In ancient Greek and Roman mythology, there were stories of creatures known as demigods. These were people who had both a god/goddess parent, as well as a human parent. They were “half-breeds”. Various legends had formed around this interesting concept, even leading to a few Chinese emperors and other such powerful people to claim “demi-godhood”. However, in the beginning of the first century, a radically new idea made its way into the world through the birth of a child, Jesus Christ. Now, there was a God-man. This was not a half-god, half-man. This was something entirely new. The baby Jesus had been born, fully God and fully man. This quickly came to be known as the “dual nature” of Christ.
John opens his gospel with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Word, referring to Jesus, was God. This leads to an important question: what did first century Jews mean by the word “God”? The Jewish belief in God (Yahweh) can be described in two ways. First, He is creational. This means that there is one God who created everything, and He remains intricately involved with His creation in a personal way. Second, He is covenantal, meaning that He called Israel to be His special people through a covenant relationship (Wright, 1998). Basically, God is simultaneously above us, and dwelling with us. He is all-powerful, yet personal. When Jesus claimed to be God (John 8:58, 10:30, 10:33), this is the God who He was claiming to be. This brings about the Christian understanding of the Trinity. This is a doctrine that, in the end, is beyond human understanding, but the basics can still at least be grasped. God is one being in three persons. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are all co-equal in power and authority, yet wholly distinct persons within the Godhead. The Trinity is not something that is merely “tacked-on” to the end of the Christian faith. Instead, this is a fundamental cornerstone to the gospel, as each person of the Godhead fulfills its own proper role. The Second Person took on the role of redemption through death on the cross.
“The Trinity is not some awkward add-on to God, the optional extra nobody should want. No, God is beautiful, desirable, and life-giving precisely because He is the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Only here can be found the God who is love, and who shares with us His very own life and joy. Only here can be found the God whom it is eternal life to know.” – Dr. Michael Reeves
Jesus Christ, God the Son, took on flesh. This has a very serious implication for the Christian faith: because God the Son took on flesh, we have a tangible picture of who God is. Mankind can now see who God is by looking at who Christ is. Colossians 1:15 begins to paint this picture nicely when it says, “He is the image of the invisible God…” This in an interesting contrast to the book of Genesis where God declares that man is made in God’s image (Gen. 1:27). In the Garden of Eden that image was broken. Human beings are still the image-bearers of God, but sin has in some aspects marred that image. But now, Paul says, Christ has come as the revelation of what is the perfect image of God. Mankind no longer has to wonder what it means to be “fully man” in the perfect sense of the word, because Christ has demonstrated that in his life on earth. However, Jesus does not stop there. It is true that Jesus is the revelation of what man was intended to be and will be again, as God’s image bearers, but He is also much more than that. In John 14, Philip tells Jesus that if He would only show them the Father, then that would “be enough” (v. 8). In response, Jesus makes a startling statement: “If you have seen me then you have seen the Father” (v.9). Christ is the revelation of God, and if man longs to know God, he need only look at Christ himself. Herein lies some of the motivation for the popular phrase “WWJD – what would Jesus do?” Scripture calls Christians to “Be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). If Christ is the revelation of the nature and character of God, then by looking at Christ we might learn how to be perfect as the Father is perfect. Christ demonstrates God’s perfect love in the way He loved even those who did not love Him. Christ demonstrates God’s heart for the poor as He Himself became a poor man. Christ demonstrates God’s passion for justice when He flipped over the tables of the swindlers who were using God’s temple for a place of money-making. Christ demonstrates God’s healing and restorative power whenever He gave a blind man sight, freed a man from the clutches of a demon, or told a lame man to “Get up and walk.” In the person of Jesus Christ, Christians have been invited to see a glimpse of who God is in His eternal nature and character.
“The gospel is Trinitarian. The Father sends, the Son accomplishes, and the Spirit applies.” – Matt Chandler
But why did God come to earth in the person of Jesus Christ in the first place? This is an important question. If God decided to go through the trouble of coming to earth, surely He must have a good reason. In 1 Timothy 1:15 Paul gives the answer, “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” God came to earth to save sinners, which He accomplishes through His atonement on the cross and His victory in the resurrection.
Mankind has sinned and rebelled against the God of the universe. God cannot allow this unrighteousness to go unpunished, lest He be an unjust God (Job 34:17). The punishment of sin is death (Rom. 6:23). Despite this, God is loving and merciful, and does not wish that any should perish (2 Peter 3:9). What is God to do? This is the “Divine Dilemma” (Athanasius). This is why the God-man was necessary. The early Church father Anselm says that it is not possible for the atonement of sins to take place unless the price paid to God for the sin of man is something greater than all the universe (Book II, Chapter VI). The sin of man against God is so great that it would take infinite punishment for the satisfaction of God’s righteous judgment. Only an infinite God can fulfill these infinite demands. But yet, Anselm reasons, only a man can make satisfaction for sin because it is man who is “on trial” for sin, and therefore it must be a true man who acts as the representative before God. As a result of these things, Anselm reasons, the atonement requires a being who is both God and man. So Christ, God in the flesh, came down to earth in order to fulfill the satisfaction for sin in a way that could not be accomplished by any other means.
Now we know that it takes a God-man to redeem humanity. But how exactly did He do this? In a basic sense, Jesus had to obey the will of His Father. This comes in two ways: passive and active obedience. Scripture tells us that it is by His wounds that we are healed (Isaiah 53:5). This is known as Christ’s passive obedience to the law: He took on the Divine punishment for sin through His death. However, there is also an active side to Christ’s obedience. It is not merely enough for the God-man to die, He must also live perfectly. During His life, Christ lived perfectly without sin, despite being confronted with intense temptation (Heb. 4:15). He actively obeyed the will of His Father in life so that His good works might be credited to those who would believe, making them perfect in God’s sight. But more than that, He obeyed even to the point of death on a cross (Phil. 2:8), so that the innocent would suffer for the sins of the guilty. It is through the God-man’s perfect demonstration of love in His life and death that the law is fulfilled on our behalf.
“The body of the Word, then, being a real human body, in spite of its having been uniquely formed from a virgin, was of itself mortal and, like other bodies, liable to death. But the indwelling of the Word loosed it from this natural liability, so that corruption could not touch it. Thus is happened that two opposite marvels took place at once: the death of all was consummated in the Lord’s body; yet, because the Word was in it, death and corruption were in the same act utterly abolished.” – Athanasius of Alexandria
The life of Jesus Christ does not end at the cross. After spending three days dead in the tomb, God the Father raised Him from the dead (Eph. 1:20). This has huge implications for humanity, as Paul points out in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul says that “by a man [Jesus] has come the resurrection of the dead” (v. 21). Christ’s resurrection from the dead secured a resurrection for us. In the end of time, all those who have died will be resurrected for the final judgment. This is a stark contrast from what is the common conception of the afterlife. The final, eternal state for those who trust in Christ is not a mere spiritual state, but an actual physical state in a resurrected body. The glorified humanity Christ experiences when He rose from the dead is analogous to Christians being brought back from being “dead in their sins” Eph. 2:1). Once Christians have been born again (John 3:3, 1 Pet. 1:3, 2 Cor. 5:17), they live in a glimpse of the glorified humanity that will one day be fully realized. But the resurrection is not a mere analogy. It is a reality for the next life. Christians will rise again because Christ Himself rose again from the dead. One day, the rewards of Christ’s death and resurrection will be fully realized, and the joy we will experience before the face of God is far beyond even our greatest imaginations.