From the looks of it, I haven’t even used the word “incarnation” in a blog post for over a year. The last post directly addressing this wonderful doctrine was three years ago. So, I’m going to include it in this series of Basic Teachings.
The incarnation is the biblical doctrine that God came to earth in the form of a man (Phil 2:5-11). According to this passage, Jesus was initially in the form of God but emptied Himself and took the form of a man. Now what did He empty Himself of? If He were to empty Himself of His deity, the nature of God would change, and the trinity would no longer exist. That can’t happen (Mal. 3:6). So, it must have been something else.
In the garden just before Jesus was dragged off to trial, He asked the Father to restore His glory to Him, the glory He had with the Father before creation (John 17:5). So, Jesus emptied Himself of His glory. The emptying of His glory seems also to have required strongly limiting or eliminating the use of His divine attributes.
When Jesus walked the earth, He said He could do nothing Himself. It was the Father working through Him (John 5:19, 30). If Jesus emptied Himself of His glory, then that’s why He was unable to do anything without the Father. He was still God. He still had His divine nature. But, He couldn’t act as God. I like to use the example of our eyes to explain this. By nature, our eyes see, but if we drape them in flesh as Jesus did His divine nature, the eye can no longer see, but its nature hasn’t changed. God’s full glory is so great it cannot exist in a frail human body.
Yes, Jesus still has a human body today, but it has been changed to a glorious spiritual body (1 Cor. 15:42-44). “What is a spiritual body,” you might ask. I don’t know. If our spiritual bodies are to be like Jesus’, they will be bodies able to thrive in heaven and will have a different set of aspects and abilities.
Back to Jesus’ incarnation, though. God became man. How can someone be both God and man at the same time? The answer is the two are not mutually exclusive. A stapler can be both black and plastic at the same time. Two natures together. A human form as we have could not contain God’s glory, certainly. !t wasn’t until after Jesus was raised that He regained His divine attributes.
The fact Jesus is both human and God explains a lot of passages in Scripture. Jesus prayed to the Father (Matt. 11:25). He called Someone else (the Father) His God (John 20:17), He said the Father is greater than He (John 14:28). If Jesus is God, then how can He say these things? It’s because He is God in human flesh. He took on human form, so He was limited to doing only what a sinless man with a loving Father in heaven could do. He told us we could do the same things and even greater works than He did (John 14:12). Jesus, as a human being, had a God.
This is a hard point to understand. In John 2:18-22, Jesus predicts He would raise His own body from the dead. Pretty good trick if you are only human. How could a dead human raise Himself? It was the divine nature of Jesus which raised His body, and Jesus calls it His body. The Person we know as the Son is the Person we know as the Word (John 1:1) who has always existed and He is the human being we know as Jesus who began to exist in Mary’s womb. Both the Word and Jesus are the same Person. He just has two natures. His human nature did not always exist.
Why is this important?
We as Christians need to realize God did not die on the cross at Calvary. It was Jesus’ human nature, His body which died. It was Jesus’ divine nature, God the Son Who raised that body. Along with that, we need to realize Jesus didn’t just enter into a “human envelope” at the incarnation and that envelope died. Jesus was fully man and felt death just as all humans do (Phil. 3:10). While God the Son did not die, He tasted death for us all (Heb. 2:9)
Jesus humbly emptied Himself and became a man. Hesacrificed His life for us. The very least we can do is give our life to Him.
Believers Armed and Dangerous 