By Tin-chee Lo
“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” (John 1:14). Such a unique claim moved the English poet Edward Shillito (1871-1948) to write:
The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.
Unthinkable, surely. The essence of the Gospel can be summarized as: A baby who was born to a virgin in a first century Middle Eastern hick town was God incarnate, and that in His human nature he lived, suffered and died. To this historic event, the 19th century pastor Charles Spurgeon put it like this:
Infinite and yet an infant.
Eternal and yet born of a woman.
Almighty, and yet nursing at a woman’s breast.
Supporting a universe, and yet needing to be carried in a mother’s arms.
Heir of all things, and yet the carpenter’s despised son.
God the Son had always existed, in eternity, with the Father and the Spirit, in exquisite and joyful unity. One of the church fathers, Athanasius, wrote in the third century:
…He entered the world in a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us… He, the Mighty One, the Maker of all, He Himself made this body in the virgin as a temple for Himself…Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death [in our place], and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, [death] was thereafter voided of its power for men.
And yet, one of those Apollo astronauts, James Irwin, said this:
The entire space achievement is put in proper perspective when one realizes that God walking on the earth is more important than man walking on the moon.
