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.
Incarnation and Covenant
The most distinctive aspect of Jesus’ identity, according to the faith of the historic-orthodox Church, is that Jesus is fully God and fully human—“God Incarnate,” to use the Church’s creedal phraseology. To accurately reflect on the Incarnation, we must avoid the temptation to think abstractly, treating the doctrine of the Incarnation as a mere metaphysical assertion that Christ is God and human. Rather, as T. F. Torrance has in particular stressed, the meaning of the Incarnation is inseparably wrapped up in the biblical narrative of God’s dealing with Israel, and through Israel, with the world. Indeed, he contends that, “the Old Testament is the revelation of the verbum incarnandum” (“word requiring to be incarnate”) while “the New Testament is the revelation of the verbum incarnatum” (“word incarnate”).[1] The doctrine of the Incarnation is thus not merely a claim that God became a human: it’s the claim that the God of Israel became the long-awaited Jewish man who was Israel’s Messiah, and therefore the Messiah for the world.
More specifically, the Incarnation is the fulfillment of both the God-side and human-side of Yahweh’s covenantal relationship with Israel, and therefore with the world. In the words of Torrance,
[Jesus] is himself the God of the covenant which we have broken, but he became man by taking upon himself the humanity of the men and women who broke the covenant, and in himself he is not only the turning of God to humanity, but the turning of humanity to God.[2]
In Christ, Yahweh definitively demonstrates himself to be Israel’s faithful covenant partner precisely by condescending to become a faithful human covenant partner before God on behalf of Israel, and therefore of the world. And it is as Israel’s faithful representative that Jesus not only fulfills the covenant by living a life that was free of covenant breaking; he also fulfills the covenant by appropriating as his own the covenantal curse that is a consequence of all covenant breaking.
Hence, by becoming a human and sacrificing himself on the cross, the God who had bound himself in a covenant relationship with Israel unilaterally fulfilled the promises and obligations of this covenant while unilaterally paying the price for Israel’s failure to live up to this covenant. The one man Jesus Christ becomes the representative suffering servant who thereby fulfills Israel’s roll as suffering servant (Isa. 53). Yahweh’s suffering covenantal faithfulness is thus an essential aspect of the full meaning of the Incarnation and therefore of the Crucifixion and every other aspect of Jesus’ identity and ministry.
[1] Torrance, Incarnation, 45.
[2] Torrance, Atonement, 148.
Photo credit: slack12 via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND
Category: General
Tags: Covenant, Incarnation, Israel
Related Reading
Four Blood Moons—What’s the Significance?
The first of four successive “blood moons” will occur on April 15 & 16. Is this significant? Does it point to coming earth-shattering events specifically related to Israel? Many authors like John Hagee believe it does. Or is this misguided divination and astrology? What do you think Greg’s take is? For more on a so-called…
Sermon Clip: Mark Moore Israel Week 2
In this sermon clip, Mark Moore talks about how God interrupts Abrahams life by asking him to have huge faith. In week two of The Forest In The Trees, Woodland Hills takes a look at the early history of the Hebrew people and the formation of the nation of Israel. Throughout these stories, we see…
A Kingdom Not of This World
In the previous post, I introduced how Jesus directly taught against the favored nation status of Israel, an theme that runs throughout his ministry. For example, Yahweh’s Sinai covenant with Israel was rooted in a system of immediate rewards and punishments. Jesus not only canceled these covenantal promises; he sometimes explicitly reversed them. The Sinai…
Paul Was Not Writing about Personal Salvation: Romans 9, Part 2
In yesterday’s post, I summarized the deterministic interpretation of Romans 9 and offered the first argument against it. In this post I offer the second and third of six arguments that reveal that there is something else going on in Romans 9. Argument #2: Has God Broken Covenant? The deterministic interpretation of Romans 9 assumes that…
The Incarnation: More Than a Rescue Mission
A mistake people often make concerning the Incarnation is that they fail to distinguish the eternal plan of God to unite himself with humanity in Christ, on the one hand, from the atoning significance this plan acquired after the fall, on the other. Some therefore think of the Incarnation as a sort of “Plan B”…
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…