Faith Test: Incarnation
Introduction
We are going to be looking today at the doctrine of the incarnation, that is that God the Son became human in such a way that he was fully God and fully human. Are you bored yet? Who wants to hear about theology? This is not what we come to church for, we want something relevant, we want something that will deepen our relationship with Jesus.
Let us use our imagination to try and understand the importance of this. Imagine you have met the love of your life. You know instantly that this is the one and you quickly propose. You decide to have a short engagement and you show up at the church to get married. A half hour before the wedding ceremony, your soon-to-be spouse asks to see you. The person tells you that they have some things to say that they had neglected to mention. They confess that they are a convicted murderer, they have a $500,000 debt that they are bringing to the marriage and they own one hundred snakes that they are also bringing with them. Now you may still go ahead and marry the person, but this information is important. If we are in a serious relationship with someone, then we want to know who they really are.
This is even more important when it comes to our relationship with Jesus. People say all sorts of things about Jesus, and if we really want to serve him, we should know the truth.
This is what John is trying to get across in his letter. He feels so strongly that he says that those who preach a false message about Jesus have the spirit of antichrist. How does that fit with the antichrist of the end times? The spirit of antichrist is something that has been at work since the time of Jesus and will only grow as we approach the return of Jesus.
Having seen that it is important to know who Jesus is, we will look at what the incarnation is and the witnesses that point us to that truth.
What is the Incarnation?
We have briefly talked about the incarnation but we need to go a bit deeper. I believe that this is one of the most misunderstood doctrines even though it is one of the most important.
My understanding of Jesus as a child was pretty far off. I thought of Jesus as sort of a demi-god, half God and half human, similar to the Greek hero Heracles. He was powerful but not as powerful as God. He probably was at angel level and could take on the devil if he needed to. I was well on my way to starting a heretical cult.
The most basic idea of the incarnation is that God the Son became a human being, by which he was still fully God and fully human. Let’s unpack this.
The most common problem people have with this is the God part. It is easy to see that Jesus was a teacher of religion and morality. After all, there were other Jewish religious leaders at the time, some of whom even claimed to be the messiah. Modern readers see this as an attractive understanding of Jesus. We can lump Jesus in with Moses, Buddha and Muhammad, human teachers who tried to make the world a better place.
C.S. Lewis spoke to this tendency of understanding Jesus.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.
This is the view that is taught in the New Testament. It is not just that Jesus is kind of special, Jesus is God. In numerous places, Jesus is described as the one who created all things in the very beginning. Let that sink in. That wooden cross, those iron nails, those Roman soldiers, all those were created by Jesus.
Christian teaching does not work without a divine Jesus. Think about the atonement on the cross. Plenty of prophets before him were martyred and yet none of their deaths moved the sin meter the slightest bit. Only Jesus could pay for our sins, because he was God. The Bible says there is only one name by witch we can be saved. That name is not Moses, Elijah or Isaiah. Why would God the Father pick the name of Jesus if he was just a prophet like everyone else?
In the context of our passage in 1 John, the problem is not that they did not see Jesus’ divinity. In fact it was the opposite. John warns about people who teach that Jesus did not come in the flesh. They believe Jesus was there, but that he only looked human. Here is the line of thinking. Spirit is good and flesh is evil. Jesus is good, therefore Jesus was spirit and not flesh. They believed that Jesus was a purely spiritual being and that he had no fleshly body.
The first problem is that this view is based on Plato and not the Bible. Plato and his followers taught a spirit-matter dualism with matter always being bad. I still see the influence of this on the church. Many Christians look forward to escaping the body at death but the Bible teaches that our destiny is to receive resurrection bodies and not to be disembodied spirits.
The Bible teaches that creation is good and that we should celebrate what God has created, including our bodies. Jesus becoming a human being was not a bad thing. I was sitting with some friends a few years back and we were discussing Jesus. They were agreeing with each other that if you went back in time and tried to shoot Jesus, the bullet would just bounce off him as if he was Superman. That is not what the Bible teaches. Jesus was fully human. We are told that he got tired and he got hungry. If Jesus received a modern medical checkup, there would be no indication that he was different than anyone else.
I have an interest in Islam and at some point I picked up some evangelistic booklets aimed at converting people to Islam. One of them was about the different names for God. One name from a tribal culture that the author liked, translated into “The One Without an Anus.” As weird as it sounds, the idea was that the true God does not have bowel movements. And yet that is the very claim of Christianity. Jesus had a fully human body and he did all the things humans do.
To bring these points together, we need both a divine and a human Jesus. Jesus needed to be both to bridge the gap between humanity God. If not for the incarnation, there would be no chance for our salvation.
Apostolic Witness
John talks about two different ways that we can protect ourselves from false teaching. The first is that the people should hold to what they heard in the beginning. What did they hear in the beginning? It was the apostolic witness, the traditions of the first disciples who knew Jesus personally. This would become what we now call the New Testament.
The Bible is our first line of defense when it comes to false teachings. What the people who knew Jesus personally say always trumps what the most talented and articulate speaker says today. If I say something from the pulpit, it is not true unless it corresponds with the message of the Bible.
So what does the Bible say about Jesus?
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14 ESV)
The New Testament clearly teaches that Jesus was God, especially in Philippians, Colossians and Hebrews. Jesus existed before the creation of the world and participated in the creation of all things.
Jesus was also human. When he was born as a baby, he was a real baby. He was not born with all knowledge, he still had to learn to walk and talk. The Gospels, while affirming his divine nature, portray him as being very human.
One example of how careful reading of the Bible is important. A Canadian denomination in the first half of the twentieth century had a challenge when it came to the identity of Jesus. They noticed that the baptismal formula in Matthew is to baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit. But in Acts, the disciples baptized in the name of Jesus. They concluded that the name of the Father, Son and Spirit was Jesus and that there was no Trinity, only Jesus.
More careful reading of Scripture would show that there is both distinction between and interaction among the Father and Son. The reference to baptizing in Jesus’ name was a way of distinguishing from the baptism of the John the Baptist. Thankfully that denomination found its way and now has a fully orthodox theology.
When we hear people making claims about Jesus, go immediately to the Bible and make sure their teaching lines up with Scripture.
The Anointing
I am very comfortable with the Bible test for staying true to the identity of Jesus. John then goes to something a little less concrete. He says that we can rely on our anointing, an anointing so strong that we will no longer have to be taught. What does that mean?
First, the anointing is likely a reference to the Holy Spirit, who we receive when we become Christians. Although all Christians have the Holy Spirit, it seems that we can grow in our relationship with the Spirit and our ability to listen to the Spirit. It is a dynamic and living relationship.
But why does John say we will no longer need to be taught? Should we cancel all Christian education initiatives since we already have the Holy Spirit? That is not what John is saying at all. He is speaking specifically about our ability to understand who Jesus is. What should be happening is that we first learn about Jesus from the apostolic witness and then eventually that truth will be kept safe as we listen to the Spirit.
What I need to clarify is that the voice of the Spirit is not necessarily the same as our thoughts. We could hear from a very gifted preacher a false teaching about Jesus and we could be moved by their eloquence. Just because inside that might feel right does not mean the Spirit is agreeing. We need to separate our feelings from the Holy Spirit.
Thankfully the Scriptures and the Spirit will never disagree. The Scriptures are Holy Spirit inspired, the same Holy Spirit that is within us. So if you hear someone say that Jesus was an alien scout preparing for an intergalactic invasion, the Holy Spirit will not be affirming that even if you love science fiction.
Conclusion
The incarnation. Jesus Christ, both God and human. As the Nicene Creed says, “And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made; of the same essence as the Father.”
This is theology but it is theology that matters. As Christians we are relying a Saviour that can make us right with God. The only way that could happen is for the Saviour to be both God and human. Jesus is that Saviour. Because of the incarnation we can have hope in this world and the world to come.
