GOD IN FLESH APPEARING
Understanding the Incarnation
The
center point of history was when the One who was God became flesh and was born
as a baby to live among us. We call this
the incarnation. Philippians 2 contains
perhaps one of the clearest presentations and descriptions of the incarnation
of Jesus.
5 Have
this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, although
He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be
grasped (Philippians 2:5-6).
While
John 1:1 tells us of the One who existed in the beginning and who was God, now
we are given to understand that the mode of that existence was not something
less than God. He existed in the form of
God.
Jesus
had an existence prior to His birth. We
cannot say that about ourselves. Until
we were conceived in the womb, we had no earlier existence. But Jesus did. He existed in the form of God. He is the One who was in the beginning with
God because He was God (John 1:1).
Jesus
had every right to continue in the form which He held from all eternity. He had been in the beginning with God and He
was God, yet He determined not to continue to grasp and hold to the form of
that equality.
6 who,
although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a
thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond‑servant,
and being made in the likeness of men. (Philippians 2:6-7).
Jesus
Christ made an active choice not to remain equal with God. He did not regard His equality with God as a
thing to be retained. This choice
involved the emptying of Himself. What does this mean? In what sense did Christ “empty”
Himself? Several views have been
presented.
1. The Kenotic View.
This term comes from the Greek phrase in verse 7 that
says Christ emptied Himself. The
Greek word for “empty” is kenow. This is the view that says Christ emptied
Himself of His relative attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence)
while retaining His imminent attributes (love, holiness, truth).
This view has certain accompanying problems. The Scriptures teach that Christ knew all men
(John 2:24-25), that He demonstrated His power over nature, demons, and death,
and that He was able to see Nathanael from afar (John 1:46). These all reflect a continuation of those
relative attributes of God.
Furthermore, if God divested Himself of that which
makes Him God, then He ceased to be god when He became incarnate. Since Christ continues to be incarnate, He is
no longer God and therefore no longer answers prayers.
2. The Lutheran View.
The
|
The Divine attributes of
Jesus |
(Communication) |
The Human attributes of
Jesus |
The problem with this view is that it does not deal with
the limitations that Jesus experienced as a man.
• He
increased in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52).
• There
were things He did not know (Matthew 24:36).
God has no such limitations. He cannot be hungry or tired. He cannot grow in knowledge or wisdom. He cannot die upon a cross.
3. The Reformed View.
The view of the Reformers is that the second member of
the Trinity took His human shape from His mother, affected by a supernatural
virgin birth. The human nature that was taken
was sanctified in its very inception and thus kept from the pollution of sin
(Hebrews 9:14).
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The Divine Attributes of Jesus |
→ |
Continue as one Person |
← |
The Human Attributes of Jesus |
This view is reflected in the language of the Westminster
Confession of Faith when it describes Jesus...
The
Son of God, the second person in the Trinity, being very and eternal God, of
one substance and equal with the Father, did, when the fulness of time was
come, take upon Him man's nature, with all the essential properties, and common
infirmities thereof, yet without sin; being conceived by the power of the Holy
Ghost, in the womb of the virgin Mary, of her substance. So that two whole,
perfect, and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably
joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion.
(WCF 8:2).
How does this help us to understand the “limiting”
verses relating to the knowledge and the weakness that Jesus experienced? Buswell suggests that
the God-man experienced two levels of consciousness in the way something can
trigger your memory so that you can call to mind your third grade teacher whom
you had forgotten. In the same way,
Jesus was consciously man, but there was another level in which He was, at the
same time, fully God.
Thus, in the same passage in which Jesus admits that
He does not know the day or the hour of His return (Matthew 24:36), He goes on
to place Himself on a level above the angels.
Notice the progression. It goes from man to angels to the Son and
then to the Father. The writer to the
Hebrews spends the entire first chapter of his epistle pointing out all the
ways in which Jesus is better than the angels.
REASONS
FOR THE INCARNATION
Why
would He do it? Why would One who had eternally existed in the image of God lower
Himself to take on human flesh and blood?
The Scriptures give us two reasons:
1. To Communicate God to man:
No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the
bosom of the Father, He has explained Him (John 1:18).
2. To Taste Death for Every Man: But we do see Him who has been made for a
little while lower than the angels, namely, Jesus, because of the suffering of
death crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God He might taste
death for everyone (Hebrews 2:9).
FALSE
VIEWS OF THE INCARNATION
In
coming to terms with the person of Christ, the church wrestled against Greek
dualism that said, "Spirit is good and flesh is bad." This led to a number of ideas regarding the
incarnation. The church was forced to
examine its beliefs regarding the person of Jesus in the setting of these
divergent teachings.
|
Party |
Date |
Reference |
Human Nature |
Divine Nature |
|
Docetic |
60 |
1 John 4:1-3 |
Deny |
Affirm |
|
Ebionite |
120 |
Irenaeus |
Affirm |
Deny |
|
Arian |
325 |
Condemned at Nicea |
Affirm |
Reduce |
|
Apollinarian |
381 |
Condemned at |
Reduce |
Affirm |
|
Nestorian |
431 |
Condemned by |
Held that
Christ was two persons |
|
|
Eutychian |
451 |
Condemned by |
Christ had one
mixed nature, neither fully human or fully divine |
|
|
Orthodox |
33 |
Affirmed
throughout |
Christ is one
person, at the same time fully human and fully divine |
|
1. The Docetic Heresy.
One
of the sects of Gnosticism was Docetism. The term comes from the Greek word dokew (dokeo), “to
seem.” It deals with the issue of
appearance versus reality. It stated
that Christ’s appearance on earth was not real.
It maintained that His bodily appearance was only a hallucination. John’s first epistle seems to reflect a
rebuke against an early form of this teaching.
2 By this you know the
Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the
flesh is from God; 3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not
from God; and this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard
that it is coming, and now it is already in the world. (1 John 4:2-3).
Why
is it important to believe that Jesus came in the flesh? There are several reasons.
• He came in the flesh to die for
sins. 1 Peter 3:18 says that He was put
to death in the flesh. If Jesus did not
come in the flesh, then He could not take upon His own body the penalty for our
sins. He could not die for us if He were
not flesh, because God cannot die.
• He came in the flesh to be a
mediator: For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man
Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5). If
Jesus were not fully man in human flesh, then He is not qualified to be a
mediator between God and man.
• He came in the flesh to identify with
man: For we do not have a high priest
who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all
things as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15). Because Jesus came in the flesh, we can know
that He has gone through the same problems and struggles that we
experience. He knows and understands our
situation.
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The Ebionites had a large
contingent of Jewish Christians. |
2. Ebionism.
The
Greek term Ebionaioi means “poor men.”
The Ebionites were the theological opposites
of the Docetics.
They held that Jesus was a man who was born like any other man, but who
was adopted into God’s family and given the title “Son of God.”
The Ebionites also taught that Jewish Christians should
continue to keep the Old Testament law—some included the Gentiles in this
mandate as well. As such, they were
something of a renewal of the Judaizers whom Paul confronted in his Epistle to
the Galatians. Irenaeus,
in his book Against Heresies, noted that the Ebionites
recognized only the Gospel of Matthew out of all the New Testament
writings. There is today a resurgence of
Ebionism in much of the modern Messianic
Movement. There is a tendency among some
of those in this movement to move away from the deity of Christ and to seek to
place people back under the law.
3. Arius.
One
of the early controversies raged over the teachings of Arius who concluded that
God could not have become flesh because a good God cannot become bad
flesh. He therefore concluded that the
Son had been created by the Father.
He
said that if Christ were considered to be God, then there would be more than
one God and this would be polytheism. In
defense of his position, Arius was able to cite Tertullian as authenticating
his teaching—Tertullian did teach that Christ became God while Arius never
admitted to the divinity of Jesus prior to the incarnation.
Alexander
and Athanasius, two of the church fathers, maintained that Christ was one in
substance with the Father. The resulting
creed that was adopted at the Council of Nicea in
A.D. 325 described Christ as “God of very God” and as of the same nature (omoiousias, from
two Greek words meaning “same” and “nature or substance).[1] The creed
rejected the teachings of Arius that claimed Jesus was a created being and
thus, those teachings were proclaimed to be heretical. The Christology of today’s Jehovah’s
Witnesses reflects the same heresy.
4. Apollinaris (381 A.D.).
Apollinaris
was the bishop of
A
council was convened at
5. Nestorius
(431 A.D.)..
Nestorius
was the bishop of
Nestorius
was opposed by Cyril, the bishop of
6. Eutyches.
Eutyches
was the head of the monastery in
• The Alexandrian School
They
tended to be Monophystic, holding to the unity of
Christ to the exclusion of His two natures.
In answer to this position, the Creed of Chalcedon described the one
person of the Son who took into union with His pre-existing divine nature a
human nature.
• The
They
tended to make too much of a distinction between the human and divine natures
of Christ. In response to this position,
the Creed of Chalcedon described Jesus as “one and the same son, one and the
same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, and one and the same Son and
Only-begotten God, Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is one person and one
subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, whose natures are without
division in the church.”
In this way, the creed drew a
line of demarcation between a “person” as a
self-conscious entity versus a “nature” as a series of attributes. This description of Christ as “one person
with two natures” is still used today to explain the incarnation.
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