He Gave Himself

By Greg Albrecht

God came into time and space in the Incarnation.
He united himself with us, giving us the greatest gift.

“When I draw the Lord He’ll be a real big man. He has to be to explain the way things are” (A Study of Courage and Fear). A young black girl in Mississippi was describing a picture of God she had drawn at the request of psychiatrist and Harvard professor Robert Coles. Dr. Coles won the Pulitzer Prize for his Children of Crisis series.

The girl was already struggling with the world at large, and with what it meant to be a black woman in the American South. Her expectations of God are shared by Christians everywhere. We all like to visualize God as a “real big man” capable of giving the help we need.

God gave himself

But ironically, when God came in the flesh, he didn’t begin his human existence as a “real big man.” In Jesus, God started the way we start. He was born. He acted in history to explain and resolve “the way things are.” He gave humanity the ultimate gift: he gave us himself. God came in the flesh, becoming one of us, for our salvation.

The teaching of Christianity that describes the historical reality of God becoming flesh is called the Incarnation. Jesus came in the flesh so that those who believe in him might be redeemed, reconciled and saved. The act of God becoming a human is the greatest gift ever given, the ultimate expression of love.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God’s greatest gift included his human birth, his life among sinful human beings and his atoning work on the cross.

Jesus’ birth, his life and his sacrificial death help us understand the depth of God’s love. Jesus Christ is a “real big man.” John tells us, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). God came in the flesh as one of us because of sin. He came because of hatred, greed, tyranny and racism. He came because of brutality, violence and war.

Love means giving

Jesus came to show us how and what to love. He showed us that love means giving of ourselves for others. He showed us that the object of love ought to be human beings, not things.

And that’s just one of the problems that we have as we seek to follow Jesus Christ. We often have our priorities backward. Instead of loving people, we are tempted and encouraged to love things.

The act of God becoming flesh demonstrated that material things aren’t wrong, of and by themselves. Jesus showed us that we should use things. But Christ also showed us that material things should never become the object of our affection or adoration. When we reverse this ethical foundation, spiritual disaster occurs. We begin to use people, and love things.

That is an accurate picture of life apart from Jesus Christ. He came in the flesh because he loved people, not things.

Sometimes we can focus on the wrong things about Jesus’ birth and his life. We minimize or forget about worshiping our Savior who loved us by coming in the flesh and dying for our sins. We can fail to focus on the meaning of his coming.

The meaning of his birth and life transcends any specific date on the calendar. He loves us, not because we are things, but because we are people. He came to atone for our sins, to save us and to help us come to know God. He didn’t come so that our worship of him would become a worship of things.

God in the flesh

The birth of Jesus Christ marked the beginning of the most important sequence of events of all history. His birth, life, death and resurrection are all part of the greatest gift. Jesus was God in the flesh. And he was of the royal line of David, the rightful heir to David’s throne. The King of kings had come. The promises to the line of David had been fulfilled in Christ.

God was miraculously and mysteriously born of a woman, coming as a baby into an oppressed land occupied by a foreign power. He was not born into wealth. His arrival on earth was not universally acclaimed. He was born in a village. He worked in a carpenter’s shop with his father. He wasn’t rich. His ship never came in. He never went to college. He never wrote a book. He never married or fathered children.

Those who promised him their loyalty deserted him at his time of greatest need. He was betrayed. He was denied justice. He was tortured and beaten without cause or provocation. He was nailed to a cross, where he died, flanked on both sides by criminals.

Jesus didn’t come as a mystical teacher with secret knowledge that would make his followers superior. He didn’t come to find fault with us or to dazzle us with clever arguments, obscure and technical chronologies and genealogies, or to thunder at us in hellfire-and-brimstone sermons.

“God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:17). God in the flesh was God’s greatest gift. The Incarnation and the Virgin Birth remind us that God loves us enough to have sent us his one and only begotten Son.

Only God can forgive

If our greatest need is for knowledge, God could have sent us an acclaimed teacher, scholar, or philosopher. If our greatest need is for money, God could have sent us a banker or an economist. If our greatest need is for physical health, God could have sent us a doctor or a dietitian. But our greatest need is for forgiveness, redemption and reconciliation. And only God could accomplish this.

A great scholar couldn’t atone for our sins. Someone who strived to lead a perfect life and build a lot of character couldn’t redeem us and reconcile us to God. The most righteous and perfect human being who ever lived could not do what God in the flesh could do.

Only God can forgive, redeem and reconcile. That’s why Jesus was God-man. Jesus was able to atone for our sins because he was God in the flesh. Jesus wasn’t merely a perfect person who was a spiritual superman. He didn’t come to earth to master sin through superhuman effort.

Jesus didn’t overcome sin because he built strong spiritual muscles. Because if that’s all Jesus was, his perfect life would have only been enough to pay for one other imperfect person’s sins. But the Bible tells us that Jesus’ death was enough to pay for all humanity’s sins. Once and for all. Because Christ was fully man and fully God.

So God sent us the greatest gift. He gave himself. And it is the life of Jesus Christ dwelling in us that makes us holy. We are not righteous because of our own superior insight or knowledge. The great central truth is that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst” (1 Timothy 1:15).

So God is a “real big man” who can “explain the way things are.” If you doubt it, think about how God, because of his love for us, was born into this world. His birth, life, death and resurrection for us demonstrate that he loved us, not things.

The Incarnation was the act of God sharing his glory and our poverty with us. Jesus retained his deity, but voluntarily gave up his divine rights in order to become our Savior. Truly this is the greatest gift. And you can receive the greatest gift, if you believe.

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