Mary had fallen pregnant with Jesus by the supernatural agency of the
Holy Spirit. Joseph her fiancée was very
worried, for he did not understand what had happened. So, to the
naked eye we find
a pregnant woman, dubious
circumstances and a disturbed
fiancée.
But this happened not to be the reality. For this reason God sent a messenger, an angel of the Lord to help Joseph to understand what he could not see with the naked eye. The explanation he receives is this :
“ Joseph , son of Mary do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus , for He will save his people from their sins.”
And then the angel backed it up with an ancient 7th century BC Old Testament prophecy :
“All
this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “ Behold,
the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel, which means “God with
us.” (Matthew 1:18-22)
Information
provided by way of a supernatural
being changes the picture completely
so that :
·
Mary cannot charged with
immorality. This is a supernatural
conception.
·
The supernatural conception will
produce a supernatural child .
·
He will accomplish a supernatural thing : He will save His people from
their sins .
So, who is this Jesus? The Bible shows us that He is BOTH, human and divine. But in this He is not half God and half man. He is fully divine and fully man at the same time [1]. “ In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily...” ( Col. 2:9) This means that in the single person of Jesus, He has both a human and divine nature. The divine nature was not changed when He, the Word became flesh (John 1:1, 14). Instead, the Word was joined with humanity (Col. 2:9) and His divine nature was not changed by this. Jesus is not merely a man who "had God within Him," nor is He a man who "manifested the God principle."
He is God come in the flesh, the second person of the Trinity.
"The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word" (Heb. 1:3).
The following table help us
to see the two natures of Jesus
"in action":
|
AS GOD
|
AS MAN
|
|
He
worshipped the Father (John 17)
|
|
|
He
prayed to the Father (John 17)
|
|
So, it
is utterly impossible to be neutral about Jesus. He was by far the most remarkable man that ever walked this earth. He is infinitely more than remarkable. He is God !
Listen to what
C.S. Lewis , a former atheist had
to say about Jesus :
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the
really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus
as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the
one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of
things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a
lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he
would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and
is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up
for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his
feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing
nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to
us. He did not intend to.”
― C.S.
Lewis, Mere Christianity
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