulfilment of the divine judgement upon sin, and the fulfilment from within mankind of man’s obedient submission to that verdict of the divine love against sin.Thus in the incarnation God comes himself, freely condescending to enter into our lost and estranged humanity, taking our lost condition upon himself in order to effect, through judgement and mercy, reconciliation with himself. In this act of condescension God comes as God the Son and God the Word.
He comes as God the Son to enter our rebellious estate in order to effect reconciliation by living out his life of filial obedience where we are disobedient, and he comes as God the Word to enter into our darkness and blindness in order to effect revelation by manifesting the love of God and by achieving from within humanity faithful appropriation of divine revelation. The act of God the Son and of God the Word are not two acts but one act, for revelation is part of reconciliation and reconciliation is part of revelation. In both, as one mighty act, God fulfils the covenant from the side of God, “I will be your God, your Father”, and fulfils the covenant of the side of man, ” I will be your obedient child, or in pleural, we shall be your people”.
This is the mighty act of the incarnation which is at once the act of God’s humiliation and the act of man’s exaltation, for he who in such amazing grace descended to make our lost cause his own, ascended in accomplishment of his task, elevating man into union and communion with the life of God.

But it began with “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John1:14).
“While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son…Today in the town of David, a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord” (Luke 2:6-7a,11).

The basis of our union with Christ is Christ’s union with us in the incarnation. We can become one with him because he first became one with us. By taking human nature into personalunion, the Son of God has joined himself to humanity. He now has a human body and soul, which he will never jettison.
God’s redemption plan, God’s covenantal promises focus in the incarnate Christ. Christ’s union with us in the incarnation serves as the foundation for all that follows in salvation, and, more than that, is at the heart of what salvation involves.
The incarnation is the indispensable basis for union with Christ. Since Chris has united himself to us in the incarnation, we can be united to him by the Holy Spirit. Salvation finds its ultimate fulfilment in the union of humanity with God seen in the incarnate Christ.

(B)
Christ has completely identified himself with us. He is one with us. He everlastingly took our nature into personal union. Christ’s becoming man was to the end that he made complete and effective atonement for our sins on the cross, defeated death by his resurrection, and ascended in our nature to the right hand of God. There is no incarnation without atonement. On the other hand, there can be no atonement without incarnation. It was necessary, according to the just nature of God and on the basis of his eternal decree, that the expiatory and propitiatory death of the Son of God should occur to put away sin once for all. He needed to do this as man, for man had sinned in the first place. It was in our nature that he offered himself to the Father on the cross, and in our nature that he ascended far above all things created, and in our nature that he lives and reigns forever – in indissoluble personal union. The complete identification of the eternal Son with our flesh and blood is part of our union with him.

Christ’s union with us in the incarnation is the foundation for our union with him, both now and in the eternal future. It is a pledge of our sonship, for our common nature with Christ is the pledge of our fellowship with the Son of God, and clothed with our flesh he vanquished death and sin together that the victory and triumph might be ours. He offered as a sacrifice the flesh he received from us, that he might wipe out our guilt by his act of expiation and appease the Fathers’s righteous wrath.

A mediator adequate for man’s needs must be both divine and human. The atonement required can come only from man. But fallen man is disqualified from making atonement. God the Son incarnate is alone free from sin and able to offer himself as an atoning sacrifice.

Christ’s task was so to restore us to God’s grace as to make of the children of men, children of God, of the heirs of Gehenna, heirs of the heavenly kingdom. Who could have done this had not the self-same Son of God become the Son of Man, and had not so taken what was ours as to impart ..what was his to us, and to make what was his by nature ours by grace (Calvin, Institutes, II.xii.2).
The Son of God was not content merely to offer his flesh and blood and to subject them to death, but he willed in full measure to appear before the judgement seat of God the Father in the name and in the person of all sinners, being then ready to be condemned, inasmuch as he bore our burden.
Jesus’ ministry reveals to us the humanity of a Saviour who can be trusted, who understands, and who is able to bring reassurance of the adequacy and fittingness of his grace. The revelation of his frailty and weakness is all intended to assure us that he is one with us and has taken our place.

When the Son of God put on our flesh he also of his own accord put on human feelings, so that he differed in nothing from his brethren, sin only excepted… Our feelings are sinful because they rush on unrestrainedly, but in Christ they were composed and regulated in obedience to God and were completely free from sin.

The apostolic writers clearly see that both the deity and the manhood of Jesus are fundamental to his atoning work. They see that it is just because Jesus is God the Son that they are to regard his disclosure of the Father’s mind and heart as perfect and final, and his death as the supreme evidence of God’s love for sinners and his will to bless believers. They realise that it is Jesus’ divine Sonship that guarantees the endless duration, sinless perfection, and limitless efficacy, of the High-Priestly service. They are aware that it was in virtue of his deity that he was able to defeat and dispossess the devil who kept sinners in bondage. Equally, they see that it was necessary for the Son of God to ‘become flesh’, for only so could he take the place as the ‘second man through God dealings with the race, only so could he mediate between God and men, and only so could he die for sins, for only flesh can die.

The Old Testament speaks of the coming one, the coming of the kingdom; the New Testament speaks of the one who has come, and of the kingdom as having arrived in Christ Jesus himself. The centre of gravity in both is the incarnation itself, to which the Old Testament is stretched out in expectation, and the New Testament looks back in fulfilment. This one movement throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament is the movement of God’s grace in which he renews the bond between himself and humanity broken and perverted at the Fall, and restores man to communion with himself.God does that by giving himself to man in such a way as to assume human nature and existence into oneness with himself. He condescends to enter into our human nature and so elevates it into union with his own divine nature. That is what took place in the incarnation of the Word.

(C)
In the New Testament, the kingdom of God is regarded as having broken into time and is overtaking men and women in Jesus Christ, but because it comes into the particularity of history, its universal domain is as yet hidden from the eyes of humanity. In the New Testament the main accent lies upon the present, but here the accent on the present has no meaning apart from the future when the kingdom of God now realised intensively in temporal and historical encounter, in Christ and his encounter with people, will be realised extensively in the new heaven and a new earth. In other words, the kingdom of God is both future and present. Hence in the 14th chapter of John, and in 1 John, the second coming of Christ refers both to his presence in the Spirit and to his presence on the last day.
What is still in the future is the full unveiling of a reality, but the reality itself is fully present here and now. Hence the relation between the today and the eschaton is much more a tension between the hidden and the manifest.

The New Testament Gospels, in their accounts of the transfiguration and the resurrection appearances, teach us that the transfigured and risen Christ cannot be perpetuated in the institutions and conditions of the passing world. He inevitably vanishes out of our sight. We cannot anticipate the second coming: of that hour not even the Son of Man knew. Without any doubt whatsoever his real presence is with us, and yet he is still to come. Christ does not communicate himself to us here and now as he will at the second coming, nevertheless his presence is as fully real as it will be then. In the repeated communicating in the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament (communion), the continual feeding of faith upon Christ (John 6) is crowned with vision, but because Christ is wholly identical with himself, and the new creation is a new creation and cannot be identified with this present evil world, it is a Christ who vanishes out of sight again and again, for as yet we walk by faith not by sight. But faith is crowned with vision in the communion (sacrament) again and again, the vision of the transcendent Christ – the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end who cannot be expressed in terms of this fallen world – that apocalyptic images are an inner necessity of faith. It is faith reaching forward to eager expectation of sight because it is faith that has already seen invisibly the risen Saviour.. And faith knows the day will come when Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, will return and the veil will be torn aside and we shall see him as he is and become like him.

(D)
It is the glory of the gospel that it meets our need. It comes to us in our sin and begins to undo what had been wrongly done in our lives in order that God’s image may be restored (Incarnation in a sense begins this process).
But it also pronounces us already to be, in Christ, what we will be in ourselves only when we are transformed by the last great crisis into his perfect image (1 John 3: 1-3).
Perhaps the most wonderful thing of all is this: God’s lifts us not only from what we are by nature to what Adam was in the Garden of Eden, but to what Adam was to become in the presence of God, and would have been had he persevered in obedience. The gospel does not make us like Adam in his innocence – it makes us like Christ, in all the perfection of his reflection of God. This is the essence of the salvation Christ provides, and it undergirds the pattern of Christian experience and doctrine which we find in the New Testament (Rom. 8:29).

But how is such a salvation provided by Chris? He came into the world as the Second Man (Incarnation), the Last Adam (1Cor. 15:45,47). Out of his perfect reflection of the image of God we may draw by the power of the Holy Spirit. We share in his death in the dominion of sin (Rom.6:10), Under him we shelter from the wrath of God, knowing that he has borne our guilt (Gal.3:13). He was made sin for us although he himself knew no sin, so that in him we might be made the righteousness of God (2 Cor.5;21). He died, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18). On the cross he triumphed over Satan, and exposed him as our enemy (Col.2:15). In his name therefore we may also conquer (Rev.12:10). Christ is our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption (1 Cor.1:30). All we shall ever need we will find he supplies by his grace.

Do we fathom what Christ has done for us? Are we truly grateful such that we no longer should live for ourselves but for Him who died for us and rose again?

(E)
The incarnation should not be seen as merely a means to salvation. Rather, salvation finds its ultimate fulfillment in the union of humanity with God seen in the incarnate Christ. If, from one angle, the incarnation was the means to atonement and all that followed it, from another (more lasting) perspective, the atonement was the means to the elevation and fruition of humanity in the renewed cosmos over which Christ rules, and we in him.

Indeed the Christian faith can be summed up as a series of unions. There is the union of the three Persons in the Trinity, ther union of the Son of God with our human nature, the union of Christ with his church, the union established by the Holy Spirit with us as he indwells us.
Each of these unions preserves the integrity of the constituent elements or members, being at once a real union and simultaneously not absorbing the one into the other.
Christ will never divest himself of his assumed humanity, or else we could not be saved, The incarnation is not for the years of time alone but for eternity. This is so because as our Saviour he is also the head of the church and will continue to be so without end. As the Mediator of creation, he has assumed the full authority given to man in creation, lost and misused by Adam but now fulfilled in his ministry as the second Adam.

If we truly appreciate what God has done for us in Christ, then we would appreciate why God desires us to be holy, because he is holy.
To attain right views about Christian holiness, we must begin by examining ther vast and solemn subject of sin. We must dig down very low if we would build high. Wrong views about holiness are generally traceable to wrong views about human corruption. The plain truth of the right knowledge of sin lies at the root of all saving Christianity. Without it such doctrines as sanctification, justification, conversion, are words which convey no meaning to the mind.
The first thing therefore that God does when he makes anyone a new creature in Christ, is to send light into his heart, and show him that he is a godly sinner. This means that Christians still sin, although they are a new creation in Christ.
Only as we begin to appreciate what we were before we became Christians, do we begin to sense something of the immense grandeur of being new creature in Christ. We will never properly understand the work of God which takes place in the Christian life unless we first of all have some kind of grasp of why we need the grace of God.
Hence the appreciation of why Christ had to come, and why he had to become man (the Word becomes flesh), and the whole scope of salvation and redemption which the Triune God undertook for us (and the decision was made even before the creation of the world). As we look and relook at the story of Christmas, let us not lose sight of this immense grandeur of God’s grace and love in his salvation plan.