Incarnation
Posted on 01. Dec, 2011 by Bart Lester in Bart, Blog
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” John 1:14
Christmas has not always been a welcome holiday for our types. The Puritans positively hated it. In their view, Christmas, Christ’s Mass, was a popish plot to reestablish Roman Catholicism in England. The weekly Sabbath was the only holiday they observed. Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan ruler of England in the middle of the seventeenth century, said Christmas encourages “an extreme forgetfulness of Christ, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights.” That view of Christmas did not remain in England alone. The Puritans who settled this country imported it and quickly outlawed Christmas. So in 1659 Massachusetts made the celebration of Christmas a crime. Eventually that edict was repealed in 1681, but the then governor required an escort of soldiers in order to attend a Christmas service. These sentiments continued through the early eighteenth century with a mob attacking a church in Boston in 1706 for having a Christmas service. Far from being out of the mainline, even the great British Baptist minister, Charles Spurgeon, refused to celebrate Christmas throughout his ministry in the late nineteenth century. Such hostility to the celebration of Christmas is very hard for our modern minds to understand. Ours is actually the opposite problem. We are not critics of Christmas. We enjoy the season but rarely remember the reason for the celebration.
Why does the church celebrate this holiday and what does it matter? Simply put, Christmas is a celebration of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The traditional sermons on the coming of Messiah from the Old Testament and the birth narratives from the gospels, present this truth. But what is the Incarnation? J. I. Packer puts it this way: “The doctrine of the Trinity declares that the man Jesus is truly divine; that of the incarnation declares that the divine Jesus is truly human.” Historic Christianity maintains that Jesus is eternal, the Alpha and Omega. As the early Christians put it: “there never was a time when He was not.” Jesus has always been divine, but He has not always been a man. There is a time in history when God became man. This miracle of God the Son, divine and eternal, adding to His deity a true, real humanity is why we celebrate Christmas.
This truth is at the center of our faith. John, the apostle, lived late into the first century and saw a phony faith called Gnosticism troubling the church. Gnosticism attempted to blend with early Christianity. One of Gnosticism’s beliefs was that matter was inherently evil. Gnostics reasoned if Jesus was supremely good and God, He could not be truly man. Jesus only appeared to be a man. John rightly viewed this as a threat to the Gospel and reacted strongly writing: “Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist” (II John 7).
Why do the Scriptures hold the denial of Jesus’ humanity as such a significant threat to the Gospel? To attack the humanity of Christ is to attack the basis of the Gospel. Jesus emptied Himself of His royal prerogatives and became man (Phil. 2:6-8). In doing so He qualified Himself to be our mediator (I Tim. 2:5). As our mediator Jesus is suited to be our substitute to atone for our sins. In order to become our Mediator it was necessary for Jesus to humble Himself. This humiliation included the difficulties of being born to poor, obscure parents, in a stable in Bethlehem where he was placed at birth in a trough. Not long after His birth, He became a political refuge fleeing to Egypt. Without honor and without status in the eyes of men is where you find Jesus at His birth.
All this trouble that Jesus experienced underlines the chief point frequently forgotten: God was not was not obligated to send His Son. At the end of the day, the great motivation of God was His own mercy not our worthiness. If someone wants proof of the kindness of God, he need not look any further than the coming of Jesus. Here the Father provides His Son as the sinless, innocent and perfect mediator between Himself and sinners. Jesus the Son of God came into the world as a real infant. His mission was to be that sinless mediator between a holy God and sinful men. A mission, He in time accomplished perfectly. The gracious of God evident in the birth of His Son provides us forgetful people with ultimate “reason for the season”.
