Wednesday, January 4, 2006
Eleventh Christmas Day
Hebrews 2:11 He is not ashamed to call them brethren . . .
A MAN IS OUR GOD
When we celebrate the Incarnation this time of year we find that we must also defend the fact which we make large. For fact it is, dated in the annals of time, an event that brought us a Person, born of a well-known virgin, a child of so many pounds and one of a certain number of inches long.
Not all believed it. Some soon said that he only seemed to have true human nature, after they saw how unearthly he was in power and knowledge and all competence. As when he sat talking to Nicodemus under cover of night, did he not refer to himself as being that very moment in heaven? Amazing!
Perhaps all of you who read this can fill in many proofs of his deity, though he came of Mary, walked our roads, and sat down to meals in our homes. But have you grasped the fullness of the fact that a man is our God?
As Athanasius said, salvation depends as much upon the human nature of Christ as upon his deity -- this from him whose main burden was to prove from Scripture that very deity! So a man is our God. In the flesh of Christ, God condemned sin. Christ "made peace through the blood of his cross." We are "justified by his blood." A man was on the Cross. A man-child was in that feed-box at Bethlehem.
After his glorification at the Resurrection, he was the same man: "Behold my hands and my feet . . . handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have" (Luke 24).
A man ascended and sat down at the right hand of rule beside the Father. A man shall return (you will see him!), and "every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him."
All this makes him our brother, one of us, like unto Moses. Our God is a man, indeed, so a man is our God, and a lowly one at that as he went about doing his saving work.
Since Jesus is "not ashamed" to call us brothers, let us not blush to say that one of us is God! What we mean by that, you can easily explain, should someone be shocked at such language.
It is the plain truth. We simply should not have a new head that does not have human nature.
