The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us

 by Dick York

There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

Several years ago I was invited to speak for two weeks in special meetings. My topic was to be the deity and the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ. I was about to discover a peculiarity in the thinking of some of God’s saints––a peculiarity that I believe diminishes our understanding and appreciation of the Gospel.

For the first week I emphasized the deity of Christ, that He was the Word made flesh. He was there at the creation. It is clear that God made all things by Jesus Christ.Ephesians 3:9 The apostle John tells us that all things were made by Him and without Him was not anything made that was made.John 1:3 That was the Word. There could have been no mistake about my unqualified embrace of the deity of Christ.
The second week I empha-sized the humanity of the Lord Jesus, a matter of incomparable importance to our appreciation of the Gospel. As we considered how absolutely human Jesus became at His birth, which was a blessing to most, it seemed that some folks wanted Him to be one hundred percent God, but they preferred Him to be only fifty percent man.
The fact is, however, that our salvation hinges on His humanity, the truth that there was a perfect man to pay the penalty for depraved human-ity. If God could have justified the salvation of mankind without the death penalty being administered to man, there would have been no need for the birth of the Lord Jesus through human parentage, and His death on the cross as a man forsaken by God.
Sometime very shortly after the beginning of human history, Adam made the decision to hearken to Eve’s invitation to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil in an act of disobedience to God. The Bible says that by one man’s disobe-dience many were made sinners. Now it would take the obedience of another man, his counterpart, for many to be made righteous.
At the very moment that Adam sinned, God was already prepared with the solution that He had pur-posed from before the foundation of the world. It involved someone that He called “The Seed of the Woman.” He would be called that because He would be an absolutely human be-ing who would be born of a human mother, as all human beings are, but without a human father. God would be His Father. The apostle Paul de-scribes Jesus as being made of a woman, made under the Law, that He might redeem them that are un-der the Law. It seems that except for sin, He was to be of the same sub-stance as the sinners that He was to redeem. Hebrews 2:16 tells us, “...verily He took not on him the na-ture of angels; but He took on him the seed of Abraham. Wherefore in all things it behooved Him to made like unto his brethren....” Romans 1:3 likewise tells us that “Jesus Christ was made of the seed of David ac-cording to the flesh.”
The difference between those He came to save and He who came to save them was that He was the only descendant of Adam who did not share the sin of Adam’s nature. He was a man as Adam had been before the fall. He was, in fact, the Word of God made flesh. As a consequence, there was in Christ at the same time, in the same person, the Word of God and a descendant of Adam.
In His human lineage, the Bible traces His genealogy from Adam through Seth, through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Boaz, Jesse, David and finally through Mary, the woman whose seed He was, as prophesied in Genesis 3:15. In the creation, the Word of God acted quite exclusively of the humanity in which He would appear. And there would also be a time when that humanity would ful-fill His purpose distinctly from the deity He had manifested to the world. That time would be at the cross where Jesus would cry out, “Eli, Eli, Lamasabacthani! My God, My God, Why hast thou forsaken me?” There, as man, Jesus died for Adam’s race. And, as Paul noted in II Corinthians 5:14, if one died for all, then were all dead. God did not die that day, man died. The whole human race was executed in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. That, according to the Scrip-tures, was the purpose of the incar-nation. He came to die, something immortality cannot do.
When referring to the sacrifice that was made for sin at Calvary, Scripture makes much of the body of the Lord Jesus. It was His physi-cal being that was put to death, the seed of the woman, Mary’s Son. Be-cause it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sin, Jesus said to the Father when He came into the world, “Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared for me.” Hebrews 10:4,5 The Apostle Paul wrote that, “He who knew no sin was made sin for us….” The apostle Peter ex-plains how “[Jesus] his own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree….” I Peter 2:24
When Jesus went to the cross, it was so that the body that bore our sins––indeed that had literally been made sin––might be destroyed. Paul said, “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that hence-forth we should not serve sin. That body that went to the cross was the body of sin, made that way for us, that we might be made the righteous-ness of God in Him. 2 Corinthians 5:21
It is understandable that the saints are sometimes defensive about the deity of Christ because there are many cultish attacks on the person of our Lord Jesus from those who would diminish Him and make Him to be nothing more than one of the prophets or a mere man. And who is able to understand perfectly or ar-ticulate adequately the one person in all history who is one hundred per-cent God and one hundred percent man. There can be no greater mys-tery than that. But to grasp the glo-rious truth of the Gospel, we must realize what He did as a man, and why. Is there a distinction made in Scripture between the deity and hu-manity of Christ? Can I adequately discuss it? Perhaps not, but I will try.
The paragraph that follows is not, as some might see it, a rebuttal of the deity of Christ, but rather an un-derscoring of the importance of His humanity in the accomplishing of our redemption.
The Body that God prepared for Jesus, unlike the eternal Word, had a beginning in the womb of Mary. It was to be identified as the incarna-tion of the Word, and was even called Emanuel, God with us. But, at the same time, it was to be distinctly human. In Romans 1:3,4 Paul said He was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God according to the Holy Spirit. The writer of He-brews describes Him as the seed of Abraham. Heb. 2:16
The Bible refers to “the Son of man” ninety-five times, and many of these are Jesus referring to Himself. Forty-seven times it speaks of the “Son of God,” most of those are other people referring to Jesus. The phrase, “God the Son” never appears in Scripture, but this is the title that seems to be the object of most de-fensiveness among those who struggle against an emphasis on Jesus’ humanity.
The apostle John identifies the Godhead in I John 5:7 as the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and in His incarnation is called the Son of God. The Bible declares that “In Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” Colossians 2:9
Before His birth, the Bible tells us, He was in the form of God and thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no
Continued from page 2 reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men. And being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
No reputation? Obedient? Death? None of these words describe God. They describe the man. He came into the world to be the last (terminal) Adam, and to die as a man (the per-fect man) for all of Adam’s race. The reason He is called the last Adam is because, in God’s view, His death was the death of every member of Adam’s race. When He died we all died. If one died for all, then were all dead. 2 Corinthians 5:14
There is nothing that is more worthy of our emotional response than is the Gospel story. It is a love story of the greatest magnitude. To be moved to tears by the gifted preaching of the cross is a good thing. But it is more than a love story to be received with much emotion. It is facts upon which faith can re-pose. And the hardest fact is that at Calvary God put man to death. The righteous judgment of God was poured out upon Adam’s race, rep-resented fully by the last Adam. The perfect man was made sin for us and, as sin personified, was executed to satisfy the righteous sentence of God upon Adam’s guilty race. Sin was condemned in the flesh of the man Christ Jesus.
Although God was in Christ rec-onciling the world unto Himself, it was not God who died at Calvary, it was the humanity in which God had revealed Himself. The man Jesus cried out, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and with the full tale of the sins of the human race upon him, the last Adam died under God’s extreme penalty for sin. What a marvelous mystery!
Man of sorrows, what a name for the Son of God who came, ruined sinners to reclaim. Hallelujah, what a Savior.
If the story had ended at Calvary, God’s justice would have been sat-isfied, but His plan to bring many sons into glory would not have been accomplished. The whole purpose for creation would have failed. It would have been a tragic end for Adam’s race because, when the last Adam died, Adam’s entire race died with Him. It would have been a hopeless end indeed.
But now the penalty was paid. Adam’s blemished race was put away. The one man who qualified to die for all had taken all men with Him to the grave. Adam’s humanity was dead. When Jesus’ body was cruci-fied, the veil was torn and the way into the holiest place was opened. But now that all were dead, who would enter in?
That is the Gospel, friend. That is why there was a resurrection. Jesus was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father. In His resurrected body He is “The second man.” He is no longer identified with Adam. He is the head of a whole new race, the new creation. He is the first begot-ten from the dead Revelation 1:5 and now, all who are in Christ by faith are made alive with Him. Our glorious hope is in that man who was dead, but is alive forever more. There is one God, and now there is one me-diator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus who gave Himself a ransom for all. I Timothy 2:5,6
It is essential that we recognize the significance of the humanity of Jesus Christ who died as a man by the righteous decree of a holy God. It is not just something that happened for us, but something that happened to us. By man came death, and by man came the resurrection from the dead. Through the death and the res-urrection of the man Christ Jesus, God has brought many sons into glory.