Notes for Episode 4

Here are the notes to accompany episode 4 of the podcast titled "Immanuel":

·      The Word became flesh.  He overcame the powers of hell, sin, and death as a man.  

·      Jesus enters into our suffering world and redeems it as a man.  

1.    In Isaiah 7:14 we read: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel”

-       Immanuel literally means “with us is God”.  It was a sign for 

King Ahaz who was afraid of an imminent war with two neighboring countries.  The sign God told Isaiah to give the king was the assurance that

Immanuel will eventually come and the Kingdom He will eventually establish will eclipse any that earthly kings possess.  Isaiah is prophesying the world of Messiah’s reign.  The prophet probably did not fully understand what he was uttering.  But we get a clue about the figure of the messiah who will come.  He will be “God with us”.  The embodied presence of Yahweh: Israel’s God.

·      Immanuel literally means “with us is God”.  The Messiah having this divine title is something we must explore. It indicates Who He is and what He desires.

2.    John expounds on what this means in John 1:1-18.  John calls Jesus the “Logos” or in English “Word”.  Logos in a sense means Jesus is the embodied voice of God.  The voice of God is central in the OT.  It’s the voice of God that creates the world.  It’s also the voice of God that creates new situations and paradigms for Israel’s patriarchs and heroes.  God spoke to Abraham and said “go!” (Genesis 12).  God spoke to Moses and said, “Go to pharaoh and say, “let my people go!”(Exodus 2). God’s voice creates new things and situations.  The Hebrew “davar” can mean a “word or a deed”.  Therefore in Hebrew thinking words and actions are intertwined.  Jesus is God physically doing good as God’s embodied voice.  Greeks separated thought and everything else, they were the first people we know of to think in the abstract and put a name to philosophical things by categorization.  Hebrews didn’t think in abstractions.  They saw mystery and connection in the way reality works and to them it is ultimately God’s business.  They had room for mystery.  

·      The pagan idols are images of what we want, either an embodied desire or fearful power to placate.  Christ embodied is the physical image of God, He is not an embodiment of our desires, He embodies God’s own desires. 

3.    In contrast to this, pagans had idols that were images of the gods they worshipped.  Therefore in a sense they were embodiments also but usually of passions, desires, or of the fearful beings to be placated that ruled nature.  The pagan religious world was not full of either hope or love, just force and obedience.  In many ways they just deified the broken elements and desires of people.  Zeus was power and bravado but was not love. He only functioned as a type of exalted man that did not transcend the brokenness of the people that envisioned him.  Jesus defies all of what people hold dear as being important.  He is the embodied cruciformed heart of God’s love.  Ruling by laying down the right to rule. Creating a world that would run from Him.  Winning that world back through surrendering to the world’s hatred of Him on the cross. 

2. God’s incarnation through Christ was to liberate us from death because it was the physical effects of sin in the natural world that Jesus destroyed.  Since God is Spirit, He had to assume a physical body to destroy death which is a physical element.  Christ also reveals Gods nature and character through the incarnation whom would be unknowable and still hidden like He was on mount Sinai. Moses was the go between for God on behalf of the Israelites.  This prefigures Jesus who not only is the bridge between the created world and the unseen God, but He also is God who steps off the mountain and descends into our world and through The Spirit makes a holy place in our hearts.  

·      We learn Who God is by what Jesus does in response to the human condition (it is God in action).  As He embodies God so do we as His children.  

·      The Spirit descending on Jesus at His baptism is the Spirit coming into the temple which is the body of Christ (Jesus as the new temple).  

4.    Incarnation as giving up oneself for others.

1.     The Incarnation was The Father surrendering the Son and the Son giving up Himself voluntarily to death for our sakes.  There is something profound and life changing in this.  Even though Christ is God, He considers equality with God as something not to cling to….for our sakes! (Philippians 2:1-11).  Athanasius says that the Logos was Spirit and not embodied but for our sakes became embodied (The Incarnation of the Word of God chapter 4).  There was a change in God through the Incarnation: God had never before became embodied and lived as us and with us on earth before.  The Greeks thought God was so far removed from human weakness that the idea of Incarnation seemed offensive.  This scandalized the ancient world for both Jew and Gentile alike.

2.     Jesus compared His body to the temple in Jerusalem as the place where God’s presence on earth physically dwelt (John 2).  Andreas Köstenberger posits that John may have written his gospel to Jewish Christians as a result of Herod’s temple being destroyed in 70AD.  When Jesus was baptized by John there was a sign given to John and witnesses who were there of The Divine Presence being with Jesus as the Spirit descended from heaven to rest on Him.  The Presence of God left the temple in Ezekiel 10 but now returned again in Jesus.

The Church is now the physical incarnation of Christ on earth.  We are His restored image bearers as those who carry the Holy Spirit in us.  In a sense we are all the temples of God.  Peter echoes this when he describes the church as “living stones” in the house of God (1 Peter 2:4) in the same likeness of Jesus being the stone rejected by people.  We have the mission to fill creation with the knowledge of Christ and display the glory of God to the nations.  We incarnate Christ wherever we go.