Father, even as we've considered the words of these Gospel writers and the way that they were so concerned to capture the truth of the birth of the Messiah and the significance of his coming, they wanted their readers to understand that this was what you had promised from the beginning. They were recording the times being fulfilled, the ends of the ages that all of the people of Israel had longed for, had waited for, and now that time had come upon them. And even in the darkness of a still night out in the fields, the sky was lit up with a terrifying sight of a multitude of heavenly hosts who were proclaiming that the time of peace had come, that the time had come for the birth of the Son of David in the city of David. And Father, that proclamation of good news, it does continue on as the song that we sung records. It does continue on. Through the difficulties of life, through each passing generation, the good news stands firm. One day, one day, the whole world will be characterized by this peace. One day, all things will be summed up in the Son of David. One day, our God will be all in all. And I pray, Father, that we would be encouraged by these things. And even as we begin to consider the coming of the Messiah, this doctrine of incarnation, I pray that you would flood our hearts with an unspeakable joy, a sense of exultation. that this would be more than just understanding a Bible truth. It would be something that would drive our hearts into the very heavenlies, the glory of our God, Emmanuel, our God with us. So I pray, Father, that you would help me, that you would help each one present to be encouraged, to have an understanding mind, And that through this time of consideration, that we would all be more thoroughly, more truly built up, not just in a intellectual knowledge of Christ our Lord, but in a living, transformed knowledge of Him. That we would be more thoroughly conformed to Him, as you intend. So bless us in this time. Help us, Father, encourage us, Convict us, strengthen us, we ask in Jesus' name, amen. Well, as I said earlier, as soon as we come into this fullness of the times, this transition from the Old Testament age that was to the age that was to come, the age that has been inaugurated in Jesus, we're confronted with this thing of incarnation. And incarnation is very much a part of our Christian vernacular and even a part of our understanding of Christian orthodoxy. We say, well, you know, if you're a Christian and you're an orthodox Christian, you have to believe that Jesus is both God and man, right? You can't You can't say, no, he was just a good teacher, he was just a man. No, he's God and man. And that's okay so far as it goes, but it really doesn't get us anywhere or do any justice to the biblical presentation of that. I mean, the question that I would raise, if someone were to say that to me and I weren't unbelievers, I would say, okay, so what? Who cares, why does it matter? Jesus is God, Jesus is man, okay, so what? Is that even important? Why is it important? Well, that design that God had ultimately, that's realized in the Incarnation, is about fulfilling all that he had brought to bear, all that he had done, all that he had said from the very beginning. And so when we consider this idea of Incarnation, it's important to consider it through the biblical lens. I want us to spend this time this week and maybe next week as well considering a more biblical understanding of incarnation. And again, people might say, well, it's always biblical, isn't it? I mean, if we're considering incarnation, it's always a biblical doctrine. But as I say in opening here, typically, historically in church history, the consideration of the incarnation has, in my estimation, been less than biblical. in that it's tended to be dealt with in terms of abstract categories of deity and humanity. I've mentioned here some of the historical arguments. If you go back even to certainly the 5th, 6th, 7th centuries, you see these things called the Christological controversies. And essentially the church very early on started dealing with this topic of Trinitarian theology or this idea of the deity of the Son, the deity of Jesus himself. And those Trinitarian controversies led into Christological controversies in the sense that if we conclude that Jesus of Nazareth was truly God, very God of very God, begotten, not made, as the Confession says. If he is truly God in that sense, then what does that mean for his humanity? How do you have a divine nature and a human nature abiding in the same entity? How does that work? So I've given you some examples here from the early centuries of the Church wrestling with this. The Ebionites, I'm kind of beginning with some of the early ones and moving a little bit farther forward, but these were things that were very much a part of the Church's thinking really all the way up into the Middle Ages and I would argue even to this day. How exactly does all of this work? The Ebionites were early Jewish Christians and the earliest Christians were all Jews or proselytes to Judaism, right? It was a Jewish church. The Christian church was regarded as a sect within Judaism. But the Ebionites held a quasi-Jewish form of Messianism. They were adoptionists, if you've heard that term before, which essentially they taught that Jesus was a man who by the empowering of the Spirit was adopted as the Son of God. Often people would point to his baptism when the Spirit descended on him in God's announcement, this is my beloved Son in whom I'm well pleased. That that was the point at which whatever quality of deity was associated with the man Jesus, that's where it happened. he was adopted into the father's sonship, if you will. So there's still a distinction between deity and his humanness, and this idea of him being son of God is merely this adopted relation that God bears with him. Jesus is a man. The docetism came along fairly soon after that, or about the same time frame, and it was very closely related to Gnosticism, if you're familiar with that. The key issue with Gnosticism is that material existence is an aberration. The ultimate design of the deities, the ultimate design in creation, was spiritual existence. Material form was an aberration that was never intended to exist. And so you see this even in Greek philosophy. The goal is to be liberated from the body. The body is corrupt. The body is just a shell to travel around in. The true self is that soul inside of me. And so the goal in death is to be set free from the body in order that the spirit can go into the ether in whatever understanding a particular group had as to what that would be. but physicality is something to be shed. There's an inherent corruption or imperfection in the material creation. And so the Docetics, based on that principle, they said there is no way that Jesus, if he was truly God, could actually have a physical body. He could not be truly human in the way that we are. And so the physicality of Jesus was analogous to angels appearing in a physical form like a phantasm or a ghost, an apparition, the appearance of physicality but no actual physicality. If you're going to ascribe deity to Jesus then you have to withhold from him physicality because deity in the nature of the case would never join itself to physicality because of the inherent imperfection of physicality. Monarchianism came along later, and its goal was really to uphold the oneness of God. These are all movements within the church. The oneness of God. God is one. Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Monarchianism. The one monarch, the one king. It had two forms, but again, its goal was to emphasize the absolute unity of God, the oneness of God. In the one form, it held that the Father, Son, and Spirit are three modes of operation of the one God. If you've heard the term modalism before, that's what it's referring to. The one God manifests himself in various modes at various times. People have said it's analogous to one actor who's playing various roles in a stage play. So modalism, the one God manifesting himself in various modes. The other view within monarchism viewed Jesus as a man who was progressively deified by adoption, another form of adoptionism, and God's transforming work in him. While all such controversies that concern Jesus' divine and human natures, how does that work, And if you have a human nature, a divine nature, how can they sit together? These things led to later doctrines and disputes regarding the relationship between those natures and Jesus' person or his hypostasis, his being. And I'm just giving you some basic ideas. You can study a lot of this further, but these were huge controversies that the Church wrestled with and grappled with and pronounced what's orthodox, what isn't orthodox. One view associated with Nestorius, and whether it's rightly ascribed to him or not there's questions, but he's often associated with it, is that this view maintained the absolute full deity and humanity to nature's a human nature and a divine nature, but because those two things are completely distinct, they could not be conjoined in one hypostasis, one personhood, if you will. There could be no hypostatic union. Others argued that Jesus' human nature was absorbed by his divine nature. Since the two are distinct, it's like mixing oil and water, right? How do you mix them together? The natures are entirely distinct. And so in this thing called incarnation, the human nature of Jesus was subsumed by his divine nature. Others maintain that the two natures merged to form a unique blended nature so that Jesus' human existence was unique. He wasn't a man in the same way as other human beings are. He was the God-man. He was unique in that sense. There was a blending, a kind of forming of a new sort of nature of the divine and the human coming together. So all of these controversies were associated with how do we deal with this thing of the divine and the human in this one person of Jesus of Nazareth. They were all incarnational controversies in that sense. Well, if you're familiar with the church councils at all, Chalcedon in 451, that was where they came together after the Council of Ephesus to, in a sense, kind of put the final mark on what was the church's official position concerning two natures in one person. And if you read the statement that came out of the Council of Chalcedon, you see this. stating again two natures but existing in one person. But obviously that council didn't put an end to the controversies. They continued on beyond that and really even continue on to this day. So the reason for mentioning this is to say that if you go back and you look at the historical ways from the early centuries of the church, the ways in which the Christian churches have dealt with this issue of incarnation, they have tended to deal with it in terms of the abstract categories of deity and humanity. In other words, there's this one kind of being called deity. There's another kind of being called human. and these two things are somehow stuck together. How do we understand them? You may even think about the way you've been taught, or in your own background, dealt with this issue of incarnation. You've got this thing called deity, you've got this thing called humanness. How do we fit them together and make one cohesive person called Jesus of Nazareth? Well, the problem with all of that, but again, what you see in these controversies is that they tend to think of the issue in that way. The abstract categories. By abstract, I mean set off by themselves, not set within a biblical context. They're dealt with in the philosophical realm, not in the truly biblical realm. And that's what I want us to consider. And the place to begin with that is to recognize that we have to understand the incarnation through the scriptural storyline. If the coming of the Messiah is the climax of the salvation history, the incarnation sits at the very center of that. Part of the reason for the Christological controversies is that the New Testament has very little to say about how this thing of deity and humanity stuck together works. It doesn't tell us how it works, and that's because it really isn't concerned with that in the ultimate sense. What it's concerned with is the existence of it and the significance of it and the outcome of it and where it is ultimately going. So I want to start by considering this issue of incarnation in terms of the purpose for it. Why did God do that? Why do we even have such a thing? Why did it happen in time and space? And people will often say, well, it's because the only way that you can make atonement for people who sin is to have a suitable sacrifice, and only a man can be a suitable sacrifice, so we had to have a sinless man. Well, you could only have a sinless man if he was somehow connected to God, and that's the reason for it. And that's not entirely wrong, but it's very incomplete and very simplistic. So as I say in the notes, the incarnation actually has its origin in Eden, in the creation itself. It presupposes and it serves God's formation of man as image son. It presupposes and it serves man's formation as image son on behalf of the creation. In other words, if we're going to understand this thing called incarnation, we have to start in Genesis 1. If we're going to have a biblical understanding of incarnation, we have to situate it within the biblical story, which takes us all the way back to the beginning. So the design that God had in man's formation, that's what lay behind what we've called the Proto-Evangelion, the promise of a seed, the promise of a man, right? The promise of an offspring of Eve, the seed of the woman. What lies behind that promise of a seed is God's formation of man and the purpose for the formation of man. And that ultimately led, as we've seen, to the election of Abraham, the choice of a man and his family to be the instrument for ultimately the accomplishing of God's design for the created order. God created man as the mediator between his creation and himself. Man is the mediator in that relationship. So human alienation brought the curse of alienation and death on the whole creation. We saw that again. This is all stuff we've been through. Genesis 3. Cursed is the ground because of you. The ground didn't do anything, but because its relationship with God is in and through human beings. When the human divine relationship is alienated, the creation's relationship with God is alienated. So the calling of Abraham, the election of Abraham and his family, looked beyond mankind. It did pertain to mankind, but it looked beyond mankind ultimately to the creation itself. Man was the source of the creation's calamity and man was to be the source of the creation's restoration. The seed promised to Eve, the seed promised to Abraham. Man would have to be the solution because of God's design, the very reason and the very nature of man in the purposes of God. So in the scriptural terms, in the way the Old Testament deals with this, the creation's destiny, its liberation from the curse, it attaining to its own destiny in God's purposes, hinged on Israel's faithfulness, Israel as the Abrahamic family, The creation's destiny hinged on Israel's faithfulness to its election and its calling. But as we've seen, the covenant people couldn't be the remedy for the creational curse because they themselves were subject to it. They couldn't be God's instrument for liberating the creation from the curse because they themselves were subject to that same curse. So the human obligation and the human quandary, those two things together underlie the solution that the scriptures disclose. God was committed to a human deliverer, restorer, and that required a man or a remnant from within mankind. I mean, in the most wide sense, it required that Israel be Israel. It required that the Abrahamic family fulfill its election and calling. But there was a human need. There was a need for a human entity who himself could prevail over the curse, but in such a way that that prevailing over the curse would be made the outcome for the whole human race, humanity at large, as well as the whole creation. So that man would have to be a true image son. a true Adam, a true image son, but as a first fruit. Because it wouldn't just be about him, but about the redemption and liberation of mankind from the curse unto the whole creation. And given that God had localized that in Abraham and his covenant with Abraham, that person would have to be Israel in truth. Israel is the Abrahamic seed. And then that, by God making Israel be Israel indeed, then it could fulfill its own mandate, its covenant election, to be the instrument of mankind's reconciliation and in-gathering. This is the way the Bible builds the story of what God's going to do. So the Old Testament scriptures keep building this case, telling Israel's story within God's purposes for the creation. And we mentioned before the four servant songs in Isaiah's prophecy, which you don't want to single them out and make them the whole issue, but they are a focal point in that story. They disclose and celebrate a servant Israel, son, servant, disciple, and witness, a faithful Israel, whom the prophet Isaiah presents as the central figure in Yahweh's promise to return to Zion. Yahweh's going to return and put all things right, and at the center of that is this promise of a faithful Israel. And through that faithful Israel, then there will come this restoration of Abraham's family, Israel for the sake of Israel, that they should fulfill their covenant calling. That's what the servant songs are about. And they build that case in a progressive way, as we saw last time. So in all of that, God continues to be adamant that now the exiles that's come, Israel's finally reached its end. It's split into two kingdoms. They've both gone into exile. They're both desolate. Everything of God's kingdom, everything of the Abrahamic covenant family and its relationship with God, all of that is an alienated desolation. But God keeps saying that's not the last word. I will arise as Redeemer." We talked about that idea of redemption. Redemption has to do with the payment of a suitable price by a suitable payer, a person who is suited to make that payment in order to liberate something or to release or extract something from either a place of bondage or some state that it exists in in order to move it to where it needs to be. God promises he's going to return as Redeemer. What does that mean? He's going to redeem his people as he did with their forefathers in Egypt. all of the prophets, and certainly you see this woven in a very intensive way through Isaiah's prophecy, is that a second exodus is coming. If God is going to arise and return as Redeemer, that means a second exodus because exodus is redemption. So a second exodus awaited Abraham's children, but of an entirely different sort. We talked about the Egyptian captivity in that exodus, and it had nothing to do with any kind of wrongdoing on Israel's part. It was a national, physical enslavement. But this new exodus is going to be of a different sort because it's going to be deliverance from spiritual adultery. It's a bondage that has come about because of unfaithfulness, violation of the covenant. That wasn't the case in Egypt. That was redemption from a national physical enemy, from the power of Egypt. This is a new bondage. This is a new enslavement. This is the enslavement that existed before Egypt and continued through Egypt and even beyond Egypt. This is the enslavement that God testified to when he departed and he sent his people into exile. Their bondage under Gentile powers, that's what God is going to arise and deliver them from. But that bondage under Gentile power is ultimately their bondage under their covenant unfaithfulness, their adultery, their sin. So Yahweh's going to return to accomplish a new redemption. This one though would require forgiveness and cleansing and reconciliation. The Egyptian exodus did not require any forgiveness or cleansing, right? There was no sin involved in that. This one will, and this is what you see in the prophets. Yahweh's going to arise and return to Zion, and he's going to cleanse his people. He's going to forgive them. He's going to liberate them. He's going to end their exile. So he's going to deal with this new, more compelling, more powerful enslaving power, just as he did with Egypt, just as he did with the Pharaoh. And if you read through Isaiah's prophecy in particular, you see constant language of exodus, liberation, bringing through the waters, gathering you to myself, all of that kind of language. And the servant songs help to clarify how God is going to do this. Now Isaiah closely associates that servant Israel, who is the true Abrahamic seed, This true Israel, this faithful Israel, is the true Abrahamic seed. He associates him with Yahweh himself, using even some of the same descriptors, and I've given you a couple of examples in the notes. I won't look at those right now. But even Isaiah, as close as he comes, stops short of directly indicating the phenomenon of incarnation. Now we read, both in terms of Matthew and Luke, the reference to Isaiah 7.14 concerning the Immanuel prophecy. That's as close as you come to this idea of incarnation. But if you look at it in Hebrew, what it actually says is, God says to Ahaz, the Lord will give you a sign. Isaiah says on behalf of Yahweh, Yahweh will give you a sign. Here's the sign. Behold, a pregnant maiden. Behold, a pregnant maiden is giving birth, and she will name her son Emmanuel. A pregnant maiden is giving birth to a son, and she will call his name Emmanuel. So there isn't the idea of incarnation inherent in that, but there is a kind of tension there because that word Alma, maiden, it doesn't mean virgin, but it means a woman who is of marrying age, but who doesn't have children and isn't married. So there's a suggestion of that, but there's an entirely different word in Hebrew for virgin. almost not used very often, but here the indication is that you have a young woman who is of marrying age, and it's a sign, behold, a pregnant maiden who's bearing a son, and she'll call his name Emmanuel. That's as close as you come to this idea of incarnation. So God left it on the horns of a kind of tension or mystery. What would this actually be? And if you look at Israel's understanding of what God was going to do, they were not thinking in terms of incarnation. They were closely connecting this messianic figure with Yahweh himself, even to the point that he would somehow sit on the throne alongside Yahweh. But as a son of David, he would be a man. Son of Abraham, he would be a man. What the prophets make clear is that this servant would embody faithful Israel and therefore he would be Yahweh's human instrument through the power of Yahweh's spirit for redeeming Israel for the sake of the world. That's what we see very clearly through Isaiah's prophecy and through the other prophets as well. So the scriptures then don't speak of incarnation as such, but when we address it in terms of these abstract categories of deity and humanity, we get even farther away from understanding it. So rather than treating it that way, Again, I hope it's clear at this point. What we need to do is to view it in the way the scripture treats it. Here's the way the scripture fundamentally understands incarnation. It is the God of Israel taking up Israel's life and circumstance in himself. Note there's nothing there about two natures, how many persons, how many hypostases, how do you put deity and humanity together in the same bucket. It's the God of Israel taking up Israel's life and circumstance in himself. That's how the scripture deals with incarnation most basically. And to flesh that out a little bit, we've seen as we've gone through the scriptures, even the title of this wider series, this sacred space or God with us idea, that is God's goal for his creation, sacred space. God creates a man in his image and likeness. He puts him in his own sanctuary space. He's image-bearer for the sake of being image-son and man now is to be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth. And in that way, by filling the earth, the knowledge of God, the presence of God, the blessing of God will fill the earth. And the prophets speak in that way. God's design is ultimately not for a creation that's empty and void but that it would be filled and filled in such a way that the knowledge of the glory of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the seas. How will God flood the earth with his presence through his image bearers who will fill the earth? So God's sacred space is about God being present and manifest in his creation in and through his intimate communion with his image children. Israel's existence was all about that. I'm taking you to myself. I've called you out. I'm bringing you to be with me, to dwell with me in my sanctuary land, and you will build me a sanctuary where I can dwell in your midst. I will be with you. You will be with me. I will be your God. You will be my people. So God's sanctuary in the midst of Israel signified that intimacy between God and his human image-bearers as the place of Father-Son encounter, the place where heaven and earth converge. That's what the sanctuary was all about. But as we've seen, Israel shared in the creation's alienation. And so God had pledged a day when he would remedy that condition and finally establish the perfect, exhaustive intimacy that he intended. He issued that promise to Israel, the Abrahamic people, but it pertained to the whole creation. Reconciling Israel had its goal in reconciling all things to himself. Wasn't that Israel's mandate? In you all the families of the earth will be blessed. The dressing of the curse through the elect man and his family. and over time the prophets more and more seemed to concentrate that work in a particular Israelite, certainly in a particular remnant, a faithful Israel. But as you tie it in with even the promise of a seed of Abraham that then becomes a certain seed of David, it becomes more narrow even than that. So this individual would be the focal point in Yahweh's return to Zion to redeem and restore Israel, and he would embody Israel as the true son of Abraham in whom Israel would return to God in order that they would then fulfill their own election and calling on behalf of the world. That's the way the scriptures are building the case for this thing called incarnation. So this Israel would embody both sides of the covenant and its obligation, and therefore embody all of God's will, words, and works. He would be God unto man, unto the creation, and man back unto God. true God, true man. That's the sense in which John can say, the Word became flesh and tabernacled amongst us. Word as dabar or lagas, meaning the meaning or significance or truth embodied in a communication. When Jesus said, I am the truth, he is all the aspects of who God is and who man is and what God's intent is and what he's done and where this is going. He is the Yes and Amen. He is the Word made flesh. So by embodying both covenant parties and fulfilling the covenant relationship from both sides, this is what you see in Isaiah again, I make you the covenant of the people. The covenant, remember, was a relational contract. The covenant with Israel was just the ratifying of the Abrahamic relationship with Abraham's descendants. What we call the Sinai covenant, the law of Moses, was just God ratifying that relationship that he made with Abraham, the covenant relationship with Abraham. He's ratifying that with Abraham's descendants. I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I've remembered my covenant. I'm bringing you out to gather you to myself. I'm making my covenant now with you. So that covenant established the relationship between God and the Abrahamic people, and it defined and prescribed the relationship between those two parties. What it meant for God to be the God of Israel on behalf of the world, what it meant for Israel to be Israel unto God on behalf of the world. and this messianic figure was going to embody both covenant parties and fulfill the covenant relationship from both sides. He would be the one somehow in whom or through whom Yahweh would return to Zion and fulfill his covenant faithfulness. He would bring covenant father and son together in truth and righteousness in himself. He would be the point of divine human encounter and communion, and that's why the prophets connected him with the sanctuary, which we saw John does in his gospel, right? And again, we can see this in many of the prophets, but if you just look at Isaiah, you have Isaiah in chapter two talking about how in the last days the mountain of the house of the Lord will be the chief of the mountains. The place where Yahweh's sanctuary is will be the center of the earth and all the nations will stream to that sanctuary to meet with God there. And then a few chapters later in chapter 11, it's the root and stem of Jesse. It's that offspring of David who is that rallying point to whom all the nations come. He's the one to whom the remnant of Israel and Judah come and then also all of the nations of the earth. So you have in Isaiah in those two passages connecting the sanctuary as the place where all the people of the earth will come with this messianic figure as being that one, that rallying point. And he also then later on hints that Yahweh would make that individual the cornerstone in his sanctuary, a stone upon which his house would be built, something else that is cited in the New Testament. And as I said, it's not surprising at all that John treats Jesus' birth as the restoration of Yahweh's sanctuary and the return of his glory to fill it. How did God leave his sanctuary during the time leading up to the exile? His Shekinah, his glory, left. It's Ezekiel 10 and 11. And God promised his glory would return. That was his presence, right, which was in his sanctuary. And John says, the word became flesh and tabernacled amongst us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. So the glory of God, Israel was waiting for it to return. And that return of Yahweh would see their reconciliation to him, cleansing, forgiveness, and gathering, renewal. They were waiting for his glory to return. And John says, this is how the glory of God is returned. He's returned in the only begotten who himself is the embodiment of the dwelling place of God. So the sanctuary was the place of divine human encounter and therefore the preeminent image for incarnation. But the sanctuary was about sacred space. Not just where God is, but how he is in relation to his creation. So the Incarnation fulfills the sanctuary. It's the fulfillment, the ultimate realization of God's dwelling place and the role of God's dwelling place in his creation. But Incarnation, in fulfilling that reality of God's dwelling place, infinitely transcends the dwelling place as it previously existed in all of its various forms. The physical sanctuary, tabernacle, temple, second temple, all of those things had brought God and Israel together spatially, a place to which you came to encounter God, right? The place he put his name. You had to go to where God was to meet with him, to worship him. Three times a year you had to go up to Jerusalem, the place where God had put his name, the central sanctuary. Well, now the fulfillment of the sanctuary in the Messiah is the bringing of God and man together ontologically, not spatially, but being to being. Remember even again in John 4, John's very much aware of this fulfillment of the dwelling place of God in this thing called the incarnation of the Messiah. And so you see in John 4 where the Samaritan woman says, let me ask you questions. I can tell you're a prophet, the Samaritan woman. And she asked him, our fathers, our Samaritan fathers, centuries ago built an altar on Mount Gerizim. And they tell us that's the place where we're to encounter Yahweh, the God of Israel. But you Jews say that it's in Jerusalem. That's where we need to go and meet with God. Which is it? And Jesus said what? I tell you truly, an hour is coming and now is, when neither on this mountain or in Jerusalem, but in spirit and in truth. She says, I know that when the Messiah comes, he will make these things clear to us. I who speak to you am he. So Jesus is making the point to her that when God actually fulfills this idea of his sanctuary, the place of encounter and communion, it will not be in a place, it will be in a union, a relational union in connection with the Messiah himself. The Messiah himself. So the way we're told by the scriptures to think about incarnation is that Yahweh has returned to Israel by taking up Israel's life and Lot in himself. He said he was going to return to Israel. This is how he's done it. By taking up Israel's life and Lot in himself. The birth of the Israelite Jesus of Nazareth was God forever humanizing himself. In other words, incarnation is God's determination in self-giving love to have his own existence forever bound up in human existence. So if we accept the doctrine of a triune God, we are accepting the doctrine of the God who has assumed human existence into himself. If we want to talk about issues of eternal assurance or reconciling all things in the Messiah, those kinds of ideas, this is where we have to begin. And we'll talk more about these things going forward. So on the one side, you see in the Incarnation, Yahweh taking up Israel's life and Lot in himself. He takes up Israel's brokenness, Israel's unfaithfulness, He is born a son of Israel as Israel was a son of Adam. He takes up Israel's covenant unfaithfulness, its sinfulness, if you will, in that sense. Not that he himself committed sin, and we'll talk more about that. But he was born into Israel's unfaithfulness and estrangement from God in order to heal that. And in that way you have God not just making things right, waving a magic wand at some abstract atonement, but you have God bearing that unfaithfulness, that brokenness, that incapacity of Israel in himself in order to make Israel become Israel for the sake of the world. And so also on the other side of that, the incarnation is the beginning of true human existence for which man was created. man as image son bearing and manifesting the life and likeness of God. Peter says that this deliverance from the corruption into which we were born is partaking in the divine nature. not the deifying of man in the way that we often think about and get scared of thinking about, but God's design for man is that man will be so unified with him, I in you, you in me, that when you see a human being, you see God himself. Jesus is the beginning of that kind of human being. He's a new Adam, right? This is the way that the scripture wants us to think about incarnation, not a category of being called deity and a category of being called humanness, and we stick them together in some abstracted way. It wants us to think about that idea of incarnation in terms of the way in which God has fulfilled this pledge that he made all the way back at the very beginning. In incarnation, God has fully revealed himself. and he has fully revealed his human creature. Jesus is God unto man and man unto God and for that for the sake of God's all-comprehending design for his creation. If you go back and you read these sections that I've given you here in Ephesians and Colossians, if we want to call them Paul's Christology, Paul's doctrine of Christ, this is what you'll see. This is what you'll see. the way in which God has accomplished these things that he said he was going to do. Well, as we prepare for the table then, for the sake of our meditation, think about those passages we read and particularly Mary's doxology. her recognition even in a mysterious way of the significance of her own pregnancy and what's going to come from this. This is Yahweh's faithfulness to Abraham. This is the power of God coming to rescue the lowly and bringing down the proud. This is the mighty works of God by which he will restore all things. So we have this piece of music, you're probably familiar with it, but let's use that as our time of meditation. And I'll pray before we start that. Father, we've just begun to unveil and and kind of take apart this idea of incarnation. But I pray that we've laid a good foundation this morning, and perhaps a startling one, perhaps a surprising one, perhaps even a shocking one. But I pray that we would have a sense, even by the leading of your spirit, that as much as some of these things may seem strange or new, unfamiliar to us, that they do ring true. that this is the way in which the gospel writers and even the epistle writers beyond that understand the incarnation, understand the significance of the person of the Messiah. And I pray that this would be a good foundation for us moving forward, because I truly believe unless we understand this concept of incarnation through the lens of the scriptures, we really cannot understand this issue of salvation, not only for us personally, but for the world and ultimately your design for the whole creation. What does it mean that you have reconciled all things to yourself and the Messiah. What does it mean? that in the Messiah we have the first, the new Adam, the beginning of a new creation. What does it mean that in him ultimately will be the summing up of everything such that our God is all in all? What is the ultimate destiny for us as individuals and ultimately for your whole created order? These are the things that we can only understand when we understand them in the light of incarnation. So Father, I pray that you will help each one, even in our study, our contemplation this week. And I pray that we would be a meditative, contemplative people this week, as we continue to move forward with this topic. Let it be fruitful in our hearts and minds. Let it be transformative in us. we would know Christ more thoroughly. We would be conformed to him more thoroughly. And so we ask for your spirit to do that work. We know that is his charter. We know that is his ministration in the world is to produce and perfect the likeness of Christ in human beings. We yield to him. We pray that he will be faithful in that work in each one of us. And it's in the name of Christ that we pray. Amen.