Image: Roses, June 2017, North Garden, Virginia
Note: This devotion taken from last Sunday's sermon on John 1:14.
And the Word was made
flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only
begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth (John 1:14).
John 1:14 is the most important and illuminating statement of
the doctrine of the incarnation in Scripture.
It begins: “And the Word was made [ginomai: to become] flesh….” The Word here, again, is the
pre-existent Logos. To say that he was made flesh is to say that he became
fully a man.
Calvin, however, notes that John, under the Spirit’s
prompting, specifically used the word flesh (sarx) to stress the wonder of the divine condescension. So, he
writes:
He intended to show to what a mean
and despicable condition the Son of God, on our account, descended from the
height of his heavenly glory.
For:
When Scripture speaks of man
contemptuously, it calls him flesh…. Yet the Son of God stooped so low as to
take upon himself that flesh, subject to so many miseries.
Take a moment and just touch your own flesh and consider this
fabulous claim: The Word was made flesh!
There were many attempts from the earliest days to deny this
declaration. We see this even in the NT itself. Compare John’s references in
his epistles to “antichrists” or false teachers who denied that Jesus came “in
the flesh” (1 John 4:1-3; 2 John 1:7).
In modern times, many challenges to the Christian
faith come from those who deny the full deity of Christ, but in the early days
the more common challenge was apparently from those who denied the full
humanity of Jesus.
Aside from those who simply denied that the Word
took on flesh, there were other distortions that arose in early Christianity:
Apollinarius argued that Jesus had a
human body but not a human soul.
Nestorius argued that Christ was two persons in
one body: He was a divine person and a human person, but not one person.
Eutyches said that he was one person but that he
had only one nature and that one nature was a mixture of divine and human.
A consensus emerged and was affirmed among
orthodox (right-believing Christians) that the Christ was fully a man (having
both a human body and soul) and that he was one person (contra Nestorius) with
two distinct natures: fully God, and fully man (contra Eutyches).
This creedal consensus is reflected in our
confession of faith. See chapter 8 “Of Christ the Mediator” paragraph 2 of the
1689 Baptist Confession:
The
Son of God, the second person in the Holy Trinity, being very and eternal God,
the brightness of the Father's glory, of one substance and equal with Him who
made the world, who upholds and governs all things He has made, did, when the
fullness of time was complete, take upon Him man's nature, with all the
essential properties and common infirmities of it, yet without sin; being
conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit
coming down upon her: and the power of the Most High overshadowing her; and so
was made of a woman of the tribe of Judah, of the seed of Abraham and David
according to the Scriptures; so
that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures were inseparably joined together
in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion; which person is
very God and very man, yet one Christ, the only mediator between God and man.
This is likewise taught in the Baptist catechism:
Q 25: How did Christ, being the Son of God, become man?
A:
Christ, the Son of God, became man by taking to himself a true body, and a
reasonable soul; being conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of
the virgin Mary, and born of her, yet without sin.
If we want to be faithful Christians, we have to
get our understanding of Jesus right. We have to know who this one is to whom
we are giving our lives and our allegiance. We honor Christ when we think
rightly of Christ.
Grace
and peace, Pastor Jeff Riddle
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