Christ: The Word Made Flesh

Study Guide

Christ: The Word Made Flesh

Who is Jesus?

The Doctrine of Christ

Introduction

Has Christmas lost its wonder? You know what I mean. No other holiday comes with expectations so high, and none have the potential to disappoint as much as Christmas. We all have a mental picture of the perfect Christmas:

The snow begins falling at Sundown on Christmas Eve. By morning the world is wrapped in perfect, untouched white. The tree is bedecked with antique glass ornaments, and soft incandescent lights that give off that perfect glow that LEDs simply cannot compete with. Big boxes, wrapped in evergreen and holly berry paper, are tied with satin ribbon sit beneath the branches.  Cinamon, orange peel, and clove drift hang heavy in the air. Bing Crosby croons and every child’s Christmas wishes are granted. It’s the kind of Christmas that only exists in our imaginations, or a Irving Berlin movie.

In reality, the snow hit the ground and turned to two inches of slush. The tree looked like the leaning tower of Pisa, dropped needles like shedding Husky, and one string of lights blinked in a seizure because no one could locate the burned-out bulb. The kids woke at 3:30AM and the gift you thought was a pair of roller skates was actually a Chia Pet.

Of course, all of those mishaps are humorous, but for some of us, Christmas is a particularly painful time of year. We know Christmas ought to be a season of promised and hope, but it often feels like an annual disappointment.

I suggest to you that the wonder of Christmas cannot be found in all the trimmings. The Grinch Who Stole Christmas was right:

“Christmas comes without ribbons! It comes without tags!”

“It comes without packages, boxes, or bags!”

“Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a store.”

“Maybe Christmas… perhaps… means a little bit more.”

Raise the Need, State the Destination, Give Signposts:

That “little bit more”, that source of Christmas wonder, is the incarnation of Jesus Christ. What does the word “incarnation” mean? It comes from the Latin word meaning “in flesh.” Stated simply, the incarnation concerns the Son of God assuming a human nature, body and soul.

Or, to expand upon that simple statement, the incarnation concerns the Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, who is truly and eternally God, who is the brightness of the Father’s glory, who made and sustains the world and governs everything he made, when the fullness of time came, took upon himself human nature, a body and a soul, and was conceived and born by the Virgin Mary. This person, the Son, is truly God and truly man, yet one Christ, the only mediator between God and man.

Do you want a source of inexhaustible wonder and Christmas joy? There it is: the Son of God became the son of Mary. We’ll begin our study of this marvelous doctrine in John 1:14, found on page 831 of our Bibles in the racks.

And let’s consider the incarnation under 4 headings:

1. Who was Incarnated?

2. What is the Incarnation?
   3. Why does the Incarnation Matter?

The Text

¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

1. Who Was Incarnated? The Word

The Apostle John tells us that the “Word” became flesh. If you look up at verse one in the chapter, John begins his gospel with these words:

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God.

The Word is a person. The Word was already existing in the beginning. The Word had a relationship with God, and the Word was God. Then, in verse 17, John identifies the Word with a human personal name in verse 17:

¹⁷ For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Who was incarnated? It was none other than the eternal Son of God, the second person in the Holy Trinity, very God of Very God. It was not the Father who was incarnate, nor the Spirit, but the Son of God. And the gospels are constantly highlighting the deity of Jesus:

• He possesses authority over creation as he calms the storms (Mark 4:39) multiplies food (John 6:11) and walks on the water. (Matt. 14:25)
• Jesus constantly forgives sins, and not just the sins committed against him. (Mark 2:5-7)
• In John 8:58, Jesus ascribes the Hebrew name for God, Yahweh, to himself when he says, “Before Abraham was, I AM.”
• And Jesus constantly receives worship. (John 20:28, John 9:38) Angels and creatures refuse worship (Rev. 19:10), but Jesus never does.

In 1:3, John says that the Word is the one through whom all things were made.

How fitting, that the very one who made all things is the one who also came in the flesh to make all things new. The Word who spoke creation into life, through his own death would bring creation through death.

As the creator of all, the Son of God reserves the right to remake all things! Only an owner can restore and redeem what is his. Friend, the final renewal is not a demolition of the original creation and a fresh start by a new architect; it’s the original architect and craftsman bringing his broken masterpiece to its intended glory.

The Son comes in the flesh because damage has been done to his own creation by his own creatures. The incarnation reminds us that our sin is not a private matter. All human sin is a rebellion against the Creator. We may abuse, neglect, and spite our fellow man, but ultimately all of our human transgressions are committed in God’s world and are an attack on his created order. It is not just humans we have offended, though that would be bad enough, every sin is an offense against the Maker.

Friend, this is why we sense shame and guilt. When MacBeth learns of his wife’s death he says, “Life’s… a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But nothing could be further from the truth. If life signifies nothing, then why do we feel shame and guilt? Could it be that our sense of shame and guilt is a signal, an echo, pointing us back to the Word who spoke us into existence and against whom we have rebelled? That’s why our guilt never goes away until we’re reconciled to him.

Thankfully, our shame and guilt need not condemn us, for “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:17)

Friend, there is nothing greater that God the Father could give you as a token of his love than his only Son. Even if he would have come himself, it would not have been a greater demonstration. For a good father would do everything including give up his own life for his son. But here is a Father who loved sinners so much that he did not hold back his only and dearest Son.

John Owen said:

“How glorious, then, is the condescension of the Father! That Father who is over all, God blessed forever, to give His only-begotten Son to be a sacrifice and a propitiation for sin! What richer pearl in the cabinet of free grace could God give unto us than the Son of His bosom? … It is love that hath an infiniteness and eternity in it. The Father gave Him not as a wealthy man gives a shilling or a pound, but as a king gives his kingdom!”

Who was incarnated? The eternal Word of God.

2. What is the Incarnation? The Word Became Flesh

John says, “The Word became flesh.” The eternal Son of God assumed a real, complete, sinless human nature (both body and soul) into permanent union with his person. This means that Jesus Christ united in his person two natures:

What does it really mean that Jesus Christ is true God and true man? How does that work? Earlier we confessed the truths of the Nicene Creed, that the Son of God who is of one substance with the Father, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin May and was made man.

But let’s unpack that. What does it mean that the Son of God was made man? James Dolezal puts it this way: “Christians worship one Lord Jesus Christ, who is true God and true man, not two Christs, one God, one man, that teamed up to get us saved… He’s not part God and part man… Emphatically, the Lord Jesus Christ is not a hybrid of God and man, nor is the name Christ  just simply a group name that we apply to the partnership of two persons, the Son of Mary and the Son of God who teamed  up to become Team Jesus. It’s not Team Jesus; it’s one person who is true God and true man. It’s not a partnership of a divine person and a human person. It’s none other than God the Son himself who has come to save us without any mitigation of his divine nature or personhood… he’s true God, that he’s true man, and he truly became man without ungodding himself in the process.”

Now, if that made your head spin. Take one more deep breath. And hear these words from the 4^th century preacher, Athanasius:

For Christ was not, as might be imagined, (caged or limited) in the body, nor, while present in the body, was He absent elsewhere; nor, while He moved the body, was the universe left void of His working and Providence; but, thing most marvellous, Word as He was, so far from being contained by anything, He rather contained all things Himself… So that not even when the Virgin bore Him did He suffer any change, nor by being in the body was [His glory] dulled: but, on the contrary, He sanctified the body also.

What is he saying? Rather than the glory of God been blunted by the assumption of a human soul and body, rather the human soul and body the Son received from the Virgin Mary is raised in glorious sanctification.

If you want to summarize all of the heresies about Christ through the centuries you can summarize them in one sentence. Something’s gotta give. Either he gives up some divinity in order to do human stuff, or he gives up pieces of his humanity in order to do God stuff. But Christian orthodoxy through the centuries has confessed: nothing’s gotta give.

Christ was infinite, yet eternal. He lay in a manger yet filled the heavens. That man should be made in God’s image is a wonder, but here God the Son is made in man’s image. The one who thunders in the heavens cries in the cradle. He who sits upon the circle of the heavens lies in the lap of Mary. The one who spoke creation into existence must now learn to speak as a man. The bread of life is fed with milk.

The Puritan Ralph Venning wrote:

Here is the greatest miracle that ever was wrought: God is become man, and yet remaineth God; the Creator is become a creature, and yet ceaseth not to be Creator; the Ancient of Days is become a child, and yet is older than His mother; He that holdeth the world in His hand is Himself held in a woman’s arms. O the height and depth, the length and breadth of this love of God!

Who was incarnated? The Son of God. What is the incarnation? The Son assumed a human nature to his person.

3. Why Does the Incarnation Matter?

It’s crucial to see that the incarnation is more than a display of God’s power. It’s not a mere parlor trick. Without the incarnation we wouldn’t know who God is, not fully. We would not be redeemed. God would be a stranger to our suffering, and we’d have no hope for the future.

To Reveal God

John 1:18 says, “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”

If you know Jesus, you know the Father because the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son. Though they are distinct in person, they are one in nature and being. The incarnation reveals God in the flesh. The incarnation makes God touchable.

To Redeem Sinners

Friend, it was necessary that the Son of God become a man. Since man sinned, the penalty for sin must be paid by man. But it was also essential that the Mediator should be very God, for only the divine life is of infinite worth. Therefore, when Jesus obeyed God’s law as a man, his obedience is of infinite worth. And when he dies, paying the penalty of death for sinners, his death is of infinite worth.

Because we were sinners, we could neither give God perfect obedience, nor could we pay the full penalty of sin without being eternally separated from God. But Christ, as the sinless Son of God, can pay the penalty and do it in such a way that his death opens a way of resurrection and escape from sin and death.

To Sympathize with Us

Hebrews 4:15 says that, in Christ, we have a great high priest who was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. Because the Son of God became a man, God can sympathize with our temptations, our weakness, and our suffering.

Dorothy Sayers – For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man.

To Guarantee Future Glory

When Jesus Christ was raised, he was raised bodily. His flesh, which died, was resurrected and glorified. Jesus Christ didn’t shed his human nature when he was raised. He is and will forever be the God-Man. The incarnation tells us our hope is not to escape the body. It’s for the body to be redeemed, resurrected, and transfigured into glory.

This is why Jesus Christ is the center of our preaching, the center of our gospel, the center of our theology. As John Frame said, “Christianity is Christ.” What is most important to us is no a set of doctrines or laws or practices or liturgies, but a person. To be a Christian is to have a personal relationship to and with Jesus Christ, one in which he is both Savior and Lord.

Our first priority is not to hold some intellectual truths, or practice some moral behaviors, but to believe in and worship a person who lived in history to save us and who lives eternally as our Mediator. Christ and him crucified is the center of all we do.

So, this Christmas, look past the slush (if we get any) and the blinking lights of the crooked tree. Look to the manger, where the one who made a trillion galaxies lay helpless so you could be healed. Behold your God, who became beholdable, for you. Fall on your knees, then rise and follow the God who had to learn to walk. He is the Word made flesh—and he is making all things knew, beginning with you.