The Implications of the Incarnation | Theocast & 1517.org

The Significance of the Incarnation for Christmas and Redemption

Hi everyone, I am with Justin. It's going to be a unique podcast just because it's been a unique year. We gathered in Knoxville. We just did a podcast together that'll be coming out later, but today is a special podcast.

Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church, Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church, and John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reform Church. We got together with some of our dear friends from 1517.

Justin, tell us a little bit about.

That combo. For those of you who don't know, 1517 is a ministry of some of our brothers and sisters in Christ of a Lutheran persuasion. They have several podcasts of their own, 30 minutes in the New Testament and 40 minutes in the Old Testament.

We locked arms with our brothers, Daniel Emory Price, Chad Byrd, and Eric Sorensen, to do a podcast about the Incarnation and its significance. As you'll gather in the intro, as our friend Daniel said, it's six dudes around a microphone who all think they have something significant to say about theology.

You're going to notice that there are a number of guys who are clamoring for the microphone in one sense, and we all are trying to offer helpful thoughts about the Incarnation and why it matters for us.

The reason we're clamoring is that we all love the subject. We can't talk about Christ enough.

It's a wonderful time of year, and a lot of times I think for Christians, Christmas is kind of ruined by just absurd notions. The birth narrative of Jesus is like, it was the night before Christmas, Christian style.

We want to talk about it from a more robust perspective. Christmas is about redemption, and it's ultimately about what Christ came to do.

We hope it's encouraging. If you want to know why there's noise in the background, you're going to have to listen to next year's podcast.

Next year.

Stay tuned to that. 2020 Review. We hope you enjoy.

Welcome to your 2020 Christmas extravaganza, the Incarnation extravaganza. This is a brave attempt that we are making right here. Six dudes who all think they have a lot to say about theology, all trying to talk to you about theology at the same time.

We're going to try to behave ourselves. So this is the, I guess, I mean, it's sort of the 1517 Theocast mashup, but it's podcast-specific. It's 30 minutes in the New Testament, 40 minutes in the Old Testament, and Theocast all together.

We've never done this before. Now, we've been together before, but we didn't record. I know that I've been on Theocast. I think Chad has been on Theocast. Has Eric been on Theocast?

I have not.

No, he's not a listener.

Boing, boing, boing.

You've got to be a listener to the podcast.

I have listened to your podcast. I have.

Eric is just saying, I don't even know who you are.

He's like, well, we're doing it with Theo. Who? The secret that people don't know is that there's a, we have a group text. That is how this, of course, comes about. So there's a group text with the six of us that is sworn to secrecy and no one can ever know the contents therein.

But that's where

Mostly memes. It's mostly memes.

It's mostly memes.

Well, let's be honest, deep theological memes.

That's right.

Very deep. Yeah. So we have not set this up well through all that texting. People probably think we're going to attempt to have a serious conversation here. If they saw that text message thread, they would have little hope that this would be accomplished, but we're going to give it a go.

We have settled on the incarnation or the implications of the incarnation. This seems like a very appropriate thing to do this time of year. So I'm done playing host now. So we just go from this point on.

Why God Had to Become Man to Forgive Sin

John, what's going on in the incarnation? Why is this a big deal? Why can't God just forgive our sins? We'll call it a good deal. Do we really need him to become man, go through all of this, die, all that kind of stuff?

Why not just say, you know what? I'm feeling like I want to forgive. It's in my nature. I'm a gracious God. You're all forgiven. Done.

Right. Well, one of my favorite stories is Luke 5, right? He's in the house. The friends lower the paralytic man down and everyone in the room at this point is packing this room out because they've already heard about Jesus and his miracles.

Of course, why these men are bringing the paralytic in. And everyone in the room is expecting Jesus to say, you're healed, and he doesn't. What does he say? He says, your sins are forgiven. And the Pharisees lose their mind.

And they're like, who are you to say that you can forgive sins? And then of course, Jesus says, well, what's easier for me to say, get up and walk or your sins are forgiven. And what I love about that entire story is that Jesus kind of sets the tone straight saying, I'm here to forgive sins and that this is why I'm here.

And the miracles are purely just me fulfilling the prophecies of my role here. And the reason why that becomes so important, of course, later on, you learn is that Jesus can't forgive that which he hasn't paid for.

And later on, the incarnation becomes, it's the correction to most people's theology. You hear all the time, Jesus came to be a good man or good teaching or whatever, but no, Jesus became our imputation, became our representative.

So if Jesus does not become a man, he cannot pay for the sins of humanity. So without human form, he cannot take on human punishment.

Yeah, I love that the message given to Mary is like, hey, you're going to have a son, and he will save his people from their sin. This is like the purpose behind him coming, period. I mean, he doesn't say, there's my cousin, or there's a good role model, or even there's a perfect man right there.

If you ever wondered what a perfect man looked like, there it is. No, he says, behold the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world.

Take away the sins of the world, so good.

Yeah.

I think another implication, something that I've been even looking at this week as, in our church, we're kind of looking at different gospel readings, and it can almost seem like the birth of Christ comes out of nowhere.

I've been really influenced by a book I'm reading that talks about how God tends to work and loves to work through the insignificant and small, and even as we think about the incarnation of Christ, could have came with legions of angels to accomplish his purposes.

And yet, as we look throughout redemptive history, one of the authors that I'm reading, he said, often at the big turning points in history, what we find is a pregnant woman and a child of promise that ends up being a kind of a linchpin in how God is working in the world.

And so, even as we look at Mary and we think about the virgin birth, the miraculous birth of Christ, if you will, this isn't coming out of nowhere. I mean, we've seen this all throughout redemptive history, right?

I mean, you have Isaac, you know, the child of laughter that, I mean, nobody saw that one coming, right? I would not see, you know, a man and a woman, very, very old, having a child, and yet we get Isaac.

And then we see Hannah, who gives birth to her son, who ends up anointing kings, and Moses, and even his miraculous deliverance as a baby. And then even John the Baptist, you know, miraculous things around his birth.

And then we get to Jesus, and it's like, it didn't come out of nowhere. Like, this is a pattern that God has. I feel like I'm stepping on Chad's toes, just talking about Old Testament stuff, but here I am.

This is a pattern that God has chosen to work in, and what I love is that Christ comes on the scene in such a theology of the cross sort of way, right? That it's not what we would expect, it's not what we would plan, and yet in the wisdom of God that makes us look like fools, this is how he's chosen to operate, you know, through the Word made flesh to dwell amongst us.

And so it's really beautiful and significant in the way that it shows us that God identifies with us and our humanness, our flesh, the things that we deal with.

On a daily basis. It's almost as if the psalmist was inspired when he wrote that God has ordained praise from the mouths of infants and babies. It's almost as if he's been working that way all throughout history in ways that often, I mean, we see even the disciples, you know, sort of be like, why are you bringing children to Jesus?

You know, why? And it's like, have you actually read the scriptures where God is always working in this way to the insignificant through, you know, even things as small and insignificant as a baby? Indeed, I mean, that's what we see with, especially in full culmination with Christ.

But to your point, Jimmy, when I think about, you know, the rest of the New Testament and that period of time, one of the implications of the incarnation is how this was so radically different than the way anybody was thinking about how God would interact with the world.

And really, you didn't have room for it in Jewish life of the idea of God becoming man. And you didn't have room for it in Greek life because of their view of matter being, you know, inherently evil. And yet here is how God chooses to interact.

He chooses to become flesh. He chooses to deal with the same sorts of sufferings that we do and the same sorts of struggles. And this is why you have for the first few hundred years, these great debates in church history, because it just seemed so radically different than the way people thought they should approach God and even more significantly, the way God approaches us.

Irenaeus, the Image of God, and Recapitulation

Let me jump in here.

And piggyback off a couple of things that Jimmy said. And then I want to bring in one of my favorite church fathers, Irenaeus, and talk about what he has to teach us about incarnation. Just to take what Jimmy said and to run with it.

You know, what you see already from Genesis 1, when God makes man in his own image, you see there what I think is a prophecy of the incarnation. Luther says that you see a dim intimation of God's desire to become one of us when he makes Adam and Eve in his own image.

So already there, you begin to see kind of the echoes that we're going to finally hear in full volume on Christmas day, because God makes humanity in his image and eventually the maker will assume the image himself.

And of course, you have all sorts of allusions to God's desire to become one of us throughout the Old Testament. Everything from the messenger of Yahweh who appears, sometimes he's called a man, sometimes he's walking around and people don't even know that it's the messenger of Yahweh.

You know, they think it's just a kind of average Joe Israelite walking by. And so they engage him in conversation. So as one author put it, God is always trying on the clothes of the incarnation throughout the Old Testament.

He's appearing as a man to his people. And that's another thing. I mean, he shows, and this is I think one of the most beautiful, comforting things about the incarnation. It shows that God desires an intimate presence with his people.

He doesn't want to be some distant hilltop or mountaintop deity, just kind of aloof from humanity. He wants to be right in the thick of things. And we see that in the Garden of Eden when he's walking around, we see that with the tabernacle, the tabernacle is smack dab in the middle of the camp of the Israelites.

So God actually wants to dwell in the midst of his people. He doesn't want to be far away. He wants to be near and accessible to them. So kind of keeping all that in mind, you jump to the second century and to the writings of Irenaeus.

What Irenaeus does is he says that what we have in the incarnation is Christ recapitulating, redoing, recreating, and fulfilling everything that happened before. So he's not only just the new Adam or the last Adam, as Paul calls him, but he is all humanity compressed into one.

So that what he does is recapitulate the history of humanity and of Israel. So he not only does it over and does it perfectly, but he does it as the God man. And in that way, he brings humanity to the perfection that God always desired us to have.

And we wouldn't have that without the incarnation. So as some of the church fathers put it, we gain more in Christ than we lost in Adam, because in Christ we now have not only the perfect human, but we have the perfect human who is also at the same time God.

That awesome Irenaeus theology when it comes to the incarnation, that Christ has recapitulated all things in himself, so that when we see him, we see the human that God desires all of us to be, and that we become as we are baptized into his flesh and become one with him.

I just have to go on record in saying, if you've listened to Theocast and I've said Irenaeus, I repent. It's Irenaeus from here on out.

Irenaeus, John.

You can say it however you want to say it. It's just the way we Texans pronounce it.

Japers, John. Japers, John, get it right.

I do think that this is a really important point, is that, I mean, how many times have you heard people try to explain to lay people or children or other theologians explain what it means to be made in the image of God?

Oh, it means that you're creative or you have consciousness or whatever, right? All these different things. It's really quite simple. God formed man in the image of Christ. God did not just say, oh, I'm going to make this arbitrary thing, this form, and then eventually it all come as that.

I mean, God knows these things, right? So, you are made in the image of God in the sense that this is what you look like Jesus. That's.

What you look like. Your arms and legs and eyes. He is the image and we are made in his image. It's an important distinction to make.

Absolutely. And what happens in the incarnation is that this is where the work of salvation really gets underway, because in the incarnation, because we are made in that image and because God is the Father of Christ, Christ then is united to all of humanity in the incarnation.

Right from the start, he isn't just some, he's not just another guy. His God is the Father and he has united him to all of us in the incarnation. I mean, the gospel itself is wrapped up in the.

The Incarnation as the Heart of Salvation and the Gospel

Incarnation and I'm not trying to be the guy that comes in and overstates it, but I think for a lot of Christians, at least that I've been around, and maybe in my young life, the birth narrative of Jesus is kind of like the Christian version of, "'Twas the night before Christmas," and that's kind of the significance that it bears.

We read it once a year on Christmas Eve and it's sentimental, it's meaningful in some way, but I think it's incredible to think that redemption is inextricably linked to God the Son taking on flesh, and that's what we're celebrating in the incarnation at Christmastime.

We love to talk about Jesus being our representative. Well, he is only our representative because he became one of us. He became a man in order to represent men. We haven't talked about the law yet, but I'm thinking about Galatians chapter 4, verses 4 and 5, where we're told that Christ was born under the law in order to redeem those who are under the law.

Well, men are born under the law, and so he's born as a man under the law in order to live a life of perfect obedience, to keep his Father's every word and fulfill it for us. So when we herald from the rooftops, you know, Christ is our righteousness and those kinds of things, we can only say that because Christ came and was a human being and accomplished everything that he did in our place.

And so this is a big deal. I mean, you can't overstate the importance and the.

Implication of the incarnation. No way. No incarnation means no salvation because no.

Manger means no cross. Well, I think it becomes, I mean, if you look at Genesis 3, when God promises the seed of Eve, right, from you will come a seed, the question becomes if you've got no knowledge of the Bible and you're reading it for the first time, your question is, well, who's that?

Because Adam and Eve lived in Utopia. They destroyed it. God promises to fix it. Well, how is he going to do that? It's the whole Old Testament leading into the New Testament is the anticipation of the incarnation of the one who's fixing that which man destroyed.

So it becomes.

The point of the Bible. Yeah. You think about how hard it must have been for the, or at least how challenging it could have been for the early apostles to stand so strongly on this idea that Jesus really did become flesh.

And yet, if you read, I mean, all of the writings of the New Testament, they just are not shy. I mean, you know, there is abundantly clear as they can be. I mean, how many times do we read? We touched him.

We saw him. We heard him. We felt him. I mean, it's very, very fleshy. It's very, very tangible. They want to emphasize the word became flesh. The author of Hebrews, otherwise known as Apollos, wants us to know that because God has become flesh, that God knows what it's like to even be tempted as we are, which is a completely mind-blowing thought.

And yet, of course, a very comforting thought, which is why the author of Hebrews decides to mention that. And it's why it's one of the most quoted verses in my life. To think that God actually really does know the ins and outs of human experience in that way is so far removed from the way that we're naturally prone to thinking about the deity, you know, the great God.

Yeah. I mean, Chad was talking about the nearness of God earlier. I mean, you're picking up on that too, Eric, that God is not just distant and cold and disconnected from his people. He's not some despot sitting off in the heavens.

He is personally involved in the lives of his people, so much so that he came and entered into this wasteland called fallen earth and experienced all the pain, the suffering, the sorrows that we experience yet without sin.

And I mean, it's a tremendous comfort. You know, the Christ of Gethsemane is a comfort to people who are suffering and who are hurting, because he knows our grief, and he knows the anguish of the soul and the dark night of the soul and all of those things.

And he's personally involved in our lives and knows our suffering, yet he is without sin. He is the great and compassionate high priest. He's gentle and lowly and tender toward those who are suffering and toward those who are in pain.

None of that's true, you know, if the incarnation is not a thing.

And praise God that it is. It's worth making explicit. I'm sure what all of our listeners know, but it's one of those things that needs to be said. God did not become disincarnate at the ascension of Jesus, so the Son of God remains human flesh and blood.

I do think I've encountered this multiple times. He has a body. He has a body, yes. People, they don't mean to hold a false opinion, but they just don't realize that they do. But they'll think, oh, okay, the Son of God came down from heaven.

He became one of us. And then when he went back to be with his Father, he sort of, you know, sloughed off his human nature because he didn't need it anymore. No, from the moment that the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and the Son of God entered into her womb and became a human being, from that point forever and ever, God is fully human.

The Son of God has assumed our nature and he has not and will never lose our nature. So right now, we can say that a man sits on the throne of God. It is to a man that we pray. It's to a man that we appeal as our great high priest.

That is not saying he's not God. He is. However, he is fully human. So as one of my favorite ascension hymns puts it, thou hast raised our human nature on the clouds to God's right hand. So there we are with him because he has taken our humanity into himself.

So when we look, when we think about the throne of God and Christ at the right hand of God,.

A man sits beside God. You know what that does, Chad? Because this bothers me to no end. It gives you permission to talk about your own body, your own humanness in a positive way. So there's so many people that are like, oh, I just can't wait to get rid of this stupid carton that my soul is locked in.

And you're going to go fly away, bro. Yeah, but you're going to become something altogether different, right? And yeah, Paul says like, yeah, you're going to be changed in a twinkle of an eye. It's going to happen.

But it ain't going to be that different. You're going to be changed. Don't get me wrong, sinlessness is a radical change, at least for me. For me, this is a big change. All of a sudden, no sin, this is going to be quite a transformation.

But it gives you permission to realize that what God initially said is very good. He intends to bring you back to that, not to do something all over again. He's like, you know what, that actually wasn't that good.

I'm going to come up with a whole new thing. No, Christ comes and he takes on flesh. And in that, he makes the human form something that we can say, like, you know what, that is good. It's flawed, it's marred, it's got sin in it.

But that's what needs to go. Not this sort of weird Gnostic idea where you're like, just can't wait until we all grow wings and play harps and whatever it is that you think is going on. No, Jesus is God, and God is a man at the right hand of the Father.

When we are yanked out of our graves, we're going to have bodies, and they're going to be very much these.

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Comfort in Suffering, the Ascension, and the Hope of Resurrection

If we're not too busy being Pelagian, it's because we're too distracted by being Gnostic. If we're not too busy trying to achieve our own righteousness, it's because we're distracted trying to get into this spiritual nirvana.

Frankly, I think that the incarnation really blows up both of those ideas. The incarnation shows us that Christ has to come and live in our place and achieve that righteousness that we could never. Also, it shows us that one of my favorite stories in the Gospels is with Jesus with Thomas, classic doubting Thomas.

Nobody talks about doubting John the Baptist, but we'll talk about doubting Thomas all day. But doubting Thomas, what is Jesus' solution? Come here. Come here and feel the holes, touch my side, that Jesus gives us physical things, that God gives us physical things that we can look to taste and touch.

This is something I say to our church every week is that I've just told you for 30 minutes or so about God's great love and grace for you in Christ Jesus, and now you get to taste it in the form of bread and wine.

That we're not spiritual beings having this weird physical existence, but rather that God is the God of all. He is spirit, but he is the God of all creation.

Yeah. By the way, I want to defend Thomas also. I just want to, first of all, this is the Thomas that when Jesus is like, yo, I'm going to go heal Lazarus, everyone's like, we're going to die, and Thomas is the one that says, let's go die with him.

Yeah.

That's Thomas that says that. Thomas says, let's go die with this dude.

Yeah, right.

And then when he watches this dude actually die and get crucified, beat to death, put in a grave, and they're like, no, no, for real, man, he rose from the dead. And he's like, yeah, I'm going to need to see that.

We're like, what a doubter. Come on, man.

Yeah.

Absurd lack of faith.

Wait a minute. You mean Christians can be fickle and we can not be consistent? Is that what you're saying?

I think so. I think we can.

So another big, big thing, when Chad was talking earlier, this came to mind, in thinking about the fact that the one seated at the right hand of God, seated on the throne of God is a man. It's kind of a big deal to use the language of Paul in Ephesians that we've not only been united to Christ, but we've been raised and we have been seated with him.

Right. I mean, in the heavenly places at the right hand of God, it speaks to just how incredible this redemption is that we as human beings in flesh, the way that we are, have been united to the Lord Jesus Christ and will be like him and will reign with him forever.

And so we see in our big brother, Jesus Christ, we see what our eternal destiny is. It's pretty epic. Just a remarkable thought that's, again, tethered to the incarnation, tethered to this Christmastime stuff.

It's not just a baby in a manger. It's like eternal fallout and implications of all this stuff. I can't help but think in this as we're discussing this. What we tend to do when we come across people that are suffering and going through hard times is we tend to emphasize a very true attribute of God's character, which is that God is in control.

We say that all the time. God is sovereign. He is in control. Now, we don't deny that. We say amen. But I will tell you just from personal experience and from close to 14 years of pastoral ministry that when people are really suffering, I found the incarnation to be a tremendously comforting doctrine for people in the midst of hardship.

It might be that it's good to be reminded of that, but I have found people really need to be reminded that God is the God who is with us, that God is the God who it does understand. He's not removed from this situation.

And so I found that it's almost more impactful for people not necessarily to think about God sort of being in control because that's kind of a mind-blowing thought that we really can't even understand because then that tends to just lead to more questions.

Well, if he is, then why this, this, and that? But God is with us. God knows what it's like to go through this. He suffered loss. He understands what it's like to be abandoned. That is a tremendous resource for comfort in the midst of life in which we all will suffer.

We all will face loss, just as Christ has done before us and on our behalf.

Well, even Christ in the garden when he's, you can hear this language of anxiety, even reaching out to the Father, is there another way this can be done? Let this cup pass from me. And then Peter in 2 Peter 5, when he says, cast your anxieties on him.

And I love the reason, not because it's wrong to doubt a sovereign God. How dare you question his power? He says, cast your anxieties on him because he cares for you. Let God carry your anxieties. And how do you cast them on him?

You have to tell him that this is what makes me anxious. This is what makes me scared. This is what makes me nervous. And he says, God will carry that because he cares for you. That's good, Eric. I love that.

Yeah, I think that you need both of those for there to be any comfort. I mean, if you just tell someone, God is sovereign, he's in control, that's actually not comforting at all, apart from a God who knows what I'm going through.

So if you say somebody has the power to help you, but they don't know anything about what you're feeling, anything about what you're experiencing, they could help you, but they don't relate to it at all.

In fact, they're so high and above you, I mean, they could help you, but maybe they will, maybe they won't. I think that the sovereignty of God is only comforting if you have a God who also, not only can he do something about it, but that he knows what it's like.

He's been there, and you're like, okay, so this is not just a God who has power, but that can actually sympathize with what I'm suffering.

Yeah. A friend of mine, we were talking about this the other day, and he said, God outside of Christ reveals him, is terrifying, right? I mean, as you talk about sovereignty, it's like, yeah, that it's like, but when God comes to us in Christ, what we see is really this thing of beauty, this amazing...

I love in Luke chapter two, when Jesus is presented at the temple, when Simeon holds him, Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.

I forget, I think it might be Rembrandt who portrays this incident, this moment, where in that painting, you know, the listeners, they can go look it up, and you know, there's Simeon, and it's like he's afraid to hold or touch Jesus, and that there's such this sense of reverent awe that God would allow him to see his salvation, like physically see it.

And so when Christ comes incarnate, he reveals to us the nature of the Jesus. I mean, that's what God is like. You know, the person and work of Christ, that's what God is.

Like. Isn't that something that Simeon would refer to Jesus in that way? My eyes have seen my salvation? He doesn't say, like, what this guy's gonna do is my salvation, or this is... He just says, that kid right there, that's my salvation.

That's what that is. That's a pretty good name for Jesus. My salvation, that's who he is. Doesn't that tell us just about everything.

About God, that the ultimate theophany is the incarnation? The ultimate revelation of who God is, is as this little baby, or this man, or this victim upon the cross. A human being is the ultimate revelation of God.

A human being who came to sympathize with our weaknesses, who came to bear our sins, that if you really want to know who God is, that's where you look. You don't look on Mount Sinai. You don't even look in Genesis chapter 1, this great powerful God who's speaking everything into existence.

If you really want to know the fullness of who God is, then you look at the manger, or you look at the cross, or you look at everything in between, that this is the the final and the ultimate revelation of everything that God wants to know about us, is found exclusively in this one human being.

It's pretty phenomenal to me that that is the way that God chose to reveal himself. At the same time, it's revelatory of what God desires for us, because if he shows us himself in the incarnation, then he also shows us what his desire is going to be for us, that he wants us to be as Christ is.

We will be in the resurrection. We will receive the glorified body that he already has. So the incarnation is this revelation, but also it's a revelation of not just God, but of what God desires for us in the resurrection.

This sounds so different from what you hear during Christmas, the birth of Christ. Most of what comes from Christianity is our significance before God, and that is basically calculated by your performance.

What you guys are saying is, no, we're talking about the significance of Christ and what Christ has done in his person as a real human being, the significance of what Christ has done for us. We could do a podcast for three days and not come to the end of the significance of the incarnation of Christ, and our significance does not matter.

What we have done or who we are this holiday season, it's meaningless when you compare it to.

Who and what Christ has done. By the way, if I can just quickly give a plug for some of Luther's sermons that I think you can find most of them online. You can just Google Luther's Christmas sermons. You will never find anyone who gets more into the incarnation than Luther around Christmas time in his sermons.

They're just phenomenal, so check them out. I think most of them are actually accessible for free, so definitely worth reading as you ponder the incarnation this Christmas season. Who's Luther? I don't know who that is.