Fearlessly Courageous
Desk of Dennis Piller
9/7/2022
How Can Jesus be God and Man…The Incarnation… Jesus is 100% Man. Part III
Please pray for Glenda and Richard Haught. Glenda is fighting for her life battling Cancer of the liver that has spread. She needs a miracle. Please pray with us for her complete healing.
Please release your faith and intercede with us as a family!
But what exactly do we mean when we say that God the Son became man?
We certainly do not mean that he turned into a man in the sense that he stopped being God and started being man. Jesus did not give up any of his divinity in the incarnation, as is evident from the verses we saw earlier. Rather, as one early theologian put it, “Remaining what he was, he became what he was not.” Christ “was not now God minus some elements of his deity, but God plus all that he had made his own by taking manhood to himself. 9 7 2022 incarnation III Thus, Jesus did not give up any of his divine attributes at the incarnation. He remained in full possession of all of them. For if he were to ever give up any of his divine attributes, he would cease being God.
The truth of Jesus’s humanity is just as important to hold to as the truth of his deity. The apostle John teaches how denying that Jesus is man is of the spirit of the antichrist (1 John 4:2; 2 John 7). Jesus’s humanity is displayed in the fact that he was born as a baby from a human mother (Luke 2:7; Galatians 4:4), that he became weary (John 4:6), thirsty (John 19:28), and hungry (Matthew 4:2), and that he experienced the full range of human emotions such as marvel (Matthew 8:10) and sorrow (John 11:35). He lived on earth just as we do.
Jesus Is a Sinless Man
It is also essential to know that Christ does not have a sinful nature, and neither did he ever commit sin — even though he was tempted in all ways (Hebrews 4:15). Thus, Jesus is fully and perfectly man and has also experienced the full range of human experience. We have a Savior who can truly identify with us because he is a man who can also truly help us in temptation because he has never sinned. That is an awesome truth to cherish and sets Christianity apart from all other religions.
Each Nature Is Full and Complete
Having seen the biblical basis that Jesus is both God and man, the second truth that we must recognize is that each of Christ’s natures is full and complete. In other words, Jesus is fully God and fully man.
Jesus Is Fully God
We saw earlier that each Person of the Trinity is fully God. The three Persons of the Trinity are not each one-third of God but are each all of God. Thus, Jesus is fully God since he is God the Son incarnate. Rather, he is fully God. “For in him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9).
Jesus Is Fully Man
It is also important to recognize that when we say that Jesus is man, we do not simply mean that he is partially man. We mean that he is fully human — everything that belongs to the essence of true humanity is true of him. He is just as truly human as the rest of us.
The fact that Jesus is truly and fully human is clear from the fact that he has a human body (Luke 24:39), a human mind (Luke 2:52), and a human soul (Matthew 26:38). Jesus does not just look like a man. He does not just have some aspects of what is essential for true humanity but not others.
Rather, he possessed full humanity.
Jesus Will Be Fully God and Fully Man Forever
For most people, it is obvious that Jesus will be God forever. But for some reason, it escapes a lot of us that Jesus will also be a man forever. He is still a man right now as you read this and will be forever. The Bible is clear that Jesus rose physically from the dead in the same body that had died (Luke 24:39) and then ascended into heaven as a man in his physical body (Acts 1:9; Luke 24:50–51). It would make no sense for him to have done this if he was simply going to ditch his body and stop being a man when he arrived in heaven.
That Christ continued being man with a physical body after his ascension is confirmed by the fact that when he returns, it will be as a man in his body. He will return physically. Philippians 3:21 says that at his second coming, Christ “will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of his glory.” This verse is clear that Jesus still has his body. It is a glorified body, which Paul calls, “the body of his glory.” And when Christ returns, he will still have it because this verse says that he will transform our bodies to be like his. Both Jesus and all Christians will then continue living together in their bodies forever because the resurrection body cannot die (1 Corinthians 15:42)
since it is eternal (2 Corinthians 5:1).
Why did Jesus become man, and why will he be a man forever?
The book of Hebrews says it was so that Christ could be an adequate Savior who has all that we need. “He had to be made like his brothers in all things, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people” (2:17).
First, notice that Jesus became man so that he could die for our sins.
He had to be human in order to pay the penalty for humans. Second, this verse says that because Jesus is human like us, he is able to be a merciful and faithful High Priest. His humanity enables him to more fully sympathize with us and identify with us. I cannot help but believe that it is very destructive to our comfort and faith to not know that Jesus is still man and in his body. For if he is not still man in heaven, how could we have comfort knowing that he can fully sympathize with us? He can sympathize and be a faithful high priest and know what we are going through not just because he was once on earth as a man, but because he continues forever as that same man.
The union of Christ’s deity and humanity in one Person makes it such that we have all that we need in the same Savior. How glorious! Because Jesus is God, he is all-powerful and he cannot be defeated. Because he is God, he is the only adequate Savior. Because he is God, believers are safe and can never perish; we have security. Because he is God, we can have confidence that he will empower us for the task that he commands us for. And because he is God,
all people will be accountable to him when he returns to judge the world.
Lauren Daigle – Noel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGg7KdN19rs
Excerpts are taken from
J.I. Packer, Knowing God
and heavily from Gotquestions.org
