I’ve often pondered about the statement that ‘Jesus is God’ and in relation to my recent post on trinity I noticed something interesting (I’m sure that many have seen this before!):
We could imagine God to be this entirely spiritual being who, whilst he created the physical earth, he was not physical himself.
An interesting statement in the Bible about Jesus is:
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. (John 1:1-2)
and making it clear that the ‘Word’ is Jesus:
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
(a link to this chapter)
Jesus wasn’t an add on to God, he was always there (whatever that means!). So for God to appear on earth as a physical being shouldn’t be a surprise because God always encompassed both the spiritual and the physical.
What is interesting to me though is that through a demonstration of his physicalness (Jesus the Messiah) he bridged for us the divide between the physical and the spiritual domains – they became one domain. As Christians we are already in the Kingdom of Heaven.
There is something significant about God bridging the spiritual and the physical by appearing in physical form and then giving us his spiritual form (the Holy Spirit) to be with us in our physical form in our new found spiritual existence – we became spiritually alive.
There is no longer a gap between spiritual and physical. There are no human high priests anymore to connect us to God, there are no ‘holy places’ any more – everything physical is also spiritual. Our spiritual worship is our very physical act of sacrificing our lives (Romans 12:1).
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There is something about the commitment of God in Incarnation that comes from the phrase ‘the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’ – the Greek word is more like ‘pitched his tent’ or ‘tabernacled’ among us, with a real sense (for a nation descended from a nomadic people) of Jesus taking the rough and tumble, the ‘getting your hands dirty’ of human life. It’s not a reflection of a God who remains in any way detached from the world, but fully involved, committed to and immersed in the substance of life. In this way our humanity is sanctified, brought nearer to God, as God stoops to touch us and be one of us.