The Greatest Mystery of All: When Infinity Became Infancy!
An Eight-Part Series Exploring Jesus’ Lifesaving Incarnation
——————————————————————————————————–
Part Three
Jesus’ Incarnation Provides
for Our Reconciliation
David Bryant
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈
A house or nation divided against itself cannot long endure.
That was the essence of Abraham Lincoln’s unheeded warning (borrowing Jesus’ words) delivered to a Chicago political convention two years before the Civil War.
Unfortunately, his prediction echoes today, as we feel a similar foreboding as we look at the rancor, enmity, divisiveness, and mistrust that have overtaken our land in recent years. The recent Presidential election brought that to a head.
This is why the true message of Christmas—the incredible miracle of the Incarnation—becomes unusually relevant at the close of 2024.
In the opening words of verse one of Joy to the World, we’re told that because Christ has come, there is every reason for heaven and nature to unite as one in singing his praises!
We’re to sing as if the rupture of sin has been abolished from the equation, as if there were not a current breaking between all of us and the One who made us, which instead inserts an unbridgeable rift between Heaven and earth.
But the carol’s 18th-century hymnist, Issac Watts, quickly addresses our horrendous disconnection with a holy God when he writes this in verse three about Jesus (emphasis added):
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.
What’s happening here? It appears that a fundamental reconstitution of all things is underway. The curse is being usurped by the unquenchable outpouring of God’s reconciling, healing, curse-crushing grace!
Curiously, although statistically Joy to the World is one of the most recorded and performed Christmas carol over the past 150 years, its theme is really about the Consummation of the ages, not Christmas! Combined, it’s four verses paint for us what it will be like when all creation will be reconciled to God, “having made peace by Christ’s blood shed on the cross” (Colossians 1) and brought under his everlasting, redeeming lordship.
But it clearly speaks to the reasons for us to rejoice at Christmas—as we celebrate the reconciling work of the gospel going on all over the globe—only because Jesus first became flesh of our flesh.
We might say that today, his incarnation has made possible countless approximations of the reconciliation of the final Consummation of all things.
That brings us in our series to PART THREE:
Jesus’ Incarnation
Provides for Our Reconciliation
God’s plan for reconciliation by incarnation was not some improvisation. It was his intention from the start—a plan laid out in ages past.
The Scriptures are filled with clues to what God was up to from the very beginning when he clothed Eden’s sinful couple with skins from animals whose blood was shed in the process, providing temporary covering for their shame.
Through Micah, who prophesied to Judah around 700 B.C. during the reigns of kings Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, and as a contemporary of the prophets Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea, God is very explicit about what we sing at Christmas:
But you, O Bethlehem . . . a ruler of Israel, whose origins are in the distant past, will come from you on my behalf. The people of Israel will be abandoned to their enemies until the woman in labor gives birth . . . And he will stand to lead his flock with the LORD’s strength, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God (Micah 5:2-4, NLT, emphasis added).
The apostle Peter takes stock of the planning made ages ago that required the Incarnation:
[Y]ou were bought with the priceless blood of Christ . . . He was chosen before God created the world. But he came into the world for your sake in these last days (1 Peter 1:19-20, NIRV, emphasis added).
A perfect plan that required a perfect man
Jesus fulfilled a multitude of God’s promises about reconciliation that required an actual person to rise from among us, like us, to advocate for us.
We needed a real person united to us, as one of us, to culminate the fulfillment of the promise in Genesis that Abraham’s greater offspring would one day bring God’s blessings to all the families of the earth. This ultimate “seed of Abraham” would restore and reconstitute humanity back to its original purpose at creation.
Jesus was also the descendent of King David—which can come only by birth—proclaimed by the prophets as the one to finally embody hundreds of Old Testament Kingdom predictions rooted in David’s greater son. What was foretold would be impossible unless an actual human being arrived to physically reign on David’s throne forever—bringing about the restoration of creation as the “Servant of the Lord” spoken of by Isaiah.
Reconciliation by incarnation: The power of God
God’s Son coming among us—as one of us, to serve and save us—is the mightiest act for reconciliation between mortal enemies the world will ever see.
In Bethlehem’s stable, time enfolded eternity. Earth was joined to heaven. In one divine moment, the Son’s “incarnation invasion” became the culmination of the old creation as well as the initiation of the New Creation.
Through Jesus, God’s irreversible identification with humankind became his sure and certain guarantee of our reconciliation. God’s grandest gift to us sinful creatures is breathtaking, as Paul confesses here describing what Jesus sacrificed to take on human flesh for our redemption:
He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges (Philippians 2:6-8, The Message, emphasis added).
One could say that the Incarnation is a more dazzling display of God’s omnipotence than the formation of the entire creation. But it was a gift of love to fallen humanity at the same time.
Jesus’ coming is an act of infinite condescension.
We might say that God had to put “skin in the game” to bring us home. We see how the apostle John lays out this holy transaction for us as we look at these two complementary translations of John 1:14:
And the Word (Christ) became flesh (human, incarnate) and tabernacled (fixed His tent of flesh, lived awhile) among us; and we [actually] saw His glory (AMPC).
The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes (MSG).
Behold! The baby in Mary’s arms displays God‘s gracious and total condescension so he can be where we are in the depths of our depravity and despair.
The Son, who is always alive to the breadth of things going on in heaven, also compresses himself to live among and reconcile all peoples, especially those despised by their fellow human beings.
The Incarnation displays how our Lord Jesus Christ does not despise or reject anyone—he has come to “seek and save the lost,” whoever they are, and bring them home to the Father. He lowers himself into our suffering and is “touched by our infirmities,” Hebrews tell us. He takes notice of the lame, the downtrodden, the beggars. He is gracious to helpless little children.
Then, he submerged himself into our experience of sin’s mortality by giving up his very body for the race that stands in rebellion against the living God. He did that for you and me.
Have you ever thought of it this way: The passion of Christ on the cross—to bridge the gulf between us and God—began when he emptied himself into Mary’s womb to become one of us.
Call it the “passion of crib” long before it became the passion of the cross. From the moment of birth onward, he was inextricably embedded in the “passions” of the world—yielding himself to be fully engaged in its pain, hunger, mocking, grief, misery, homelessness, public humiliation, rejection, and betrayal.
Then came the final and greatest passion of all. The cross culminated a lifetime of walking daily with heartbreak over our brokenness and lostness. ALL of the passions of the Christ—focused finally at the cross—took place to bridge the gulf between the God who “so loved the world” and countless rebels made in his image. That’s you and me.
Now, the “God-gap” exists no longer!
Jesus among us, in a human body, shows us the full scope of the hope—but also the cost—of God’s superlative saving purposes to bring reconciliation to the nations.
Commissioned by flesh and blood into the arena of the human enterprise, God’s Son put God’s mission of reconciliation in motion—physically, visibly, tangibly, concretely, sacrificially, and permanently—all for people like us.
Jesus in the flesh closed the “God-gap” for us. “Although God cannot be fully comprehended, yet in Christ he can be fully apprehended” (theologian Herman Bavinck).
Without the Incarnation, we would remain at an infinite distance from the Father in terms of our creatureliness, as well as in terms of our fallenness.
When we see how low Christ had to go—how far he had to stoop to reach us and retrieve us from our desperate estate—we get some idea of how far from God we really were and would remain without our Savior.
But hallelujah!—a man has become the singular Mediator between Heaven and earth. We can pass over to eternal life with the God of grace and glory only because our Savior first passed over to us.
There is only one God. And there is only one go-between for God and human beings. He is the man Christ Jesus. He gave himself to pay for the sins of all people. We have been told this message at just the right time (1 Timothy 2:5-6, NIRV, emphasis added).
There would be no saving faith in God unless Christ put himself in the middle. A chief architect of the Protestant Reformation wrote:
All thinking of God, apart from Christ, is a bottomless abyss which utterly swallows up all our senses . . . In Christ, God, so to speak, makes himself little in order to lower himself to our capacity . . . that [we] may dare to intimately approach God.
Now, our eternal prospects before God are fused to a fully human person who was and is exactly like us. He is called no less than “Emmanuel,” which means “God with us” (Matthew 1). He is God among us, totally for us, forever accessible to us. Jesus invaded our fearful, finite, fallen, futile condition to lift us up with him, as one with him, into his very own rapturous fellowship with God.
Therefore:
His incarnation becomes as crucial to
reconciliation with God as are his
crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension!
Reflect on that for a minute. Profound, yes. And praiseworthy, for sure!
In fact, such a gift deserves extravagant praise—like that composed by the fourth-century bishop, theologian, and statesman Ambrose. Join his celebration!
Come, thou redeemer of the earth,
and manifest thy virgin birth.
Let every age adoring fall;
such birth befits the God of all!
Begotten of no human will,
but of the Spirit, Thou art still
the Word of God in flesh arrayed,
the promised fruit to man displayed.
Equal to the Father, thou!
Gird on thy fleshly mantle now.
The weakness of our mortal state with
deathless might invigorate.
Thy cradle here shall glitter bright,
and darkness breathe a newer light,
where endless faith shall shine serene,
and twilight never intervene.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————-
About the Author
Over the past 50 years, David Bryant has been defined by many as a “messenger of hope” and a “Christ proclaimer” to the Church throughout the world. Formerly a minister-at-large with the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, president of Concerts of Prayer International (COPI), and chairman of America’s National Prayer Committee, David now provides leadership to ChristNow.com and Proclaim Hope!, whose mission is to foster and serve Christ Awakening movements. Download his widely read ebooks at ChristNow.com. Enjoy hundreds of podcast episodes. Watch his vlogs at David Bryant REPORTS. Meet with David through Zoom or in-person events through David Bryant LIVE!