“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched-this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared to us…. We write this to make our joy complete” (1 John 1).
The Incarnation was not a divine visitation in the mere form of a human being. Jesus was no holograph of divinity. Some ancient self-described sophisticates called the Gnostics, who wanted to make Christianity more spiritual than it already was, said that the Savior only appeared human and to possess real flesh. He was a super-spiritual being who came to impart cryptic saving knowledge. If you could understand this coded truth and grasp the lingo, then you would be enlightened, and thus saved by the knowledge. They even said that the Savior went nowhere near the cross. He switched identities with Simon of Cyrene, the man who was forced to carry Jesus’ cross, and then stood at a distance, laughing at the foolish Romans who thought they had nailed the man who claimed to be Messiah to the cross.
No, Christ was not standing at a distance laughing at the cross. He was on the cross, and bore all its sorry, shame, and pain.
The Gnostics of ancient days and today (New Age religion) are wrong. 1 John 4:2-3 says, “Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.” The Messiah didn’t laugh on that day because he fooled people into thinking he was a human being, while he skirted around the torture of the cross. Rather, he took the pain of the world on himself, and in that abject agony offered the way out for us. As wrong and unjust and inexcusable as it was, the death of Jesus also makes perfect sense. It all fits into a consistent pattern of God’s character, the nature of the corrupt world, and the love that God has for those he created in his own image. The mission to put the world back together was itself coming together. God was doing what only God could do.
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