Rebecca Writes - Rebecca Writes

When my husband and I named our children, we looked up what each potential name meant, because we didn’t want to saddle anyone with a name that meant something embarassing. But we certainly didn’t make meaning the most important consideration when choosing a name.

When God chose a name for his incarnate Son, however, the meaning of the name was everything. God named him Jesus, which means “God saves,” because “he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Saving people was the Son’s mission in the triune God’s work of redemption. The meaning of the name God chose pointed to the purpose of the coming of the eternal Son: He was born as a human being to save his people.

The Word Became Flesh

To carry out his mission, the Son entered our world as one of us. The Word, who was with God in the beginning, the apostle John writes in his gospel, “became flesh” (John 1:1,14). John’s gospel is filled with testimony to the full deity of Jesus, so we know this doesn’t mean the Son stopped being God, or became a little less God (whatever this would mean) when he became human. Rather, the eternal Son of God was joined forever with genuine human nature, so that Jesus was (and still is) one person who is both fully God and fully human.

In other words, the Son became human by addition, not subtraction. In the incarnation, he took on a human nature, including a human body, a human mind, and a human soul. Theologians sometimes say it like this: Remaining what he was, he became what he was not.

If you’re left wondering how in the world this works, you’re not alone. Wayne Grudem writes,

The fact that the infinite, omnipotent, eternal Son of God could become man and join himself to a human nature forever, so that infinite God became one person with finite man, will remain for eternity the most profound miracle and the most profound mystery in all the universe.¹

Each person of the Trinity had an active role in the incarnation. The Father sent the Son (Romans 8:3; Galatians 4:4) and the Son came. According to Philippians 2:5-7, the Son willingly “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”

And the Holy Spirit? He was working, too. Jesus, the incarnate Son, was conceived without a human father by the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. “The most profound miracle … in all the universe” in which true God is united with true humanity in the one person of Jesus Christ, begins with a miraculous conception.

For Our Salvation

It’s because of his miraculous conception that the human Jesus was morally pure (Luke 1:35). Every other human being inherits guilt and corruption from the first human, Adam. But Jesus, conceived without a human father, did not. To “save his people from their sins,” Jesus needed to be sinless, because only another human being, but one without any sin, even inherited sin, could be an atoning sacrifice to bear our sins and die in our place. (We’ll look more closely at how he saves his people, including his atoning sacrifice, in the next post of this series.)

This explains why Jesus had to be a sinless human to fulfill his mission, but why did he have to be God incarnate? One reason is that only someone who is both God and human could be the mediator who represents God to us and us to God (1 Timothy 2:5; John 14:9). What’s more, because Jesus is God, he is able to accomplish everything he intends to accomplish. Because he is God, he is an effective Saviour. He will surely save all those who come to him.

The union of God and man in Jesus Christ stands at the very center of the Christian faith, because without it there would be no Christians—and no Christianity. The incarnation was necessary for us to be saved.

Definition of Chalcedon

The ancient Christians took the biblical data on the nature of the incarnate Son of God and formulated the Definition of Chalcedon, a statement of what all Christians must believe regarding the person of Jesus. It teaches that Jesus has two distinct natures, a human nature and a divine nature. His divine nature is the same as God the Father’s. His human nature is the same as our human nature, except that ours is sinful and his is not. The divine nature and human nature are united in the one person Jesus so that he could save his people from their sins.

1Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem, page 563.

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