We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

surprise

What Jesus Revealed About Being Human

According to the creation story, when Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they essentially ceased being the wonderful, God-centered, God-dependent human beings the Creator intended them to be. They became less than fully human. Instead, they began using everything and everyone in the world as surrogate gods, trying to get from people, deeds, and things what only God can give for free.

The solution to this problem is Jesus Christ. Just as Jesus uncovers the truth of the real nature of God, over against the serpent’s lie about God, Jesus uncovers the truth about what it means to be fully human. He reveals the truth about us. In revealing the true God, Christ reveals the true human.

When Christ uncovered the God of unsurpassable love, he uncovered humanity as the object of God’s unsurpassable love.

This is one of the reasons “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). In the words of the Chalcedonian creed, the Son of God is “fully God and fully man.” God reveals humanity in the very act of revealing deity. Jesus is said to be the image of God both as perfect human and as the perfect expression of God (1 Cor 15:49; 2 Cor 3:18; 4:4; Col 1:15). Christ is both God before us as well as us before God.

Just as all we need to know about God is found in Christ, so too all we need to know about humanity is found in Jesus Christ.

Jesus is who God always intended humanity to be and who humanity truly is—if only we will yield to God’s Spirit and relinquish the illusions of the serpent’s lies about who God is and who we are.

What Christ reveals about humanity is just as unexpected as what he reveals about God. Nothing about Christ fits easily with our ordinary, fallen preconceptions, for they are polluted with the serpent’s lie. Let’s briefly consider two basic things that Christ uncovers:

  1. By dying on the cross for us, Christ revealed the depth of human sinfulness. Christ reveals that our false humanity is overcome by illness. The seriousness of an illness can be assessed by how radical the cure is that is required to overcome it. Only when we look at the cross, God’s cure for our sin, can we see the full gravity of our condition. If God had to go to the furthest extreme imaginable to save us—the cross—then our situation must have indeed been desperate.
  2. The same act that exposes our hopelessness before God uncovers our hopefulness in God. The cross reveals the unsurpassable worth we, in our humanity, are mercifully given by God. The very act that exposes the horror of human rejection of God reveals the beauty of God’s acceptance of humanity. In the act of exposing the sickness of humanity, God brings the cure.

In bearing our sin on the cross, Christ revealed the truth about God—that is his unfathomable love—and the truth about us—that our sin is damnable and that we are nonetheless loved, forgiven, and reconciled to God. Through this, we become recipients of and participants in God’s eternal, perfect love. “In Christ,” what it means to be human is redefined.

—Adapted from Repenting of Religion, pages 149-155

Photo credit: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ via Visualhunt / CC BY-SA

Category:
Tags: , , , ,

Related Reading

At the Start of This New Year

 Anthony Easton via Compfight Wishing all of you a year filled with an increasing awareness of God’s presence and a willingness to go where he leads you. May you be challenged every day to love outrageously as we are loved by God. May we be one as Jesus and the Father are one. Peace and…

Is there Archeological Support for the Reliability of the Gospels?

One of the many tests historians typically submit documents to in accessing their historical reliability concerns the extent to which archeology supports or undermines the historic claims the document makes. So we need to investigate the extent to which archeology confirms, or refutes, aspects of the Gospels. Before we address this question, however, a preliminary…

Confronting Divine Determinism

Part of the fallen human condition inclines us to shirk our moral responsibility and accept that everything is predetermined, whether by God, the gods, fate, or blind chance. Various forms of determinism have been prevalent in most primitive religions, in much ancient philosophy, in most forms of Islam and even, most surprisingly, in much traditional…

Living Incarnationally

The Christian faith is centered on the belief that in Jesus Christ God became a human being. This is commonly referred to as the doctrine of the incarnation. It means that in Jesus, God became embodied. God left the blessed domain of heaven, was born in Bethlehem, and took on our humanity that we might…

Rethinking Election: Romans 9, Part 1

Many people believe that Romans 9 demonstrates that God has the right and power to save whichever individuals he wants to save and damn whichever individuals he wants to damn. I’ll call this the “deterministic” reading of Romans 9, for it holds that God determines who will be saved and who will be lost. On…

Why Did Jesus Curse the Fig Tree?

One of the strangest episodes recorded in the Gospels is Jesus cursing a fig tree because he was hungry and it didn’t have any figs (Mk 11:12-14; Mt 21:18-19).  It’s the only destructive miracle found in the New Testament. What’s particularly puzzling is that Mark tells us the reason the fig tree had no figs…