God With Us
The prophet said, “Call His name Immanuel—God with us!”
It really is amazing you know, that God became a man. This truth is certainly beyond our mind’s ability to comprehend. A holy, sinless, omnipotent sovereign God took on humanity! It blows my mind that the God who is everywhere present slipped into a human body. Paul rightly spoke of this as the “kenosis”, that is, the emptying of God in the incarnation of Christ. “He who was in very nature God...took on the nature of man.” Jesus Christ was God walking among us in human shoe leather!
Theologians call the joining of a fully divine nature with a fully human nature in the person of Christ the hypostatic union. Jesus was not half-man and half-God but fully man and fully God! This separates Jesus from every other human being who ever lived. He is truly the unique God-man.
It is insulting to the character of Jesus to put Him in the same category as Mohammed or any other religious leader. It is equally insulting to put Him in the category of the angelic beings for He has “become so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they” (Hebrews 1:4). The writer of Hebrews goes on to say, “And of the angels He (God) says; ‘Who makes His angels spirits and His ministers a flame of fire.’ But to the Son He says; ‘Your throne, O God, is forever” (Hebrews 1:7-8). That’s right, God the Father calls Jesus the Son, God! The reason this is not a contradiction is because God the Father is God and God the Son is God and God the Holy Spirit is God. Blessed trinity!
Every cult in the world gets this wrong! They, under the influence of the evil one, strip Christ of His glory as the eternal Son of God. I had a lady approach me at Perkins recently asking me if I was a Jehovah’s Witness and I said, “No.” I told her to be careful what she’s learning and reminded her that according to the Bible Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. She parroted the cult’s by-line saying, “Jesus never claimed to be God.” But Jesus clearly identified Himself as God in many places in scripture like John 8:58 where He said, “Before Abraham was, I AM,” a statement no mere man could make. And in the verse from Hebrews we see clearly that God the Father called Jesus the Son, GOD.
To call Jesus a mere man is as insulting as calling your human friend a slug. (Slug-a common name that is normally applied to any gastropod mollusk.) See how he responds to such a demeaning statement.
To think that God would go so far as to take on humanity that He might identify with us is more than wonderful to a sinner like me. And scripture seems to indicate that when Christ took on a human body in the incarnation He did so permanently. For all eternity Jesus will remain in that body forever solidifying His loving intention to “partake of flesh and blood” and share with us the commonality of humanity! For all eternity we will look upon Him who stooped so low to not only identify with us but suffer and die in the body the Father prepared for Him so that we as sinners could share in the glory of His righteousness.
Thank You Lord Jesus for your humility. Thank You for coming down to my level that I might be lifted up to Your level. As the prophet said, “Call His name Immanuel—God with us!”
Pastor Dan
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