HE IS ONE OF US
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| Christ Emmanuel, Christian icon with riza by Simon Ushakov, 1668. According to the Gospel of Matthew Immanuel (Hebrew עִמָּנוּאֵל meaning, "God with us") refers to Jesus Christ. |
The incarnation sets Christianity apart from every other religion
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| Christ Pantocrator, God incarnate in the Christian faith, shown in a mosaic from Daphni, Greece, ca. 1080-1100. |
The incarnation sets Christianity apart from every other religion. The thought that God would become man is simply without parallel in any other faith. In no other religion does a god do anything more than tell his subjects what to do to become like him, earn his favor, or give instruction on how, if they’re lucky, they might avoid ticking him off. In no other religion does a creator god become weak and an indistinguishable part of his creation.
Jesus’s deity was perfectly veiled in human flesh
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| The oldest known icon of Christ Pantocrator, encaustic on panel (Saint Catherine's Monastery). The two different facial expressions on either side may emphasize Christ's two natures as fully God and fully human. |
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| Mirror composites of the two sides of the face. |
In the incarnation, God became so completely one of us that the people who lived with him didn’t notice anything special about him; Jesus’s deity was perfectly veiled in human flesh. In fact, when he went to his own village, Nazareth, “the people who had known him for many years did not receive him.” “Is not this the carpenter’s son?”they asked. “Is not his mother called Mary?”(Matt. 13: 55). Even his own family didn’t know he was the incarnate one. Think of this: “Not even his brothers believed in him”(John 7: 5).
What did Jesus look like?
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| The Shroud of Turin: modern photo of the face, positive left, digitally processed image right. |
What did Jesus look like? A regular Joe. His form was just like ours. Put this book down for a moment and look across the room at someone. That’s how ordinary he looked. Or, better yet, look at yourself in a mirror. He looked just like you! He had eyes, pores, hair, and teeth. If you’d seen him, you wouldn’t have thought he was anything special. He didn’t have any sort of magnetism that would make you take a second look. He looked like any twenty- or thirty-something carpenter on any construction job.
Jesus completely identifies with us
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| Isaiah 53 in the Great Isaiah Scroll, found at Qumran and dated to the 2nd century BCE. “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” |
His complete identification with us shouldn’t have taken his contemporaries by surprise, because seven hundred years before his birth the prophet Isaiah spoke of how normal the Messiah would appear: “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him”(Isa. 53: 2). He willingly took a servant’s form and was born in the likeness of men. He was fully human (Phil. 2: 7–8).
What was baby Jesus like?
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| "Adoration of the Shepherds" by Gerard van Honthorst, 1622 |
What was baby Jesus like? Did he have some sort of radioactive glow about him? Maybe a little halo or cherubs floating around his head? No. He looked like any Middle Eastern infant, wrapped in rags and nursing at his mother’s breast. And contrary to the sweet carol “Away in the Manger,” he did cry when awakened by the cattle’s lowing. He cried just like us.
Jesus is unlike mythological gods
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| Boniface bears his crucifix after felling Thor's Oak in Bonifacius (1905) by Emil Doepler |
Unlike ancient mythological gods, Jesus was no naughty demigod stripped of his superpowers and banished to earth as punishment. Jesus isn’t Thor. No, God the Son freely volunteered to become one of us and to forever take to his person all that it meant to be human. “Though he was rich, yet for your sake he [voluntarily] became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich”(2 Cor. 8: 9). The incarnation isn’t a punishment on the Son; it is an act of his love, a “voluntary humiliation.” He gladly “made himself nothing”(Phil. 2: 7 NIV). He who had everything, who was Lord of all, God Most High, creator, became a poor servant—your servant—out of love for you, his beloved. He came to serve you and win you with his love. He became one of our own so that we could be his own.
JESUS THE JEW
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| Moses receiving the Law (top) and reading the Law to the Israelites |
But his self-humiliation didn’t end with becoming a human. He was born as a Jew, into the nation of Israel, an insignificant nation that the Lord described in this way:
It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples. (Deut. 7: 7)
Nehemiah describes Israel
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| Gustave Doré, Nehemiah Views the Ruins of Jerusalem's Walls, 1866. |
Further, there wasn’t any other nation upon which the Lord so incessantly poured his love and yet was so opposed to his wooing. Even though he loved them, they gave themselves completely to wickedness. Nehemiah described Israel’s persistent resistance in these terms:
Nevertheless, they [the Israelites] were disobedient and rebelled against you and cast your law behind their back and killed your prophets, who had warned them in order to turn them back to you, and they committed great blasphemies. Therefore you gave them into the hand of their enemies, who made them suffer. And in the time of their suffering they cried out to you and you heard them from heaven, and according to your great mercies you gave them saviors who saved them from the hand of their enemies. . . . Yet they acted presumptuously and did not obey your commandments, but sinned against your rules, which if a person does them, he shall live by them, and they turned a stubborn shoulder and stiffened their neck and would not obey. (Neh. 9: 26–27, 29)
Jesus born under foreign rule
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| The statue known as the Augustus of Prima Porta, 1st century. "In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register." (Gospel of Luke, chapter 3) |
In fact, this nation had a history of being so wicked that even the Philistines, those idolatrous wretches, were actually ashamed of Israel’s lewd behavior (Ezek. 16: 27). Because of the Israelites’ relentless stubbornness and unbelief, they were trodden under the heel of one wicked nation after another, and it was into this nation of failures (in every sense of that word) that the Savior chose to be born, in a Roman colony in a barn where his family had been forced to travel for taxation purposes. In his veins flowed Jewish blood, and in his manhood he remains Jesus the Jew to this day. Jesus the Jew embraces Israel’s national identity as the shameful chosen who were not known for their consecration but rather for their idolatry, insignificance, weakness, and slavery. How many times had they suffered exile as punishment for their rebellion? He came unto his own people, but in typical fashion, they “did not receive him”(John 1: 11).
Jesus came to Israel and not to the Chinese, the Romans, or the Greeks
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| Some of the thousands of life-size Terracotta Warriors of the Qin Dynasty, c. 210 BCE. "Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there," says atheist Christopher Hitchens. |
This is your Savior
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| The Scourging on the Front (La flagellation de face) - James Tissot |
This needs to speak to your heart so that you know that no matter what kind of “loser” you are, Jesus willingly condescended to go even lower than that. He had no great pedigree. He was of questionable lineage, working class, uneducated, poor, weak, despised, rejected, and exiled. This is the baby and his family of origin; this is your Savior.
Source: Fitzpatrick, Elyse M. Found in Him: The Joy of the Incarnation and Our Union with Christ. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013, pages 44 to 47.
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