The Incarnation is mind-blowing — at least it ought to be.
God in Christ!
No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him. — Matthew 11:27
Every bit of the Incarnation of God—of the human life of Jesus Christ—is mind-blowing. At least, it ought to be.
God becomes human in the person of Jesus Christ! God in Christ! God in Christ in history! The Creator becomes created flesh and blood! God enters the human condition in Jesus Christ!
Grasping the Incarnation
To not understand the full meaning of these things—the full meaning of the Incarnation—is one thing. Even the disciples grappled with these realities. From the disciples forward, people have attempted to wrap their minds around it. But to not understand why the Incarnation ought to blow our minds is to not grasp much of who God is and what we—humanity—have become.
If we understood the simplest aspects of these two things, we would gasp in awe at the cross. At the cross, the full meaning of “God in Christ” crashes through the thickest walls of our thinking, breaks in upon our broken human minds, and transforms our perception of who He really is.
And yet, in both Matthew’s Gospel and Luke’s Gospel, we read these words spoken by Jesus:
...no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.
So, if we are to understand anything about God or if we are to ever hold anything true about God in our minds—even the simplest of truths—there is no more important verse in all Scripture. To know absolutely anything about the God of Heaven comes down entirely to the Son.
Suppose there is a truth about God’s nature or character in my thinking. In that case, if there is something true that I know about him—it exists there in my mind because the Son has personally and explicitly chosen to reveal it to me.
...no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.
By definition, godly faith, godly understanding, godly life, and godly practice require knowledge of God. And no such knowledge is accessible apart from the person of Jesus Christ. To the extent that we hold notions of God apart from Jesus Christ is the extent to which we have come to know a false god. Apart from Jesus Christ, nothing is revealed about God that could be revealed.
The central object of Christian faith is a person
In Him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. — Colossians 1:19
He is the radiance of the Glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature. — Hebrews 1:1–3
Jesus Christ is the fullest expression of who God is. In Christ, all of who God is is revealed — His character, His love, His commitment to His creation, even His judgment.
The central object of Christian faith is a person. Jesus Christ himself is the content of Christian Faith. He is not simply the founder or the author or the architect; He is the content itself. He did not provide a heretofore new and genius perspective on life — a new meaning, a new purpose, an enlightenment that lives on beyond him and apart from Him and that we take up and believe and live out as a religious belief that if not from Him could have come from an equally enlightened other person.
Christian faith does not lie in specific ideas that somehow came to be in the possession of a historical teacher named Jesus—a person very near to God, to be sure, but a teacher nonetheless.
No.
He is himself very God of very God. He is the content. And what He reveals is Himself: God in Christ. This is the center of Christian faith. This is the starting point. This one belief forms the keystone of the whole of Christian faith. Apart from this Truth, all other “Christian” truth falls into empty religion, as empty as all other religions are, for all other religions are empty of “God in Christ.”
The mystery of the incarnation
In Him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
He is the radiance of the Glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature.
God has fully revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. Nothing more can be known of God than what has been expressed in the person of Jesus Christ. A great teacher named Jesus didn’t teach us some new information about the character of God or about the nature of reality. He was God. And being fully God, He fully revealed God to us.
In Jesus Christ, God revealed Himself.
This makes Christian revelation unique. This makes Christian faith unique. It is the mystery of the Incarnation. It reveals the depth of God’s love. It reveals the abysm of our brokenness. It reveals just how far He would go to heal the brokenness of humanity.
All other faiths show us how far we must go to achieve greater enlightenment, greater standing, greater life. In Jesus Christ, we see just how far God would go to restore our brokenness. And it is only in that revelation that we see just how irreparable we were and just how uncrossable the chasm was.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory. — John 1:14
Thinking about God
Thinking about God can be a complicated matter. There’s much to think about, and there are a near-endless number of categories in which you could think. And there are many books that go about defining these categories biblically or systematically or devotionally. And it’s hard to spend time in any one category without considering others. And, no category can be thought about adequately or intelligently without adequate reference to the whole.
But here's a starting point.
Spend time thinking and considering and discussing Jesus Christ. To do that well, you'll need to think and consider and discuss God. Thinking rightly about Jesus Christ assumes thinking rightly about God. God in Christ. The one presupposes the other. However, the only way to rightly think about God is to know Jesus Christ, for God has fully revealed himself in Christ. So, thinking rightly about God comes from understanding the person of Jesus Christ. The one is produced from the other. And yet, the person of Jesus Christ can be understood properly only relative to the background of sinful humanity in need of redemption. And that human state of affairs—that chasm of brokenness and separation—we can only really see for the first time with any clarity when we think about just who Jesus Christ really was and about the redemption he came to bring.
And that should blow your mind.
And every prayerful time around that loop of thinking and consideration you go, the Son will reveal something more about the Father which will reveal to you more about the Son.
No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.