What the Incarnation Accomplished

On Contingency, Divine Intercession, and the Recovery of Man in the Son of God

Jesus slept in the stern while the boat filled with water. The disciples, seasoned men who had spent their lives on that lake, were frantic with fear, and the one who ought to have been most afraid was the only man aboard who was at rest. They woke Him, and He did not complain that His sleep had been disturbed. He rose and dealt with the thing that terrified them, and only afterwards did He turn to them. That order tells us more about the character of God than most of our systems of theology manage to say in a volume.

It also tells us why He came. God did not become man so that men might become comfortable. He became man so that man, fallen, severed, and powerless to raise himself, might be saved, restored, reclaimed, and brought back into participation in the divine nature. Every true aspiration of the Christian life is measured against that one fact. The aim of the Christian is to lay hold of, and to possess in full, what the incarnation of God accomplished; anything we pursue that does not lie along that road, however earnestly it is preached and however many verses are gathered to support it, is a different pursuit wearing Christian clothes.

This is my thesis, and the rest of this essay is its defence. The argument rests on a single theological foundation, which is the contingency of the creature. Man exists because another exists. He did not give himself life, he cannot keep himself alive, and when he lost the life he had received, he could not recover it. Prayer is the confession of that contingency; intercession is the answer God gives to it; the incarnation is the form that answer took; and the Holy Eucharist is the table at which the Church receives what the answer secured.

I will stay a little longer in that boat, then name the gospel of material emphasis for what it is. From there I set out what God is and who God is, and then prayer and intercession as the creature's posture and the Godhead's ministry. I trace the breach to the garden, follow the woman's seed through Isaiah, open the sealed book of the Apocalypse, and stand beneath the cross, closing at the fountain of life and the Lord's table.

The stakes are practical before they are academic. A believer who misunderstands what the incarnation was for will pray for the wrong things, measure his life by the wrong standard, and conclude, when outward blessings fail, that God has failed. A Church that loses sight of the incarnation will not stop speaking of Christ; it will simply begin to speak of Him as the means to ends He never came to serve.

The Power of Christ’s Word

Mark tells the story with a fisherman's economy, and the order of his sentences repays attention. When the disciples woke Him with their reproach, "Master, carest thou not that we perish?", Jesus "arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm." (Mark 4:38–39) Only then did He turn to the men: "Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith?" (Mark 4:40) The storm had never disturbed Him. The boat was shaken and about to be sunk, and the One asleep in it was unperturbed, because the measure of a trial is not the violence of the wind but the strength of the One to whom the wind is subject.

Most commentary settles on the faithlessness of the disciples, and their faithlessness is real, but the order of the narrative points to the character of Jesus. He does not rebuke us first and help us afterwards; He rises and deals with what threatens us, and then He deals with us. Many believers carry an image of a God who must first be satisfied with the quality of their trust before He will stretch out His hand against what is crushing them; the boat on Galilee overturns that image. The rebuke comes, but it comes after the rescue, and it comes from One who has just proved that His word is stronger than any external force that can rise against a man.

This is why the prophet's command can be spoken without qualification: "Say ye to the righteous, that it shall be well with him: for they shall eat the fruit of their doings." (Isaiah 3:10) There is no pain that lasts for ever and no circumstance that is eternal; however vicious a trial may be, it belongs to time, and time ends. Trust means that we stop measuring our tribulation against our own strength, which is precisely the strength the storm has already overwhelmed, and measure it instead against the strong and mighty God. I cannot know which chapter of his life a reader has open as he reads these lines. I know that the word which stilled the sea is more powerful than the most powerful thing in this world, and that our task is to learn to trust that word, to cleave to it, and to abide in it.

Mystery Babylon's Vocabulary in the House of God

Much of contemporary Christian teaching lays an unnecessary emphasis on the external and material welfare of the believer. There is nothing wrong with a believer being well or having enough; the error lies in allowing that emphasis to sit on top of the internal transformation of the Christian until the transformation is buried beneath it, and it is compounded by a circular argument: the needy are told that they must be well and they must be rich, and when they are not, their lack is taken as evidence of a defect in their faith, which is then offered as the explanation of their lack. This is Babylonian language, and I use the word with care.

The rich young ruler shows why. He came running to Jesus, knelt, and asked, "Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" (Mark 10:17) He had amassed everything the world could offer, and the one thing he lacked was the one thing he most needed. Jesus directed him to the commandments, and he answered that he had observed them all from his youth. Then comes one of the most tender sentences in the Gospels: "Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me." (Mark 10:21) The command was given in love, and the young man heard it as loss: "he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions." (Mark 10:22)

Our Lord then gave the image no gospel of prosperity has ever managed to digest: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." (Mark 10:25) The difficulty lies in what entry into the kingdom requires, which is a circumcision of the heart from the things that hold it. God is not against possession; He is against our passion for possession and our enslavement to what we possess. The pattern He employs is fixed: a man must first inherit eternal life, and then walk the path by which he comes to possess it, and that path demands a disposition that abandons everything for the kingdom. This is why our Lord described the way as hard: "strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." (Matthew 7:14) A gospel of material emphasis cannot be the gospel of Christ, because it reverses the order Christ Himself established.

There is a second fault in this preaching, which is its vocabulary. It borrows the language of Babylon to motivate God's people towards things God never commanded them to pursue. John saw Babylon in the visions of Patmos: a woman who sits upon many waters and rides the beast from whom she draws her power, bearing on her forehead the name "MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH." (Revelation 17:5) And he heard a voice concerning her: "Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins." (Revelation 18:4) The command is addressed not to pagans but to my people, and its very existence tells us that many of God's people live, function, and prosper within the system of Babylon without noticing that they are there.

The coming of the kingdom is an invitation to leave that system, a satanically ruled order of governance and conduct within the earth. The two orders cannot be held together. A man will love the one and hate the other, hold to the one and despise the other, for "Ye cannot serve God and mammon." (Matthew 6:24) The heart must pursue God, be loyal to God, and love God above all things, material possessions among them.

Christianity, then, is not a religion for those who aspire to accumulate. It is a baptism into the mystery of God, which He kept hidden from the foundation of the world. Paul understood his apostleship in these terms: grace was given him "that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ; And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God." (Ephesians 3:8–9) The Christian's journey is a journey into the depths of the knowledge of God, a baptism into the mysteries by which man inherits eternal life and comes to be among those who are "partakers of the divine nature." (2 Peter 1:4) To trade that journey for a list of material outcomes is to trample on the work of the incarnation, and the believer must never hold that work in low regard.

What God Is and Who God Is

By the incarnation I mean God taking flesh. For several months I have laboured to give the people of God an understanding of God Himself, because the incarnation cannot be understood until we know who it is that became incarnate, and that question requires a distinction. God is both a what and a who.

When we ask what God is, we are speaking of His essence, His nature. God is the uncaused cause of all things. He is ungenerated and uncreated, and everything else that exists is contingent upon Him. Only God is uncontingent. Every other being, however celestial its dwelling, however rich its nature, however great its power or strength, depends for its existence on the uncaused cause, who is God. The highest archangel and the smallest sparrow stand on the same side of that line.

When we ask who God is, we are speaking of His hypostasis, the term the Church uses for a divine Person. The Father is who God is. The Son is who God is. The Holy Spirit is who God is. The three share the one essence that makes God what He is, and they are distinct in who they are. Theology therefore states the matter in a formula: God is one what and three who. The Father is not the Son; the Son is not the Spirit; the Spirit is not the Father; and each is God. When we say that we worship one God, we mean precisely that, because there is only one uncaused and uncreated essence. The who is the mystery of the Godhead, and it is one of the three who became incarnate.

The Scriptures name Him. "He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." (John 3:18) No human mind can comprehend how the Son is begotten of the Father eternally and is yet uncreated, sharing the very essence of the One who begets Him. It is a mystery of mysteries, and it forbids us to turn His begetting into creation. Heretical movements across the centuries have made exactly that move, and some Protestants hold the view today. It is a dangerous error. If a man does not believe in the Trinity he cannot be saved, and he cannot be called a Christian.

Our Lord fixed the confession of the Church in His final commission: "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." (Matthew 28:19) He did not say in the names, as though to many gods. He said in the name. Three distinct Persons share one common name, and if they share one name, all three are God. Christianity is a Trinitarian faith: one God in three Persons. These Persons are not modes of expression, as though the one God appeared in different costumes at different times. They are the way God has chosen to reveal Himself and to exist within His universe. How God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and yet one God lies beyond the grasp of any created being; it is God's reality, and the creature can only receive it or refuse it.

It is this only begotten Son who calls us into the adoption of sons, so that we might inherit, embrace, and truly possess all that His incarnation accomplished.

Prayer as the Confession of a Creature

Last week I set out the doctrine of divine intercession: what intercession is, what its nature is, and why it belongs to God. Before taking that doctrine further, I want to establish the posture from which all intercession is needed, and that posture is prayer.

Luke introduces the parable of the widow and the unjust judge by stating its purpose: "And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint." (Luke 18:1) Prayer belongs within the nature of man. It is part of his design, not an activity attached from outside by religious habit. Man was created for communion with God, and prayer is natural to him because of the specification of his creation. That is why our Lord says ought always: the obligation follows the design.

The parable itself is simple. "There was in a city a judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man: And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary." (Luke 18:2–3) She went to the judge because the remedy she needed could be granted only by him. Had she been able to obtain it herself, she would not have spent her days wearying a magistrate who neither feared God nor regarded man; her persistence is the measure of her helplessness. Prayer, then, is a posture of the soul: a call of the soul, an invocation of God by the soul, for what the soul cannot attain on its own. If the soul could attain it, there would be no need for prayer.

Our Lord's choice of a widow carries its own meaning. A widow is a woman bereft of her husband, which is to say that she has lost her support. The husband was the one into whose care she had been given; he was responsible for her, supported her, and was her head. Without all of that, she went to a judge for justice. In the parable she is a particular person, but she stands for something larger than herself; the person in the story portrays the nature of man. Man, like the widow, is marked by deficiency. He prays because he is limited, because he is constrained by circumstances he did not choose and cannot overturn, and because he needs a greater authority than his own to change the conditions of his life. At bottom, prayer is an endeavour to bring the judicial power of God to bear upon our lives.

The unjust judge sharpens the point by contrast. Our Lord sets him there to show the strength of the widow's petition, and to set an unwilling judge who does not fear God against God, who is willing. If persistent asking can prevail with the one, it will prevail far more with the other, and the parable closes with exactly that promise: "And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily." (Luke 18:7–8)

Beneath the parable lies the architecture of prayer itself, and that architecture is contingency. If you are a creature and you have a Creator, you owe a debt to your Creator, and there will never be a moment when you can offer God something that does not already belong to Him. God alone is uncontingent; everything else depends on another for existence and livelihood. It follows that there will never be a time when we do not need God, since the only way to stop needing Him would be to become uncreated and uncaused, and a creature cannot become its Creator. We are eternally contingent and eternally dependent. Prayer is the recognition of that dependency, the creature confessing before the Creator what it is.

This is also why prayer rests upon God's initiative rather than ours. Our Lord said, "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you." (John 15:16) We ask because He chose us first, and He chose us so that He might give, and so that the Father might be glorified in prayer that bears fruit.

The Intercession of the Godhead

Prayer reveals one deficiency; intercession reveals a deeper one. When a man goes before a judge, he needs advocacy and representation. He may try to represent himself, but he will be limited by his ignorance of the law from which he seeks relief. And man's greatest deficiency is found in prayer itself. He ought always to pray, and yet there are moments when he does not know how.

Intercession is divine in its nature, because only God can truly intercede for man. The New Testament uses two words for it. The first, entynchanō, describes the ministry of Christ as High Priest of God, "made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec." (Hebrews 6:20) The second, hyperentynchanō, describes the ministry the Holy Spirit carries out for the saints. The object of the Spirit's intercession is the saints, and so the Spirit is a member of the intercessory ministry of the Godhead on behalf of man.

Scripture gives each ministry its own reason. Christ intercedes in order to save: "Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them." (Hebrews 7:25) The Spirit intercedes because we are ignorant: "for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered." (Romans 8:26) The first text tells us that man cannot save himself; the second tells us that man cannot even pray rightly by himself. Between them they describe the whole poverty of the creature and the whole provision of God.

That is the theological foundation of divine intercession. Intercession exists because there is a breach. There is sin, and there is something in the justice of God that must be satisfied, and a creature who is both guilty and ignorant of how to plead cannot cross the breach by himself. His advocate must be one who can stand on both sides of it. To see how that breach was opened, we must go back to the garden.

The Breach in the Garden

"Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" (Genesis 3:1)

The serpent's subtlety is the first thing Scripture tells us about him: crafty, prudent, more cunning than any other creature. The second thing is revealed by his question, because God had never said what the serpent implied. God had said that of every tree of the garden man might freely eat, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, "for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." (Genesis 2:17) The serpent generalised because he was himself investigating and unsure of his ground. Satan is not omniscient, and his question betrays it. He compensates for his lack of knowledge with craftiness, and his craft lies in drawing out from his victim the very information he will then turn against her.

The woman supplied it. "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." (Genesis 3:2–3) Her answer tells us that the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil stood at the centre of the garden, surrounded by the other trees. It also tells us that she understood the consequence: lest ye die. Here is justice in its plainest form, a commandment with its penalty attached.

Then the serpent contradicted God outright. "Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:4–5) God had said, Ye shall die. The serpent said, Ye shall not surely die. He brought a word that opposed the word of God, and he accused God of concealing the truth.

He brought it, moreover, to the woman and not to the man. Adam had received the commandment directly from God; the woman had received it through Adam, as a third party. Satan always aims at the weakest link in the chain, and here the weakest link was the one furthest from the original word. Against her he directed his deceit and his plan to divide, and it was enough.

Until that hour, mankind, in the icon of Adam and Eve, had lived in communion with God. There was no breach, because they lived according to the commandment. God had already declared what disobedience would bring: death, which meant cessation and severance from God. It meant introducing into the garden something alien, an incompatibility between man and the God who had made him. Death is nonexistent in God; God cannot die. As long as man kept the commandment, his life carried no expiry. By eating, he would bring into his life time, temporality, and the cutting short of life, a foreign intrusion into the plan of God and into the nature of one made in the image of God and after His likeness.

This is the dilemma of mankind, and it has two halves. First, man did not make himself alive; he was made alive. His life was received, not possessed. Second, when he was put to death by his disobedience, he could not summon life back, because life had never been his to command. Man therefore became a slave in limbo: dead in his severance from God, and helpless to restore himself, since the life he had lost was a life he had only ever been given. A creature in that condition cannot be his own remedy. The breach caused by disobedience requires an intercessor.

The Seed of the Woman

After the fall God pronounced judgment on Adam, on the woman, and on the serpent. Eve had been beguiled; Adam had disobeyed; and the serpent had sinned by deception. God reserved a particular judgment for the serpent, because the serpent had gravely disrupted the destiny of man. Had he not beguiled the woman, there would have been no external force to disturb their life in the garden; his influence from without corrupted their state within and ensured man's alienation from God.

"And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go." (Genesis 3:14) God first addresses the physical creature, the beast itself, though we know that the serpent was also Satan, "that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan." (Revelation 12:9) Satan used the form of a real creature, and God cursed that creature. Upon thy belly shalt thou go implies that it once had legs, and God altered its anatomy. Look at the lizards and the crocodiles, which have legs and yet crawl; the snake is the lowest of them. Of all the creatures God made, this is the one He cursed, because Satan had inhabited it. There is more to be said about this creature, and I will save it for another occasion.

Then God moves beyond the material creature and addresses the entity behind it. "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." (Genesis 3:15) At once there is a difficulty in the words, and the difficulty is deliberate. Women do not produce seed; it is the man who produces seed. Yet God speaks of the woman's seed. He is speaking mysteriously and prophetically, laying down a divine structure through which the head of the serpent will be crushed. "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God" (Hebrews 11:3), and in Genesis 3:15 God begins to frame the age of man's redemption. He declares that it will come through the seed of a woman and not through the seed of a man: a woman will conceive outside the realm of ordinary conception, and her child's birth will fall outside every human norm.

We know that the seed of the woman is Christ Jesus, because prophecy tells us that a virgin will bear the Son of God. "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." (Isaiah 7:14) Two chapters later Isaiah tells us who this child is: "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace." (Isaiah 9:6) A child will be born, and His name will be called the mighty God, El Gibbor. No one else born of woman has borne that name, and it is not a title conferred as an honour; it is who He is. Of the increase of His government and peace, Isaiah adds, there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, from henceforth even for ever (Isaiah 9:7). His will be a virginal and divine conception, outside the ordinary means of human generation, in fulfilment of the promise spoken in Genesis.

The seed of the serpent needs identifying with equal care. In my earlier thinking I took it to refer to the antichrist. That is true as far as it goes, but Christ came before the antichrist, and Christ did the crushing first. The offspring of the serpent is sin and death. Christ would crush the death to which man had succumbed, and crush the sin to which man had become beholden. The bruising of the heel is His death on the cross, and He did not remain dead for long. God Himself, as a man, would "taste death for every man" (Hebrews 2:9), and in tasting it would destroy it, "that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil." (Hebrews 2:14)

Here we see the intercessory work of God set in motion, and it is accomplished not by man but by God Himself. God was unwilling to let His creature fall into utter destruction and eternal ruin. He took the responsibility and the accountability upon Himself. Man fell, and God said, I will save him. The intercession could not come from man's side, because man owed God what he could not pay, a debt he could not settle by blood or by any other means. So God assumed man's nature in order to undo man's disobedience. The uncaused cause took the nature of the creature He had made, for the sake of that creature's redemption. This is the beauty of salvation and the essence of the gospel, and it is why the incarnation is not an episode in the history of redemption but the hinge on which the whole of it turns.

The Sealed Book and the Lion of Judah

The coming of Christ is set deliberately against the first Adam, and the reason lies in what Adam's sin interrupted. When Adam sinned, the plan of God for mankind was suspended. It could not continue in its fullness for the creation on the earth until man was redeemed, and the remedy took about four thousand years. The Apocalypse shows us that suspension from the vantage point of heaven.

John saw in the right hand of Him that sat on the throne "a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals" (Revelation 5:1), and heard a strong angel proclaim, "Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?" (Revelation 5:2) The answer was silence: "And no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon." (Revelation 5:3) The book represents the plan of God for the earth, and it lay closed in the hand of God. The wording repays close attention. John does not say that no angel was found worthy. He says that no man was found worthy. This was a book only a man could open, because it concerned the destiny of man: the life of humankind and the destiny of the earth entrusted to him.

So John wept, and the elder's answer is the gospel in a single sentence: "Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof." (Revelation 5:5) The book remained closed until Christ prevailed, and He prevailed as a man, in the humanity He had taken from the virgin.

From the fifth chapter to the twenty second, John is describing the contents of the opened book. The judgments are necessary because the creation must be purged, but they are not the end. The end is God coming down to tabernacle among men: "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God." (Revelation 21:3) That is what God intended in Genesis, and in the twenty second chapter we see the garden again: a pure river of water of life, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb, and on either side of the river "was there the tree of life." (Revelation 22:2) The tree that man lost in Genesis stands again in the last chapter of the Bible.

God could not move into the final mode of His purposes until He had dealt with the sin and death introduced into the world. That is why "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (John 3:16) It is why "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." (John 1:14) To as many as received Him "gave he power to become the sons of God" (John 1:12), born not of blood nor of the will of man, but of God; "For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." (John 1:17) He is the One of whom the prophets prophesied, the One of whom God first spoke to the serpent, and the One the serpent had been waiting for ever since.

The Wisdom the Princes of this Word Did Not Know

When the LORD asked Satan where he had come from, he answered, "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it." (Job 1:7) Through all those ages of wandering he was searching for one figure: the child who would be born of a virgin, a woman who had not known a man. He searched in fear, waiting for the day his fate would be sealed, and he did not know the way it would come. God had told him only that his head would be crushed.

Then he saw the Son of God come to the Jordan. He watched the heavens open and the Spirit descend, and he heard the Father's voice: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." (Matthew 3:17) At once "was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil." (Matthew 4:1) Satan believed temptation would stop Him. When temptation failed, he turned to conspiracy, using men, the Pharisees and the machinery of the Roman Empire, to put Him to death.

He did not understand what he was doing, because Christ is a mystery, the hidden wisdom God kept from the ages for our glory. Paul says so directly: "But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory." (1 Corinthians 2:7–8) Had they known, they would have moved heaven and hell to prevent it. But the wisdom of God was hidden and wrapped in foolishness, and so, looking at the nailed Christ, they thought they had Him at last. God knew what they did not: "the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God." (1 Corinthians 1:18) Only when He said "It is finished" and "gave up the ghost" (John 19:30) did they understand what they had done.

The cross was the final blow to the satanic system, to the world order and to its prince. Christ blotted out "the handwriting of ordinances that was against us," nailing it to His cross, and "having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it." (Colossians 2:14–15) When His hands and feet were nailed to the wood, the commandment written against us was nailed there with them, and so were the principalities and powers that had worked through man's weakness, through sin, and through death.

The angel of the LORD said to Gideon, "thou shalt smite the Midianites as one man." (Judges 6:16) Jesus, as one man, did the same. He swallowed up death, swallowed up sin, and annulled the work of the first Adam. By the Spirit He went down to the regions of the dead, "By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison." (1 Peter 3:19) And Matthew records what many readers of the Gospel pass over: "the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection." (Matthew 27:52–53) When He rose, they rose with Him as the firstfruits of the resurrection. Abraham is in heaven; David is in heaven. They were carried from Abraham's bosom to heaven because the One who carries the redeemed came for them: Jesus, the Son of Mary, the Son of God, the eternal LogosLogosThe eternal Word of God, through whom all things were made, who became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1–14)., our Saviour.

The apostles call Him God without hesitation. Paul writes to Titus of "the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13), and Peter writes of "the righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ." (2 Peter 1:1) There is none like Him in all the earth: the incarnate God, the Uncreated who came and became part of His creation so that He might restore us to the Father and to the Godhead. In Him we have life, and a better hope than all the patriarchs of old possessed. He is the fulfilment of the law, the fulfilment of the psalms, and the fulfilment of the prophets.

The Fountain and the Table

Christ is the second Adam. "The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit." (1 Corinthians 15:45) He is the fountain from which all creation now receives its life, and every thirsty soul must find it. He told the woman of Samaria that whoever drinks of the water He gives "shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." (John 4:14) And to Martha, at the tomb of her brother, He said, "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." (John 11:25–26) The life He offers is not temporal. It is eternal, and it is exactly the life the first Adam lost and could not recover.

The baptism He calls us into is a baptism into His mysteries, into the contemplation of God and of the works of God, and there our participation and our life are found. The soul is fragmented, and only Christ can unify it, cure it, and heal it. This is the good news He proclaimed in the synagogue at Nazareth: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised." (Luke 4:18) To the poor, the brokenhearted, and all imprisoned by sin, oppression, and every form of evil, it announces that the deliverer has come. Paul's whole ministry was directed to this end, "that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus." (Colossians 1:28) Only Christ is the perfection of the human race.

So the believer is to "lay hold on eternal life" (1 Timothy 6:12), on what is eternal rather than what is temporal. This is why the apostles took vows of chastity, of poverty, and of holiness. They could renounce the world and reject it because they loved their Lord more than they loved life itself, and they were willing to die as martyrs, as witnesses to His person and to His faith. Their renunciation was not a performance of austerity; it was the natural conduct of men who had seen what the incarnation accomplished and wanted nothing less.

This brings me back to the thesis with which I began. If God became man to save, our aspiration is to be saved. If He became man to restore the soul, our aspiration is to have our souls fully restored. If He came not only to reclaim and redeem but to renew man's participation in the divine nature, then that participation is our aspiration. We must want everything the Godhead accomplished through the sending and the incarnation of the Son. From the beginning of time man has amassed riches, prospered, and gathered every form of material blessing. What he did not have, and could not have until God became incarnate, was eternal life, for all were subject to death and all were slaves of sin. "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil." (1 John 3:8) That is the Christian faith; there is no other.

The Church receives this at the Lord's table. There was no sacrifice that could satisfy the demands of divine justice, and so the Father sent His only begotten Son, Son by nature, to take flesh and become the offering acceptable to Him, so that the whole punishment of sin, and of the treason of the first Adam, might be laid on Him. "But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed." (Isaiah 53:5) Our High Priest did not fail. In the sacrament of the Eucharist we show forth what He did, "For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come." (1 Corinthians 11:26) Together, as the sons and daughters of God, we show the Lord's death. We portray it in our souls, in our surroundings, and in the Spirit, and the body given for our healing and the blood shed for our redemption are set forth before us.

On the night He was betrayed, He took the bread, blessed it, and said, "This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me." (Luke 22:19) We ask the Holy Spirit to consecrate the bread as the body of Christ, for in eating that flesh our healing proceeds and our wholeness is gathered out of the fragmentation of our being. In the same manner He took the cup and said, "Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." (Matthew 26:27–28) Our sins are remitted, and the new covenant is conferred upon us. The cup of blessing is "the communion of the blood of Christ," and the bread we break is "the communion of the body of Christ" (1 Corinthians 10:16), and in that communion eternal life is found. The Holy Eucharist changes us inwardly. It transforms us as we participate and commune, and the blessings that belong to it are conferred on every life that receives it in faith.

Conclusion: The Book Is Open

The argument has travelled from a boat on Galilee to a table in the Church, and it has been a single argument throughout. The Christ who spoke to the storm before He spoke to His disciples is the God who, when man fell, did not wait for man to deserve rescue. Man is contingent, and prayer is his confession of it, the widow's posture before the only judge who can grant relief. Intercession is God's answer: the Son pleads that man may be saved to the uttermost, and the Spirit pleads within him because he does not know how to pray. The incarnation is the form that answer took: the seed of the woman, the mighty God born as a child, the only Man found worthy to open the book of human destiny, the Lion who prevailed by being slain.

The implications are pastoral, and they cut in two directions. They are a warning to every pulpit that has taught the people of God to measure grace by possessions, because such teaching has borrowed the vocabulary of Babylon and placed it on Christian lips. They are also a consolation to every believer in the storm, who need not earn the attention of a God who deals with the threat before He deals with the frightened, nor perfect his own prayers when the Spirit prays within him. And there is an eschatological horizon: the book that lay sealed is now open, the purging of the creation is under way, and the end of it is the tabernacle of God with men and the tree of life by the river.

My conviction, then, is the one with which I began, now carrying the weight of the whole argument: the aim of the Christian life is to lay hold of, fully and in actual possession, what the incarnation of God accomplished. Salvation, the restoration of the soul, redemption, and renewed participation in the divine nature are the inheritance the Son came down to secure, and nothing less is worth wanting. The riches of Christ are unsearchable, and a whole lifetime spent searching them out is a lifetime rightly spent.