Essential Tenet #4: Jesus Christ as the Incarnation of God is both truly God and truly human.

Culture is going through a “fruit basket turnover” with everything that we counted true. The fruit hasn’t settled yet, and it is a confusing world. The Christian Church in America is experiencing a similar disorientation. While the church in each age needs to rethink how it shares the gospel, our foundation, our essential beliefs, does not change. To ensure that we have our identity clearly rooted in the historic orthodoxy of the Reformed/Presbyterian Christian faith, the leadership of the First Presbyterian Church of Douglasville adopted 12 essential tenets.

This post is on our 4^th tenet: Jesus Christ as the Incarnation of God is both truly God and truly human. To expand on that: The divinity of the Son is in no way impaired, limited, or changed by his gracious act of assuming a human nature, and his true humanity is in no way undermined by his continued divinity.

In the first seven chapters, Hebrews explains why Jesus is superior to all other voices of authority in Israel’s tradition. Each had its time and place, and served an important role. Hebrews says that Jesus is superior to the prophets, angels, Moses, Joshua, Aaron – the founder of Israel’s priesthood. Jesus at his birth was the “rising sun that eclipsed the stars.” What made him superior?

He was fully human. This was never a surprise. His peers in the Bible never doubted in his humanity. They saw him born, reared, toil in labor, eat, drink, walk, teach, encourage, cry, bruise, bleed, and die. He really died like any human dies. He was clothed in the attributes of humanity with one exception. He did not sin. He lived a sinless life. The significance of that we will see in just a moment.

He was fully God. Jesus was not merely a human. He was both fully God and fully flesh. The Bible affirms the divinity of Jesus many times. For instance…

“He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.”(Hebrews 1:3)

“Anyone who has seen me has seen the father.” (John 14:9)

“The image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1:15)

“Being in very nature God.” (Philippians 2:6)

I particularly appreciate the way Hebrews 1 talks about Jesus as heir. “But in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things.” (Hebrews 1:2) The “heir” is the one that receives a gift through an estate. I would normally consider us to be heirs of the work of Jesus, yet Hebrews turns it around. What does that mean for us? Calvin put it this way,

“For being made man, he put on our nature, and as such received this heirship, and that for his purpose, that he might restore to us what we had lost in Adam.” (Calvin, Commentary on Hebrews)

The thoughtful Christian might wonder why? Why would the Son need to put on human flesh and be heir to our burden?

C. S. Lewis, in the fourth chapter, “The Perfect Penitent”, of his book Mere Christianity, offers a helpful way to understand why the incarnation was necessary for what Hebrews 1:3 calls “the purification of our sin.” I encourage you read the whole book, but here are some helpful excerpts from that chapter.

Now what was the sort of "hole" man had got himself into? He had tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to himself. In other words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor-that is the only way out of a "hole." This process of surrender-this movement full speed astern-is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person-and he would not need it.

Now if we had not fallen, that would be all plain sailing. But unfortunately we now need God's help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all-to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this process at all. So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not.

 But supposing God became a man-suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person-then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.

Through the Incarnation, God did for us what we could not do for ourselves. If Jesus were only human, his death could not have any metaphysical significance. If he was only God, then his death could not restore humanity. He was both. The costliest love is that which is embodied in flesh!