Behold,
I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I
will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
--Isaiah 43:19
And
the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of a great
joy that will be for all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of
David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.
--Luke 2:10-11
The Christmas story is not a children’s tale about a baby born in a
stable and laid in a manger. It is not something to ponder whimsically once a
year and then forget about like the piles of torn-up wrapping paper in the trash.
The Christmas story began before people existed and is still happening today.
It is the story of a God who became one of us so that He could rescue us out of
darkness, so that we might become heirs along with Him, as sons and daughters,
in a kingdom we cannot, even with the farthest reaches of our intellect,
imagine or understand.
If you feel like that’s hard to comprehend, it’s probably because it
is. Frankly, it’s a lot easier to just eat cookies and wrap presents than to
sit here and try to put into words a story that cannot really be put into
words. After a hiatus from writing for a
month or so, during which God has been working with me on a lot of things (stay
tuned for later posts!), I find myself suddenly two days out from Christmas, wrestling
with the idea of incarnation—a spirit
becoming flesh.
The first being to become flesh was Adam. God made him out of dust. He
breathed the spirit of life into Adam’s flesh through His own nostrils. Then He
took part of Adam’s flesh—his rib—and created Eve, Adam’s bride. They were
spiritually and physically one flesh.
Adam said, “‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall
be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ Therefore a man shall leave
his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one
flesh” (Genesis 2:22).
In the beginning, flesh was something beautiful. It was uncorrupted. It
was only a vessel in which a spirit could live. But then something happened.
The flesh got control. Through their mouths, Adam and Eve ingested sin. They
didn’t believe God’s Word—that the
fruit of the tree would bring death. Their flesh had never seen death and
couldn’t even conceptualize what it was.
But when death entered the earth, it spread and formed this earth that
we know now, in which death is the constant and life the anomaly. Now, humanity’s
flesh causes its spirit to die a little more every
single day, instead of its spirit
giving life to its flesh. How
backwards it all became.
God loved humanity. He wasn’t going to give up on the horror His
creation had become. So how was He to restore what was lost?
He said, “I will become flesh. I will come down there, and I will re-do
the marriage.”
When I was little, we had this picture book about a little girl and her
relationship with God. All the illustrations were done in soft pastels, and
everything seemed to be surrounded by this faint glowing light. Jesus was a
tall yet unintimidating figure with a very demure beard and a kind face,
clothed in a soft robe with a blue sash.
When I pray, to this day, I see that image of God from the picture
book: Jesus all haloed and robed in pastels and looking like he stole his beard
from 1967. This is embarrassing for me to admit. You’d think I would have outgrown
this by now. But humans are visual; we need images. That’s probably why the
Israelites kept returning to images of Baal. They wanted something to look at,
something to identify with. I think our culture often does us a disservice by
instilling these images in our minds—a little blonde baby in a manger, a
whimsical floating angel choir, a cartoon Jesus breaking cartoon bread—so that
our images of Him are reduced to what we can imagine.
I’m not saying we should take all the Bible story coloring pages away
from our kids. What I’m saying is that we should stop looking at the Incarnation
from the perspective of children’s storybook pages and begin to conceptualize
it as the great cosmic narrative that it is.
Maybe you already do. I do, when those moments of wonder hit me. It’s
just that my mind, and my blind human eyeballs, tend to be my downfall. I sometimes
find it frustrating that God is impossible to illustrate. Every time the Old
Testament writers attempt to describe what they’ve seen, they always have to
say, “It was like this….,” comparing
their visions of God with things that were familiar but pathetically inadequate
to illustrate His glory. (See Ezekiel if you want to read some weird
descriptions.) I feel like I am
constantly trying to draw a picture of God for myself with chalk pastels, and
all I am doing is getting the dust all over my hands and smudging the paper.
John tried his best to put the mystery of the story into words and came
up with some of the most perplexing, beautiful, and wonderful verses in the
Bible:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All
things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was
made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in
the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
—John
1:1-5
God is not an image. Jesus is the force through which we see all
images: He is light.
Yet, He became flesh, became something to see and touch and feel, so
that He could be Immanuel: God with us.
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
He came down here and experienced flesh like we experience it,
experienced death as we experience it, in the most gruesome of ways. And here
is the GOSPEL, the good news, the good tidings of great joy for ALL people, the
truth: He defeated flesh and death. He rose from the dead. He brought
light into darkness, and He rescued His bride.
Thus says the Lord: In this place of which
you say, ‘It is a waste without man or beast,’ in the cities of Judah and the
streets of Jerusalem that are desolate, without man or inhabitant or beast,
there shall be heard again the voice of mirth and voice of gladness, the voice
of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the voices of those who sing, as
they bring thank offerings to the house of the Lord…
--Jeremiah 33:10-11
Adam was the first man. He was supposed to be the first son of God. But
he didn’t believe God; he believed his flesh. He believed what he saw in the
natural world instead of believing the Word, the promises, of God. He brought
darkness, by which we are all blinded, and death, which we all were destined to
suffer.
Just as Eve was created out of Adam’s flesh, we as believers are recreated out of Jesus’ spirit. We are
wedded to Him, and we become one flesh with Him. He says, “This is my body.
Eat. This is my blood. Drink. Become like me. Become a son. Become a daughter.”
Just as Adam ate and brought darkness and death, we can eat again, and bring
the life that is the light of men. WE
are now the Word incarnate! When we become believers, we receive His implanted
word (James 1:21), and every day we receive the incarnation—His spirit becoming
flesh in our own flesh. “If anyone loves me,” said Jesus, “he will keep my
word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home
with him” (John 14:23). Our spirits become Christ’s spirit; our flesh, His
flesh.
A new marriage. A new, uncorruptible body.
Back to God’s plan A.
For as the rain and the snow come down from
heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and
sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be
that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall
accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I
sent it.
For
you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills
before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall
clap their hands.
--Isaiah
55:10-12
Your mind is blown, I know. We can’t understand. But we don’t have to.
Because He is with us.
In the lengthy stretches of depression I suffered at the beginning of
the semester, when I was stressed and crying in my car, at my lowest points, I
asked God for comfort. I didn’t receive elaborate oratories full of thunder and
fire from heaven; the word that I got was always, simply, “I am with you.” And
those were some of the sweetest moments with the Lord I have ever had.
How could I not believe a God who came down here Himself, became a man
of flesh who could be seen, and touched us? Literally. He touched the flesh
that had been corrupted by sickness and death, and He gave it life.
It’s time to take a pause this season and remember how mysterious,
awesome, and wonderful it is that we can receive this life through Jesus
Christ. If we are brave enough to come out of the darkness, out of this death
that is familiar to us, we can receive the light and actually begin to see.
He came to his own, and his own
people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his
name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood
nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.—John 1:11-13
What a sweet relief it is to be born not of this fleshly death, not of
ourselves, but of an eternal being, our Father, God.
If you want to see God, don’t let your old blind flesh drag you down
into death. Come into the light.
And from his fullness we have all
received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth
came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at
the Father’s side, he has made him known.—John 1:14-18
Don’t forget to re-gift this Christmas. As Jesus said Himself: “Heal
the sick, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. Freely you have received; freely
give” (Matthew 10:8). Bring life and light to a world that was cast into
darkness.
Hear the prophecy that Zechariah spoke over his son John, who would
make the way straight for his cousin, Jesus:
And
you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High,
for
you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
to
give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins,
because
of the tender mercy of our God,
whereby
the sunrise shall visit us from on high
to
give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to
guide our feet into the way of peace.
--Luke 1:76-79
Because of the tender mercy of
our God, who loved us enough to come down and be with us and to touch us,
we can have light. When you have light, you don’t have to sit in darkness
anymore and be afraid of the shadow of death hovering over you. So—fear not!
Merry Christmas!
