I will always take the whole issue on the divinity and humanity of Jesus quite personally. I was reading an article on the Jesus Seminar in a magazine a few years ago. This group of “Christian scholars” (and I use that first and second term quite loosely) got together in order to decide what parts of the Gospels were true and which were not. You would think the thing that bothered me most was that they had the nerve to believe that they had the ability to to decide what parts of the Bible were authentic or not. However, the first thing that caught my eye was where they were meeting to do this. They were meeting in the exact same place that my wife and I had our wedding reception! How dare they ruin my happy memories with their conference? Couldn’t these guys have found a different place to abuse the Bible? I am sure a meeting room was available at the Lake of Fire resort.
I find it ironic that early in church history, false teachers simply didn’t want to affirm the humanity of Jesus. Gnostics were so focused on escape from the flesh through knowledge, that it simply blew their minds that God would inhabit an illusory, evil body. It was much easier for their Greek philosophical minds to accept Jesus only appearing to have a body, then to radically shift their mindset. (that’s not the ironic part, just hold on a minute). Now, today, false teachers don’t want to affirm the divinity of Jesus, and are quite happy to reduce Jesus to a poor, Jewish, peasant philosopher. To their rational, humanistic minds, it is much easier to believe in a wise Ghandi-like figure, than someone who walks on water and is born from a virgin. I mean, if you believe this kind of stuff, what’s next? talking donkeys???
For the next few posts, we will be discussing various challenges of the doctrine of Jesus incarnation. In the midst of some of the posts (but hopefully not all of them), you may be tempted to throw your hands in the air and say, “Somebody scream!” Oops, no, that is what you would say at a rap concert. What I meant to say is, “Why does all this really matter?” It matters because God’s covenant with His people in the Old Testament began with a great promise. Exodus 29:46 says, ” They shall know that I am the LORD their God who brought them out of the land of Egypt, that I might dwell among them; I am the LORD their God.” This was a RADICAL statement and promise from God.
Why? Because the gods NEVER wanted to live with their people. The gods lived up there or under there or out there, but never with man. Why would they want to live with evil, mortal, stinky, weak, insignificant people? The Greek gods lived on Mount Olympus. Most Egyptian gods lived in the heavens or sky. Sure, they would come down periodically just to mess with people and send them on meaningless quests or father a human child for fun, but there is no reason a god would live down here. The whole point of religion has been to escape this world of suffering and get to where the gods are, not the other way around. When the Jews failed to live up to their part of the covenant, Ezekiel 11:22-25 reveals that the glory of God departed from Jerusalem.
Yet, we know that isn’t the end of the story. God made a promise and was serious about pursuing His relationship with man. How serious? So serious that He became a man to do so. John 1:14 says, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory.” That God would take on hunger, persecution, pain, tears, and eventually a horrible death on the cross to dwell with us is astounding. But it gets better. It matters that Jesus was God and man, because the New Testament tells us that He had to be so in order to be the perfect sacrifice for our sins. Hebrews 10:14, “For by a single offering, he perfected for all time those who are being sanctified”. Read all of Hebrews 9 – 10. You will get the point that Jesus was the only sacrifice that would provide us with eternal forgiveness.
That is where these two things come together in the incarnation. Not only does Jesus coming in the flesh show us God dwelling with us (hanging out with Lazarus, prostitutes, zealots???), but it also had to happen so that Revelation 21:3 could take place. “Behold the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people.” This is speaking of our living in eternity in heaven with God, which we can only enter into through the sacrifice of Jesus. We get Eden back again, and it is all seen and due to Jesus being fully God and fully man. So, umm, yes it matters.
The Bible Nerd 