Word of Salvation – Vol. 33 No. 08 – February 1988

 

Like His Brothers

 

Sermon by Rev. M. P. Geluk on Heidelberg Catechism Lord’s Day 14

Reading: Luke 1:26-38; Hebrews 2:5-18

Singing: Ps.H.89; BoW.H.100; BoW.H.102; Ps.H. 298.

 

Dear people of God,

The historic Christian faith has some important things to say about the way Jesus Christ came into the world.  We all know how we came into the world.  It is the same way for everybody.  It is true for the famous and for the unknown, for the rich and for the poor, for the powerful and the weak.  It is true also for those who became very important to the world’s great religions, like Mohammed, Ghandhi and the Pope.  All came into the world as a result of their mother being made pregnant by the seed of a man.

I am aware that I have to choose my words very carefully here for nowadays modern man has discovered several ways of making babies.  Yet, every human being is the result of a father and mother being involved somehow and somewhere in the process of human reproduction.  The only exceptions to this are Adam and Eve and Jesus Christ.  Our first parents had no parents themselves.  They were the direct result of God’s creative act.  And of Jesus Christ the Christian church has this to say: “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary.”

The unique entry into the world by Adam and Eve and by Christ, also meant that they had a unique life.  Before the fall into sin ruined everything, Adam and Eve experienced a perfection and wholeness about which we don’t know very much at all.  Christ however, remained sinless all through His life in the world.  But for the rest of mankind, life has been very much characterised by imperfection and death.  With every baby born the beginnings of death are already present.  Everyone hopes for a long and healthy life in peace and security.  But we know that only a few are so fortunate.  Of course, there are times when it is good to be alive.  Things are going well and one can feel on top of the world.  We can think of chapter 3 in the Bible book Ecclesiastes where the preacher wrote about there being a time in life for different things.  He started off by saying that there was a time to be born and a time to die.  A singing group even put the words to a nice tune and people liked it.  It spoke about life in a way that we felt was true.  The preacher in Ecclesiastes 3 mentioned positive and negative things.  For positive things he mentioned: birth, planting, healing, building, laughing, dancing, gathering stones, embracing, searching, keeping, mending, speaking, loving and making peace.  And for negative things he listed: dying, uprooting, killing, tearing down, weeping, mourning, scattering stones, refraining from embrace, giving up, throwing away, tearing, being silent, hating and making war.

But maybe I was all wrong in listing positive and negative things; maybe there are positive and negative things to each activity and to everything in life.  There can be a negative side to being born into a situation of abject poverty, disease, war and outside of marriage.  And maybe there is a positive side to dying when faced with a long, painful process of a terminal illness.  Indeed, there are lots of “maybe’s” to life, aren’t there?  Life is like that, it’s full of uncertainties.  As the saying goes: “you just don’t know when your number comes up!”

Now you would somehow think with regard to life as it is that people would find a great attraction to Adam and Eve and to Christ.  After all, for a while, before sin came, our first parents had those paradise conditions that we all long for.  But strangely enough, many people find it very difficult to accept an historical Adam and Eve, and a fall into sin that really took place in history and which explains the reality of all those things we read about in Ecclesiastes 3 In fact, those who reject the first Adam and the fall into sin, do not really know how to explain the origin of evil, let alone come up with a solution to it.  People are aware, of course, of the presence of good and evil in the world, but they close their eyes and stop their ears when you suggest that God and Satan might have something to do with it.  They would rather say that unilateral disarmament may have some hope.  Passive resistance might be the road to peace.  People can be very serious about this.  Some say: do not try to stop the enemy’s aggression by arming yourself to the teeth.  Active resistance will only cause the enemy to really have a go.  They will want to retaliate and increase their punches.  But if you remain passive, eventually the enemy will become tired of his own brutality.  Moreover they will give up in the end and leave because you could not be provoked into active resistance.

Many believe there is good in every man and somehow you have to find the way to it.  Yet in all this the Bible’s claim is rejected, namely because of the fall into sin there is evil in every man’s heart, and that the force of evil can only be overcome by Christ, the second Adam.  But this is rejected.

Whilst it is strange that a historical Adam and Eve are rejected, it is equally strange that the historical Christ is also rejected as a solution to evil.  The theme of good versus evil is played again and again in books and films, but not often does man turn to Christ as the real victor.  In the world of fiction, heroes and heroines are invented, people with almost super-human qualities.  And on the lighter side of things each of these heroes becomes a super-man, and a super-woman.  In all this the “goodies” overcome the “baddies”. These “good” heroes who overcome tremendous odds give you a feeling of optimism; they put you in a good mood.  Never mind the real life, when it gets too tough out there, then you just return to your dream world.

Many others, of course, are very much aware of the real world around them.  They want to really face up to the hard facts of life.  They know that good does not always win.  So they produce books and films where evil wins.  Instead of optimism, they let pessimism come out on top.  The depravity of life and of man becomes the winner.

But now the Word of God points us away from our world of dreams and make-belief, away from our man-made optimisms and pessimisms, away from famous lives, away from religious leaders, and whoever else, and points us to only one life Jesus Christ!  If any other person suggests a solution to the wrongs in life and that person does not point to Christ, then he is not worth listening to.  People in the world like to stand next to someone whom they think has the answers.

Or they like such a person to come and stand next to them and help them to maintain a balance in life.

Congregation, the only person who can truly fulfil that role is Christ.  Christ Jesus has those supernatural qualities that man is looking for because he knows that ordinary man is weak and open to failure.  Well, Christ has those superhuman qualities, for Christ is God!  But that sinful, weak and imperfect man also needs a fellow-man to stand next to him to understand him, to sympathize with his weaknesses, and to feel for him.  That is, man needs a brother!  Someone as close as that.  Well, Christ is also our brother.  He is also fully man.  He is one Person, but in the one Person of Jesus Christ, we find both God and Man!

When the Christian church confesses its faith in Christ in Lord’s Day 14, it says: see, here is Christ, who is and remains true and eternal God, but who also, through a mysterious work of the Holy Spirit, took to himself a truly human nature.  The doctrine of the virgin birth is the doctrine of the incarnation, the doctrine of God in the flesh.  This is Christ, the eternal Son of God, who became Man, like us His brothers.

The incarnation of the Son of God is a miracle.  Which is to say: we can’t explain how it could happen.  The Bible does not explain the incarnation either.  It simply tells us that a girl by the name of Mary was told by an angel of God that she would conceive and bear a son.  The miracle was really in the way Mary conceived.  The seed of a man was not in any way involved.  Jesus had no human father.  All we can say from the Bible’s account of it is that in some mysterious way the Holy Spirit caused Mary to be pregnant.  From then on Mary’s pregnancy went the normal way and after nine months her child was born.  Her child, who by the fact of being conceived and born, was fully human, was also the Son of God, yes, God in the flesh.  And, the Bible says, Christ grew and became strong in spirit.  When fully mature He began His work of wiping out man’s sins and thus bringing a solution to man’s imperfection and death.

But as indicated earlier, strangely enough many in the world are prepared to look everywhere for some kind of saviour yet they turn away from Christ.  Even some of those who know the Bible’s record about the incarnation seem to cast doubt on the miracle of the virgin birth.  They seem to have more difficulty with this miracle than with any other miracle in which Jesus was involved.  But why would it be easier to accept other miracles around Jesus, yes, even the miracle of His resurrection, and not the virgin birth?  If God raised a dead man from the tomb, can He not also cause a virgin to be pregnant?

In the incarnation God joined man.  And He did it in the belly of a common girl.  Perhaps that’s the problem for some.  Mary may not be sufficiently spectacular to fit the heroic mode in which we would expect God to arrive on earth.  People have of course tried to make Mary very spectacular.  To some she became the Queen of heaven.  She was declared to be without sin, it was assumed that later in life she bodily ascended into heaven.  But the Word of God will have none of it.  Mary was a common girl, with a sinful nature like everyone else.  God simply chose her to be the means by which He became man.  But that’s all she remained, a mother.  Yes, a humble, believing mother who let go of Jesus as her own son and accepted Him in faith as the Son of God, the saviour, also for her sins.

The Christian church must never feel bad about not being able to explain the incarnation to a world that dotes on science.  Many questions can be asked for which there are no answers.  Did Jesus, also being God, pray to Himself in any respect?  If He was God, could He really die?

Such questions may be of interest to some, but the answers are often just speculation.  The Heidelberg Catechism wastes no time on them for they are not profitable.

What is more important is that we become convinced of the benefits of the incarnation.  It is in the working out of the good which the miraculous conception and birth of Christ has for us, that we find out its value for our life.  That is, what does the incarnation do for your faith?  For your life?

We can perhaps see this by learning to avoid the extremes that are so close at hand.  What goes wrong, for example, when we see Christ more as God than as man!  That is, emphasising Christ’s divine nature at the expense of His human nature?

Well, those who overlooked that Christ was truly human, often ended up thinking that being a human being was somehow inferior.  They saw Christ more as God than as man.  And when they thought of Christ in His human nature they felt that this was a real humiliation for Him.  The Bible in Philippians 2 does speak of Christ’s humiliation whilst in the flesh but it does so in the context of sin.  It was humiliating for the sinless Christ to be the carrier of man’s sin.  But being man was not a humiliation.  When you read Genesis 1 and 2 then you have an impression of Adam and Eve being gloriously dignified and wonderfully human.  And that’s the way God meant it.  Man was the crown of His creation.

So for Jesus to be fully man was to bring back to human nature what was lost and distorted by sin.  Jesus became man in order to fully restore perfect human nature back to us.

Now when you cannot see that, when you somehow think that being human is the same as being sinful, then you are tempted to follow Christ more as God than as man.  Hence your soul becomes more important than your body.  You will think of things really being spiritual when all earthly matter is finally excluded.  With this thinking it was only a small step to regard monks and nuns as being on a higher spiritual level.  Of course, marriage was not likely to be thrown out, yet it seemed somehow less pleasing to God than a celibate life, free from sexual expression.  A pious Christian was one who was quite loose from all earthly attraction.

It is always interesting to see how eastern religions with their particular message of salvation tend towards this mystical emphasis.  Meditation, yoga exercises, solitude, are all high on the list.  Ghandhi, for example, felt he had achieved something worthwhile when he had mastered himself sufficiently not to give in to the desire to live with his wife in marital relations.  The Hare Krishna sect will also say that sex is only allowed for procreation.

And many in the world are attracted to the message and the life-style of eastern religions.  Conscious of having over-indulged in many earthly things, they turn their backs on material things.  But it is then refreshing to remember how Martin Luther, saved from monastic asceticism, began to enjoy life, married, had children, grew crops and worked hard physically.

Indeed, prayer, Bible reading, meditation are all very important but they are not more holy than working, playing, studying, marrying and living on the earth.

Jesus became man, fully human, to help us know how to be fully human.  Because we sinned, Christ became man, in order to wipe away our guilt.  But not to take human nature away from us, but to restore it to us fully and perfectly.  And the redemption that Christ brings is not only to bring us to heaven, but it is also to live life here and now to God’s glory, and that includes work, marriage, children, yes everything that has to do with life on this present earth.

But the extreme can of course go the other way too.  Things go wrong when we see Christ more as man than as God, that is, His human nature is emphasized at the expense of His divine nature.

When this is done, heaven and a future new earth and heaven are likely to be rejected.  It’s the here and now that receives all the emphasis.  Christ as man shows you how to clean up this life.  And so you become a social activist.  World improvement is then what Christianity is all about.  Liberation movements become the only hope for man living in oppression and exploitation.  And the gun and the bomb may be necessary to reach the goal.  But here it is overlooked that only God can overcome the forces of evil and sin.  And when it is not conquered, then, notwithstanding the fine deeds of mercy that may have been achieved, evil and sin will just go on.  Unless man is born again by the Spirit of God, unless he is re-made after the image of the man from heaven, then all earthly improvements will only face another round of deterioration.  One mess is cleaned up, but another mess will follow it.  To change the situation at its very core, there must be conversion.

So man needs Christ, both as God and as man.  To emphasize the one at the cost of the other will result in a distorted world-and-life view and a false life style.

The incarnation of Christ, the biblical confession of Christ being truly God and truly man, is crucial to us.  Our very lives, the way we live, the way we think, depend on a proper understanding of Jesus, our Saviour and Mediator.

AMEN.