The manger: A symbol of justice and love
Part 2 Christmas: the Eternality and Justice of God
This past month I had the difficult responsibility of helping a family through a very strenuous time. Their teenage daughter had encountered someone online who had been grooming her for inappropriate photos and information. The father wanted to kill the perpetrator, the mother wanted to send him to jail for life, and both wanted to provide the best care for their daughter. In this particular instance the parents had learned to the situation early enough that while things had progressed beyond appropriate there was little legal action that could be taken against the perpetrator. The mother made the comment, “I can’t believe how bad things in this world have become. There is no justice for our children.” In that moment her statement hung in the air with a silent chill. For days my heart broke with the family as I sympathized with deep feelings of injustice.
Justice is a difficult concept for our culture. For most Americans getting justice means receiving fair treatment, and having wrongs righted. Often justice is delegated to the legal system whose responsibility is to protect the innocent and ensure impartial judgments for all sides of a situation. If you have worked with the legal system or watched enough legal television dramas, you are aware that the correct outcome of a case is not always the conclusion. There are many situations where evil appears to win and sometimes having the best lawyer who can perform the best show is more important than being right. But why does it matter so much to us that the right or correct outcome should take place.
If there is no God, then there can be no objective morality and there is no true right and wrong. Yet I have yet to encounter someone who truly lives consistently with this belief. Instead, we observe that even in children there is a deep sense of fairness and desire for “right” behavior. When a child cuts in line for the drinking fountain at school, another child with quickly say, “Stop, that’s not right!” When a preschooler takes the sucker away from another student who is weaker than they are, someone will complain, “That’s not fair.” The Biblical worldview argues that humans are made in God's image and therefore we possess innate moral compass reflects His character. One of the attributes of God that we posses as image bearers is justice.
Biblically, justice is a term used to describe what is right or “as it should be.” Justice is one of God’s attributes and is part of His holiness. Justice and righteousness are often used synonymously in the Bible. When speaking of God's attribute of justice, we are acknowledging that God upholds perfect fairness. There are no sins overlooked and no evil unaccounted for. God as perfect judge, holds everyone accountable, punishes evil, and rewards good as part of the outworking of God’s perfect character. This is all essential to speak correctly and understand the magnitude of Christmas. What was so important and crucial that God himself had to leave Heaven and become incarnate? The answer is us.
I regularly hear an argument made against God’s loving nature stated this way: “How can a loving God send someone to Hell?” It is a poorly thought-out critique of God because love is not the only attribute that is God’s being. God is also a God of holiness and justice. My response is usually that God doesn’t send anyone to Hell, he simply does not force anyone to be in Heaven with him. If the person is willing to listen and engage further in the conversation I often state, “The real question is how could a just and righteous God let any of us evil creatures into Heaven?” If God is holy, righteous and just, which scripture and logic support as three basic attributes for God, then how could he abide any imperfection in his presence. The response is that God could not. Where sin abides the Spirit of God cannot. Therefore, either no human can ever enter into the presence of God which is Heaven, or humans must be purified from the inside out. A total transformation of the individual must transpire so that the sinner is justified and made holy. This is the foundational understanding of why Jesus' sacrifice was necessary to satisfy divine justice. Through the atonement of Christ God’s attribute of love and justice was balanced upon each side of the cross beam Jesus hung upon. The cross ensures moral order, and promises ultimate vindication for the oppressed, making His actions meaningful.
Modern culture does not like to talk about God’s justice and righteousness. In our postmodern minds we resist the idea that there are absolutes, moral laws, and objective standards by which all humanity is measured. God is most commonly viewed as a senile grandfather who just wants all his children to be happy so he does not care about their behavior. But this is not the Biblical God. God does not age, does not change, does not become anything, so God cannot become senile. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. But God is not on trial in this document, humanity is on the dock.
We are rebellious, sinful creatures. Sin is part of our identity, not taught. A parent does not have to teach a two-year-old child to be selfish. A parent does have to teach their children to share and not beat their infant brother and sister. There is something broken deep within us and when we truly examine the depths of our soul it is not purity that we discover but a nature that rebels against the authority and holiness of God. Logically if Heaven is filled with being that are in rebellion against God, then it will not be Heaven, but another type of Hell on Earth. God’s solution was not to abandon humanity or to destroy us all and start over. God’s solution was to redeem and sanctify those who would accept the gift of grace and eternal salvation. To accomplish this God became incarnate and became the sacrifice for our sins. This is why Jesus came to earth. This is why the Gospel of Matthew records within the birth announcement the purpose of the incarnation:
“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,” (Matthew 1:21).
From the beginning of time and then from the very moment of miraculous conception, the mission of Jesus was a rescue operation. A mission only God himself could accomplish. The redemption mission meant that God must become incarnate. As I stated in part one of this article, when we sin against an eternal being, we create an eternal debt against the eternal being. For the sacrifice of atonement to be able to reconcile the debt of sin we owed against an eternal being, the sacrifice would have to be an eternal being. From logic we know there can only be one eternal being, therefore, God himself must become the sacrifice if God is just and righteous. This act of God becoming human is called the incarnation. To speak correctly of the Incarnation, we should communicate that at Jesus’ birth the Second Person of the Trinity added humanity to divinity. This took place so that Jesus could take upon himself our sins and in return we receive the gift of grace which is able to transform our hearts and make us holy before God. Throughout the gospels we see both the incarnation language and the sacrificial language united to describe the person and mission of Jesus. In the most famous Biblical passage of all, we see the inseparability of the incarnation and the atonement work:
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16 NKJV).
Here I must confess I still love the New King James interpretation of the Greek, still use of the word “begotten” for the Greek word (Monogenēs) which means: “single of its kind, only.” Jesus was not birthed by traditional sexual relations, nor was he created. Jesus was begotten as the second person of the trinity that eternally existed as part of the God head, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In an incredible act of love and sacrifice God invented Christmas by becoming incarnate. This is why the Gospel of John describes the event stating, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth,” (John 1:14 ESV). Peterson’s paraphrase is my favorite description of the incarnation, “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish.” (John 1:14 Message). The God of justice, acted out of his attribute of love and instead of keeping his distance, he moved into the neighborhood. But what God moved in? From inception the church has been fighting heresies that claimed Jesus was not fully God.
Arianism believed that Jesus was a lesser created being. This is also true of modern Day church of Latter-Day Saints, (Mormons and also true of Jehovah’s Witness). Adoptionism claimed that Jesus became divine later in life once he learned that he was God. Ebionitism claimed that Jesus was a mere man/prophet which is what those who practice Islam believe. Finally, Gnosticism taught that Jesus was a divine revealer of secret knowledge, which is believed by many who try to harmonize Jesus with Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. But in order for the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross to be efficacious Jesus had to be fully God. This is why the Apostle Paul wrote to the church of Colossae describing Jesus, as “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation,” (Colossians 1:15).
The Greek word used for invisible (aoratos) means literally unseen. God, the First Person of the Trinity, is not made of material and is not physical. This is what makes the incarnation so amazing. That God in the invisible became visible in the flesh.
The Greek word used for image is, (eikōn) which means “an image, figure, or likeness.”
Christ alone is the one supremely who makes the invisible God visible. Christ is the manifestation of all that is the unseen God made physical in this world. In 1Corinthians 15:49 and 2 Corinthians 4:4 Paul used the term, (eikōn) for the resurrected and exalted body that we shall share in through Christ. The new imperishable, physical body that we shall inherit in the Kingdom of God is made possible because the last Adam gave himself as an atonement for our sins. The eternal became flesh to die for us in order to present the bride of Christ as spotless before the throne of grace. The resurrection was the supreme expression of the image of God and the event which validated Jesus’ clam to be God. Where the first Adam failed to be truly human Jesus in the image of God gave us the example of what it means to be truly human. God created Adam and Eve in his image, Genesis 1:26-27, but they failed to live into their created identity. From dust Adam was made and from the side of Adam eve was made. Jesus was not made. Jesus was not created but is the eternal, invisible God in the flesh. Jesus is not a similar version of God but is God in the incarnation.
To be clear Adam was made in the image of God, while Jesus existed in the form of God. Adam, the first human sought to become like God though he was already made in the image of God (Genesis 3:4-5). In contrast Jesus who is the exact image of God sought to humble himself and refused the privileges of being God in human form as seen in Philippians 2:6-8. Adam: grasped at a dignity to which he had no right while Christ renounced a status to which he had every right. The Apostle Paul wrote about his in his letter to the church of Philippi, quoting one of the oldest creeds of the church:
“[Jesus] Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:6-8).
Jesus is not another God. Jesus is not a replica of God. Jesus is God. Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity, the complete form of God. In the manager we see the addition the form of humanity to divinity to become something totally unique and unthought of. The everlasting God wrapped himself in the temporary to rescue us from sin. Here we should pause in amazement at the length and depth of God’s love for us. That God would leave all the comforts and glory of heaven and lower himself to a human and then die for our sins. What love the Father has lavished upon us. It is from this perspective that claiming there is any other way to obtain salvation is not only folly but to ignore the sacrifice of Jesus and the very love of God. The birth of Jesus, celebrated at Christmas is a unique event when the one being who created all things and is outside of all things, while sustaining all things, took upon himself the weakness and vileness of all things to save those who want rescued from sin. Laying in the feeding trough we find God’s infinite love and infinite justice both being satisfied in the mystery of the incarnation.
While earthly justice may be delayed and there are imperfections in our courts of law, there are no imperfections in God’s court. God is holy, only the holy shall abide with God, and this is what will be the conversation point of the third installment of this article.
This past month I had the difficult responsibility of helping a family through a very strenuous time. Their teenage daughter had encountered someone online who had been grooming her for inappropriate photos and information. The father wanted to kill the perpetrator, the mother wanted to send him to jail for life, and both wanted to provide the best care for their daughter. In this particular instance the parents had learned to the situation early enough that while things had progressed beyond appropriate there was little legal action that could be taken against the perpetrator. The mother made the comment, “I can’t believe how bad things in this world have become. There is no justice for our children.” In that moment her statement hung in the air with a silent chill. For days my heart broke with the family as I sympathized with deep feelings of injustice.
Justice is a difficult concept for our culture. For most Americans getting justice means receiving fair treatment, and having wrongs righted. Often justice is delegated to the legal system whose responsibility is to protect the innocent and ensure impartial judgments for all sides of a situation. If you have worked with the legal system or watched enough legal television dramas, you are aware that the correct outcome of a case is not always the conclusion. There are many situations where evil appears to win and sometimes having the best lawyer who can perform the best show is more important than being right. But why does it matter so much to us that the right or correct outcome should take place.
If there is no God, then there can be no objective morality and there is no true right and wrong. Yet I have yet to encounter someone who truly lives consistently with this belief. Instead, we observe that even in children there is a deep sense of fairness and desire for “right” behavior. When a child cuts in line for the drinking fountain at school, another child with quickly say, “Stop, that’s not right!” When a preschooler takes the sucker away from another student who is weaker than they are, someone will complain, “That’s not fair.” The Biblical worldview argues that humans are made in God's image and therefore we possess innate moral compass reflects His character. One of the attributes of God that we posses as image bearers is justice.
Biblically, justice is a term used to describe what is right or “as it should be.” Justice is one of God’s attributes and is part of His holiness. Justice and righteousness are often used synonymously in the Bible. When speaking of God's attribute of justice, we are acknowledging that God upholds perfect fairness. There are no sins overlooked and no evil unaccounted for. God as perfect judge, holds everyone accountable, punishes evil, and rewards good as part of the outworking of God’s perfect character. This is all essential to speak correctly and understand the magnitude of Christmas. What was so important and crucial that God himself had to leave Heaven and become incarnate? The answer is us.
I regularly hear an argument made against God’s loving nature stated this way: “How can a loving God send someone to Hell?” It is a poorly thought-out critique of God because love is not the only attribute that is God’s being. God is also a God of holiness and justice. My response is usually that God doesn’t send anyone to Hell, he simply does not force anyone to be in Heaven with him. If the person is willing to listen and engage further in the conversation I often state, “The real question is how could a just and righteous God let any of us evil creatures into Heaven?” If God is holy, righteous and just, which scripture and logic support as three basic attributes for God, then how could he abide any imperfection in his presence. The response is that God could not. Where sin abides the Spirit of God cannot. Therefore, either no human can ever enter into the presence of God which is Heaven, or humans must be purified from the inside out. A total transformation of the individual must transpire so that the sinner is justified and made holy. This is the foundational understanding of why Jesus' sacrifice was necessary to satisfy divine justice. Through the atonement of Christ God’s attribute of love and justice was balanced upon each side of the cross beam Jesus hung upon. The cross ensures moral order, and promises ultimate vindication for the oppressed, making His actions meaningful.
Modern culture does not like to talk about God’s justice and righteousness. In our postmodern minds we resist the idea that there are absolutes, moral laws, and objective standards by which all humanity is measured. God is most commonly viewed as a senile grandfather who just wants all his children to be happy so he does not care about their behavior. But this is not the Biblical God. God does not age, does not change, does not become anything, so God cannot become senile. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. But God is not on trial in this document, humanity is on the dock.
We are rebellious, sinful creatures. Sin is part of our identity, not taught. A parent does not have to teach a two-year-old child to be selfish. A parent does have to teach their children to share and not beat their infant brother and sister. There is something broken deep within us and when we truly examine the depths of our soul it is not purity that we discover but a nature that rebels against the authority and holiness of God. Logically if Heaven is filled with being that are in rebellion against God, then it will not be Heaven, but another type of Hell on Earth. God’s solution was not to abandon humanity or to destroy us all and start over. God’s solution was to redeem and sanctify those who would accept the gift of grace and eternal salvation. To accomplish this God became incarnate and became the sacrifice for our sins. This is why Jesus came to earth. This is why the Gospel of Matthew records within the birth announcement the purpose of the incarnation:
“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,” (Matthew 1:21).
From the beginning of time and then from the very moment of miraculous conception, the mission of Jesus was a rescue operation. A mission only God himself could accomplish. The redemption mission meant that God must become incarnate. As I stated in part one of this article, when we sin against an eternal being, we create an eternal debt against the eternal being. For the sacrifice of atonement to be able to reconcile the debt of sin we owed against an eternal being, the sacrifice would have to be an eternal being. From logic we know there can only be one eternal being, therefore, God himself must become the sacrifice if God is just and righteous. This act of God becoming human is called the incarnation. To speak correctly of the Incarnation, we should communicate that at Jesus’ birth the Second Person of the Trinity added humanity to divinity. This took place so that Jesus could take upon himself our sins and in return we receive the gift of grace which is able to transform our hearts and make us holy before God. Throughout the gospels we see both the incarnation language and the sacrificial language united to describe the person and mission of Jesus. In the most famous Biblical passage of all, we see the inseparability of the incarnation and the atonement work:
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16 NKJV).
Here I must confess I still love the New King James interpretation of the Greek, still use of the word “begotten” for the Greek word (Monogenēs) which means: “single of its kind, only.” Jesus was not birthed by traditional sexual relations, nor was he created. Jesus was begotten as the second person of the trinity that eternally existed as part of the God head, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In an incredible act of love and sacrifice God invented Christmas by becoming incarnate. This is why the Gospel of John describes the event stating, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth,” (John 1:14 ESV). Peterson’s paraphrase is my favorite description of the incarnation, “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish.” (John 1:14 Message). The God of justice, acted out of his attribute of love and instead of keeping his distance, he moved into the neighborhood. But what God moved in? From inception the church has been fighting heresies that claimed Jesus was not fully God.
Arianism believed that Jesus was a lesser created being. This is also true of modern Day church of Latter-Day Saints, (Mormons and also true of Jehovah’s Witness). Adoptionism claimed that Jesus became divine later in life once he learned that he was God. Ebionitism claimed that Jesus was a mere man/prophet which is what those who practice Islam believe. Finally, Gnosticism taught that Jesus was a divine revealer of secret knowledge, which is believed by many who try to harmonize Jesus with Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. But in order for the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross to be efficacious Jesus had to be fully God. This is why the Apostle Paul wrote to the church of Colossae describing Jesus, as “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation,” (Colossians 1:15).
The Greek word used for invisible (aoratos) means literally unseen. God, the First Person of the Trinity, is not made of material and is not physical. This is what makes the incarnation so amazing. That God in the invisible became visible in the flesh.
The Greek word used for image is, (eikōn) which means “an image, figure, or likeness.”
Christ alone is the one supremely who makes the invisible God visible. Christ is the manifestation of all that is the unseen God made physical in this world. In 1Corinthians 15:49 and 2 Corinthians 4:4 Paul used the term, (eikōn) for the resurrected and exalted body that we shall share in through Christ. The new imperishable, physical body that we shall inherit in the Kingdom of God is made possible because the last Adam gave himself as an atonement for our sins. The eternal became flesh to die for us in order to present the bride of Christ as spotless before the throne of grace. The resurrection was the supreme expression of the image of God and the event which validated Jesus’ clam to be God. Where the first Adam failed to be truly human Jesus in the image of God gave us the example of what it means to be truly human. God created Adam and Eve in his image, Genesis 1:26-27, but they failed to live into their created identity. From dust Adam was made and from the side of Adam eve was made. Jesus was not made. Jesus was not created but is the eternal, invisible God in the flesh. Jesus is not a similar version of God but is God in the incarnation.
To be clear Adam was made in the image of God, while Jesus existed in the form of God. Adam, the first human sought to become like God though he was already made in the image of God (Genesis 3:4-5). In contrast Jesus who is the exact image of God sought to humble himself and refused the privileges of being God in human form as seen in Philippians 2:6-8. Adam: grasped at a dignity to which he had no right while Christ renounced a status to which he had every right. The Apostle Paul wrote about his in his letter to the church of Philippi, quoting one of the oldest creeds of the church:
“[Jesus] Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:6-8).
Jesus is not another God. Jesus is not a replica of God. Jesus is God. Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity, the complete form of God. In the manager we see the addition the form of humanity to divinity to become something totally unique and unthought of. The everlasting God wrapped himself in the temporary to rescue us from sin. Here we should pause in amazement at the length and depth of God’s love for us. That God would leave all the comforts and glory of heaven and lower himself to a human and then die for our sins. What love the Father has lavished upon us. It is from this perspective that claiming there is any other way to obtain salvation is not only folly but to ignore the sacrifice of Jesus and the very love of God. The birth of Jesus, celebrated at Christmas is a unique event when the one being who created all things and is outside of all things, while sustaining all things, took upon himself the weakness and vileness of all things to save those who want rescued from sin. Laying in the feeding trough we find God’s infinite love and infinite justice both being satisfied in the mystery of the incarnation.
While earthly justice may be delayed and there are imperfections in our courts of law, there are no imperfections in God’s court. God is holy, only the holy shall abide with God, and this is what will be the conversation point of the third installment of this article.
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