A Christmas mystery - a final quote for Advent
The following is taken from an article by James Anderson which was entitled 3 Christmas mysteries. In the article this was the first of them with the heading -The Incarnation of the Son of God. If you want to read of the other 2 mysteries you can access the whole article here: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/3-christmas-mysteries
James Anderson is associate professor of theology and philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. (John
1:14)
“The Word became flesh.” Those four words can sound so
familiar to us that we fail to appreciate the magnitude of John’s statement
(echoed by the other New Testament writers). The divine (v. 1) became
human (v. 14). The infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Son of
God took on a human nature: finite, limited in power, limited in
knowledge, limited in space and time. It’s one thing to claim God would
ever do such a thing. It’s yet another to suppose God could ever do such
a thing—that he could clothe himself with frail humanity, veiling his divine
glory without relinquishing for one moment any aspect of his divine nature. The
Danish Lutheran philosopher Søren Kierkegaard referred to the incarnation as
the “absolute paradox” of the Christian faith. How could the eternal inhabit
the temporal? How could the finite accommodate the infinite?
We may not know how this mystery could be reality,
but by the testimony of inspired Scripture we know with certainty
(Luke 1:4) it was and is reality. This is a mystery of the first
order.
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