How big of a deal is the Incarnation at Christmas. Part 1
Explaining Christmas Part 1
One of my favorite Christmas hymns is O come O come Emmanuel. The first verse reads,
“O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel. That mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear.”
My soul feels this verse. In the darkness, I know the loneliness, captivity, and weight of the sin oppressing my soul. Daily, I am frustrated with the exile from the Garden of Eden and the presence of God that we were created to experience. Deep from within I cry out, “O come, O come Emmanuel.”
My cry is not that just anyone would come. A superhero wearing tights could not rescue me from the separation from God. There is no political plan or economic answer to the problem of sin. What is needed is the fullness of the power of God in physical form. What is required for the rescue of the soul is the Emmanuel.
Why is it that only such a being can rescue us? S
Sin, regardless of whom the assault was against, is ultimately an offence against God. God is an eternal being. The debt created by sinning against an eternal being is an eternal debt. The only way to pay off an eternal debt is by the sacrifice of something eternal. There is only one being that is eternal, namely God. Therefore, God himself is the only sacrifice that is able to make atonement for my sins. The only person who can rescue us is the Emmanuel, the incarnate God.
And that is why Christmas exists.
Our objective is to understand how we might correctly communicate the magnitude and glory of Christmas. How does one speak of the eternal God taking on the temporal, degrading flesh of humanity? How can we fathom such love that God would choose to leave Heaven and dwell on earth with us? What is the proper response to the majesty, magnitude, and mystery of what has been revealed to us and the sacrifice made for us?
As the chorus of the hymn declares, “Rejoice, rejoice! Emanuel has come to thee, Oh, Israel.”
For most of us Christmas is about the presents, overcrowded malls and holiday rush. Many of us give the manager a passing ponderance but not in-depth thought about how big of a deal the baby Jesus, fully God, fully human, really is. I want to invite you to take a moment and let your mind expand as I communicate some of the magnitude of Christmas and the incarnation.
One of the most important questions we can ask is “What actually happened at Christmas?” It is the largest celebration around the world every year. The season is filled with commercials, TV specials, parties, gifts, and decorations. There are stores and even careers that are exclusively dedicated to this one holiday season. Even our calendars are all based on this one event that transpired over 2000 years ago, which divided history into B.C. and A.D. Even your birthday is dated by the birth of Jesus. A long time ago in a city called Bethlehem, a child was born who changed all of history. If the message of scripture is true, then there is nothing more important for us to understand than the implications of Christmas for our lives.
The core message of Christmas is that God became flesh and dwelt among us.
That is a remarkable claim made throughout scripture. From the very beginning of the book of Genesis to Revelation, all sixty-six books in the Bible point to this one person who was identified as Jesus Christ, the Messiah. To best grasp the magnitude of what took place that first Christmas, we will have to begin to think critically about important things and ask questions that stretch our minds as we attempt to understand the theological and philosophical truths about the incarnation of Christ.
It is out of my deep love for Jesus and the desire to help others communicate effectively that I write. Far too often, children of God, including myself, fail to speak properly of the incarnation, which leads others to doubt and even reject the person of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. For instance, when we speak of Jesus, do we communicate anything beyond a baby in a manger? Is Jesus the Savior of the world or simply a cute infant in an animal feed trough? Do we communicate the majesty of the incarnation, which took place as God wrapped himself in human flesh to be near to us? Do we tell the story with the awe and passion of a soul rescued be a Savior and in love with the living deity? Or is our Christmas message a children’s pageant void of depth but full of cute folly? Let me say it again; if the message of scripture is true, then there is nothing more important for us to understand than the implications of Christmas for our lives.
Christmas is the celebration of good news and of great joy for all people, because the Second Person of the Trinity added humanity to divinity. I know that is a mouthful to say, especially compared to “Merry Christmas,” but it is the best communication of the truth of the incarnation at Christmas. When we speak of the Trinity, we are communicating that there is only one God, one essence composed of three persons. When we are in a conversation with our coworker about Christmas, we speak of God becoming human, but what is often thought of by our non-Christian friend is more of a Hercules character, half god, half man. Or just as bad, our Islamic brothers and sisters claim that we are inventing an additional god and elevating Jesus above the status of prophet to deity.
Another common mistake that we make when talking about Christmas is to speak of Jesus being born, implying that is when Jesus came into existence. It is difficult to comprehend someone being born and existing eternally before their birth, but this is exactly what is meant by John’s opening lines of his gospel,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God,” (John 1:1-2).
The birth of Jesus is unique in all creation, as the eternal God in the second person of the Trinity added humanity to divinity to create an unprecedented mathematical equation, where 100% God and 100% human is present in the person of Jesus Christ. Often, when we speak of Jesus’ birth, we are unintentionally communicating that Jesus came into existence at that moment. If this were true, Jesus could not be fully God, as God is eternal. All created things are temporary, and therefore, if Jesus came into being at his birth, as the rest of humanity has, he could not be God. If Jesus were not God, then the sacrifice upon the cross is of no value, because atonement required an eternal being to give his life to pay the infinite debt of sin against an eternal being. To speak of Jesus' birth correctly, we speak of him as begotten, not made or created. This is why the Nicene Creed states this about Jesus:
“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father…”
Jesus shares with God, as part of the Trinity, the attributes of God, including the attribute of eternality.
To speak of God’s attributes, we are communicating the fundamental qualities and characteristics of God’s being. God’s attributes include omniscience (all-knowing), omnipotence (all-powerful), omnipresence (all-present), immutability (unchangeable), holiness, justice, goodness, and love. God’s attributes are not something God does, but they are who God is. God is love. God is omnipresent. God’s attributes are inherent qualities of God's perfect nature.
The attributes of God are often discussed in two categories: Communicable attributes and incommunicable attributes. Communicable attributes are those that God shares in some way with creatures, particularly humans, such as love, goodness, faithfulness, holiness etc… While humans or even another creature can be good, they cannot be good in the same way God is good. I can be good by doing good works, but only God is actually good in his nature and being. Incommunicable attributes are those attributes that God does not and cannot share with creatures, such as being all-knowing (omniscience), all-powerful (omnipotent), eternal, simple (not composed or parts), immutable, etc… To say that Jesus is exactly, perfectly, like God is to say that he possesses both the communicable and the incommunicable attributes of God.
When speaking of the incarnation of Christ, it is also important to distinguish between attributes of God and the properties of God, or to distinguish between being, which is what something is, and personhood, which is who a person is. God’s being is best described by his attributes, which are shared by the three persons of the Trinity. To speak of the person of God is to focus on the First Person of the Trinity. To speak of the properties of God, is to communicate about the characteristics of the interior relations of the person of the Trinity. To speak of God as the Father is a property or person that is about the Father. (First person does not mean a numerical order, but a title that is given to understand the distinction between the persons of the Trinity within scripture). The Father is not the Son, or the Holy Spirit. The Father is the person who sent the Son, which is to speak of God’s actions as properties as the sender of the Son. To say that the Holy Spirit guides us, is to speak of a property of the Holy Spirit. Again, think of Being as what you are, and person as who you are. Jesus is fully God in being, but not the same person.
At Christmas, we celebrate God becoming human. Jesus as the second person of the Trinity, added humanity to divinity to atone for our sins.
Hebrews 2:17
“Therefore, he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.”
It is imperative that we speak of Jesus not as a lesser being, but as the fullness of God in being as the second person of the Trinity. To imagine that God loved us so much that he left heaven and became human is truly good news of great joy. The complexity of what took place in a manger over 2000 years ago should shake our world every day as we comprehend the fullness of God wrapped in the flesh of an infant. This is exactly the message the Apostle Paul wrote about to the church of Colossae,
Colossians 1:19 “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,”
Colossians 2:9 “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,”
Fullness = (Plērōma) completeness or fullness.
In the manger scene, we discover the fullness of God, the Trinity in being, the Second person of the Trinity has come to dwell with us.
Before the first Christmas, it was possible for the people of God to imagine that God would come to earth and roam the lands. God might would even temporarily reside in a temple built by Solomon. Solomon said that God would dwell in the Temple but acknowledged that God’s true dwelling place was in Heaven. This would mean that God was constantly distant. But Christmas changed everything. Paul writes that the fullness of God dwelt in Christ. The very presence and nature (the fullness) of God is found in Christ. The concept of the Emmanuel, God dwelling with us is called the Incarnation. This is why Matthew records the words of the angel to Jospeh,
“Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us,” (Matthew 1:23).
This amazing act of God becoming flesh and dwelling with us is called the incarnation. Incarnation literally means “the act of being made flesh.” It comes from the Latin version of John 1:14, which in English reads, “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.” Theologically we speak of the incarnation as the hypostatic union, a term used to describe how God the Son, Jesus Christ, took on a human nature, yet remained fully God at the same time. Jesus always had been God (John 8:58, 10:30). In the manger, a baby lay as the incarnation of the Second person of the Trinity in human form (John 1:14). The addition of the human nature to the divine nature in Jesus Christ, the God-man. This is the hypostatic union, Jesus Christ, one Person, fully God and fully man. Jesus’ two natures, human and divine, are inseparable. Jesus will forever be the God-man, fully God and fully human, two distinct natures in one Person.
This Christmas I invite you to think deeply about the majesty and mystery of God. The gift of Jesus Christ is the most expensive gift you will ever be given. The love of God is priceless. The gift of the incarnation will last forever. There will be many gifts given this year that will break and be destroyed within an hour. Jesus is the only eternal gift. Finally, Jesus is the most practical gift that you will use all year long, for the rest of your life. The gift of the Emmanuel, God with us is the strength, hope, and will to move forward, looking towards a greater good and greater glory that awaits those who put their trust in Jesus. All this was delivered literally in a manger over 2000 years ago. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
One of my favorite Christmas hymns is O come O come Emmanuel. The first verse reads,
“O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel. That mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear.”
My soul feels this verse. In the darkness, I know the loneliness, captivity, and weight of the sin oppressing my soul. Daily, I am frustrated with the exile from the Garden of Eden and the presence of God that we were created to experience. Deep from within I cry out, “O come, O come Emmanuel.”
My cry is not that just anyone would come. A superhero wearing tights could not rescue me from the separation from God. There is no political plan or economic answer to the problem of sin. What is needed is the fullness of the power of God in physical form. What is required for the rescue of the soul is the Emmanuel.
Why is it that only such a being can rescue us? S
Sin, regardless of whom the assault was against, is ultimately an offence against God. God is an eternal being. The debt created by sinning against an eternal being is an eternal debt. The only way to pay off an eternal debt is by the sacrifice of something eternal. There is only one being that is eternal, namely God. Therefore, God himself is the only sacrifice that is able to make atonement for my sins. The only person who can rescue us is the Emmanuel, the incarnate God.
And that is why Christmas exists.
Our objective is to understand how we might correctly communicate the magnitude and glory of Christmas. How does one speak of the eternal God taking on the temporal, degrading flesh of humanity? How can we fathom such love that God would choose to leave Heaven and dwell on earth with us? What is the proper response to the majesty, magnitude, and mystery of what has been revealed to us and the sacrifice made for us?
As the chorus of the hymn declares, “Rejoice, rejoice! Emanuel has come to thee, Oh, Israel.”
For most of us Christmas is about the presents, overcrowded malls and holiday rush. Many of us give the manager a passing ponderance but not in-depth thought about how big of a deal the baby Jesus, fully God, fully human, really is. I want to invite you to take a moment and let your mind expand as I communicate some of the magnitude of Christmas and the incarnation.
One of the most important questions we can ask is “What actually happened at Christmas?” It is the largest celebration around the world every year. The season is filled with commercials, TV specials, parties, gifts, and decorations. There are stores and even careers that are exclusively dedicated to this one holiday season. Even our calendars are all based on this one event that transpired over 2000 years ago, which divided history into B.C. and A.D. Even your birthday is dated by the birth of Jesus. A long time ago in a city called Bethlehem, a child was born who changed all of history. If the message of scripture is true, then there is nothing more important for us to understand than the implications of Christmas for our lives.
The core message of Christmas is that God became flesh and dwelt among us.
That is a remarkable claim made throughout scripture. From the very beginning of the book of Genesis to Revelation, all sixty-six books in the Bible point to this one person who was identified as Jesus Christ, the Messiah. To best grasp the magnitude of what took place that first Christmas, we will have to begin to think critically about important things and ask questions that stretch our minds as we attempt to understand the theological and philosophical truths about the incarnation of Christ.
It is out of my deep love for Jesus and the desire to help others communicate effectively that I write. Far too often, children of God, including myself, fail to speak properly of the incarnation, which leads others to doubt and even reject the person of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. For instance, when we speak of Jesus, do we communicate anything beyond a baby in a manger? Is Jesus the Savior of the world or simply a cute infant in an animal feed trough? Do we communicate the majesty of the incarnation, which took place as God wrapped himself in human flesh to be near to us? Do we tell the story with the awe and passion of a soul rescued be a Savior and in love with the living deity? Or is our Christmas message a children’s pageant void of depth but full of cute folly? Let me say it again; if the message of scripture is true, then there is nothing more important for us to understand than the implications of Christmas for our lives.
Christmas is the celebration of good news and of great joy for all people, because the Second Person of the Trinity added humanity to divinity. I know that is a mouthful to say, especially compared to “Merry Christmas,” but it is the best communication of the truth of the incarnation at Christmas. When we speak of the Trinity, we are communicating that there is only one God, one essence composed of three persons. When we are in a conversation with our coworker about Christmas, we speak of God becoming human, but what is often thought of by our non-Christian friend is more of a Hercules character, half god, half man. Or just as bad, our Islamic brothers and sisters claim that we are inventing an additional god and elevating Jesus above the status of prophet to deity.
Another common mistake that we make when talking about Christmas is to speak of Jesus being born, implying that is when Jesus came into existence. It is difficult to comprehend someone being born and existing eternally before their birth, but this is exactly what is meant by John’s opening lines of his gospel,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God,” (John 1:1-2).
The birth of Jesus is unique in all creation, as the eternal God in the second person of the Trinity added humanity to divinity to create an unprecedented mathematical equation, where 100% God and 100% human is present in the person of Jesus Christ. Often, when we speak of Jesus’ birth, we are unintentionally communicating that Jesus came into existence at that moment. If this were true, Jesus could not be fully God, as God is eternal. All created things are temporary, and therefore, if Jesus came into being at his birth, as the rest of humanity has, he could not be God. If Jesus were not God, then the sacrifice upon the cross is of no value, because atonement required an eternal being to give his life to pay the infinite debt of sin against an eternal being. To speak of Jesus' birth correctly, we speak of him as begotten, not made or created. This is why the Nicene Creed states this about Jesus:
“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father…”
Jesus shares with God, as part of the Trinity, the attributes of God, including the attribute of eternality.
To speak of God’s attributes, we are communicating the fundamental qualities and characteristics of God’s being. God’s attributes include omniscience (all-knowing), omnipotence (all-powerful), omnipresence (all-present), immutability (unchangeable), holiness, justice, goodness, and love. God’s attributes are not something God does, but they are who God is. God is love. God is omnipresent. God’s attributes are inherent qualities of God's perfect nature.
The attributes of God are often discussed in two categories: Communicable attributes and incommunicable attributes. Communicable attributes are those that God shares in some way with creatures, particularly humans, such as love, goodness, faithfulness, holiness etc… While humans or even another creature can be good, they cannot be good in the same way God is good. I can be good by doing good works, but only God is actually good in his nature and being. Incommunicable attributes are those attributes that God does not and cannot share with creatures, such as being all-knowing (omniscience), all-powerful (omnipotent), eternal, simple (not composed or parts), immutable, etc… To say that Jesus is exactly, perfectly, like God is to say that he possesses both the communicable and the incommunicable attributes of God.
When speaking of the incarnation of Christ, it is also important to distinguish between attributes of God and the properties of God, or to distinguish between being, which is what something is, and personhood, which is who a person is. God’s being is best described by his attributes, which are shared by the three persons of the Trinity. To speak of the person of God is to focus on the First Person of the Trinity. To speak of the properties of God, is to communicate about the characteristics of the interior relations of the person of the Trinity. To speak of God as the Father is a property or person that is about the Father. (First person does not mean a numerical order, but a title that is given to understand the distinction between the persons of the Trinity within scripture). The Father is not the Son, or the Holy Spirit. The Father is the person who sent the Son, which is to speak of God’s actions as properties as the sender of the Son. To say that the Holy Spirit guides us, is to speak of a property of the Holy Spirit. Again, think of Being as what you are, and person as who you are. Jesus is fully God in being, but not the same person.
At Christmas, we celebrate God becoming human. Jesus as the second person of the Trinity, added humanity to divinity to atone for our sins.
Hebrews 2:17
“Therefore, he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.”
It is imperative that we speak of Jesus not as a lesser being, but as the fullness of God in being as the second person of the Trinity. To imagine that God loved us so much that he left heaven and became human is truly good news of great joy. The complexity of what took place in a manger over 2000 years ago should shake our world every day as we comprehend the fullness of God wrapped in the flesh of an infant. This is exactly the message the Apostle Paul wrote about to the church of Colossae,
Colossians 1:19 “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,”
Colossians 2:9 “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,”
Fullness = (Plērōma) completeness or fullness.
In the manger scene, we discover the fullness of God, the Trinity in being, the Second person of the Trinity has come to dwell with us.
Before the first Christmas, it was possible for the people of God to imagine that God would come to earth and roam the lands. God might would even temporarily reside in a temple built by Solomon. Solomon said that God would dwell in the Temple but acknowledged that God’s true dwelling place was in Heaven. This would mean that God was constantly distant. But Christmas changed everything. Paul writes that the fullness of God dwelt in Christ. The very presence and nature (the fullness) of God is found in Christ. The concept of the Emmanuel, God dwelling with us is called the Incarnation. This is why Matthew records the words of the angel to Jospeh,
“Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us,” (Matthew 1:23).
This amazing act of God becoming flesh and dwelling with us is called the incarnation. Incarnation literally means “the act of being made flesh.” It comes from the Latin version of John 1:14, which in English reads, “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.” Theologically we speak of the incarnation as the hypostatic union, a term used to describe how God the Son, Jesus Christ, took on a human nature, yet remained fully God at the same time. Jesus always had been God (John 8:58, 10:30). In the manger, a baby lay as the incarnation of the Second person of the Trinity in human form (John 1:14). The addition of the human nature to the divine nature in Jesus Christ, the God-man. This is the hypostatic union, Jesus Christ, one Person, fully God and fully man. Jesus’ two natures, human and divine, are inseparable. Jesus will forever be the God-man, fully God and fully human, two distinct natures in one Person.
This Christmas I invite you to think deeply about the majesty and mystery of God. The gift of Jesus Christ is the most expensive gift you will ever be given. The love of God is priceless. The gift of the incarnation will last forever. There will be many gifts given this year that will break and be destroyed within an hour. Jesus is the only eternal gift. Finally, Jesus is the most practical gift that you will use all year long, for the rest of your life. The gift of the Emmanuel, God with us is the strength, hope, and will to move forward, looking towards a greater good and greater glory that awaits those who put their trust in Jesus. All this was delivered literally in a manger over 2000 years ago. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
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