The Son
The second person in God, the Son, became human Himself: was born into the world as an actual man – a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular color, speaking a particular language, weighing so many stone. The eternal being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus inside a woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.
The result of this was that you now had one man who really was what all men were intended to be: one man in whom created life, derived from His mother, allowed itself to be completely and perfectly turned into the begotten life. The natural human creature in Him was taken up fully into the divine Son. Thus in one instance humanity had, so to speak, arrived: had passed into the life of Christ. And because the whole difficulty for us is that the natural life has to be, in a sense, “killed”, He chose an earthly career that involved the killing of His human desires at every turn – poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the police, and execution by torture. And then, after being thus killed – killed every day in a sense – the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the whole point. For the first time we saw a real man.
CS Lewis
Jesus did not masquerade as a man, He was a man.
Consider Jesus
To Know Him
“I have given up everything else – I have found it to be the only way to really know Christ and to experience the mighty power that brought Him back to life again, and to find out what it means to suffer and die with Him.”
Christ can never be known and loved without a sense of awe and fear accompanying the knowledge. He is the fairest among ten thousand, but He is also the Lord high and mighty. He is a friend of sinners, but He is also the terror of the devil. He is meek and lowly in heart, but He is also Lord and Christ who will surely come to be the judge of all men. No one who knows Him intimately can ever be flippant in His presence.
The love of Christ both wounds and heals, it fascinates and frightens, it kills and makes alive, it draws and repulses, it sobers and enraptures. There can be nothing more terrible or more wonderful than to be stricken with love for Christ so deeply that the whole being goes out in a pained adoration of His person, an adoration that disturbs and disconcerts while it purges and satisfies and relaxes the deep inner heart.
A.W. Tozer
Jesus came to show us the Father. His personality reflected the Father’s personality. “We know how God would act if He were in our place – He has been in our place. When Jesus was on earth, He was a man acting like God.” (A.W. Tozer)
Jesus said, “He who has seen Me, has seen the Father. Why then do you say, show us the Father?”
The Faith, A Perturbing Thing
Consider: When the Son of Man comes, will He find the faith on the earth? (Luke 18:8)
“The faith of Paul and the other apostles was a revolutionizing thing. It upset the whole life of the individual and made him into another person altogether. It laid hold on the life and brought it under obedience to Christ. It took up its cross and followed along after Jesus with no intention of going back. It said goodbye to its old friends as certainly as Elijah when he stepped into the fiery chariot and went away in the whirlwind. It had a finality about it. It snapped shut on a man’s heart like a trap; it captured the man and made him from that moment forward a servant of the Lord. It turned earth into a desert and drew heaven within sight of the believing soul. It realigned all life’s actions and brought them into accord with the will of God. It set its possessor on a pinnacle of truth from which spiritual vantage point he viewed everything that came into his field of experience. It made him little and God big and Christ unspeakably dear…
The faith will command or it will have nothing to do with a man. It will not yield to experimentation. Its power cannot reach any man who is secretly keeping an escape route open in case things get too tough for him. The only man who can be sure he has true Bible faith is the one who has put himself in a position where he cannot go back. His faith has resulted in an everlasting and irrevocable committal.”
AW Tozer
“For yet in a very little while, He Who is coming will come, and will not delay. But my righteous one shall live by faith; and if he shrinks back My soul has no pleasure in him.”
“And now little children, abide in Him, so that when He appears, we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming.”
“And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
Life is short, then we get to go to Heaven!
Love, your brother in Christ,
Chris Chloupek
