Monday, November 14, 2011

The Incarnation of Christ Is A Great Mystery

And the angel answered
and said to her, 
'The Holy Spirit will 
come you, 
and the power of 
the Highest will
overshadow you;
therefore, also, that 
Holy One who is born
will be called 
the Son of God.
Luke 1:35

     The Incarnation is a complete reference to the coming of the Son of God in the flesh. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was given this prophecy by the angel and this prophecy contains all three Persons of the Trinity: The Holy spirit; the Highest, the Holy One who is born. To call the Son of God Holy is to claim that He possesses something more than sacred. This Holy One would be the expression of the Character of the Godhead inasmuch as He is not only True God of True God, the very Wisdom of God, the Word of God, He is totally free from all defilement. Jesus Christ is not only sacred, above all things, He is pure, blameless, and separated to perform the purpose of the Father, to be the propitiation for the sins of those that God elected to be saved before anything was created. Jesus is the very object of the Love of God; therefore He took on a human body and moved among men. To be able to perform this task of love God moved upon Mary when His very essence in the Person of the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary with the Wisdom of God. This Wisdom we call the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Holy One of God. Yes, He did move among men, and in the flesh He bore all the natural things that occur to any man. His being God did not overcome the natural events that occur in any man's life. Therefore, when the oblations occurred, He felt them in His sufferings as Man. His being True God did not bring to Him physical relief, He suffered for us, as us, and that suffering was ordained by the Father, not so Jesus might suffer so that we might have some object that gives us a sense of feeling that as the elect we are superior in some way. No! He suffered as that was the death, a death given to vile criminals by the Roman courts, and also a penalty that would be admitted as just by the so-called spiritual Jews. Suffering was just part of the death penalty prescribed by the Romans. Do not focus on the sufferings, focus on the reason that the oblations occurred. He died, whatever penalty prescribed for His death, to pay our debt of sin, and to remove the Law of Death, to remove the corruption that keeps us from being in a right relationship with God. We are to be devoted to Him as  our Savior, as to the fact that God came for us, not some angel, not by any other means, but through Him and by means of His Wisdom, and His power, He saves us. 
     Jesus does meet our senses inasmuch as He met us half-way. He became an object for the senses, by the senses being returned to a right relationship with God then we would worship Him accordingly to that which pleased God. He did not come to just be an object for the senses that are over emotional so that the emotional person focuses on the emotionality of their senses and those emotions become the validity for their faith. He came and dealt with the sense that those who are seeking God, those that are drawn to God, enabled so that they can apprehend Him, and this Jesus gave to us in signs of miracles, so that by the Father sending His Son into the world, in a human body to do certain things that only God could do, even to pour out this ability upon His Apostles, demonstrating that God is Sovereign and is involved in man's life. It is by this means, that human minds of men in their sensible world would find themselves to be taught the truth. 
     When these miraculous events occurred, the fact that Jesus was no doing sensible things: i.e., healing a man born blind, restoring a withered limb, etc. Were they awe stricken? Yes! Those miracles caused those seeking Him to confess Jesus Christ as Lord. It was the deeds of Jesus Christ, His uniqueness that marked Him, as Son of God, and even when His Apostles were given the power to heal, raise the dead, they were not led to believe and regard men as gods. When Jesus drove out evil spirits, they were not drawn to evil spirits: No! They learned for the Word of God that He alone was God and that the evil spirit were not gods. When Jesus raised the dead were they inclined to hero worship and the cult of the dead? No! It was by this means that the Savior who rose from the dead showed them how false other deities were. The resurrection of Jesus Christ, as the Word of God manifested Him as man, that He was born and that He had died and rose, in order that act of God the Father, He eclipsed all other human deeds. All this so that He might recall men from all over the world from paths of error so that they might apprehend the Father: "for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10).
     Jesus Christ submitted Himself to appear in a body and when the mind of man comes to a level of sensible things they then upon the work and Person of Jesus Christ center their senses upon Him. Jesus Christ by means of His human acts proved that He Himself is a man and not only man but by His acts of miracles proved that He was god, the Word of God, the Wisdom of the true God. We should fall flat on our faces in humble worship, that God would so choose us before we were born and as the Holy Spirit came upon Mary impregnating her with the Holy One, the very Wisdom of God, so He has promised and has done, to have the Holy Spirit indwell in all of His children: "For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, form whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height--to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:14-19). 
When He ascended on High,
    He led captivity captive,
and gave gifts to men. 
                 Ephesians 4:1b

Greet Every Saint In Christ

Richard L. Crumb
 

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