Faith in the Incarnation

Romans 1:1-6

By Robert Rayburn

That is the significance and the necessity of God becoming a man. But you can't see the incarnation. It is precisely the nature of this stupendous event that God came clothed as a man, a true man and that he lived and spoke and acted as the true man that he was. His divine glory was hidden from sight. Even those who were eye-witnesses of the incarnation, that is, saw Jesus in person, could not see the divine nature. Only on a very few occasions, most notably his transfiguration, was the divine glory of Jesus Christ revealed and only to three of his disciples. Many of those who came to hear him preach or to be healed by him did not believe and would not believe that he was the Son of God, or that he had lived before Abraham, or that he was equal with the Father in heaven or that when he went to the cross he carried the sins of the world with him.

And, in the ages since, just as in the days of the Lord's presence in the world, many have scorned the very idea of an incarnation and many others have been indifferent to it.

And when Christians have proclaimed the incarnation to the world, many have responded: "if Jesus Christ is really God, let him show himself to be so to the world. Why does he ask us simply to believe such a stupendous, such an unlikely, such a difficult thing." Just like those at the crucifixion, "if he is the King of Kings, let him come down from that cross." Two hundred years later, Celsus, the pagan critic of Christianity said the same thing: "But if he was really so great, he ought, in order to display his divinity, to have disappeared suddenly from the cross." [Origen, Contra Celsum, II. 68]

Now, it needs to be said as an aside, that everyone else, including Celsus and John Hick is in the same boat. Everything really important to human life and especially to human hope can be known only by faith. We cannot see the future, we cannot know the past in any other way. We cannot know what human life means or where it is going or how to attain our hopes and aspirations for goodness and happiness unless someone tells us who knows what we cannot prove. Celsus' and John Hick's rejection of the incarnation was an act of faith on their part just as it is for us who accept that it happened as the Bible teaches.

Strong Son of God, immortal love
Whom we who cannot see thy face
By faith and faith alone embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove.

But Hick must say the same of his relativism and pluralism.

And, all along, there have been multitudes of others who have not only believed that the child that Mary bore was the eternal Son of God but rejoiced in that knowledge and built their lives and their hopes upon it. As the author of Hebrews tells us, "faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." And that is what Christians are: they are certain that God the Son became a man even though they did not and could not see it. To be quite honest, Christians are, as a rule, little troubled by the John Hicks of this world. The arguments for the incarnation and for the Bible's entire presentation of the truth about God, the world, man, and salvation are simply too convincing, too perfectly in harmony with what we know about human life and experience and what we can gather about God, and, what is more, the Bible has the ring of truth about it particularly at those very points where people wish that the Christian faith were different than it is. It is the truth even when the truth is unwelcome, so uncharacteristic of the religions and philosophies invented by men. And, of course, still more, we believe in the incarnation with certainty because we have met Christ ourselves, he has come to us, and shown himself to us both God and man. The King of Kings knows how to prove himself in the secret places of the human heart!

In some ways, of course, it takes even more faith for us today to believe in the incarnation of God the Son, for unlike his disciples who saw him work miracles, who heard him and observed his life so as to know that they were in the presence of no ordinary man, or who saw him transfigured that wonderful night on the mountaintop in Galilee or, as in Paul's case, saw his divine glory and heard him speak from heaven, we have none of this tangible evidence of the incarnation, of the double nature of Jesus Christ that they had.

But what is that? When God grants faith to a human heart, it is a power strong enough, a conviction certain enough to withstand not only all the objections of unbelief, but all the absence of sight and sound.

Fact is, there is a New Testament at all because of this stupendous thing that happened. The incarnation was simply too great a thing not to change the world. Imagine the shepherds. Do you suppose that they discussed among themselves that night whether they ought to tell anyone else of what they had heard and seen? Even if, for some reason, they had attempted to keep the appearance and the announcement of the angels a secret, they couldn't have done it. Imagine them at breakfast the next morning and carrying on as if nothing unusual had happened. Imagine them in the synagogue the next Sabbath, hearing some great prophecy of the Messiah's coming being read, and saying nothing to anyone about what they now knew from the mouth of angels. The incarnation could not more be kept under wraps than Jesus Christ could be ignored when he began his public ministry and performed his great miracles. This was something that changed the world forever.

We think, you and I, far too infrequently and far too little about the greatest thing that has ever happened, that event that explains everything else, that gives meaning and purpose to our lives, and is the foundation of all our hopes. We protestant evangelicals perhaps think even less about the incarnation than other Christians do.

As Rabbi Duncan of the 19th century Scottish Presbyterians admitted,

Well, brothers and sisters, let it not be so this year! Not this Christmas. Not among us! No matter what the circumstances of your life. No matter what your trials, what your sorrows, or what your joys at this moment of your life and this time of year, the incarnation throws all of that into the shadow, makes all of that comparatively nothing. God entered this world as a man. And if you know that and believe that and have ordered your life in keeping with that fact, then you are in living touch with the very center of reality. All that matters most and matters for ever is yours for you understand "the only thing that ever really happened." Or, as John puts it, "he who has the Son, has life, and he who does not have the Son of God does not have life." And, if you do not have the Son of God, remember what he himself said: "The one who comes to me, I will never drive away."

I selected this text to read for two verses, 3 and 4, so impressive in their simple, artless confession of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, God the Son taking to himself a human nature. That is, after all, what happened at Christmas. The infant who was born to Mary was also and at the same time God the Son, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, the Judge of all men. Paul's confession of the double nature of Jesus Christ, both eternal God and now true man, is even more impressive for its place here in the introduction of the letter. This is so much what Christians believe, so much the bedrock of their faith, that it is not taught in Romans so much as simply assumed, stated at the outset as part of Paul's greeting.

Nothing could be clearer in v. 3 than that when Paul says that Jesus was, by birth, a descendant of David according to his flesh or human nature, he is assuming everyone understands that his human nature is not the whole story about Jesus. Human nature is the whole story about you and me, but not about him. You can say of him that he was a descendant of David and that is true. But that is not all you can say about him. You can also say that he is God (as Paul will say in Romans 9:5) or that he is the Lord, as here in v. 4, which in the NT amounts to the same thing as saying that he is God. This same Jesus Christ, born a descendant of David, was, at the resurrection, declared with power to be the Son of God -- or, perhaps better, was appointed the Son of God. Paul does not mean that Jesus became the son of God for the first time at the resurrection, of course. Jesus was often in trouble during his ministry because he claimed equality with God. Paul means that he entered into his exaltation, a new phase of his messianic Lordship. But all of that depends upon the fact that there is more to Jesus Christ than his human nature. He is also the Lord. He existed as God before he became a man and now exists both as God and man. He has two natures: human and divine.

Now this is the central doctrine of the Christian faith. It is precisely this reality of incarnation, of God taking to himself a human nature, that makes of the birth of Jesus, as Alfred Edersheim once wrote, "the world's greatest event" [p. 185]. Or, in a more vivid way, Dorothy Sayers gave expression to the same momentous character of Christmas, precisely because it produced a divine incarnation, when she referred to the birth of Christ as "the only thing that has ever really happened." "When you understand this," she wrote, "you will understand all prophecies and all history."

We Christians get too easily used to the most astounding claims and assertions rolling off our tongues as though they were mere commonplaces. The eternal God, God the Son, the second person of the Triune God, taking to himself a human nature and living forever after as a man -- God and man together in a single person. This is more exciting than any adventure, more perfect than any fairy tale we have ever heard or read. Hollywood in its wildest imagination cannot improve on this! A visit from heaven to earth; God appearing incognito; coming to endure the most horrible trials to win salvation from his people who have been enslaved to the cruelest of masters -- the Devil and their own sinful hearts. We can call the incarnation, the birth of God the Son as a human infant exhilarating or we can call it devastating, or, we like many other people, can call it a myth or fairy tale; but if we call it dull or uninteresting then words have no meaning at all.

And, let there be no mistaking this: the incarnation is the central fact of the Christian faith, its central doctrine, its central proclamation. Without it there can be no Christianity. Now you will certainly hear folk say that Christianity does not need this miraculous history, that its spirit, its teaching can continue whether or not you believe the Bible's account of the incarnation and the virgin birth. But the man in the street knows full well that this is rubbish. Christianity without the incarnation is not Christianity at all.

That is easy enough to demonstrate. Not only is the incarnation so clearly taught in the Bible, as here in Romans 1, not only does it lie beneath all the central assertions of our faith, not only is it essential to the gospel, the good news of Christ as the Savior of sinners, but it explains, it accounts for, it answers every one of the great objections that unbelievers have against the Christian faith.

Take for example the miracles that are reported in the four gospels. Can we who live at the end of the 20th century really believe that Jesus walked on water, or that he fed 5,000 with a little bit of food, or that he gave sight to a man blind from birth, or that he rose from the dead on the third day? Still today many people find these accounts simply incredible, impossible to believe in a scientific age. Of course these events were incredible to the folk who witnessed them; the gospels make that clear. But, don't you see, all of the difficulty in believing accounts of the miraculous simply disappears if you accept the incarnation, that Jesus Christ was both God and man, that he was utterly unlike, in this most profound way, any other man who has ever lived or shall live in the world. If the incarnation is real, the difficulty does not lie with Jesus' rising from the dead -- that goes without saying -- the real problem is that he suffered and died in the first place! That God should stoop so low for us!

Or, take the Bible's teaching about man's sinfulness, his guilt before God, God's wrath against sinners and his impending judgment of them. Probably this is the central objection of most people who turn away from Christianity. They do not care for what it says about man being so great a sinner and they do not like the notion of a God of judgment and vengeance.

But, accept the incarnation and this objection disappears. Accept that God became a man, underwent a thirty-three year course of humiliation at the hands of his own creatures, endured their scorn, suffered and died at their hands for the sins of the world, and it is no longer possible to doubt that sin and guilt are gigantic things. If it took God himself coming into the world as a man, to suffer and die so cruelly for his people's salvation, if it took this to secure man's forgiveness, then man's sin must be a terrible thing indeed! One measures the sickness by the cure: so great, so expensive, so painful a cure leads us back to a very sinister and deadly disease. And if God himself endured his own wrath -- for our salvation -- does that not make it impossible to doubt that God is in fact holy and just as well as abounding in love?

Or, take the very common objection to Christianity heard nowadays that it requires the belief that there is but one road to God and heaven, that Christianity alone is true and that the other religions and philosophies of the world are false. This is so politically incorrect in our pluralist day, so unwelcome, so offensive to modern taste. It strikes so many as intolerant, arrogant, proudful. "You say you have the truth and everyone else is in darkness. Where do you get off?"

But, accept the incarnation and this objection too vanishes in an instant. For if the living God who made heaven and earth came into the world as a man to save men from their sins, then it goes without saying that this and this only is the way of salvation! If God did that for us, no one could continue to think that religions and philosophies that left this fact entirely out of account could direct men and women safely to God.

Very interestingly this is admitted by the champion of religious relativism and pluralism in our generation, John Hick, the English religious philosopher. In his book, The Metaphor of God Incarnate, Hick argues exactly this way. The title of his book says it all. He is happy to believe in the incarnation as a religious "idea," a metaphor of God's nearness to man. But he will have nothing to do with it as history, as an event in the real world, as something that actually happened. He wants nothing to do with the Christmas history as it is related in the Bible, God the Son begin born a human child to a virgin mother. We cannot believe that God actually became a man in Jesus Christ, Hick argues, because if we did that, we would have to accept that Christianity is alone the truth about salvation and peace with God, we would have to accept Christianity's exclusive claim, and we can't do that, we can't believe that. Hick rejects the incarnation not because he has some proof that it didn't happen, but because he sees so clearly that to accept it as history would require him to believe things he does not want to believe, chief among them that Christianity alone shows mankind the way of salvation.

Or, finally, take the very practical objection that so many have to Christianity, viz. that it asks too much of its adherents. It is one thing to have to perform certain religious rites from time to time, even briefly every day; it is one thing to be asked to live according to a not very demanding ethical system; it is one thing to be able to practice one's religion and keep largely intact one's high view of himself and independence of judgment. But Christianity asks, no it demands, the surrender of one's pride and of one's independence. It demands absolute subjection of one's will to the rule of God. It demands that its followers strive to practice an ethic, a way of life, that even the most ardent Christians have found exhausting and deeply frustrating. It sets standards that are so high that they cannot be achieved in this world yet Christians are required to strive to achieve them come wind, come weather. And what is demanded is invariably that which human beings are, by natural instinct, least inclined to give: the denial of self and the love of enemies above all.

Ah, but what if God really did come into the world as a man? What if he really did live incognito among men for those thirty-three some years, suffering abject humiliation at the hands of his own creatures and, finally, gave himself to death on a cross to pay the price of our sins? What if salvation really cost so much and took so much. Well, then, as C.T. Studd so memorably put it: "If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice is too great for me to make for him." Set the bar as high as it can be set, the incarnation makes entirely reasonable whatever demands a holy God may make of his sinful creatures and, especially, of his sinful children, whom he has saved by the sacrifice of his own son!

A real incarnation means that we can no longer fit our Christianity into the rest of our life, but must fit the rest of our life into our Christianity. It means that being a follower of Christ must be the all-consuming passion of our existence.

In all of these ways and others like them, the incarnation is the explanation of the Christian faith as well as its core doctrine. This is the gospel, the good news, that God has become a man for man's salvation, that nothing short of God becoming a man to live and to die in man's place would do and so God did it, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering, which is how Paul puts it in Romans 8:3.

But if the incarnation of God the Son -- the stupendous event which we are celebrating at Christmas -- is the bedrock of Christianity, then we must say something else about our Christian religion -- it is, in the most profound sense, a matter of faith.

I don't mean now that it is a matter of faith as opposed to works. It is that, of course. We are made right with God through faith in Christ, through the gift of his righteousness received by faith and not through any effort on our part to gain the favor of God. That is clear. But I am speaking of faith now not as the receiving of a gift, faith as opposed to works, but faith as believing what cannot be seen or proved in a laboratory.

For at the center of Christianity is precisely this assertion that God became a man, that Jesus Christ is both God and man, and that only because he is both God and man could he save us from our sins.

As Francis Turretin, the great 17th century theologian beautifully put it:

The work of redemption could not have been performed except by a God-man, associating by incarnation the human nature with the divine by an indissoluble bond. For since to redeem us, two things were most especially required -- the acquisition of salvation and the application of the same; the endurance of death for satisfaction [of God's justice] and victory over [death] for the enjoyment of life...our mediator [had] to be God-man to accomplish these things: man to suffer; God to overcome; man to receive the punishments we deserved, God to endure and drink it to the dregs; man to acquire salvation for us by dying, God to apply it to us by overcoming… God alone could not be subject to death, man alone could not conquer it. Man alone could die for men; God alone could vanquish death.

We make far too little of the incarnation; the Fathers knew much more of the Incarnate God. Some of them were oftener at Bethlehem than at Calvary; they had too little of Calvary, but they knew Bethlehem well. They took up the Holy Babe in their arms; they loved Immanuel, God with us. We are not too often at the cross, but we are too seldom at the cradle; and we know too little of the Word made flesh… [Moody Stuart, Life of Duncan, p. 167]