Now you build a house out of these blocks, Joslin,” the second-grade teacher demanded, tapping her foot ominously and holding a ruler threateningly in her right hand. Mrs. Lenard had me (Josh) sit down at the small table of blocks to teach me a lesson—to use my right hand.
I was born left-handed, but my teacher was trying with all her might to make me switch to being a right-hander. When I reached out with my left hand, she smacked it with the ruler and said, “Stop—think it through. Do it with your right hand.” I was terrified and confused. I was only doing what came naturally, but I was severely punished for it. This experience significantly affected how I saw myself. I began to think I was defective, a factory reject.
The trauma of this experience also caused me to develop a speech impediment. Whenever I became frightened, anxious, or tired—usually at school—I stuttered. My stuttering was a great embarrassment to me. In the fifth grade I was told to memorize and recite the Gettysburg Address. I was so nervous when I stood up that I began to stutter. In front of the entire class, my teacher demanded, “Say it! Say it! Stop stuttering, and say it!” Mortified in front of my friends, I ran out of the classroom crying.
Because my parents’ education had stopped at the second grade, they had never learned good grammar. As a result, I usually mangled the language. If my English teachers emphasized correct grammar, it never got through to me. Somehow I got by. But when I entered college, my down-home grammar caught up with me, and I again became the object of ridicule. I was embarrassed to speak up in class. One day in freshman English, the professor asked me, “Where’s Bob?” I said, “He doesn’t feel good.” In front of everyone, the professor corrected me: “Mr. McDowell, you mean ‘Bob doesn’t feel well.’” I looked at her perplexed, wondering what the big deal was. To me it seemed just as well to say “good”! Experiences like these further solidified my perception that I was an inferior human being and a totally unacceptable person.
Adam and Eve must have felt that way as well after they sinned. At first they had experienced a wonderful love relationship with God in the perfect Garden of Eden. There was no hunger, greed, fear, or pain because God’s holy presence produced nothing but goodness. But after they sinned, they were banished from the garden.
We rejected God yet he still accepted us.
They were no longer innocent—instead they were guilty. They no longer delighted in God—instead they felt fear and shame. Rather than basking in God’s favor and enjoying his provisions, they worked the cursed ground and sweated to make ends meet. Their sin had left them feeling alone and unacceptable.
But how did God feel? Was he angry and vindictive? Did he never again want anything to do with the human creation that had rebelled against him?
Instead of anger, God felt grief and sadness. From one generation after another his cherished humans lived a life of sin and rebellion and “it broke his heart” (Genesis 6:6).
Imagine God as he watches in grief and sadness while your own generation sins and suffers the consequences of those sins. He was there when you were born into the very world where he and the first human couple once walked in perfect relationship. And instead of rejecting you, he accepts you in spite of your sin. He longs to relate to you and me and those around us as intimately as he once did to them. He wants to take pleasure in us. He wants to see in our eyes the delight that only his life and love can bring. But that’s not possible, because our sin has separated us from the life that is found in him, from the moment we were conceived. While his heart accepts us without condition, his holiness cannot embrace our life of selfishness. For each of us have followed in Adam and Eve’s footsteps, becoming his enemy by repeatedly and selfishly choosing our own sinful ways instead of his holy ways.
So what did God do? He took the initiative. We are the ones who desperately need him, but we didn’t seek him out. We are the ones who should have been crying out for help. Yet the all-sufficient Lord, who “has no needs…[but] gives life and breath to everything, and…satisfies every need there is” wants you and wants me (Acts 17:25). We rejected him yet he still accepted us. He wants to relate to us—to enjoy and delight and take pleasure in a personal relationship with us. He wants to complete our joy.
So God entered our world to cancel the curse of sin and death that has power over us. He “became human and lived here on earth among us” (John 1:14). “Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—Jesus also became flesh and blood by being born in human form. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the Devil, who had the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14). “God’s secret plan has now been revealed to us; it is a plan centered on Christ” (Ephesians 1:9). Only the Son of the living God could wrench the power of death out of the hand of our archenemy, Satan, so God could be reconnected to his children in a personal, one-on-one relationship.
The incarnation is the miracle of God’s Son taking on human form.
We believe the truth of the incarnation (God becoming human), in which God accepted us without condition and sent Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, to redeem us and restore us to a relationship with him.
The incarnation says, “You may have turned away from me, but I’m not turning away from you. You are so important to me that I will go to extraordinary lengths to have a personal relationship with you. I’ll enter your world and become human like you to save you from death and eternal aloneness without me.” Faced with the issue of restoring a relationship with humans, God did not merely send a prophet or even an angel to declare his truth of his unconditional acceptance of us; he sent the ultimate gift—himself!