Mystery of Incarnation
When told that she would bear a special child, Mary responded in wonderment. “ ‘How will this be . . . since I am a virgin?’ ” The angel then said: “ ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you’ ” (Luke 1:34, 35, NIV). This Child came into our history through the creative power of the Spirit in the womb of Mary (Matt. 1:18). The verb overshadow reminds us of Exodus 40:35, where we find a description of the glory of the Lord on the cloud coming down to dwell among men in the tabernacle. The Lord was coming down in a mysterious way in order to be conceived in the womb of this woman.
The coming of Jesus into humanity is precisely about the union of the divine and the human. Although the two natures remain distinct, what took place was not simply the indwelling of the divine in the human but a real incarnation. That is, Christ is truly God and truly man. The Bible does not tell us what took place at the moment the two natures were united in the womb of Mary. In the Incarnation God became human, and the fullness of God must have dwelt in humanity. This is precisely what Paul says.
Read Colossians 2:9. What does it tell us about who Jesus was?
The point is that Jesus was fully God! Had one or several of the divine attributes been lost during the Incarnation, we would have had less than the incarnation of God. Paul states that the preincarnated Christ was “in very nature God” (Phil. 2:6, NIV), equal to God, but in the Incarnation He took “the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (vs. 7, NIV).
Though fully God, Jesus placed everything He had under the authority of the Father, but in doing that He did not divest Himself of any of His divine attributes. During the Incarnation there was a concealment of the divine in Jesus, yet deity was always fully present. For the purpose of the atonement it was indispensable to have God in human flesh, because only God could save us.
| Read Matthew 1:18–25. How many miraculous things occurred there, things that can’t be explained other than by the supernatural intervention of God? What should this tell us just how limited we are, in and of ourselves, to understand the most important truths? Why, just because we can’t understand something, must we not automatically dismiss it as untrue? |
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