God Becomes Man

Throughout the Old Testament, God announces that He is coming, and finally comes by becoming a human being.

Sometimes the coming of God means judgment. God says, “Why do you long for the day of the LORD? That day will be darkness, not light.” (Amos 5:18) The coming of the Lord may bring with it the fiercest judgment. This judgment extends beyond His own covenant people to all the nations, for God is sovereign over all.

He also keeps promising to come with forgiveness and hope. Isaiah 9:6 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on His shoulders. And He will be called Won-derful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Although the monotheistic religions claim that God influences the world in some way, Christianity is unique in claiming that God became a human being in history for the purpose of mankind’s redemption.

The New Testament

When we come to the New Testament, the four Gospels all begin a little differently. But they all begin in some way with the coming of Jesus.

“And the Word was made flesh.” John 1:14

In six simple words, the apostle states the most profound mystery of human thought: How deity could cross the gulf separating what is God from what is not God.

It is a rather stunning fact that before the coming of Jesus, more than seven hundred years after the prophecy of Isaiah, no one clearly understood that the promised servant of the Lord would also be the Davidic king, whose coming would at the same time be the visitation of God. In retrospect it is easy to see one of the reasons why people did not put it together was it was hard to imagine how a conquering and victorious king of David’s line could also be a suffering servant, and for the condemned.

The Word: God’s Self-Expression

So when the baby came, Joseph was to give him the name Jesus. Jesus is simply the Greek form of Joshua, and means “Yahweh saves.” Yahweh, is the name of God in the Old Testament, connected to “I AM WHO I AM.”

John’s Gospel begins by thinking about what the coming of the eternal Son, the coming of God means.

John 1:14a The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.

John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John 1:3 Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made.

All that which is not God was made by God, but God was made by none. How God managed to bridge that gulf and join Himself to His creatures and limit the limitless seems to be beyond our comprehension.

Some think that the gap between God and humans is too great for an incarnation to occur. However, we should remember and understand that the Bible never presents God as “totally Other.”

God is transcendent in His omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence; but God is also personal: a moral agent who knows, intends, feels and acts. In this sense we are like God with respect to personality, but in a finite way.

We are finite agents who know, intend, feel and act. This should help lay the foundation for understanding the incarnation because it is not unseemly for a personal God, who made humans in His own image, to take on that very image for His once for all mission to redeem His creation!

Understanding God Becoming Man

The relationship between Jesus’ deity and humanity is better understood as a subcontrary relationship:
a proposition related to another in such a way that both may be true, but both cannot be false.

In a subcontrary relationship neither the affirmation nor the denial is universal, so both may be true. For example, some of the attributes of a person are physical and some of the attributes of a person are nonphysical. As humans, we have both a material and an immaterial nature, but we are not thereby two persons. Our brain weighs a certain amount, but our mind weighs nothing. This is not a contradiction, because we are speaking of two different aspects of personhood.

This analogy might help us understand how Jesus’ deity and humanity can coexist in the same person without any contradiction. We are all two substances, mind and body, that nevertheless make up our one person.

Some attributes of the person of Jesus Christ are divine and some are human. Neither the divine set of attributes nor the human set of attributes is said to be all that He has, and so neither affirmation is necessarily false.

Jesus did not forfeit His divine attributes in the incarnation. If He had, there would have been no incarnation, because deity would have been left behind. Rather, Christ left behind His preincarnate position—the full manifestation of His divine power and glory with the Father and the Spirit. In doing so, for our sake Christ temporarily suspended the employment of some of His divine attributes, but without His total being losing these attributes.

Fully God, Fully Man, in order TO REDEEM US!