Meditations
”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father.” (John 1:1-14) “He withdrew from them, knelt and prayed, ‘Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me…’ and being in anguish, He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” (Luke 22:41-44)
Was this our God in so much anxiety that He was intensely sweating drops of blood, on a night when others were trying to stay warm around fires? Martin Luther said of this scene that surely no man ever feared death like this man. So which was it – God or man? “It is the kind of thought that we find nowhere else in world religion. It is a preposterous claim that Christians alone subscribe to: Christ is truly and fully both God and human. The mystery of it should draw us to it in order to recognize the importance of it. If we neglect this task, others will attempt to explain it in ways which lead to error and confusion. In the doctrine of Christ’s person, careless shepherds invite predatory wolves!” (Pastor Bruce Milne)
“Jesus lived His divine-human life in and through His human mind and body at every point. He acted and endured everything, including His sufferings on the cross, in the unity of His divine-human person. The only satisfaction that we can get from trying to grasp the idea of the incarnation is to recognize that what we have in Christ is addition, not subtraction. For God to become man, He becomes man by addition, that is, He never ceases to be divine. He is not giving up His divinity, He is only giving up His ‘seat’ in heaven for a while and taking on flesh so as to dwell among us. If Jesus is less than fully God, He can’t show us the Father (John 14:9), and He won’t be as able to help those who encounter agony and temptations in life unless He is fully human. (Heb 2:18) It is this scene in Gethsemane where we are confronted with exactly who Jesus is: totally human in His fear and pain, and yet never being overwhelmed or compelled by some divine force to do something He does not choose to do on His own authority. (John 10:18)” (J.I. Packer) What an awesome God. He is not content to just create us and then leave us to figure out how to live. He came down because He loves you so very much. (Phil 2:5-8)
