The Word Became Flesh

Read: Hebrews 2:5-18

Christmas is about the Incarnation – the Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity becoming a human being in order to redeem and restore lost humanity.  That is what we celebrate in Christmas – not winter or snow or sleigh bells ringing; not presents or decorations; not coziness and cocoa; not chestnuts roasting on an open fire and that elusive “Christmas feeling”; not even family and friends.  It’s about one thing: the Incarnation of Jesus the Messiah.  If it’s not about that, it’s nothing.

The American Atheists have placed a billboard near the Lincoln Tunnel with a picture of the Nativity that states, “You KNOW it’s a myth. This season, celebrate reason.” 

If they are right and it is just a myth, then God (if he even exists) has not come near.  God has left us alone to wallow in our wars and greed and violence and perversion and corruption and cruelty.  There is no hope and ultimately no meaning to life.  If they are right, then God does not care and is uninvolved.  Therefore Freud is right: we are basically beasts driven by sexual impulses; Darwin is right; we have simply evolved from primordial muck and only the fittest survive; and therefore Nietzsche is right: all we have is the will to power and the highest human goal is to dominate others.  “Merry Christmas” or should I say “Happy Holiday”?  Either way, if the Incarnation is a myth, it is an empty statement.

But we who belong to Christ know that it is NOT a myth.   “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father full of grace and truth.”  We stake our lives on that fact.

Hebrews 2:5-18 is about the Incarnation – about the Son of God being made, for a time, lower than the angels and sharing our humanity so as to redeem and restore us.  Jesus came, as the text says, “to bring many sons to glory”.

And so, Jesus came to destroy (in the sense of making powerless or impotent) sin, death and the devil.

Sin – v. 17 “For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way … that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.”  By His death, Jesus made atonement for the sins of the people.  Sin is not a very popular term these days.  People don’t want to hear about sin.  Sin, however, is an unavoidable reality and so people refer to it through round about means, such as ‘dysfunctional behavior’ or being ‘morally challenged’.  They see it as only on a human, personal/interpersonal level and so bad behavior is not an offense against a holy God that demands justice , but is simply a dysfunction that can be corrected through education or therapy.  But there is a God – a God who is holy and who takes sin seriously – so seriously that He sent His Son Jesus our Messiah to suffer and die in our place and to rise again so that our sins could be covered and God’s justice could be satisfied.  Jesus came to destroy sin.

Death – v. 14b-15 “that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death - that is, the devil - and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”  Death is our reality as human beings but is something we fear and avoid.  All of our safety measures, our exercising, our health food and our medications are attempts to hold off and avoid death, because we fear it.  All of our fascination with death (TV, movies, video games) stems from, oddly enough, our fear of death.  That is why the author speaks of “those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”  But Christ came to free us from the fear of death.  How?  We read it in v. 9, “because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone”.  Jesus’ death was the death of death.  It was so because Jesus who was without sin became sin for us and because He died in our place and rose again so that we might rise.  Therefore, as Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”  If we belong to Christ, we do not need to fear death for Jesus has overcome.  Jesus came to destroy death.

Devil – v. 14 “that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death - that is, the devil”.  And as the apostle John wrote (1Jn 3:8), “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work”.  The devil is a created being who does not himself create, but only corrupts.  He wields the weapons of sin and death against creation.  But the work of Christ has destroyed the devil’s work.  Satan is a defeated enemy. Though while we wait for the fulfillment of all things we still feel his antagonism, we have been, as the Hiedelberg Catechism states, set free from the tyranny of the devil.  “The prince of darkness grim - we tremble not for him. His rage we can endure, for, lo, his doom is sure; one little word shall fell him.”  And that word, above all earthly powers, is the Word of God made flesh for us and our salvation. Jesus came to destroy the work of the devil.

And so, Jesus came as our Pioneer, our Champion and our Mediator.

Jesus came as our Pioneer.  We read in v. 10, “In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering”.  The word the NIV translates as “author” literally means, “one who goes first on the path” and therefore can be understood as originator, founder, leader, trailblazer or pioneer.  Jesus went ahead so that we could follow behind.  We don’t bushwack our way to Jesus, rather He blazed the trail of salvation and we simply follow in His path.  He is the author and pioneer of our salvation.  And as such he suffered.  The text says that He was “made perfect through suffering”.  This is not referring to moral perfection but to completion.  Jesus had to suffer not to make up for any deficiency in Himself (He is perfect) but in order to make His saving work complete.  His incarnation and suffering were necessary to complete God’s plan of salvation.  Christ came as a human to do for us what we could not do for ourselves.  We read in v. 11, “Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers.” And in v. 14, “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity.” The Word became flesh – Christ shared our humanity in order to pioneer our salvation.

And Christ came as Champion.  He came as our Rescuer.  He came to “destroy him who holds the power of death - that is, the devil - and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” We were told back in Genesis 3 that the “seed of the woman” (of Eve) would eventually crush the head of the serpent (the devil).  And that is what Jesus did.  And so we read in 1 Corinthians (15:55-57), “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ”.  And we read in Colossians 1:13-14, “For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins”.  Christ is our Champion.

And Christ came as our Mediator.  We read in v. 17, “he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”  Jesus is our High Priest.  He brings us to God and reveals God to us.

We read in the H.C. 15-18:

               Q.  What kind of mediator and deliverer should we look for then?

A.  One who is truly human and truly righteous, yet more powerful than all creatures, that is, one who is also true God.

Q. Why must the mediator be truly human and perfectly righteous?
A. God's justice demands that a human being must pay for human sin; but a sinful human could never pay for others.

Q. Why must the mediator also be truly God?
A. So that, by the power of his divinity, he might bear the weight of God's wrath in his humanity, and earn for us and restore to us righteousness and life.

Q. Who is this mediator true God and at the same time truly human and perfectly righteous?

A. Our Lord Jesus Christ, who was given us to set us completely free and to make us right with God.

Christ came as our Mediator to make us right with God.

And so this passage in Hebrews is a fitting one for the first Sunday of Advent, for it speaks to the very essence of Christmas: the Incarnation.

But, “You KNOW it’s a myth” right?  So we should probably just “celebrate reason”.  Well if it is a myth, what do we have?  We’ve got some pleasures in life … and a whole lot of unexplained sorrow and pain, fighting and cruelty, hatred and retaliation, which ultimately turns out to simply be part of a meaningless existence (with a purposeless beginning and a hopeless end).

BUT, if it’s true:

• We have ultimate purpose to which God is restoring us, as Christ brings many sons and daughters to glory; 
• We have fellowship with God to which Christ has redeemed us;
• We have a Pioneer who has blazed the trail of salvation so we can be free from the tyranny of sin;
• We have a Champion who has destroyed the power of our enemy, the devil, so that we can be fearless in the face of death and therefore fearless in the reality of life.
• And we have a merciful and faithful High Priest (a Mediator with God) so that we can be assured of our forgiveness, confident in our requests and guaranteed a Helper in the midst of temptations.

I’m a big fan of reason.  But this season (and every season) I would (for very reasonable reasons) much rather celebrate Christ.