For Us and For Our Salvation
Part 4 of a Study in the Nicene Creed
“Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man”
“Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”
Hebrews 2:14-18
The author of Hebrews had the task not only of admonishing these early Jewish Christians not to return to the old covenant system, since the fulfillment had come in Christ. But there was also evidently some exaltation of angels mixed into the false teaching that they were entertaining. So if we read the first chapter and a half leading up to our text, we see a clear comparison-and-contrast between Christ and the angels. And here there is no comparison. But the inspired author goes further than to exalt Christ as the Son of God over the angels, because he then turns to exalt the very essence of human nature in some way over that of the angels. And how does he do that?
First, he quotes Psalm 8 in verses 6 through 8, leading to the conclusion that Christ is the Man in whom God is going to re-subject the entire creation under human dominion, but that the glory of that new dominion must come through the suffering of his human flesh. Now, in our passage, he brings together a principle that was captured by several of the early church fathers in the words, that: What is not assumed is not redeemed.
Too often we Reformed have treated the Incarnation as the mere land bridge between heaven and the cross, whereby Jesus takes care of our sin problem. That he does—and the Reformed have been the great champions of the perfection of that atoning work of Christ. However, we are slow to see the perfection of the human nature itself.
We are often in danger of being all negation and no affirmation when it comes to the Incarnation. Let us then take a cue from the early church fathers and notice the Grand Miracle of Christ assuming all that which he is going to restore.
The Miracle of the Incarnation
The Manner of the Incarnation
The Meaning of the Incarnation
The Miracle of the Incarnation
1. It says that the Son ‘was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary.’ In the first instance, this was a sign. Before we speak of the necessity of the Incarnation in terms of Christ’s sinlessness, we must catch what is most clearly on the surface. That is that this was the fulfillment of the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14, where a sign was foretold,
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel (cf. Mat. 1:23).
Now the English words “sign” and “miracle” are obviously different. However, in the Hebrew (אוֹת) and the Greek (σημεῖον), there is a close connection between the two.1 If we knew nothing else about the Virgin Birth, we would at least know this — that God is signalling to his people the coming of the promised Kingdom by the surprising way of invasion into the world of its promised King. To say that a MIRACLE is a sign of the kingdom, is to suggest that a miracle is “God drawing near” in a special way, that is, in a more immanent and momentous way than in divine providence. But not randomly, not merely to “flex his divine muscles,” but in the pressing in to enemy occupied territory with a promise to his people from our true home. In this sense, C. S. Lewis was correct in seeing the Incarnation as the “grand miracle.”
2. Having established that a miracle must be a sign of the kingdom, a second attribute in any sound definition of a miracle, is that it is unapologetically supernatural in its causal power. Note that “supernatural” does not mean an exclusion of nature, but rather super-nature is the invasion of nature, so that nature is called into the act. That’s why people can see it! The Holy Spirit was the cause of conception, but very much the production of a full set of human chromosomes. This will be important in understanding why the Roman Catholic doctrine of the immaculate conception is as unnecessary as it is unscriptural. But in order to see that, we need to understand the link between God’s act of creation ex nihilo and his act of miracles. In the most important sense, they are the same kind of act, or the same kind of power.
3. But when we say that a miracle is both a sign of the coming kingdom and a supernatural invasion of nature, this is a way of seeing that a miracle is one foretaste of that maxim of Thomas Aquinas, which is grace perfecting nature. An act of God giving us a glimpse of the greater world that is to come and is now, in some “previewed” sense, bursting onto the scene even now.
The Manner of the Incarnation
1. Again, back to the credal language: ‘came down from heaven … and was made man.” This takes both parts of what Paul does in Philippians 2:5-8. So, let’s compare that biblical passage with these words from the Creed:
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
One of the modern errors about Christ, and one the easiest ones to commit, is known as Kenosis Christology. That name comes from the Greek word Paul uses here in this text for “emptied” (ἐκένωσεν). The root verb, κενόω, can mean “empty” or to “make unreal” or “void.” So it would seem that Paul is using figurative speech here—hyperbole—to communicate this unimaginable form that the divine Son would take on as a human servant. But what he is not doing (contrary to the Kenosis error) is to suggest that the Son became less than divine, or that the divine “went” anywhere during the Incarnation.
2. The idea of the flesh in the Incarnation is, as Turretin said, what is called a synecdoche,2 which is a literary device where a word signifies a whole as if it were a part or a part as if the whole—in this case, the whole is designated by a part. So “flesh” in this context means the whole of the human nature, as opposed to “spirit” such as the angelic beings. When John 1:14 says that “the Word became flesh,” what the Gospel writer is saying is that the Son of God took on the whole of the human nature. That implies not only a human body and human feelings, but a human mind and therefore will. And so the Westminster Shorter Catechism, in answering Q.22, speaks of the Son taking on “a reasonable soul.” And this brings up another heresy around the century of Nicea that we haven’t covered yet. That is the error of Apollinarianism. It has been called the “God in a bod” heresy. In other words,
Apollinarius held that the divine logos was that mind that animated the human nature of Christ. In other words, this is not simply saying that the eternal logos, as the Second Person, is the acting Subject of the two natures, but very specifically denying the human mind.
3. Go back to the Hebrews 2 passage. How does it start? “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things” (v. 14). Christ became man for a share in flesh and blood. That means body and soul, biological life and intellectual life and emotional life. All of these were on trial and found wanting in Adam. We fail in thought, word, and deed. We fail to love God with our whole heart, and to love our neighbor too. So for Jesus to be our representative, he would need to possess the faculties that do all of these things that are owed in covenant to God.
4. What we have in the Incarnation is what Jonathan Edwards called the most “admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies,”3 but in manner that we can behold: both Lion and Lamb, or as Dabney put things,
The Messiah was to be both priest and victim. (Ps. cx; Is. liii.) He was to be an outcast, (Is. liii,) and a king, (Ps. ii) So was Jesus. He was to conquer all people, (Ps. xlv and lxxii : 110); yet, without violence. (Is. xlii : 3; Ps. xlv : 4) He was to combine the greatest contrast of humiliation and glory.4
The Meaning of the Incarnation
1. In this statement of the Creed, the purpose (or the Meaning) comes at the beginning of the sentence, namely that it was ‘for us men and for our salvation.’ Everything else in that line of thinking in our Hebrews 2 passage regards his rescue of his brethren. Not only rescue, but restoration as well. Not only restoration, but perfection. Completion.
2. When we say “We are not perfectionists!” we mean that the moral transformation during the Christian life does not confuse sanctification with justification. We understand that we will sin until death. However, there is another sense in which our gospel must include PERFECTION. It is good news that what Christ assumes, he is perfecting. He will “bring it to completion” (Phi. 1:6), and “when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn. 3:2).
3. But all of that ultimate gospel comes later in the Creed. Salvation is first a deep descent into sin and misery. There has always been speculation, first by Irenaeus, about whether God might have devised the Incarnation without respect to the fall. However one considers such a thing, the fact is that he did not. As Dabney remarked,
“On the contrary the Bible implies always that Christ’s offices were undertaken, because men were sinners.”5
So we close this installment of our study with the words of Belgic Confession, capturing the meaning of that manner of the Incarnation: “For since the soul was lost as well as the body, it was necessary that he should take both upon him, to save both.”6 You see that the Reformed creeds and confession were intentionally rooting themselves in that Patristic insight that, What is not assumed is not redeemed, or in other words, the truth of Hebrews 2 — that “he had to be made like his brothers in every respect” (v. 17).
_________________________
1. The Greek word used in the LXX for this word in Isaiah 7:14 is also σημεῖον.
2. Turretin, Institutes, II.13.3.1
3. Edwards, “The Admirable Conjunction of Diverse Excellencies”
4. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 466.
5. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 464.
6. Belgic Confession, Article 18
