The third Sunday of Advent: Incarnation

(This is the third in a four-part series that seeks to help Christians observe Advent, that season celebrating the coming of our Savior and leading to Christmas. This series is designed for use on each Sunday of Advent, but it can be used at any point up to and including Christmas Day.)

The greatest development in human history is simple in its presentation.

And she gave birth to her firstborn son; and she wrapped Him in cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. (Luke 2:7)

With that no-frills description, the Bible reports the incarnation. God comes in human form.

Hidden within the simplicity of the description is unfathomable truth. This baby is fully God and fully man. The Creator of the universe becomes the child lying in a feed trough for animals. This seems impossible. Yet, it is true.

J.I. Packer depicts the wonder of it this way in Knowing God:

[T]he Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in this: the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the incarnation.

This is what Christmas is about. God the Son humbles Himself to become a man. Yet, this embryo who becomes a newborn who becomes a boy who becomes a man maintains the deity He possesses as God.

The New Testament points to this reality:

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. (John 1:14)

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Phil. 2:5-8)

The incarnation -- God the Son willingly humbling Himself to become a man -- is for the purpose of a humiliation that makes Christmas all important. God the Son suffers and dies in the place of sinners that they might know His Father. He lives righteously as a substitute for us, then dies sacrificially as a substitute for us. It is a work He only could perform through His incarnation.

And as we anticipate Christmas and its truth of God putting on human flesh, we also look forward to His second coming -- when we will see Him in the glorified body which He now possesses.