The God-Man

5. The God-Man

Let us now see how God put His rescue operation into effect through the coming of His Son. Of course, He had made His plans, before the foundation of the world. We are only looking at Gods intervention in time and space, in our own history.

First, we must consider the mystery of the Person of the Lord Jesus. He is God the Son, the second Person of the Trinity, equal in every way to the Father and to the Holy Spirit. In the beginning of Johns gospel, He is called the Word, for He is the One through whom the Triune God speaks, acts, and makes Himself known and visible. He is the image of the invisible God. No one has ever seen Godthe only Sonof the Father has made Him known. Through the Lord Jesus, God expresses Himself, communicates with us and acts the Word was God.

At Bethlehem, the Word became flesh. The Eternal Son became the Incarnate Son. He is the God-Man for In Christ dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. Here is a great mystery which our finite mind can neither fully understand nor explain, but nor do we need to try. The Lord Jesus was truly God and truly Man; that is all we need to know and to cling to. If He were less than God, or not truly human, He could not have rescued us.

We must stress this great truth, that the Lord Jesus was truly God and truly Man, because throughout history we find many wrong ideas and heresies regarding the person of Christ, and they persist to this day. Many false, though professing, Christians, even leaders of churches, do not believe in the deity of Christ, nor in His unique, sinless humanity. They do not believe in the Triune God, the Trinity, nor that Jesus is God the Son, nor in the person of the Holy Spirit. They do not believe that the Lord Jesus was both truly God and truly man, nor in His virgin birth. They believe in an imaginary, and therefore false, Christ, not the Christ of the Scripture. They may use the words of Scripture, but not with their intended meaning. Those who are in error, vague or evasive in this matter cannot build on Gods foundation.

When the Lord Jesus came, He did abandon His Deity, but voluntarily and continuously chose to live as Man. He could at any time have acted as God, for He was God, but He chose to live in dependance on His Father as a man. He could and did use the Divine Name, I AM, but we are told that His miracles were not done in the power of His Deity, but through His dependence on His Father, as the One sent by Him, and the power of the Holy Spirit.

He did not pretend to be a man - He was a man, truly human like us, yet with these two great differences:

• He was sinless the only sinless man who ever lived and,
• Unlike Adam, He possessed eternal life.

He was truly one with us, truly human, yet He was different. He was different from us because of our sinful nature and because of our mortality we do not have eternal life until we are born again of the Spirit.

In thinking of His humanity, it is crucial we understand these differences. We need to see not only the uniqueness of His Person as the God-Man, a uniqueness which places Him forever apart from us, but also the uniqueness of His manhood. He is one with us, because of His humanity, yet very different from us unless and until we are united to Him by the Holy Spirit through new birth.

• As a man, He was without sin and possessed eternal life.
• As a man, He revealed perfectly the character of God He was the image of God.
• As a man, He lived His life in complete, immediate, and continuous obedience to and dependence on His Father.

Understanding the unique nature of His humanity is crucial to understanding the Christian life. We must not think of His humanity as being lived at our level, nor must we identify it with even that of unfallen Adam. His humanity defines true humanity, the kind God seeks and accepts. In His incarnation the Lord Jesus did not assume either our fallen state or Adams unfallen state, but instead revealed Gods original high purpose in creating man and made possible its fulfillment in us.

Christians are being conformed to the kind of humanity that was revealed in the Lord Jesus during His life on earth. This humanity was glorified, that is, it was made a channel for the glory of God. There is now a glorified Man on the throne of Heaven, the Man Christ Jesus.

God is not working to improve or to fulfill us while at the same time leaving us in our present fallen state. Our fulfillment and our destiny is in our union with Christ. He is the only true Man who ever lived, and His life was a light that shone in the darkness. We therefore define true manhood and the Christian life by Him and by His life. We must look deeply into both His character and the way He lived, including His attitude to the sinful world around Him, His attitude to family life, to work, to social life, to culture and to politics. His attitude is to determine ours. The signposts are all there in the Scripture.

For example, we are told of His family relationships, and of how he worked as a carpenter in Nazareth until He was thirty. We know that He attended a wedding in Cana, watched children at play, and that He accepted the hospitality of different types of people. We know from His parables that He was a keen observer of nature and everyday life, but there is no mention of His interest in or involvement with the cultural activities of His time. His concern was for people. As to the political scene and social unrest, He refused to become involved He said, My kingdom is not of this world. As to the terrible evils of His day, such as widespread slavery and frequent infanticide, He said nothing. This was not because He did not care, for He was always showing how much did He care about people. As it is written, God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with powerHe went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him. But Jesus knew that He had not been sent as a social reformer, but as the Savior of the world. Only the power of God, working through the Gospel which changes hearts, can achieve that which is eternal.

Seeing this radically affects how we live as His witnesses in the world. Jesus said of His own, They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. John said, As He is, even so are we in the world. To be a Christian is to be totally identified with the Lord Jesus, including in the way He thought and lived.

God has invaded history in the Person of His Son to deliver us out of this failed and rejected humanity into a new humanity, created in Christ Jesus, through His death and resurrection.