CHAPTER 3
THE FATHERS OF JESUS
This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will conceive and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).
—Matthew 1:18–23
When most people think of angels at Christmas, they remember that these messengers came to the shepherds and to Mary. They often forget that an angelic herald also came to Joseph, who learned some things no one else was told. Matthew 1:18–23 gives us this invaluable account, from which we learn that Jesus is God, that he is human, and that he is with us.
JESUS IS GOD
There are several ways that Matthew drives home the core Christmas message that Jesus is not simply a great teacher or even some angelic being but the divine God himself. In verse 20 the angel tells Joseph that the human life growing inside Mary has come not from any human being but from the heavenly Father. So Joseph learns that he will be Jesus’ father only in a secondary sense. Mary is pregnant by the Holy Spirit. God is the real father.1
However, the most direct statement of Jesus’ identity comes in verse 23. There Matthew quotes from Isaiah 7:14, “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel,” which means “God with us.” For centuries Jewish religious leaders and scholars had known that prophecy, but they had not thought it should be taken literally. They believed it was predicting the coming of some great leader through whose work, figuratively speaking, God would be present with his people.
But Matthew is saying this promise is greater than anyone imagined. It came true not figuratively but literally. Jesus Christ is “God with us” because the human life growing in the womb of Mary was a miracle performed by God himself. This child is literally God.
Matthew was a Jew and would have been deeply conversant with the Hebrew Scriptures. That makes this statement even more startling. The Jews’ distinctive view of God made them the people on earth least open to the idea that a human being could be God. Eastern religions believed God was an impersonal force permeating all things, so it wasn’t incongruous for them to say that some human beings are particularly great manifestations of the divine. Western religion at the time believed in multiple nonomnipotent personal deities. And sometimes they would disguise themselves as human beings for their own purposes. So to Greeks and Romans there was no reason that a given personage could not be Hermes or Zeus, come to us incognito.
Jews, however, believed in a God who was both personal and infinite, who was not a being within the universe but was instead the ground of its existence and infinitely transcendent above it. Everything in the Hebrew worldview militated against the idea that a human being could be God. Jews would not even pronounce the name “Yahweh” nor spell it. And yet Jesus Christ—by his life, by his claims, and by his resurrection—convinced his closest Jewish followers that he was not just a prophet telling them how to find God, but God himself come to find us.
Matthew is not the only biblical author to teach this. John the apostle says Jesus Christ is “the Word,” who was never created, who existed with the Father from the beginning, through whom everything was made, and the Word was God (John 1:1–3). Paul, a Jew and a Pharisee, says that all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Jesus bodily (Colossians 2:9)—not just a third or a half or part of it but all of the divine substance. The apostle Peter, another Jewish man, writes, “Through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ . . .” (2 Peter 1:1). Jesus Christ is “our God.”
The opinion of these authors would not mean much, however, if Jesus had shown no consciousness of his divine identity. But he did. All through the Gospels Jesus is constantly forgiving sin, which only God can do. He also claims, in various places, “I am going to come back to judge the earth,” and only God can do that. He claims to have mutual, equal knowledge with God the Father (Matthew 11:27–28). At one point Jesus actually says, “Before Abraham was born, I am!” (John 8:58). He takes the divine name upon himself (cf. Exodus 3:13–14). At many times and in many ways Jesus Christ, a Jewish man, said, “I am God,” and thousands believed him and came to worship him (Acts 2:41).
That is the claim—that he is God. Many know this doctrine and give it lip service without thinking out its implications. If Jesus really is God, what does that mean for us practically?
IT IS AN INTELLECTUAL WATERSHED
Some have argued that the supreme miracle of Christianity is not the resurrection of Christ from the dead but the incarnation. The beginningless, omnipotent Creator of the universe took on a human nature without the loss of his deity, so that Jesus, the son of Joseph of Nazareth, was both fully divine and fully human. Of all the things that Christianity proclaims, this is the most staggering. J. I. Packer puts it starkly:
God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. . . . The babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.2
Packer goes on to make an intriguing point. Many people say, “I can’t believe in miracles.” They can’t believe Jesus could walk on water or raise the dead. They may also find that the atonement—that one man’s death could wipe out the sins of billions of people—seems impossible to them. However, Packer argues, “It is from misbelief, or at least inadequate belief, about the Incarnation that difficulties at other points in the gospel story usually spring. But once the Incarnation is grasped as a reality, these other difficulties dissolve.”3 If there is a God, and he has become human, why would you find it incredible that he would do miracles, pay for the sins of the world, or rise from the dead?
Everyone’s path to faith is different, as we will see later in this volume. But I have known many people who have discovered that once they wrestled with and understood the incarnation, it became far easier to accept the rest of the teachings of the New Testament as well.
IT IS A PERSONAL CRISIS
The claim that Jesus is God not only poses an intellectual challenge but also causes a personal crisis. A crisis is “a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events, especially for better or for worse, is determined.”4 A crisis is a fork in the road, and the assertion that “Jesus Christ is God” is exactly that.
Whenever you see Jesus acting in the Gospels, you see him putting people into motion. He is like a giant billiard ball. Wherever he goes he breaks up old patterns, he sends people off in new directions. As we observed briefly in chapter 1, Jesus evokes extreme reactions. Some are so furious with him they try to throw him off a cliff and kill him. Others are so terrified they cry out, “Depart. . . . Get away from me!”5 Others fall down before him and worship him. Why the extremes? It is because of the claims about who he is. If he is who he said he is, then you have to center your whole life on him. And if he is not who he said he is, then he is someone to hate or run away from. But no other response makes any sense. Either he is God or he isn’t—so he’s absolutely crazy or infinitely wonderful. The modern world, however, is filled with people who say they believe in Jesus, they say they understand who he is, but it hasn’t revolutionized their lives. There has been no crisis and lasting change. The only way to explain this is that, contrary to what they claim, they haven’t really grasped the meaning that he is “God with us.”
IT IS A GREAT HOPE
The claim that Jesus is God also gives us the greatest possible hope. This means that our world is not all there is, that there is life and love after death, and that evil and suffering will one day end. And it means not just hope for the world, despite all its unending problems, but hope for you and me, despite all our unending failings. A God who was only holy would not have come down to us in Jesus Christ. He would have simply demanded that we pull ourselves together, that we be moral and holy enough to merit a relationship with him. A deity that was an “all-accepting God of love” would not have needed to come to Earth either. This God of the modern imagination would have just overlooked sin and evil and embraced us. Neither the God of moralism nor the God of relativism would have bothered with Christmas.
The biblical God, however, is infinitely holy, so our sin could not be shrugged off. It had to be dealt with. He is also infinitely loving. He knows we could never climb up to him, so he has come down to us. God had to come himself and do what we couldn’t do. He doesn’t send someone; he doesn’t send a committee report or a preacher to tell you how to save yourself. He comes himself to fetch us.
Christmas means, then, that for you and me there is all the hope in the world.
JESUS IS HUMAN
Jesus is also one of us—he is human. The doctrine of Christmas, of the incarnation, is that Jesus was truly and fully God and truly and fully human. Do you know how unique that is among all the philosophies and religions in the world? Go through the history of philosophy. They are always arguing: What is more ultimate, the absolute or the particular? The One or the Many? The ideal and eternal or the real and the concrete? Is Plato right or Aristotle? But the doctrine of the incarnation breaks through those binaries and categories. “Immanuel” means the ideal has become real, the absolute has become a particular, and the invisible has become visible! The incarnation is the universe-sundering, history-altering, life-transforming, paradigm-shattering event of history.
However, from such a lofty height of this truth we must ask—what difference does it make to the way we actually live that God has become fully human?
IT MEANS A NONPATERNALISTIC LIFE OF SERVICE
Christians have historically understood passages such as Philippians 2:5–11 as teaching that when the Son of God became human he did not lay aside his deity. He was still God, but he emptied himself of his glory—of his divine prerogatives. He became vulnerable and ordinary; he lost his power and his beauty. “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him . . . that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). David and Moses speak of the beauty and glory of God. Yet Isaiah indicates that the incarnate Messiah did not have even a human attractiveness or beauty.
What does that mean to Christians, whom Paul calls to imitate the incarnation in their own lives (Philippians 2:5)? It means that Christians should never be starry-eyed about glamour. They should never be snobs or make it a goal to get up into the higher echelons of the sleek and beautiful. J. I. Packer puts it like this:
For the Son of God to empty himself and become poor meant a laying aside of glory; a voluntary restraint of power; an acceptance of hardship, isolation, ill-treatment, malice, and misunderstanding; finally, a death that involved such agony—spiritual even more than physical—that his mind nearly broke under the prospect of it. It meant love to the uttermost for unlovely men. . . .
It is our shame and disgrace today that so many Christians—I will be more specific: so many of the soundest and most orthodox Christians—go through this world in the spirit of the priest and the Levite in our Lord’s parable, seeing human needs all around them, but (after a pious wish, and perhaps a prayer, that God might meet those needs) averting their eyes and passing by on the other side. That is not the Christmas spirit. But it is the spirit of some Christians—alas, they are many—whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the marginalized of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on as best they can.
The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor—spending and being spent—to enrich their fellow humans, giving time, trouble, care and concern, to do good to others—and not just their own friends—in whatever way there seems need.6
The fact that God became human and emptied himself of his glory means you should not want to hang out only with the people with power and glitz, who are networked and can open doors for you. You need to be willing to go to the people without power, without beauty, without money. That is the Christmas spirit, because God became one of us.
IT MEANS INFINITE COMFORT IN SUFFERING
We touched on this when looking at Isaiah’s term “Wonderful Counselor.” The New Testament is even more explicit. Hebrews says Jesus was made like us, “fully human in every way” (Hebrews 2:17). That means “because he himself suffered when he was tried and tested, he is able to help those who are being tried and tested” (Hebrews 2:18).7
When you are happy and things are going well, you feel like part of the human race. But when something bad happens and real suffering comes to you, it feels so lonely. People around you may express sympathy, but it doesn’t help. Then you meet someone who has been through exactly the same thing. They know what it is like. You pour your heart out to them. You listen to them and their opinions because they have been through the same thing. When they comfort you, you are comforted.
Some years ago I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I was treated, and the cancer has not returned. Yet I learned for the first time what it was like to live under the shadow and uncertainty of a life-threatening disease. I was fifty-one when that happened. I had been a pastor for many years and I had held a lot of hands at hospital bedsides. I thought I understood what it was like to go through chronic illness. Yet when I went through my own bout with cancer I realized I knew far less than I imagined. I also discovered that people now were more eager to talk about their suffering with me. My experience of fear and pain had given me a new power to comfort.
The incarnation means that God suffered, and that Jesus triumphed through suffering. That means, as Hebrews 2:17–18 said, that Jesus now has an infinite power to comfort. Christmas shows you a God unlike the god of any other faith. Have you been betrayed? Have you been lonely? Have you been destitute? Have you faced death? So has he! Some say, “You don’t understand. I have prayed to God for things, and God ignored my prayer.” In the garden of Gethsemane Jesus cried out, “Father . . . may this cup be taken from me” (Matthew 23:39) and he was turned down. Jesus knows the pain of unanswered prayer. Some say, “I feel like God has abandoned me.” What do you think Jesus was saying on the cross when he said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Matthew 27:46)?
Christianity says God has been all the places you have been; he has been in the darkness you are in now, and more. And, therefore, you can trust him; you can rely on him, because he knows and has the power to comfort, strengthen, and bring you through.
JESUS IS WITH US
There are three ideas in “Immanuel”: He is God, he is human, and he is with us. It would have been astonishing enough if the Son of God had become human and simply lived temporarily among us and then left, leaving a set of teachings. But his designs were infinitely greater than that. In the Gospel of Mark it says that Jesus Christ chose twelve apostles and appointed them so that they would be with him (3:14). What does “with him” mean? From that text and the rest of the Gospels we can see that it means being in Jesus’ presence, conversing with him, learning from him, having his comfort moment by moment. The purpose of the incarnation is that we would have a relationship with him. In Jesus the ineffable, unapproachable God becomes a human being who can be known and loved. And, through faith, we can know this love.
This does not stun us as much as it should. Look at the Old Testament. Anytime anyone drew near to God it was completely terrifying. God appears to Abraham as a smoking furnace, to Israel as a pillar of fire, to Job as a hurricane or tornado. When Moses asked to see the face of God, he was told it would kill him, that at best he could only get near God’s outskirts, his “back” (Exodus 33:18–23). When Moses came down off the mountain, his face was so bright with radiance that the people could not look at him (Exodus 34:29–30)—so great, so high and unapproachable is God.
Can you imagine, then, if Moses were present today, and he were to hear the message of Christmas, namely that “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son” (John 1:14)? Moses would cry out, “Do you realize what this means? This is the very thing I was denied! This means that through Jesus Christ you can meet God. You can know him personally and without terror. He can come into your life. Do you realize what’s going on? Where’s your joy? Where’s your amazement? This should be the driving force of your life!”
When God showed up in Jesus Christ, he was not a pillar of fire, not a tornado, but a baby. There is nothing like a baby. Even young children have their own agenda and can run from you. But the little babies can be picked up, hugged, kissed, and they’re open to it, they cling to you. Why would God come this time in the form of a baby, rather than a firestorm or whirlwind? Because this time he has come not to bring judgment but to bear it, to pay the penalty for our sins, to take away the barrier between humanity and God, so we can be together. Jesus is God with us.
The incarnation did not happen merely to let us know that God exists. It happened to bring him near, so he can be with us and we with him. Millions of people every Christmas sing, “Jesus, our Immanuel,” but are they really with him? Do they know him or do they only know about him? Jesus literally moved heaven and earth to get near us—what should we be doing now to truly be with him?
What are the elements of a genuine, personal relationship with Jesus? It requires, as does any close relationship, that you communicate with him regularly, candidly, lovingly. That means not simply “saying your prayers” but having a prayer life that leads to real communion with God, a sense of his presence in your heart and life. Consider Psalms 27, 63, 84, 131 to see this kind of prayer. On the other hand, being in a close relationship means he communicates with you. That comes from a deep acquaintance with the Bible, the ability to read it, understand it, and meditate on it. Consider Psalms 1 and 119 to see how to have the Bible become a vital force in your life.8 Those are only the most individual “means of grace” that enable you to draw near to God. There are other, more communal means, such as worship and prayer, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and the other resources available in the gathered church, the people of God (Hebrews 10:22–25).
In this passage, there is one more trait necessary for having a personal relationship with Jesus, and it is one that Christians in Western society, at least, are most likely to overlook. An intimate relationship with Jesus always requires courage.
Consider what the announcement of the angel meant to Joseph and Mary. Mary is pregnant, and Joseph knows he is not the father. He decides to break off the engagement, but the angel shows up and says, “Marry her. She is pregnant through the Holy Spirit.” But if Joseph marries her, everybody in that shame-and-honor society will know that this child was not born nine or ten months after they got married; they will know she was already pregnant. That would mean either Joseph and Mary had sex before marriage or she was unfaithful to him, and as a result, they are going to be shamed, socially excluded, and rejected. They are going to be second-class citizens forever. So the message is “If Jesus Christ comes into your life, you are going to kiss your stellar reputation good-bye.” And this is just Matthew 1. When we get to Matthew 2, Joseph will see that having Jesus in his life means not just damage to his social standing but also danger to his very life.
What is the application to us? If you want Jesus in your life, it is going to take bravery. There are at least three kinds of courage required of all believers.
THE COURAGE TO TAKE THE WORLD’S DISDAIN
First, you are going to need courage to take the world’s scorn. All of Joseph’s friends are going to say, “Either you got her pregnant before you were married, or she was unfaithful to you.” Can you imagine Joseph trying to tell them the truth? “Oh, I can explain. She is pregnant through the Holy Spirit.” Imagine the stares. The truth isn’t something his friends will understand and, therefore, they will always think he’s either crazy or gullible. Virtually all Christians will experience the same thing in some of their relationships.
In many non-Western countries a profession of Christian faith can be dangerous to your very life. There is as yet little physical persecution of Christians in Western countries but there is, increasingly, ridicule and contempt for those holding to historical Christian beliefs. All this takes courage to face. Just as with Joseph, there are going to be a lot of people who just don’t understand, and in many cases your reputation will suffer.
THE COURAGE TO GIVE UP YOUR RIGHT TO SELF-DETERMINATION
The angel tells Joseph what he is to name his boy. In that patriarchal culture it was the father’s absolute right to name his child. He had complete rights over his children, and naming was a sign of his control over the family. The angel, however, takes that away. By refusing to let him name Jesus, the angel is saying, “If Jesus is in your life, you are not his manager. This child who is about to be born is your manager.”
People constantly say to me, “I am interested in being a Christian, but not if being a Christian means I have to do X or Y.” Do you know what they are doing? They are trying to name him. They are saying, “I want Jesus Christ, but on my terms.” But the angel says that, if he comes into your life, you don’t control him, he controls you.
When you come to Christ, you must drop your conditions. What does that mean? It means you have to give up the right to say, “I will obey you if . . . I will do this if . . .” As soon as you say, “I will obey you if,” that is not obedience at all. You are saying: “You are my adviser, not my Lord. I will be happy to take your recommendations. And I might even do some of them.” No. If you want Jesus with you, you have to give up the right to self-determination. Self-denial is an act of rebellion against our late-modern culture of self-assertion. But that is what we are called to. Nothing less.
To become a Christian you are going to have to have the courage to do something our culture thinks is absolutely crazy. You are going to have to commit to denying yourself. “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves. . . .” (Luke 9:23). We are told repeatedly in our society that the one sacred law is “To thine own self be true,” that we must always work to fulfill our deepest dreams and satisfy our deepest desires. There are enormous problems with this philosophy of life. It starts with the fact that our feelings change over time, and at any given time they are usually in conflict with one another.
Nevertheless, this is the dominant view, and so the Christian calling is shocking. Modern people need bravery to give up their right to self-determination, yet that is what is required. If you want Jesus in the middle of your life, you have to obey him unconditionally. We will talk more about that in chapter 5.
I know this is intimidating, but it’s also an adventure, the adventure of his lordship. Like most young adults, I struggled to know myself, to find out “who I am,” and when I considered Christianity, I remember thinking, “I don’t want to become a Christian if he doesn’t let me be myself.” But now, looking back forty years, I realize I couldn’t have possibly known at that stage in my life what was really in my heart. Only if we give him our supreme allegiance will we get what we need most from him. We need him to name us. He made us. He knows who we are, what we were made for, what will fit us. That means that we cannot know who we are until he comes into our lives and then, through obedience to him, learn our true identity.
So have the courage to take your hands off your life, to give yourself to him and begin a lifetime of adventure.
THE COURAGE TO ADMIT YOU ARE A SINNER
Finally—and most fundamentally—you can’t know Jesus personally unless you have the courage to admit you are a sinner. What is Jesus’ entire mission? It tells you right here: “He will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). You say, “Wait, I thought Jesus came to empower us and love us.” Yes, but first he came to forgive us, because everything else comes from that.
Are you willing to say, “I am a moral failure. I don’t love God with all my heart, soul, strength, and mind. I don’t love my neighbor as myself. And, therefore, I am guilty, and I need forgiveness and pardon before I need anything else”? It takes enormous courage to admit these things, because it means throwing your old self-image out and getting a new one through Jesus Christ. And yet that is the foundation for all the other things that Jesus can bring into your life—all the comfort, all the hope, all the joyful humility, and everything else.
How will you get the strength to be courageous like that? By looking at Jesus himself. Because if you think it takes courage to be with him, consider that it took infinitely more courage for him to be with you. Only Christianity says one of the attributes of God is courage. No other religion has a God who needed courage. As Packer points out, Jesus could save us only by facing an agonizing death that had him wrestling in sweat in the Garden of Gethsemane. He became mortal and vulnerable so that he could suffer, be betrayed and killed. He faced all these things for you, and he thought it worth it. Look at him facing the darkness for you. That will enable you to face any darkness yourself.
You have heard the phrase in “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing”—“Mild, he lays his glory by.” What does that mean? He did it voluntarily, willingly, and lovingly. No one forced him. It wasn’t just a duty. He faced unimaginable pain and death out of love for you. Don’t ever get between a mother bear and her cub. Think of the many stories or movies that depict a mother staunchly defending her children even against an overwhelming foe. Where does she get the courage? It is love. Why did Jesus have the courage to do what he did for us? Love! And how will you get your courage? The same way.
See him doing all that he did for you, and that will draw out your love for him—and then you will have the courage to put him into the center of your life, and then he will be with you, and you with him.