The Greatest Mystery of All: When Infinity Became Infancy!
An Eight-Part Series Exploring Jesus’ Lifesaving Incarnation
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Part Eight
Jesus’ Rulership—as One of Us—
in Our Lives and World Today
David Bryant
Introduction Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
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I’ve stood in the Oval Office at the White House. I’ve held hands with the president as I prayed over him standing in the Oval Office at the White House. What an unforgettable experience—engaging with the most powerful person in the world in the very place where nation-changing and earthshaking decisions are made every day.
But in the end, as impressive as it is, the Oval Office is just one speck of ground on one speck of the planet that is one speck in a gigantic, incomprehensively massive and constantly expanding universe.
It is nothing—compared to the place a certain person is sitting, where he has been actively involved in the world for over two thousand years since becoming one of us!
We read this in Hebrews 1 about our Lord Jesus Christ:
“This Son . . . effected in person the reconciliation between God and man and then took his seat at the right hand of the majesty on high—thus proving himself, by the more glorious name that he has won . . . ” (within vv. 1-4, Phillips, emphasis added).
His “oval office” encompasses all creation and takes charge of all advances of God’s kingdom throughout the earth.
One day, millions of his followers will be “there” with our Savior, engaged with him face-to-face and beholding him as bone of our bone. He is one of us, more fully with us than ever, and yet still reigning over us as he has always been doing.
Surprisingly, this incomparable transaction began centuries ago inside a virgin’s womb when, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the eternal second person of the Triune God became incarnate. Nine months later, the miracle continued inside a dirty animal shelter where the future King of all heaven and earth was born into poverty and laid in a feeding trough.
But he came to us with an eye toward that great day when he would reign over those he redeemed by his outpoured life, fulfilling his long-awaited redemptive mission.
Now, he is engaged with you and me as one of us—with us and for us—just as he is at work with every Christian believer around the globe at this very hour.
In this final installment, I want to bring our series on the Incarnation to an exquisite ending as we explore together the “mystery” of how each day the Incarnation impacts our lives in practical ways that will continue into the ages to come.
Securing the best person to take charge over us
This fall, America endured a hard-fought presidential campaign, unlike any other in our 248-year history.
Over $15 billion was spent on all candidates. Most of those funds were invested in TV and social media ads promoting the personal and professional qualities that help make an aspirant to an office more appealing to voters who hope to prosper under her or his leadership.
But that was just a start. Since the election, the lobbying has intensified even before the president-elect takes office. But with this round, it’s a full-court press on Capitol Hill to convince representatives and senators to thoroughly vet and finally approve candidates for scores of high-level positions in the new administration.
The process is arduous but essential. Each app0intee tries to convince Congress to allow them significant influence on the direction of America and the well-being of millions of its citizens. Only time will tell whether each leader’s influence will be for good or ill.
This expenditure of energy shows us that everyone wants to live under quality, competent leadership, whether locally or nationally.
We vote to elect those who prove to be dependable and faithful to their promises, relatable to the average voter, sensitive to our needs, responsive to our appeals, confident about guiding us into a better future, and committed to assuming their authority honorably, using it diligently to serve the common good.
However, no leader in our nation or our world comes close to meeting all those expectations—let alone accomplishing much more—like the Son of God does today!
His campaign was effective. It began with the Incarnation—when he emptied himself of his divine prerogatives to become one of us, to experience our challenges, to sacrifice himself for us in our place, and then to rise again to destroy death itself for us.
He won his mission. He became and always will be the Father’s “elected one” (Ephesians 1) when he ascended on high to take on his new “office” as Giver of life and Lord of all.
As our “man in glory,” he was seated on heaven’s throne—a real flesh-and-bones person, a human being like each of us (while also remaining God in the flesh)—forever to reign over us in power and love day by day yet always and forever one of us!
The daily implications of what has happened
should never cease to thrill us!
Amazing as it sounds, the incarnation of God’s Son—God taking on our flesh—is an act that is irrevocable and irreversible. The world’s Redeemer will remain eternally God’s man and our “friend of sinners”—glorified and possessing all authority in heaven and on earth.
For Jesus, there’s now no turning back. Therefore, there’s now no holding back either. Ponder that! With all the choirs of heaven hymning his unending praise, Jesus will never cease to be one of us! He will always be alive for us, permanently inseparable from us, and by his Spirit, even right now, dwelling among us as his people. He’s always working with us as the one who achieved the ultimate victory on our behalf.
He first demonstrated this permanent human state to the incredulous disciples on the evening of his resurrection. He did it this way:
“Why are you troubled? Why do you have doubts in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is really me! Touch me and see. A ghost does not have a body or bones. But you can see that I do.” After he said that, he showed them his hands and feet. . . . They gave him a piece of cooked fish. He took it and ate it in front of them (Luke 24:38-43, NIRV, emphasis added).
The daily implications of what has happened
should never cease to thrill us!
Having taken on and redeemed the totality of our humanity in his own humanity, Jesus left none of his identity with us behind when he ascended forty days after he walked out of the tomb. No! He took it all with him into glory! As Ephesians 4 asks:
What does “he went up” mean? It can only mean that he also came down to the lower, earthly places [incarnation]. The one who came down [incarnation] is the same as the one who went up. He went up higher than all the heavens. He did it in order to fill all creation (NIRV, vv. 9-10, emphasis added).
A 17th-century Scottish Puritan pastor summed it up this way: “The dust of the earth now resides on the Throne of Heaven.”
Throughout eternity, we will be celebrating every facet of what I’ve come to refer to as Christ’s “Irreversible Fourfold Revolution”—his saving work for us—which includes the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. But let’s never forget that none of those would have happened without this first step in the revolution to end all revolutions: the incarnation of God’s Son.
This is the starting place for our adoration because it is the act that made all the rest possible. Our abounding joy at Christmastime should be about Christ’s irreplaceable “in-flesh-ment” for us—when we can first “see” our incarnate God as a newborn babe with his mother, Mary, in a cave designed for livestock. There, she brought forth her firstborn—soon welcomed by shepherds, the poorest of the poor. This baby was the one born to bring unbounded light and life to all our dark and fallen world.
This wonder—the mystery—takes center stage in one song being shared worldwide this season as Christians worshipfully sing (emphasis added):
Silent night, holy night!
Son of God, love’s pure light.
Radiant beams from Thy holy face
With the dawn of redeeming grace,
Jesus, Lord at thy birth.
As I remarked above, the daily relevance of the Incarnation is far from over when the Christmas tree comes down. Far from it. Daily, Jesus remains actively pursuing his reign among and over us in so many ways.
For example, we read in Hebrews 2:13-18 (PHILLIPS, emphasis added):
Speaking as a man, he says: . . . ‘Here am I and the children whom God has given me.’
Since, then, “the children” have a common physical nature as human beings, he also became a human being, so that by going through death as a man he might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might also set free those who lived their whole lives a prey to the fear of death.
It is plain that for this purpose he did not become an angel; he became a man, in actual fact a descendant of Abraham. It was imperative that he should be made like his brothers in nature, if he were to become a High Priest both compassionate and faithful in the things of God, and at the same time able to make atonement for the sins of the people.
For by virtue of his own suffering under temptation he is able to help those who are exposed to temptation.
His human experiences qualify him to be our Advocate with the Father. Nothing we are going through in this flesh is strange territory to him. He’s been there; he knows.
That is what motivates us to surrender to his lordship in all aspects of our lives. Paul writes:
It’s GOD we are answerable to—all the way from life to death and everything in between—not each other. That’s why Jesus lived and died and then lived again: so that he could be our Master across the entire range of life and death, and free us from the petty tyrannies of each other (Romans 14:8-9, MSG, emphasis added).
The greatest thrill of all:
The culmination of the Incarnation
One day, not long from now, we will see our Lord Jesus “in the flesh” with our own eyes. You will be there. I will be there. The whole world will be there—when he returns not only as the servant of all but also to be recognized as the Sovereign of all.
How might that moment unfold? Maybe some of us will experience him the way Thomas did a week after the resurrection. John reports:
The other disciples told [Thomas], “We saw the Master.” But he said, “Unless I see the nail holes in his hands, put my finger in the nail holes, and stick my hand in his side, I won’t believe it” . . . Jesus came through the locked doors, stood among them, and said, “Peace to you.” Then he focused his attention on Thomas. “Take your finger and examine my hands. Take your hand and stick it in my side. Don’t be unbelieving. Believe.” Thomas said, “My Master! My God!” (John 20:25-28, MSG, emphasis added).
Or maybe for others of us, that visible encounter with our risen, ascended, triumphant Lord will discombobulate us like it did the Apostle John. He recorded his experience like this:
I turned around to see who was speaking to me. When I turned, I saw . . . someone who looked “like a son of man.” He was dressed in a long robe with a gold strip of cloth around his chest. The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow. His eyes were like a blazing fire. . . . His face was like the sun shining in all of its brightness. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as if I were dead. Then he put his right hand on me and said, “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One. I was dead. But now look! I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys to Death and Hell (Revelation 1:12-18, emphasis added).
Whatever the case, we all must stay alert. A day is coming when we will see him descending the same way he went up on high: bodily, visibly, magnificently (see Acts 1).
John exhorts all of us:
[S]tay with Christ. Live deeply in Christ. Then we’ll be ready for him when he appears, ready to receive him with open arms. Who knows how we’ll end up! What we know is that when Christ is openly revealed, we’ll see him—and in seeing him, become like him (from 1 John 2 and 3, MSG, emphasis added).
The experience of those who don’t know him will be quite different, of course. The Bible warns that they will also see King Jesus in a body, appearing before them as a man. To all humanity comes that unavoidable experience in their future, as set forth in the Bible’s last book:
[Y]es, he’s on his way! Riding the clouds, he’ll be seen by every eye; those who mocked and killed him will see him. People from all nations and all times will tear their clothes in lament. Oh, Yes. (Revelation 1:7, MSG, emphasis added).
Everyone hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains . . . They called out to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us! Hide us from the face of the One who sits on the throne! Hide us from the anger of the Lamb! The great day of their anger has come. Who can live through it?” (Revelation 6:15-17, NIRV, emphasis added).
In that day, he will sum up everything under himself as Lord of all (Ephesians 1). At the same time, this one, who is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, will restore our mortal bodies to be like his resurrected body—incorruptible but still very human. Paul declares:
But there’s far more to life for us. We’re citizens of high heaven! We’re awaiting the arrival of the Savior, the Master, Jesus Christ, who will transform our earthly bodies into glorious bodies like his own. He’ll make us beautiful and whole with the same powerful skill by which he is putting everything as it should be, under and around him (Philippians 3:20-21, MSG, emphasis added).
Without the Incarnation, none of what I wrote just above would be of any concern. However, in his first coming the seeds of his second coming were sown. The one automatically leads to and climaxes in the other.
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We’ve explored eight “mysteries” of the Incarnation.,
Should this not give us whole new reasons to sing
the praises of our Lord Jesus Christ at Christmastime?
Let me conclude with a song—with some of the words from the world-renowned Christmas carol “Once in Royal David’s City.”
According to Wikipedia, the words to this hymn were first written as a poem by Cecil Frances Alexander. The carol was first published in 1848 in her hymnbook Hymns for Little Children. A year later, the English organist Henry Gauntlett discovered the poem and set it to music. Since 1919, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at the King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, has begun its Christmas Eve service with Dr. Arthur Henry Mann’s arrangement of “Once in Royal David’s City” as the processional hymn.
Enjoy how it starts and where it ends:
Once in royal David’s city
stood a lowly cattle shed,
where a mother laid her baby
in a manger for His bed.
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ, her little child.
He came down to earth from heaven,
Who is God and Lord of all,
And His shelter was a stable,
and His cradle was a stall.
With the poor and meek and lowly,
lived on earth our Savior holy . . .
And our eyes at last shall see Him,
through His own redeeming love;
for that child so dear and gentle
is our Lord in heav’n above . . .
Not in that poor, lowly stable,
with the oxen standing by,
We shall see Him, but in heaven,
set at God’s right hand on high . . .
(emphasis added)
May this expanded vision of the incarnation of Jesus
take you deeper into your life in him
as you walk with him throughout 2025!
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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!
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