Jon Moffitt: Hey, everyone. I am with Justin.
Justin Perdue: Hi, everybody.
Jon Moffitt: It is going to be a unique podcast just because it's been a unique year. We gathered in Knoxville. We just did a podcast together—that will be coming out later—but today is a special podcast. Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church, Justin Purdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church, and Jon Moffitt—that's me—pastor of Grace Reformed Church. We got together with some of our dear friends from 1517. Justin, tell us a little about that combo.
Justin Perdue: For those of you who don't know, 1517 is a ministry of some of our brothers and sisters in Christ of a Lutheran persuasion. 1517 Christ For You. They have several podcasts of their own: 30 Minutes in the New Testament, 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. So we locked arms with our brothers Daniel Emery Price, Chad Bird, and Erick Sorensen to do a podcast about the incarnation and its significance. As you'll gather in the intro, it's six dudes around a microphone who all think they have something significant to say about theology. So you're going to notice that there are a number of guys who are clamoring for the microphone, in one sense, and we all are trying to offer helpful thoughts about the incarnation and why it matters for us.
Jon Moffitt: The reason we're clamoring is that we all love the subject. We can't talk about Christ enough.
Justin Perdue: Amen, brother. It's a wonderful time of the year and a lot of times, for Christians, Christmas is ruined by absurd notions like the birth narrative of Jesus is like 'Twas the Night Before Christmas Christian style. We want to talk about it from a more robust perspective that Christmas is about redemption and it's ultimately about what Christ came to do.
We hope it's encouraging.
Jon Moffitt: If you want to know why there's noise in the background, you're going to have to listen to next year's podcast. Stay tuned for that. We hope you enjoy.
Daniel Emery Price: Welcome to our 2020 Christmas extravaganza—the incarnation extravaganza. This is the brave attempt that we are making right here: six dudes who all think they have a lot to say about theology, all trying to talk to you about theology at the same time. We're going to try to behave ourselves.
This is the 1517-Theocast mashup, but it's podcast specific. It's 30 Minutes in the New Testament, 40 Minutes in the Old Testament, and Theocast all together. We've never done this. We've been together before but we didn't record.
I know I've been on Theocast, Chad has been on Theocast. Has Erick been on Theocast?
Erick Sorensen: I have not.
Daniel Emery Price: We have settled on the incarnation or the implications of the incarnation. This seems like a very appropriate thing to do this time of year.
Jon, what's going on in the incarnation? Why is this a big deal? Why can't God just forgive our sins and we'll call it a good deal? Do we really need him to become man and go through all of this? To die and all that? Why not just say, "You know what? I'm feeling like I want to forgive. It's in my nature. I'm a gracious God. You're all forgiven. Done."
Jon Moffitt: One of my favorite stories is Luke 5. He's in the house, the friends lower the prolific man down, and everyone in the room at this point were packing this room out because they've already heard about Jesus and his miracles. This is also why these men are bringing the paralytic in. Everyone in the room is expecting Jesus to say, "You're healed." But he doesn't. What does he say? He says, "Your sins are forgiven." The Pharisees lose their mind, and they ask, "Who are you to say that you can forgive sins?" Then, of course, Jesus says, "What's easier for me to say: 'Get up and walk,' or, 'Your sins are forgiven'?"
What I love about that entire story is that Jesus sets the tone straight saying, "I'm here to forgive sins. This is why I'm here. The miracles are purely just me fulfilling the prophecies of my role here." The reason why that becomes so important, of course, later on you will learn, is that Jesus can't forgive that which he hasn't paid for.
The correction to most people's theology is Jesus came to be a good man or give good teaching, but Jesus became our imputation, became our representative. If Jesus does not become a man, he cannot pay for the sins of humanity. Without human form, he cannot take on human punishment.
Daniel Emery Price: I love that the message given to Mary is, "You're going to have a son and he will save his people from their sin." This is the purpose behind him coming. Period. The first time John lays eyes on him, he doesn't say "There's my cousin," or, "There's a good role model," or even, "There's a perfect man right there. If you ever wondered what a perfect man looked like, there he is." No, he says, "Behold, the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world."
Jimmy Buehler: I think another implication is it can almost seem like the birth of Christ comes out of nowhere. I've been really influenced by a book I'm reading that talks about how God tends to work—and loves to work—through the insignificant and small. Even as we think about the incarnation of Christ, he could have come with legions of angels to accomplish his purposes and yet, as we look throughout redemptive history, one of the authors that I'm reading said that often at the big turning points in history, what we find is a pregnant woman and a child of promise. That ends up being a linchpin in how God is working in the world.
Even as we look at Mary and we think about the virgin birth—the miraculous birth of Christ, if you will—this isn't coming out of nowhere. We've seen this all throughout redemptive history. You have Isaac, the child of laughter. Nobody saw that one coming. We would not see a man and a woman who are very, very old having a child and yet, we get Isaac. Then we see Hannah who gives birth to her son who ends up anointing kings. Moses and his miraculous deliverance as a baby. Even John the Baptist and the miraculous things around his birth.
Then we get to Jesus—it didn't come out of nowhere. This is a pattern that God has chosen to work in. What I love is that Christ comes on the scene in such a theology of the cross sort of way that it's not what we would expect, it's not what we would plan, and yet in the wisdom of God that makes us look like fools, this is how He has chosen to operate: through the Word made flesh to dwell amongst us. It's really beautiful and significant in the way that it shows us that God identifies with us and our humanness, our flesh, and the things that we deal with on a daily basis.
Erick Sorensen: It's almost as if the Psalmist was inspired when he wrote that God has ordained praise from the mouths of infants and babies. It's almost as if he has been working that way all throughout history. We see even the disciples asking, "Why are you bringing children to Jesus?" Have you actually read the Scriptures where God is always working in this way? Through the insignificant, through even someone as small and insignificant as a baby? That's what we see especially in full culmination with Christ.
To your point, Jimmy, when I think about the rest of the New Testament and that period of time, one of the implications of the incarnation is how this was so radically different from the way anybody was thinking about how God would interact with the world. Really, you didn't have room for it in Jewish life—of the idea of God becoming man—and you didn't have room for it in Greek life because of their view of matter being inherently evil. Yet here is how God chooses to interact: He chooses to become flesh; He chooses to deal with the same sorts of sufferings that we do, and the same sorts of struggles. This is why you have, for the first few hundred years, these great debates in church history because it just seemed so radically different than the way people thought they should approach God—and even more significantly, the way God approaches us.
Chad Bird: Let me jump in here and piggyback off a couple of things that Jimmy said. I want to bring in one of my favorite church fathers, Irenaeus, and talk about what he has to teach us about incarnation. What you see already from Genesis 1, when God makes man in His own image, you see there what I think is a prophecy of the incarnation. Luther says that you see a dim intimation of God's desire to become one of us when he makes Adam and Eve in His own image. Already there, you begin to see the echoes that we're going to finally hear in full volume on Christmas day, because God makes humanity in His image and eventually the Maker will assume the image Himself.
Of course, you have all sorts of allusions to God's desire to become one of us throughout the Old Testament. Everything from the messenger of Yahweh who appears—sometimes he's called a man, sometimes he's walking around and people don't even know that it's the messenger of Yahweh. They think it's just an average Joe Israelite walking by so they engage them in conversation. As one author put it, God is always trying on the clothes of the incarnation throughout the Old Testament. He's appearing as a man to His people—and that's another thing. This, I think, is one of the most beautiful, comforting things about the incarnation: it shows that God desires an intimate presence with His people. He doesn't want to be some distant hilltop or mountain top deity, aloof from humanity; He wants to be right in the thick of things. We see that in the Garden of Eden when He's walking around. We see that with a tabernacle—the tabernacle is smack dab in the middle of the camp of the Israelites so God actually wants to dwell in the midst of His people. He does not want to be far away. He wants to be near and accessible to them.
Keeping all that in mind, you jump to the second century and to the writings of Irenaeus, and what Irenaeus does is he says that what we have in incarnation is Christ recapitulating, redoing, recreating, and fulfilling everything that happened before. He's not just the new Adam or the last Adam, as Paul calls him, but he is all humanity compressed into one so that what he does is recapitulate the history of humanity and of Israel. He not only does it over and does it perfectly, but he does it as the God-man. In that way, he brings humanity to the perfection that God always desired us to have, and we wouldn't have that without the incarnation. As some of the church fathers put it, we gain more in Christ than we lost in Adam because in Christ, we now have not only the perfect human, but we have the perfect human who is also at the same time God. That awesome Irenaeus theology when it comes to the incarnation, that Christ has recapitulated all things in himself so that when we see him, we see the human that God desires all of us to be, and that we become as we are baptized into His flesh and become one with Him.
Daniel Emery Price: I do think that there's a really important point. How many times have you heard people try to explain to laypeople, or children, or other theologians what it means to be made in the image of God? They say, "It means you're creative or you have consciousness," or whatever. It's really quite simple: God formed man in the image of Christ. It's not like He just said, "Oh, I'm going to make this arbitrary thing, this form." And then eventually all come as that. God knows these things. You are made in the image of God in the sense that this is what you look like: Jesus. That's what you look like.
Chad Bird: He is the image and we are made in His image. It's a very important distinction to make.
Daniel Emery Price: Absolutely. What happens in the incarnation is that this is where the work of salvation really gets underway, because in the incarnation, because we are made in that image, and because God is the Father of Christ, Christ then is united to all of humanity in the incarnation right from the start. He isn't just another guy. His God is the Father and he has united Him to all of us in the incarnation.
Justin Perdue: The gospel itself is wrapped up in the incarnation. I'm not trying to be the guy that comes in and overstates it, but I think for a lot of Christians that I've been around and maybe in my young life, the birth narrative of Jesus is like the Christian version of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. That's the significance that it bears: we read it once a year on Christmas eve and it's sentimental and it's meaningful in some way. But I think it's incredible to think that redemption is inextricably linked to God the Son taking on flesh. That's what we're celebrating in the incarnation at Christmas time.
We love to talk about Jesus being our representative. He is only our representative because he became one of us; he became a man in order to represent men. We haven't talked about the Law yet, but I'm thinking about Galatians 4: 4-5, where we're told that Christ was born under the Law in order to redeem those who were under the Law. Men are born under the Law, and so he's born as a man under the Law in order to live a life of perfect obedience to keep his Father's every word and fulfill it for us. So when we herald from the rooftops that Christ is our righteousness and those kinds of things, we can only say that because Christ came and was a human being, and accomplished everything that he did in our place. This is a big deal. You can't overstate the importance of the implication of the incarnation.
Daniel Emery Price: No incarnation means no salvation because no manger means no cross.
Jon Moffitt: You can look at Genesis 3 when God promises the seed of Eve: "From you will come a seed." If you've had no knowledge of the Bible and you're reading it for the first time, your question is, "Who is that?" Adam and Eve lived in utopia, they destroyed it, God promises to fix it—how is He going to do that? The whole Old Testament leading into the New Testament is the anticipation of the incarnation of the one who's fixing that which man destroyed. It becomes the point of the Bible.
Erick Sorensen: You think about how hard it must have been, or at least how challenging it could have been, for the early apostles to stand so strongly on this idea that Jesus really did become flesh. Yet if you read all of the writings of the New Testament, they just are not shy; they are as abundantly clear as they can be. How many times did we read, "We touched him," or, "We saw him," or "We heard him," or "We felt him." It's very, very fleshy. It's very, very tangible. They want to emphasize the Word became flesh. The author of Hebrews wants us to know that because God has become flesh, that God knows what it's like to even be tempted as we are, which is a complete mind-blowing thought—and yet, of course, a very comforting thought, which is why the author of Hebrews decides to mention that, and it's why it's one of the most quoted verses in my life. To think that God actually really does know the ins and outs of human experience in that way is so far removed from the way that we're naturally prone to thinking about the deity or the great God.
Justin Perdue: Chad was talking about the nearness of God earlier, and you're picking up on that too, Erick, that God is not just distant and cold and disconnected from His people. He's not some desk spot sitting off in the heavens. He is personally involved in the lives of his people, so much so that He came and entered into this wasteland called fallen earth and experienced all of the pain, the suffering, the sorrows that we experience, yet without sin. It's a tremendous comfort.
The Christ of Gethsemane is a comfort to people who are suffering and who are hurting because He knows our grief, He knows the anguish of the soul and the dark night of the soul and all those things. He's personally involved in our lives and knows our suffering yet He is without sin. He is the great and compassionate High Priest. He's gentle and lowly and tender toward those who are suffering and toward those who are in pain. None of that is true if the incarnation is not a thing, and praise God that it is.
Chad Bird: It's worth making explicit, I'm sure, what all our listeners know, but it's one of those things that need to be said: God did not become disincarnate at the ascension of Jesus. The Son of God remains human flesh and blood. He has a body. People don't mean to hold a false opinion, but they just don't realize that they do. They'll think the Son of God came down from heaven and he became one of us, and then when he went back to be with his Father, he sloughed off his human nature because he didn't need it anymore. No. From the moment that the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and the Son of God entered into her womb, became a human being from that point forever and ever, God is fully human. The Son of God has assumed our nature and he has not and will never lose our nature. Right now we can say that a man sits on the throne of God. It is to a man that we pray, it is to a man that we appeal as our great High Priest. That is not saying he's not God—he is—however, he is fully human.
As one of my favorite ascension hymns puts it, "Though has raised our human nature on the clouds to God's right hand." There we are with him because he has taken our humanity into himself. When we think about the throne of God and Christ at the right hand of God, a man sits beside God.
Daniel Emery Price: You know what that does, Chad? This bothers me to no end. It gives you permission to talk about your own body, your own humanness, in a positive way. There are so many people that go, "I just can't wait to get rid of this stupid carton that my soul is locked in." Like you're going to become something altogether different. Paul says "Yeah, you're going to be changed in the twinkle of an eye, it's going to happen, but it ain't going to be that different." Don't get me wrong: sinlessness is a radical change, at least for me this is a big change. All of a sudden there is no sin; this will be quite a transformation. But it gives you permission to realize that what God initially said is very good. He intends to bring you back to that, not do something all over again where He is like, "You know what? That actually wasn't that good. I'm going to come up with a whole new thing." No, Christ comes and he takes on flesh. In that, he makes the human form something that we can then say, "You know what? That is good." It's flawed, it's marred, it's got sin, but that's what needs to go—not this weird gnostic idea where you can't wait until we all grow wings and play harps, and whatever it is that you think is going on. No, Jesus is God and God is a man at the right hand of the Father. When we are yanked out of our graves, we're going to have bodies and they're going to be very much these bodies.
Jimmy Buehler: If we're not too busy being Pelagian, it's because we're too distracted by being gnostic. If we're not too busy trying to achieve our own righteousness, it's because we're distracted trying to get into this spiritual nirvana. Frankly, I think that the incarnation really blows up both of those ideas, that the incarnation shows us that Christ has to come and live in our place and achieve that righteousness that we could never.
One of my favorite stories in the gospels is Jesus with Thomas—classic doubting Thomas, nobody talks about doubting John the Baptist, but we'll talk about doubting Thomas all day—but with doubting Thomas, what is Jesus' solution? "Come here and feel the holes. Touch my side." Jesus gives us physical things, God gives us physical things that we can look to, taste, and touch.
This is something I say to our church every week: "I've just told you for 30 minutes or so about God's great love and grace for you in Christ Jesus, and now you get to taste it in the form of bread and wine." We're not just these spiritual beings having this weird physical existence, but rather that God is the God of all—He is spirit, but He is the God of all creation.
Daniel Emery Price: By the way, I want to defend Thomas. First of all, this is the Thomas that when Jesus said he was going to go heal Lazarus and everyone said they were going to die, Thomas is the one that says, "Let's go die with him." Then when he watches Jesus actually die, get crucified, be beaten to death, and be put in a grave, and then everyone is talking about how Jesus rose from the dead and Thomas says, "I need to see that," we all go, "What a doubter. Absurd lack of faith."
Justin Perdue: Another big thing when Chad was talking earlier—it just came to mind—in thinking about the fact that the one seated at the right hand of God, seated on the throne of God, is a man: it's a big deal to use the language of Paul in Ephesians that we've not only been united to Christ, but we've been raised and we have been seated with him right in the heavenly places at the right hand of God. It speaks to just how incredible this redemption is. We as human beings, in flesh, the way that we have been united to the Lord Jesus Christ, and we'll be like him and will reign with him forever. We see it in our big brother, Jesus Christ; we see what our eternal destiny is. It's pretty epic. Just a remarkable thought that's, again, tethered to the incarnation, tethered to this Christmastime stuff. It's not just a baby in a manger. There's like eternal fallout and implications of all this stuff.
Erick Sorensen: I can't help but think this as we're discussing. What we tend to do when we come across people that are suffering and going through hard times is we tend to emphasize a very true attribute of God's character, which is that God is in control. We say that all the time. "God is sovereign. He is in control."
We don't deny that. We'd say amen. But I will tell you just from personal experience, and from close to 14 years of pastoral ministry, that when people are really suffering, I found the incarnation to be a tremendously comforting doctrine for people in the midst of hardship. It might be that it's good to be reminded of that, but I have found people really need to be reminded that God is the God who is with us, that God is the God who it does understand. He's not removed from the situation. I found that it's almost more impactful for people not necessarily to think about God being in control, because that's a mind-blowing thought that we really can't even understand because then that tends to just lead to more questions. "Well, if He is then why this, this, and that?" But God is with us. God knows what it's like to go through this. He suffered loss. He understands what it's like to be abandoned. That is a tremendous resource for comfort in the midst of life, in which we all will suffer and we all will face loss, just as Christ has done before us and on our behalf.
Jon Moffitt: Even Christ in the garden: you can hear this language of anxiety even reaching out to the Father: "Is there another way this can be done? Let this cup pass from me." Then Peter in 2 Peter 5 says, "Cast your anxieties on him." I love the reason, not because it's wrong to doubt a sovereign God, and how dare you to question Him, but He says to cast your anxieties on Him because He cares for you. Let God carry your anxieties. How do you cast them on Him? You have to tell Him. "This is what makes me anxious. This is what makes me scared. This is what makes me nervous." He says God will carry that because He cares for you.
Daniel Emery Price: I think you need both of those for there to be any comfort. If you just tell someone that God is sovereign and that He is in control, that's actually not comforting at all apart from a God who knows what I'm going through. If you say somebody has the power to help you but they don't know anything about what you're feeling, anything about what you're experiencing, they could help you but they don't relate to it at all. In fact, they're so high and above you. They could help you—maybe they will, maybe they won't. I think that the sovereignty of God is only comforting if you have a God who not only can do something about it, but that He knows what it's like. He's been there. This is not just a God who has power, but that can actually sympathize with what I'm suffering.
Jimmy Buehler: A friend of mine and I were talking about this the other day, and he said, "God outside of Christ is terrifying." But when God comes to us in Christ, what we see is really this thing of beauty. In Luke 2, when Jesus is presented at the temple when Simeon holds him and says: "Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel." I forget but I think it might be Rembrandt who portrays this incident, this moment, where in that painting there is Simeon, and he's afraid to hold or touch Jesus. There is such this sense of reverent awe that God would allow him to see His salvation—to physically see it. When Christ comes incarnate, he reveals to us the nature of the character of God. What's God like? Look at Jesus. That's what God is like. The person and work of Christ: that is what God is like.
Daniel Emery Price: Isn't that something that Simeon would refer to Jesus in that way? "My eyes have seen my salvation." He doesn't say, "What this guy is going to do with my salvation," he just says, "That kid right there—that's my salvation." That's what that is. That's a pretty good name for Jesus: "my salvation". That's who he is.
Chad Bird: Doesn't that tell us just about everything about God, that the ultimate theophany is the incarnation? The ultimate revelation of who God is as this little baby, or this man, or this victim upon the cross. A human being is the ultimate revelation of God; a human being who came to sympathize with our weaknesses, who came to bear our sins. That if you really want to know who God is, that's where you look. You don't look on Mount Sinai. You don't even look in Genesis 1, this great, powerful God who is speaking everything into existence. If you really want to know the fullness of who God is, then you look at the manger, or you look at the cross, or you look at everything in between. The final and the ultimate revelation of everything that God wants to know about us is found exclusively in this one human being.
It's pretty phenomenal to me that that is the way that God chose to reveal Himself, and at the same time, it's revelatory of what God desires for us. Because if He shows us Himself in the incarnation, then He also shows us what His desire is going to be for us, that He wants us to be as Christ is—and we will be in the resurrection. We will receive the glorified body that he already has. So the incarnation is this revelation, but also it's a revelation of not just God, but of what God desires for us in the resurrection.
Jon Moffitt: The sounds so different from what you hear during Christmas. Most of what comes from Christianity is our significance before God, and that is basically calculated by your performance. What you guys are saying is no, we're talking about the significance of Christ and what Christ has done in his person as a real human being; the significance of what Christ has done for us. We could do a podcast for three days and not come to the end of the significance of the incarnation of Christ. Our significance does not matter. What we have done or who we are this holiday season—it's meaningless when you think that compared to who and what Christ has done.
Erick Sorensen: By the way, if I can just quickly give a plug for some of Luther's sermons, and I think you can find most of them online—just Google Luther's Christmas sermons—you will never find anyone who gets more into the incarnation than Luther around Christmas time in his sermons. They're just phenomenal. Check them out. I think most of them are actually accessible for free. Definitely worth reading as you ponder the incarnation this Christmas season.
Chad Bird: If we're plugging books along these lines, if you've never read on the incarnation by Athanasius, I believe our listeners should read that. I try to read it every December. In fact, I need to pull that off the shelf and read it again. It's short. There's a volume out that has a very brief and very helpful introduction by C.S. Lewis. Check that out. It's one of the best things that I've ever read, and re-read, and then re-read again on the incarnation because he just brings out so much that we haven't even had a chance to get to about all these implications of the incarnation.
Justin Perdue: When you trace the story of the Bible from Genesis as it unfolds, human beings are created in God's image, and through man, sin enters the world and the creation is cursed. Then throughout the Old Testament, God is unfolding revelation. The question that was alluded to earlier is who is this promised seed? This seed of Eve who is going to come and crush the head of the snake? Who is going to redeem humanity? Then Jesus shows up on the scene.
Jimmy, the passage you read from Luke 2 is just so great, that when Simeon lifts them up and says, "My eyes have seen your salvation that you've prepared. He's a light for the Gentiles and for the glory of your people Israel," we see that this promised seed is here now. There were 400 years of silence and then an angel appears to a young virgin and says, "You're going to have a son and he's going to save his people." And he's here; the promised seed has arrived.
Then as a man, he comes and makes atonement for sin. He takes upon himself our corrupt nature and all of our wickedness and all those things and atones for that, and bears the wrath of God for that. But then he lives a perfect life in obedience to God. Through a man, the curse is reversed; that great curse that was put upon all of creation, and creation is groaning—that occurred because of a man. Now the second Adam, the better one, came and reversed the curse. We sing of the second coming of Jesus Christ, than joy to the world. He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.
Daniel Emery Price: That's one of the big things too. If you're into the church calendar at all, you know that some people get a little annoyed with this sort of stuff when they rebuke you for saying anything about Christmas during advent. Technically what you got is an advent, which is anticipation over the coming Messiah. You have Christmas, the arrival, and then we just live in perpetual second advent where we are now awaiting the return. Yet what the incarnation does, in conjunction with the resurrection, is waiting for the return of that body that came in the incarnation and then popped out of the grave, and it ascended to the Father. The advent that I'm living in now is only a thing because the incarnation is a thing.
Jon Moffitt: I think the only positive side of Christmas is that it creates this anticipation in people; we're all looking forward to this day. Just turn that and say that anticipation you have—and then that letdown on December 26th—when Jesus comes back, which we should be anticipating and Peter encourages us to anticipate his return, there will be no letdown. It will be a glorious, glorious restoration of all things.
I'm kind of a Grinch when it comes to Christmas, but that might be the one positive I take out of it: it is that anticipation.
Daniel Emery Price: I think this has been a good conversation—maybe a little bit different than what people were anticipating for a Christmas special. We were talking a lot about the Old Testament, talking a lot about the second coming, the resurrection, and miracles. What about Mary? She needed to come up. Next year, we're going to talk about the perpetual virginity of Mary, so we decided to save it all for that next year. So that should be good.
This has been fun. Maybe we'll make it an annual thing. We'll see how people respond.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
