It’s hard to take everything there is to say about Jesus and put it in one series of blogs, so let’s start with a summarized definition of the doctrine of Christ:
The Doctrine of Christ
Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man.
He was born of a virgin, lived the sinless, perfect life we could never live, and died the death we all deserved to die by offering Himself as a sacrifice for our sin through His death on the cross.
Three days later He rose again, defeating sin and death!
Because of Jesus, there is now no condemnation for anyone who trusts in what He has done, but only life that begins now and lasts forever!
There are four mind-blowing realities when it comes to the doctrine of Jesus Christ.
MIND-BLOWING REALITY #1
GOD CAME TO EARTH
When you boil the birth of Jesus down to brass tacks, the birth of Jesus Christ was really a cosmic INVASION. The same God who existed eternally with the Father and Holy Spirit before the world began… The same God who breathed and spoke the universe into existence (Jn 1:3, 10; Col 1;16; Heb 1:2, 10)… The second person of the Godhead — miraculously and mysteriously, took upon Himself flesh and blood.
He became a man.
Theologians have coined an important word to describe this miracle. They call it “the Incarnation.” The word is from a Latin word that means “to provide with a body.”
The incarnation was the act of God the Son whereby He took to Himself a human nature. —Wayne Grudem [1]
The incarnation describes the fact that the pre-existent, eternal Son of God took upon Himself our humanity.
He became one of us!
The word “carne” literally means flesh. When Jesus was born, the second person of the Holy Trinity took upon himself a literal, actual human body through the miracle of “the virgin birth.”
John, one of the disciples and friends of Jesus and the author of the Gospel of John describes it like this in John 1:
In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He existed in the beginning with God. 3 God created everything through him, and nothing was created
except through him.
—John 1:1-3 NLT
Verse 14 is amazing!
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. —John 1:14 NIV
Eugene Peterson in The Message translated Verse 14 like this:
The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood…
—John 1:14 MSG
John’s point is that the eternal, invisible God somehow miraculously took upon Himself a literal, physical, actual human body.
The theological term for the union of both natures in Jesus — His divinity and humanity — is sometimes referred to as the Hypostatic Union. [2]
Hypostatic Union — the union of Jesus’ human nature and divine nature in one person.
This doctrine and idea is something that the church felt so strong about and convinced of that they actually created a creed in A.D. 451 called the Chalcedonian Creed that basically said, “Jesus Christ is ONE PERSON with two natures (human and divine) who is both fully God and fully man.” [3]
J.I. Packer described it like this:
…all the qualities and powers that are in us, as well as all the qualities and powers that are in God, were, are, and ever will be really and distinguishably present in the one person of the man from Galilee.” —J.I. Packer [4]
Packer went on to point out that “eight of the nine NT writers…were Jews, drilled in the Jewish belief that there is only one God and that no human is divine.” But all eight of these writers reached the conclusion that Jesus was and is both God and man — “without confusion, without change, without division and without separation”. [5]
Jesus was and is the unique God – Man – fully God while also being fully man!
This is the greatest miracle described in the Bible!
God opening up a path in the Red Sea to free His people from Egyptian bondage is nothing by comparison! Fire falling from heaven to totally consume Elijah’s altar? No big deal when compared to this! The miracle of Lazarus being raised from the dead after being dead for four whole days? Easy-peasy. But this miracle is mind-blowing.
Philip Yancey poetically described it like this:
“The God who came to earth came not in a raging whirlwind nor in a devouring fire. Unimaginably, the Maker of all things shrank down, down, down, so small as to become an ovum, a single fertilized egg barely visible to the naked eye, an egg that would divide and re-divide until a fetus took shape, enlarging cell by cell inside a nervous teenager.” [6]
We can’t even begin to imagine this! God the Son, who had existed for all eternity with Father and Holy Spirit, became dependent, floating in the amniotic fluid of a teenager’s uterus. The one whose power sustains the entire universe had to receive nourishment through an umbilical cord. You may have never thought of it this way, but Jesus, the unique God – man, had a bellybutton!
Can you understand why I call these realities mind-blowing?
The Gospel of Luke indicates that angels announced His birth.
…but the angel reassured them. “Don’t be afraid!” he said. “I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people. 11 The Savior—yes, the Messiah, the Lord—has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David! —Luke 2:10-11 NLT
The most amazing word in Luke 2:11 may be the word “born.”
GOD had been BORN.
Think for just a few moments about what that statement means.
It doesn’t mean that Jesus was “carried down from the sky by chubby cheeked angels and wrapped in a blue and white blanket and placed in a golden crib.”
It means “born.” It means BORN in the excruciatingly painful, screaming, sweaty, bloody, pushed-out-between-the-legs-of-a-woman sense of the word. Jesus traveled the birth canal of His teenage mother and experienced every contraction that every child experiences not delivered by a C-section.
Imagine it. Just for a moment… Jesus — the Son of God Himself — covered in fluid and blood.
Jesus — His lungs filling up with air for the very first time.
Jesus — crying, helpless, weak, dependent. God Himself took on flesh. Jesus was “born.”
Once again, Philip Yancey writes:
“The God who roared, who could order armies and empires about like pawns on a chessboard, this God emerged in Palestine as a baby who could not speak or eat solid food or control his bladder, who depended on a teenage couple for shelter, food and love.” [7]
Tomorrow’s post will answer the question, “How can we know that Jesus was actually God?”
[1] Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, p 1316 of 3251, Kindle Edition.
[2] John MacArthur, Biblical Doctrine, Location 7506, Kindle Edition.
[3] Mark Driscoll, Vintage Jesus, page 36.
[4] Packer, J. I.. Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs (p. 105). Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
[5] John MacArthur, Biblical Doctrine, Location 7511 of 34425, Kindle Ed.
[6] Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew, page 36.
[7] Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew, page 36.