Trinitas, over the last two Sundays, we have expounded two truths. That the Lord Jesus Christ, unlike us, has two distinct generations. He is, on the one hand, born of a woman, born of humanity. He is, on the other, eternally generated from the Father. And in that sense, distinct from us all. Well, two generations from two different sources means that the Lord Jesus Christ has two distinct natures. I know this week, for so many of us, there are a multitude of things on our minds. But it's my responsibility this morning to, as it were, unwrap the great gifts of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. My work is cut out for me. We have two passages we're going to read today, just two scriptures, two verses from two different parts of the Bible that lay emphasis on this dual nature of our Savior. Given the weight of what lies ahead, let's go to the Lord in prayer and ask God the Holy Spirit to give us understanding in His word. Please bow your heads with me. Living God, As we make a reconnaissance of things too wonderful for us, things wholly unique in this reality in which we live, we know we need the help of God the Holy Spirit to illuminate our minds and to give us understanding, to give us concentration on those things that are above when our minds and our hearts and our souls are flooded with the cares and concerns of this life. Please, Lord, we pray, lift us up out of all of the matters with which we are preoccupied that we might contemplate the most important truths to be spoken, to be meditated upon, to be celebrated. In Jesus' name we pray, by your spirit, amen. You'll turn with me in your Bibles, or maybe stick your finger in two different places in your Bibles, in Isaiah 7, verse 14, and then John 1, verse 14. I'm gonna read both of these verses, and when I'm done, I'll say this is God's word. You can respond, thanks be to God, and we'll sing a short verse together, the Gloria Patri. Isaiah 7, 14, and John 1, 14. Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call his name Emmanuel. And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father. full of grace and truth. This is God's Word. Trinitas, in the great confession of all Orthodox Christian churches, Jesus is one person with two distinct natures. And the passages before us today lay emphasis on these grand truths. Isaiah 714 says that a woman will give birth to a child. And by all natural inference, we would conclude that that child would be human after the manner of his mother. At the very same time, she is told to name this child Immanuel, which means God with us. Looking at the whole matter from another angle, the Gospel of John opens, speaking of this individual known as the Word of God who preexisted the creation itself. As such, the word of God is God, says John chapter one, verse one. But our verse 14 tells us that the word became flesh and dwelt among us, speaking to his humanity. I would imagine that most of us in this room don't spend a lot of time, as did the philosopher Plato, thinking about what a nature is. Have you ever thought about that? What is a nature? Every animal species has its own distinct nature, says James 3, verse 7. Just the same, there is a human nature, says the same James 3, verse 7. Those who are idol worshipers, they're indicted by the Apostle Paul for worshiping things that by nature are not divine. Natures are real things. We're told in Colossians 2.9, largely after the manner of the verses we've already read, that in Jesus, all the fullness of the divine nature dwells. A common word for human nature in the Bible is flesh, and hence it says in John 1.14, the word became flesh. But what is a nature? Friends, it's something very real that we all have. Here in this room, we all share something together in a very unique way. And frankly, unlike anything else that we share, there are things that are common to all of us in this room that are merely accidental. They don't enter into our very nature or essence. Here in this room, We all share in the fact that we are in a common place, and we exist at a common time, and we're in a common state of being awake. But friends, we all know that those things could be different. Maybe on past Sundays, you were somewhere else. And maybe just a few hours ago, some of you, maybe 45 minutes ago, you weren't awake at all. Some of you often aren't awake during the sermon. I know who the sleepers are in this room. There are other accidental features of us. You might note that we're all members of this congregation, but there are different congregations out there, and this congregation could cease to be. A whole nother paradox is how small would this congregation have to be to cease to be a congregation? We experimented a lot with that at the beginning of Trinitas Church. Like are we a congregation if I'm preaching and Scott Hedgecock is the only person listening? Maybe not. We share things that are more fundamental than these accidental features of where we are and what we're doing. And our nature is one of the most mysterious things of them all. We all have a common essence. And that's quite strange to think about. What that means, for example, is this. Your essence is what you are always, always. So that differs from all the accidental things I talked about. Your human nature cannot be had in degrees. You are all fully human. Not only that, but your human nature is in every part of you. And so the Bible can say that human hands make idols. And there's a thing called human wisdom in contrast to divine. Everything that you are is human. And not only that, but the entirety of human nature is in each one of us. See, humanity or human nature, it's not like a pizza, where we're all a slice of it. Where I'm part of human nature, and Elder Bosserman is another part of human nature, and Morales is another part of human nature. No, we all have an entire and complete human nature in us. Have you ever thought about what this thing is that we all share in common? Somehow is this one unified thing but is in each one of us? We call these things universals. All of this speaks to the fact that creation is this wonderful thing that reflects the nature of our God. There's this wonderful mystery of unity and difference, universals and particulars, and that's why we can write dictionaries, where we define a human nature that billions of people have. That one thing defines them all. Numbers are in a similar fashion, present all over the place, and yet, in another sense, present nowhere. What is the number three? We have numerous instances of the number three here, there, and the next place. We call these things universals that are manifested in particulars. Here's the thing, though. Whatever this mysterious thing called a nature is, you have to believe that natures are real. The incarnation of Jesus Christ depends upon it. There is no incarnation of God, the second person of the Trinity, who has one divine nature, who nevertheless also takes on human nature in himself, so that the two meet in one conscious person. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna talk to you about three things. It's really straightforward. I'm gonna talk to you about what your human nature is. I'm gonna talk to you about what the divine nature is, and then I'm gonna talk about the wonderful mystery of their presence in one and the same person. So let's talk about humanity. Okay, think about your nature for a moment, and I hope that it occurs to you that you are a dichotomy of sorts, a combination of two very different things. Namely, a material element and an immaterial element. A body and a rational spirit. One of the reasons that you can conceive of and think of ideas that are immaterial, like numbers and mathematical principles and logical laws, is because part of you is immaterial. And you can store ideal reality. Philosopher Aristotle liked to define human beings as rational animals. The Bible wants us to know that we are made in the image of God, and I'll tell you something, that image of God especially resides in your rational soul. And what I mean by that is this. Your physical bodily form does not reflect deity as if God himself had such a shape. He doesn't. He's spirit, he's infinite, has no boundaries. But it is especially as rational souls that we can mirror God's character. And it's a wonderful thing. Now, for all that, I don't want to depreciate the material part of your nature. That, too, is wonderful. In fact, your material nature is like a cosmos all in itself. In the ancient world, they would typically think of there being four different basic elements that everything is made of, and they would observe that you, you contain all those elements. As we've grown in our scientific knowledge, that concept has not diminished, but only increased when we understand all the elements of reality working together in your physical body. To begin, man was made from the dust of the earth. We share something with those tangible, solid elements of reality, and it's especially manifest in our bones, which go on even after our flesh has died. disintegrated and returned to dust. Now we know that this physical body of ours, it has all sorts of basic chemical elements in it from calcium to potassium to sodium to iron to magnesium. You are part of the earth. But there's obviously also a liquid element about us. Most of us know today that a vast percentage of the human person is water, And we are told that when Adam was made, there used to be a mist that rose up from the ground. And Elihu says to Job, I too have been formed out of the clay with this moisturizing feature. And of course, when you think about humans, there's something very fluid about us. See, nature, unlike solids, or excuse me, water, unlike solids, is often moving in nature. That's why the Bible will speak about living water sometimes. Water is flowing, it's moving. And when you think about your motions throughout the day, you're actually more like water, moving and flowing from here to there. The Bible says, for example, that the life is in the blood for a reason. It's circulating in your body. Water moistens, it renders things malleable, and your flesh is malleable like clay. I have, in the last several years, introduced my kids to the comedian that we all knew from the 90s, the great Jim Carrey. He was once called, by many, a rubber face, because he could move his face in these ways to look like different people, and it's an incredible feature of him. And therefore, I've shown them a few redacted Jim Carrey routines. Highly redacted. But it reflects the fact that we are incredibly and wonderfully made, but not only earth and water, but wind and air are obviously in us. We breathe. And breath is itself a wonderful element to use as a metaphor for spirit because it has this ability to move things and influence things without being seen. And the angels are therefore compared to winds in Psalm 104 verse 4. But just the same, you might not think of it this way, one of the basic elements is fire. And in the ancient world, they would think of you and I as having some fire in us. Fire, after all, is one of the only elements or things that you would see in nature that emits heat. And they would observe that we're all warm, like an oven with something burning inside of us that is emitting heat from the inside out. Moreover, fire eats things. God is described in his anger as a consuming fire. Well, when you eat something and it goes into your belly, it gets consumed. And by the way, your body temperature raises when you're digesting things. This, I hope, gives you a different picture of what's going on in the Old Testament at God's altar. When you would bring an offering, you would put some on the altar, God's fire, his priest would eat some of it and put that food into himself, his fire, and the worshiper in the shalom offering would eat some as well, and three fires would eat the same meal, and there'd be fellowship and communion there. Today we know that in fact incredible principles and powerful things are at work in each of us. There's electricity in us as well as a digestive system. There's even a small amount of radiation in all of you. These are wonderful things. But friends, it is not just that our human nature is composed of this body with all of these wonderful parts working together. The very shape of our bodies and the systems of our bodies have a unique dignity to them. Part of human nature is that we walk upright. That means that a very small amount of our body makes contact with the ground. You might point out that other creatures actually fly through the air, but in fact, the birds make much more direct contact with the ground sticking those beaks right into it to grab their food, whereas we live most of our lives touching the ground but raised above it. This makes for any number of incredible things. When we face other people, we show more of ourselves to those other people than any other animal or creature. The upright person is constantly showing themselves to others. And not only that, but our facial expressions are unique in that our faces are able to make more expressions. They have more muscles in them than almost any other creature. There's a dignity. There is a glory to our humanity. We have other features about our bodies, our opposable thumbs. Our thumbs have the most unique dexterity of any creature that exists because God designed us to manipulate the world around us and to take control of it. And therefore, although the image of God is not primarily about the shape of our body, our bodies are uniquely designed to do the things that our rational spirit might conceive in our minds with creativity. Just the same are human tongues. They can make more distinct sounds than any other creature. God uniquely designed you and me to make words and to communicate. All of this is part of our humanity. All of these things are resident in this physical body. And even more, our bodies have this grand power and principle of life. And life itself has a threefold sense to begin with. We have vegetative life, which means that we take in nutrition, we grow, and we reproduce. We also have sensitive or animal life. We have the power of locomotion. We can move from here to there. We have five senses to guide us in it and internal senses like memory and instinct. But most importantly, we have a rational soul. That means that when we see things, we don't just get sensations. We actually take in ideas and can apprehend natures. We have an active intellect, which means that we can, through empirical and deductive reasoning, solve problems, create solutions. And we have volition, a power of choice, to even act against our appetites and instincts. Friends, I hope you're struck by the wonders of human nature as we have simply scratched the surface. no other species, writes histories, builds libraries, forms sports teams, composes symphonies, builds monuments, develops cuisine, laughs at comedy, forms governments, conducts business, mints currencies, develops philosophies, debates right and wrong, sets new fashion trends, celebrates national holidays, or unwraps gifts. No other species worships in temples feels the weight of conscience and the relief of the gospel. A little lesson for you here. Some of you young people in the room especially are so excited for the 25th. You can hardly wait or concentrate right now. You're looking forward to new clothes, books, games, music, treats. You don't even realize it, but most of all, you're looking forward to unwrapping mysteries, because the Bible says it's the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the glory of kings to search it out. And I just want to encourage you, the excitement you have are all good things, appropriate to your human nature. It's a gift simply to be you. Many of the older people in this room, you can't wait to live vicariously through these little ones because part of your human nature is you're knit together with the people nearest to you by blood and affinity. There's another lesson in all this. You have a responsibility to appreciate the gift of humanity that you have been given. And I'll bet very few of us in this room have celebrated that gift because we take it for granted. You have been fearfully and wonderfully made. And how many of us have carried about bemoaning ourselves or our condition? How many of you have said, oh, I'm nobody important. I'm nothing special. I'm not a leader of anything. Listen to me, Trinitas Church. Every single one of us in this room commands 35 trillion living souls. You are the sovereign and the king over them. Every one of those 35 trillion living cells has 40 million molecules and more complex functions than that of galaxies. And you have the audacity to appreciate yourself. You have the audacity to look down on the wonder that you are. Everyone in this room has thoughts and dreams and vantage points and wishes wholly unique to you. You have a conscious soul that will never cease to be. And do you care about Looking at yourself is close to worthless. There are things to be sad about when it comes to who you are, but it is not your constitution as a human person. It's your sin. You know, many of you know I went to high school with Chris Pratt. He was a senior when I was a freshman. One of the things that Chris Pratt used to say was, there's something cool about everybody. And that meant a lot coming from the bar none coolest guy in high school by far, and it wasn't even close. There is something utterly unique about everybody. And I just would challenge you, are you making any effort to find that in your brothers and sisters in this room? Do you take opportunity to be in their presence and to find that thing that is unique, profound, and wonderful, or do you have little appetite? Not just for those who are human, but your brothers and sisters in Christ. Another thing that follows from the true wonder of human nature is the utter depravity of human sin. You probably don't think of your sin as much very often. But if what we have said is true, then in every single transgression in sin, you command a military force of 35 trillion living cells. You marshal the very elements of God's creation against their creator. You stain an eternal soul, tarnishing God's preeminent image in all of his creatures. Worse than any adultery, theft, or even murder against your fellow man is your turning God's creation against such a benevolent creator. If you don't know what humanity is, you can't appreciate the sheer problem of human sin. Well, so much for humanity. Let's now consider deity God's divine nature. We all need to ask this question, what is God? And when we ask it, we need to realize God has a nature or something very much like a nature. But then when we speak of God, deity exceeds anything we know. It bursts any physical form we could ever imagine for God, and it even bursts the rational boundaries of our most grand ideas. It's one of the reasons we don't make images of God and bow down to him. We can't. This means we must settle for an adequate description of God's divine nature, Working notions as opposed to comprehension. Of himself, God says this, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways, my ways rather, declares the Lord. He says, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. When asked his name, God either gives an incomprehensible answer or literally says, like he said to the father of Samson, why do you ask my name seeing as it is incomprehensible? That's one attribute of God. God is incomprehensible, but in a profound way that produces wonder. God's incomprehensibility means that he can do things we never thought possible. And frankly, when the announcement of the virgin birth came to Mary, Gabriel the angel says nothing will be impossible for God. It follows from God's incomprehensible being that he can do things we could never dream of. To begin with, God's nature, however we conceive of it, differs from ours in this. His nature is identical with existence, whereas we could imagine our human nature never existing. In fact, there was a time, there were indeed five days of creation when human nature didn't exist. There was no man at all. The nature had to be given existence and being because it didn't have existence and being in itself. And just the same, our human nature must be sustained and fed by food from outside of us. And this is one of God's ways of teaching you that you yourself are utterly dependent on realities outside of yourself. It's his first revelation to you that your life is not in your hands. Your life is wholly dependent on the giver and creator of good gifts. But when God speaks of himself, he says, it is my essence or nature to exist such that you cannot think of me as not existing. And anyone who claims atheism is actually in deep delusion and deception because God cannot even be so much as thought of as not being. He says, my name is I am who I am. He is speaking to his self-existence. And if you wanted a bad metaphor, it is as if God is his own food and self-sustaining being. And it's no wonder that when God announces this name, he comes as a fire on a bush that's burning, but not consumed because it's life does not come from the bush. God is self-existent, we call that aseity. God is absolutely necessary, everything else is contingent, and we're told in Hebrews 1.3, He upholds all things by the word of His power. God is simple, that means you can't divide Him into parts, and He's also infinite. Nothing outstrips Him or exceeds Him. He's eternal in the grand sense, not only to exist throughout all time, but to be above time, so that time is for Him, as it were, At every point, present. The Apostle Paul speaks of God this way, giving us this adequate description of God's nature, the King, eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God. God's nature differs from us in such a grand way that he can bring things into being out of nothing, and so it is with the creation as you know it. My kids, especially when they're young, they always wanna know what heaven and eternity is gonna be like. Because here's the problem, it sounds like a contradiction, they just know it's gonna be very long, in fact, never ending, and that sounds boring. They don't even like car drives that exceed a couple of hours. I always like to tell my kids that to be in heaven will to be in the presence of the one who brought every beautiful thing, every thrilling wonder, every living thing into being out of nothing, based on nothing at all, but himself as the archetype. When you make wonderful things, you get inspiration for something outside of you. For God, he is the sole inspiration of all the things we think most wonderful. For God who can bring things into being out of nothing, there is literally no limit. to the wonder that we will have in His presence. And so Psalm 1611 says, in your right hand is fullness of joy, in your right hand there are pleasures forevermore. The Lord doesn't tell us much more than that. He doesn't need to. God's nature is marked by these grand attributes, but he also has these moral attributes that we can reflect profoundly and meaningfully. God is true in a preeminent way in that there is no misrepresentation of him in himself or of anything else. God's knowledge of you is frankly more true than your knowledge of yourself. God is faithful. He has literally no appetite whatsoever to deviate from his own commitments. He cannot do it. God is faithful, and as three persons, God is always faithful to his commitments, and each person to the other two. God is righteous. He conforms to a standard of behavior that is himself and each of the three persons of the Trinity conform to the standard of that divine being and of one another. God is inherently just. Justice involves repayment with an equitable reward and each divine person is rewarded in the other two, equitably and completely. Not only that, but God in himself is love. We're told this about the divine nature and this indicates that God is always giving himself in each of the three persons wholly and completely and in a blessed way to the others. God differs from man in such awesome ways that you wouldn't be wrong if you only heard those two descriptions of humanity and deity to say there could never be a perfect harmonious union of the two. But that is the very thing that we are celebrating every Lord's Day in the person of Jesus Christ. You need to know a few things about the incarnation of the Son of God. It involves one of the divine persons taking on human nature in addition to deity. What it most emphatically does not mean when it says the word became flesh is that one person of the Trinity ceased being God and simply turned into a man. Friends, it ought to be intuitively clear to you that that is not possible because one of the attributes of God is that he's unchanging. And therefore we can't have God changing into his opposite. And importantly, our verse, John 1 14 does not say that. It doesn't say that deity or divine nature became human nature. It says that one person of the Trinity called the word or the son of God became flesh. It's also important for you to know that the incarnation didn't involve a sort of divine human hybrid, a person who was 50% God and 50% man. That would be deeply problematic because there would be no union between deity and humanity in that person. There'd be this third thing, sort of mutant, made of both. You know, I'm a little late to the party, but I watched the movie Man of Steel, 2013, I know, with my kids just a few days back. The picture of Superman is unfortunately what too many people have in their minds about the incarnation and Jesus. A person who's not really quite man because he has all these superpowers, and a person who's not really quite God, he's not almighty, and that's why he can be thwarted by his enemy superheroes. This is not Jesus Christ. Jesus is fully God and fully man in such a way that the two natures are not confused, but ever in harmony and communion with one another. This means, as well, you would be wrong to think of the incarnation as a situation where you had a really good guy, a person named Jesus, who through his obedience throughout human life, eventually earned the gift of being possessed, as it were, by a divine spirit. So the human goes unconscious, and then a divine person supervenes all the acts of this human person. This, too, would not be a grand union between God and man. In fact, it would preach the idea that if you're good enough, you can attain deity, and then everything after Jesus, as it were, became God. It would be the work of God alone and not of humanity. God and man would still be divided. This is not Christian orthodoxy. In 451 AD, the Council of Chalcedon, there was produced this grand biblical definition of Christ as one person with two distinct natures in the most intimate communion with one another. Friends, we have to think these things to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Just think with me for a moment what this means. I'll bet many of you have thought a variety of times about Jesus in the manger, Jesus being held by his mother. Think through this with me. When Mary held Jesus, Jesus' life depended on her arms to hold him and on milk from his mother. Mary's life in turn depended on whatever bread she ate from wheat growing in the fields. And that wheat depended for its life on the light from the sun and water from the clouds and these stars and elements. They depended. They were being upheld by the eternal word of God, the son of God, by the word of his power. And so when Mary held Jesus, who was holding who? The answer is that she was holding the God-man, even as the God-man held all of creation, indeed, his mother included, in his sovereign power. More truly than the manger or the ground itself supported Jesus, he upheld them. Even more than Mary gave life to Jesus, Jesus was giving life and constant providential support to Mary. Even more than Jesus' teachers educated him, he, as the word of God, was imparting intelligence to each one of them at all times. Yet Jesus was truly held, truly nurtured, and he developed truly as a man. This is the mystery of the incarnation. Only when you have swallowed that pill can you understand the great work that Jesus does by the end of the gospels. See, when Jesus, shortly before he was killed, was confronted by the religious authorities, he tells them this, he goes, I'm gonna die. but no one has taken my life away from me, but I lay it down on my initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. More than any man ever to live, the God-man Jesus Christ, orchestrating all things by his providence, could say, no one overpowers me when I go to death. I am actually the orchestrator of all these circumstances coming together, and my death is my offering, my gift. To die, he had to be a man. But to be the one who has the authority to lay that life down and take it up again, he had to be God. This is the wonder of Christ. Einstein taught us to think that heavy bodies bend space toward themselves. Right now, prevailing theory of gravity. This, by analogy, means that the God-man Jesus Christ must bend all attention and all of creation to himself. There is never a more heavy body than the body of Christ incarnate. We must give our attention to Him. No indifference toward Him can remain. Jesus galvanizes. We must love Him or hate Him. And I hope, believer, you have recognized anew this morning the sheer weight and significance of Jesus Christ. And if you're with us and you have not believed in the Lord, make no mistake. indifference toward the most holy man ever to walk this earth is a farce. It's a lie. Indifference can only be at root a deep hatred. And you will either take that hatred with you into eternity or you will bend the knee to Jesus Christ as did potentates and kings from afar, wise men who gave him gifts. This Lord's Day, receive Jesus Christ in the gift of salvation and give yourself in return to him as the only gift you have to offer. This is our prayer for you today. Bow your heads with me. Living God, we pray that you would give weight to our witness. Lord, as we speak the name of Jesus, we know that the enemy's attention is bent toward it. that the enemy is aware of how powerful it is, may we find a way to speak the name of Jesus this week. As we encounter loved ones and families, may we give credit to Jesus. May we display that he has all the weight of significance and all of reality for us. God, we pray that we would be prepared to experience, whether it be false indifference, overt ire, or Lord-willing, joyful reception of who Jesus is from those who we love most. We pray these things, Father, in the name of your Son, Jesus, and by your Spirit, amen.