GOD'S INCARNATION AND THE CHURCH
The “doctrine of the
Incarnation” is no bad phrase as long as we remember that it is only a
shorthand way of affirming that something happened, something actually was done
and that it was God who did it. When we reflect on what it is that the Almighty
God has actually done we use words to speak about it but we don’t use words as
a substitute for what God has done.
The one Christians
speak of as “the Lord Jesus” is God being a man. The Lord Jesus is the man that
God is being.
But we can’t leave it
there for God does not want us to leave it there, won’t permit us to leave it
there. We then try to unpack the meaning of it and the divine reasons for it
and, in addition, we want to know how it affects us. Or should affect us.
None of us is competent
to unpack all the truths that are embedded in God’s eternal purpose to become a
human or why he ceaselessly chooses to be a human but as we gain a deeper
understanding of the character and purpose of God we gain an enriched
understanding of his Incarnation in and as Jesus Christ.
There are social ramifications
of all the major doctrines the Bible reveals to us. That is, we aren’t taught
these major truths simple to give us correct information—they are truths to
live by. For example, Paul affirms the OT doctrine that there is no God but
one [see Romans 3:29]; he concludes from that that there must be one Creator
and one human family. From that he concludes that God cares for the entire
human family and offers them life in and through the
Lord Jesus [3:30].
He earlier concluded
that the entire human family is faithless [3:19, 23] in contrast to God’s
faithfulness [3:21-22] but in and through the faithfulness of Jesus God’s
maintains his commitment to the human family. Paul insists that humanity
knowingly embraced the world spirit that makes itself visible in the
principalities and powers and was enslaved and was in need of rescue. Instead
of despising humanity and keeping his distance God came nearer than near,
became incarnate in and as Jesus, became one of us [see Romans 8:3 and note
Hebrews 2:10-11] and came to humanity’s rescue.
This rescue work
continues in “the body of Christ” [that is, the Church, the NT covenant People]
in which Jesus dwells as and by the Holy Spirit
[see Galatians 4:6, Ephesians 2:22; 2 Corinthians 3:17;
Acts 16:7]. The Church is in a real way an “extension” of the Lord’s
incarnation.
It would be strange, then, if the
corporate body of the Lord Jesus were to despise humanity, would it not?
It won’t do for us to
say that humans are terrible sinners and that we are to distance ourselves from
them if we are to be good people and, more to the point, if we are the body of
Christ. It won’t do because God who knows better than anyone how sinful the
human family is and who is goodness in perfection refuses to distance himself
from us and chooses to be one of us so that he might rescue us.
We cannot make our
moral uprightness a reason to distance ourselves from sinful humans when God
would not do it. As Bonhoeffer has taught us, we can’t despise humans if God has
so loved them that he became one of them to rescue them. If we despise humans
we despise what God has become in Jesus and in despising God’s choice to be one
of us we despise God himself.
However we are to
engage with our fellow-humans it mustn’t be out of contempt for them but always
with the purpose to rescue them [however doubtful we might be about the
effectiveness of our attempt]. While we’re at it we are to remember who we are
and what we have been though now we may be more morally upright then many of them
[see Titus 3:2-7].
The Church that
[however it goes about its business] is not and refuses to be in the business
of rescue is not the NT Church; it is not the Body of Christ.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, theabidingword.com.