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This evening we’ll read a passage from the Gospel of Luke chapter 1, Luke chapter 1 verses
30 through 37, please stand.
The angel said to her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.
And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name
Jesus.
He will be great, and he will be called the Son of the Most High.
And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over
the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.
And Mary said to the angel, How will this be, since I am a virgin?
And the angel said to her, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most
High will overshadow you.
Therefore the child to be born will be called Holy, the Son of God.
And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this
is the sixth month with her who is called barren, for nothing will be impossible with
God.
You may be seated.
What are the chances?
When we try to estimate the probability of something happening, we usually look back
at how often it has happened before.
A coin flip, 50-50.
Rain tomorrow, check the forecast.
But what about events that are utterly unique, once in all of history, never before, never
again, kinds of moments?
How do you calculate the odds of something that defies every category that we know?
This is the question hanging in the air when the angel Gabriel appears to a young virgin
in Nazareth and announces that she will conceive and bear a son who will be called the Son
of the Most High, whose kingdom will never end.
But his immediate and honest response is, how will this be, since I am a virgin?
How will this be?
We still ask it today, not because we doubt God’s power, but because the thing that he
has promised is so staggeringly improbable in our finite minds.
The promises of God are absolutely certain, yet the event here promised transcends comprehension.
The improbability of the incarnation is not about uncertainty, it’s about the sheer unbelievability
almost, that the eternal God could truly become a man.
This carries a peculiar, mysterious awe, even that many unbelievers sense.
It communicates of the single most improbable event in all of history, God entering his
own creation as a helpless baby, fully divine and yet fully human.
And while Matthew and Luke give us the historical details of Christ’s birth, but John takes
us further back to the very beginning, John 1.1, in the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God, all things were made through him, and without him was
not anything made that was made.
In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
And verse 14, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory,
glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Tonight, for a few moments, we will linger on this profound mystery in three movements
drawn from John’s prologue.
Number one, in the beginning was the Word.
Number two, the Word was God.
And number three, the Word became flesh.
As singer-songwriter Michael Card beautifully reflects in his song, The Final Word, he says,
You and me, we use so very many clumsy words.
The noise of what we often say is not worth being heard.
When the Father’s wisdom wanted to communicate his love, he spoke it in one final perfect
word.
His final word was Jesus.
He needed no other one.
So this Christmas let us stand with Mary at the edge of the impossible, and hear the angels’
reply anew, for nothing will be impossible with God.
Number one, in the beginning was the Word.
By the time of the beginning, something already existed.
John attempts to begin at the beginning, but even as he does so, he finds that there is
something which was before the beginning.
The Word was in the beginning because he had no beginning.
As God, he never began, because he has never not existed.
In all of eternity, God has been the single constant from before time was.
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit, in perfect fellowship and unity, existing
simultaneously as one God in three persons, all equally God, equal in power and glory.
And we struggle to understand this concept of not having a beginning, since everything
we know in our lives is on a path of continual change.
Things do not stay the same, they change with age.
We get older, we get bigger and then smaller as time passes.
We get wiser, our bodies get stronger and then weaker, always changing from the time
we begin life as an individual entity at conception.
And time is really a measure of change, and everything around us in creation changes.
It has a beginning, and it continues to change.
But the Word was from before the beginning.
In the beginning, the Word already was.
The beginning came after the Word.
The Word’s existence and purpose predates the beginning.
The beginning serves the Word’s purpose, and not the other way around.
The beginning was created for and by the Word, and what is that purpose?
The purpose was to showcase His glory, to display His stunningly beautiful, good, brilliant,
wise, righteous, powerful, and holy nature.
So He created the world and everything in it, and crowned it with creatures who were
made in His image, human beings.
But instead of worshipping Him, loving Him, adoring Him, and thanking Him, they disobeyed
and rebelled against Him.
They attempted to bend, distort, and mar that image that He had made them in.
And despite all this, God had an even greater plan before the beginning.
His plan had never been to merely reveal His wisdom, power, beauty, goodness, and holiness
in creation, but to reveal it even more in redemption, in overcoming and undoing all
the wrong that His image bearers had done, and doing it in the most unlikely manner imaginable.
God’s Word, His perfect revelation of Himself, was not another creature who could portray
God more accurately, but He was in fact God Himself.
Number two, the Word was God.
The Church throughout history has found it necessary at different points to battle heresies
that strike at the heart of the person of Christ.
Four main councils have provided the venues for ecclesiological consensus and affirmation
of the Bible’s teaching about who the Word, Jesus, is.
In 325 in Nicaea, the Church affirmed that contrary to some false teachers, the Scripture
teaches that Jesus is indeed fully God.
And then in 381 at Constantinople, the Church reiterated that the Scripture teaches that
Jesus is fully human.
But those two concepts are very difficult to hold together in our minds, and some people
started putting those two ideas together in problematic, even heretical ways.
And so in 431 at Ephesus, the Church affirmed that the Scripture teaches that Christ is
a single person.
There are not two people, Christ the God and Christ the man.
There is a single, unified person who is both fully God and fully man.
But almost immediately, there were some who took things too far the other way, and suggested
that that one person, Jesus Christ, since he was both God and man, must be some sort
of hybrid.
But that would defeat the whole purpose of his being fully man, since he would be something
different from the rest of us, and thus could not pay for our sins.
So 20 years later in 451 at Chalcedon, the Church reiterated that the Scripture teaches
that Christ is one person who has two distinct natures, completely God and completely man,
without being blended or mixed.
By the end, the Church had articulated the scriptural outline of the person of Christ
as fully God, fully human, one unified person with two distinct, fully intact complete natures.
If you had been one of the shepherds who left their sheep to see what the angels were singing
about, you would have seen a very normal-looking baby.
The angels didn’t tell the shepherds that they’d know the baby was God based on his
appearance the moment they laid eyes on him.
They said you’ll find an ordinary baby in an unordinary place, a manger, and that will
be the sign that God is doing something extraordinary.
Isaiah 53 verse 2 says there was nothing special to look at him, and as Jesus walked around
as an adult, people didn’t fall on their faces and worship him in awe.
They just saw another normal-looking Jewish rabbi until he spoke.
What did they say about him when he spoke?
Matthew 7, 28, and when Jesus finished saying these things, the crowds were astonished at
his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, not as their scribes.
In John 7, 45, the officers came to the chief priests and Pharisees who said to them, why
did you not bring him?
The officers answered, no one ever spoke like this man.
Christ was God’s word, and he was recognized as God when he spoke.
His appearance was unremarkable, but his speech was unmistakable.
This ordinary-looking man spoke like no man ever had, because he was God.
People who dismiss Jesus as a good moral example, a wise teacher but nothing more, have not
seriously considered what he said.
When considered carefully, Christ’s words leave only two options, either you love him
or you hate him.
His words by themselves leave three possibilities, either he was crazy and possessed by demons
as some of his enemies claimed, or he was a brazen liar taking titles to himself that
weren’t his, or he was speaking truth, absolute truth and authority, because he is the Lord
of Lords, God himself.
The thing that his enemies never even attempted to assert during his ministry was that he
was a benign teacher, or merely a bold prophet pointing to someone beyond himself.
Jesus was the ultimate prophet who came speaking on behalf of God, because he is God.
So whatever he spoke was God’s speech.
He came to reveal the one true God, not as a lesser being explaining what God was like,
but as God himself who took on humanity, the second person of the triune God who added
a human nature to his divine pre-existing nature.
Number three, the word became flesh.
In defending the full humanity of Christ in 381 at the Council of Constantinople, a bishop
named Gregory of Nazianzus said, for that which he has not assumed he has not healed,
but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.
If only half of Adam fell, then that which Christ assumes and saves may be half also.
But if the whole of Adam’s nature fell, it must be united to the whole nature of him
that was begotten, and so be saved as a whole.
We might put it as the hymn, Joy to the World says, he comes to make his blessings flow
as far as the curse is found.
Thanks to the actions of the first man, Adam, you and I, all of us humans, are born with
a human nature twisted towards rebellion against God.
Instead of reflecting the beautiful glory of God in our lives, we possess an inner darkness
that despises God and seeks to make ourselves king.
We long to be lord of our own lives and live according to our own rules rather than God’s.
Unfortunately, there is no part of our being that is free from this corruption, either
body or soul.
We need help.
Christmas is about God bringing that help, fulfilling his promise to give us a way out,
coming down to our level, becoming like us so that we might be like him.
Christ was born with a full human nature, body, soul, mind, will, heart, emotions, all
of it, in order to redeem your whole body, soul, mind, will, heart, emotions, and all the rest.
Christ didn’t skimp on assuming a single aspect of humanity except sin.
The sin that infects every part of your human nature failed to defile Christ, and this is good news.
It means that if you become united to Christ, instead of infecting him with your sin nature,
you will find healing in his sinless human nature.
In Christ, the union between God and his image bearers was restored, and you can participate
in that restoration by becoming one with Christ.
In Jesus Christ, God and man become one again.
Not as man becoming God, but as God becoming man.
This perfect union between the human and divine natures finds its unity in the person
of Jesus Christ, who perfectly holds them together in his person.
And within the person of Christ there is no division, or confusion, or blending, or lack
of distinction between the natures.
But there is perfect harmony, as Christ is both fully God and fully man.
How can this be?
Mary asked, and tonight we have asked it with her.
The incarnation is not merely improbable.
From every angle of human reason it seems impossible that the eternal word who spoke
the universe into being should become a speechless infant.
That the unchanging God should enter our world of constant change.
That the Holy One should take on our frail flesh without being tainted by our sin.
This defies every calculation of probability we possess, and yet here is the glory of Christmas.
The impossibility is precisely the point, for nothing will be impossible with God.
The God who spoke light into darkness has now spoken himself into our darkness.
He did not send an angel, a messenger, a prophet.
He came.
The final word was made flesh, and in that flesh he has assumed everything that makes
us human.
Body, soul, mind, will, heart, emotions, and all the rest, so that every part corrupted
by the curse might be healed.
This is the good news of the incarnation, because Jesus is forever the God-man.
The breach between heaven and earth is closed.
Sin separated us completely, but in Christ, God and man are united perfectly, never to
be divided again, and by faith you can enter that union.
Trust in this Jesus, who became what we are, so that we might become what he is.
We might become forgiven, restored, brought near to God.
So let us leave here tonight, not with heads merely shaking at the improbability, but with
hearts burning with wonder and worship.
The one through whom all things were made lay in a manger.
The king of glory cried as a baby.
The eternal word learned to speak, and he did it for you.
Come, come to him, behold him, believe him.
The impossible had happened.
God is with us.
Amen.
Let’s pray.
Father in heaven, we thank you that you sent your Son into the world out of your love,
that you planned from all eternity that the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ,
would become man forever.
He would be born, and he would die for our sins, and he would rise again and call us
to be sons and daughters of the living God.
We thank you for this, in Jesus’ name, amen.
Let’s turn and sing now, hymn 319.
Let’s stand as we sing, O come, all ye faithful.
Number 319.