THE FIRST ADVENT: THE INCARNATION

“The Incarnation Blows My Mind!”

The physical nature of the human body and its sexuality are major components in God’s plans. He created the race of Adam as an alloy of matter and spirit. This incarnate amalgamation prepared us to be special mediators between the cosmic and the celestial worlds. As body-spirit beings “created in the image of God,” we were to serve as the Triune Godhead’s unique representatives (Gen 1:26). Our job was to bring physical and spiritual creation under a single, universal, government. So crucial was this divine plan that, when it got off course, God became human to fulfill it.

For over 30 years the Incarnation has never ceased to blow my mind! The eternal Word, Creator of all things, actually “became flesh,” (John 1:1-2,14). The Second Member of the Trinity became the Second Adam (1 Cor 15:45), “firstborn” (Col 1:15) of a new human race. Jesus Christ is now the human King who will lead redeemed humanity in ruling over “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev 21:1).

The Incarnation has magnificent implications for human destiny. But the bodily aspects of God’s strategy have often been ignored. Religious infatuation with Gnostic ideas has exalted the spiritual to the exclusion of the physical. God’s goal is to bring the two into unity, and His express manner of doing so is through the body-spirit nature of humanity.

The Sexual Physiology of the Incarnation

The Bible is biologically correct. Avoiding human sexuality and its anatomical realities as a religious taboo is neither biblical nor Christian. Yet the popular, even traditional, exclusion of sexuality from theological thought has caused many to overlook what actually occurred in the Incarnation.

Right after the Fall, God promised a Savior who would be a woman’s “seed” (Gen 3:15)—not a man’s offspring. The virgin Mary descended from Abraham, in whose “seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen 22: 18). But Mary’s DNA also carried the genetic code from Adam, which she contributed to the Incarnation in an ovulated egg. In this way, Jesus sexually inherited from Mary the nature of Adam’s fallen race as half of His unique human nature.

A biologically functional conception did in fact occur (Luke 1:31), but Mary’s egg was not fertilized by a sperm from Adam’s fallen race. Although authentically human, it wasn’t from an earthly man. Joseph was told, “that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit” (Mat 1:20, ESV). Genetically, the other half of Christ’s human nature, was formed by God. This newly created human “seed” was not of this world. But Scripture’s revelation that Mary had a true conception implies that this totally new, divinely created human sperm—or at least the exact complementary human DNA material necessary for a real conception—was the location where “the Word became flesh.” If this is where God entered cosmic creation, where He physically embodied His personal and divine Identity, then when that new human DNA joined with the ovum of Mary, the Son of God became one of us, a true human being.

Biology and theology dovetail here. God formed Adam “of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature,” (Gen 2:7, ESV). In the same way, God’s Spirit [“breath”] directly fashioned and vitalized this holy haploid of human DNA. I personally believe God had no qualms about becoming an authentically fleshly sperm and carrying out the DNA transfer in the normal way of conception. But regardless of how it happened, the genetic material in that transfer—although truly human, sexually functional, and equipped with the gene determining male gender—was not a part of our fallen world. It was an entirely new creation and the beginning of a new humanity.

Theological and Sacramental Implications

This was no mere supernatural manifestation. God really did become one of us, with a human body, a human soul, a human spirit. But in His Incarnation—this strategic union of the old human race with a new humanity—Jesus came to die. His nature as a sinless new Adam allowed Him to pay for fallen humanity’s sins (2 Cor 5:21). But His union with the fallen human race allowed Him to take Adam’s nature [“our old man”] to the Cross with Him (Rom 6:6). The sacrifice of His dual humanity provided exactly what sinners need: freedom from both sin’s penalty and its power.

Salvation isn’t automatic. It resides only “in Christ,” and we access it only by personal faith. (Gal 2:20; Phil 3:9). But Christ’s bodily Resurrection shows that it isn’t limited to the spiritual realm. Nor is faith in Christ limited to heart-belief, for “with the mouth confession is made unto salvation,” (Rom 10:9-10, NKJV). As bodily signs of our faith in Him, Jesus stipulated both Baptism (Mat 28:19) and Holy Communion (Luke 22:19-20). Yet both these body-focused sacraments go beyond illustrating His plan to resurrect and glorify our physical bodies (1 Cor 15:42-43). They exemplify God’s original intent for the spiritual and the physical to be brought into unity. Faith and works do not stand and cannot be understood separately (James 2:14-26). Trust and obey are as divinely wedded as the “one flesh” union of human marriage, and what “God has joined together, let not man separate,” (Mat 19:6, ESV)

As a Christian rite of initiation, water baptism uses the body to declare faith. But Paul goes deeper, expounding its metaphysical ability to unite us with Christ’s death, which is valid only if Jesus actually took our old Adamic nature with Him to the Cross:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Romans 6:3-5, ESV)

Christ’s words about Holy Communion were so physically shocking that they turned away many early followers. Some otherwise faithful Bible teachers still balk at taking them at their face value. But if our personal, faith-filled baptisms put us into Christ, uniting us with His incarnational death of the old human nature, then our ongoing, faith-filled nourishment at the Lord’s Table puts into us His new resurrected life as the Second Adam:

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. (John 6:53-56, ESV)

These words are no surprise. Early on, God said we do “not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD,” (Deut 8:3, ESV). If spiritually true of His written Word, how much more eagerly should we spiritually feed on the living Word Incarnate?

Anticipating the Second Advent

The Son is back in heaven sitting beside the Father. But now a Human Being fills the seat. Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection introduced physical humanity into the Trinity. Jesus left Heaven to obtain a human Bride. As in the first Adam’s deep sleep, when God opened his side to create Eve (Gen 2:21-22), so in the Second Adam’s sleep of death on the Cross, His side was opened to create the Church.

Revelation 19:7-9

Our destiny, as redeemed humanity, is corporate marriage to the Son of God, whose genetic conception on earth wedded Adam’s flesh to a new humanity. His bodily Resurrection empowers those who receive Him to become God’s spiritual children by new birth (John 1:12-13). But we join all of creation in eagerly longing for redeemed humanity's full manifestation, when we receive “the redemption of our bodies” (Rom 8:19-23), bodies that match the resurrected body of our Bridegroom (Phil 3:20-21).

The first Advent brought us the Incarnation, and because of it, the second Advent will bring us a Wedding. When Jesus returns to reign, those united to Him by faith will be literally taken into the Trinitarian Family as in-laws. Forever married to our Husband-King, the incarnated God-Man, we will be the new humanity ruling with Him over all the realms He has ever created or will create.

In the meantime, to those who don’t have this faith and hope,

The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price. (Rev 22:17, ESV)

And I join the Apostle John in praying this last prayer in the Bible: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev 22:20, ESV).

EarthEarthEarthEarthEarth!

The title isn’t a typo. Read it again, with new capitals and strategically placed dashes…

eart—He art—Heart—Hear the art—h!

When merged together consecutively, the word “earth” spells repetitions of the phrase:

“He art, He art, He art,”

or the word:

“Heart, Heart, Heart,”

or the imperative sentence:

“Hear the art, Hear the art, Hear the art.”

As far as I know, this spelling trick with our planet’s name works only in English, and it’s not something I came up. The interesting story of how I learned of it often comes to mind when I look at the painting I did using this word-play.

In January of 1996, I acted upon a growing desire to learn art by enrolling in an elementary drawing class at a local community college. I ended up taking one each semester, a total of 11 art courses over a five year period.

In the last weeks of a “color theory” class, we were given a very regulated painting assignment for our final. Except for tints and tones, it was to contain just 3 colors. Only 3 sheets of letter-size paper could be used, taped together in any arrangement we chose. And the painting had to contain some form of lettering. I had trouble coming up with an idea for it. But one night shift I got some help from a patient I took care of in labor and delivery.

The previous nurse on the PM shift gave me a fairly straightforward report. It was this patient’s first pregnancy, and she wanted to try delivering without an epidural. For that reason, she’d requested to move to an “ABC” (alternative birth center) room, where she could shower and move more freely about the room to cope with her contractions. An ABC room was soon to be available....

But my dear coworker neglected a “biggie” in her report, which I discovered upon entering the room. As part of her way of dealing with labor, my patient was laboring in the nude. After making sure she didn’t mind having a male nurse, I began to work with her as I would with any other patient.

Most moms don’t labor totally naked, but the sight of bare body parts was as normal in my OB job as it was in the figure drawing class I’d taken at the college. Both healthcare and that specific art class can help a person see nakedness with new eyes. They heighten awareness and appreciation of our anatomy’s “fearfully and wonderfully made” beauty, rather than treating nudity in terms of sex appeal, which is the ongoing obsession of our depraved culture. Nursing and art didn’t dull my vision; they healed it.When I saw this patient’s lovely pregnant form fully exposed, I began imagining the challenge of capturing it on paper in charcoal or pastel.

My way of keeping my nursing care human-friendly was to try having normal social conversations with patients and their families. That’s how I discovered that my patient was an artist. When I shared my own love for art, she gave me a wonderful gift: “EarthEarthEarth.” She explained how running the word “earth” together spells those three things: “heart,” “he art,” and “hear the art.” Immediately, I envisioned the possibilities of using this in my art assignment.

Much to my teacher’s consternation, I was the first of his students in this assignment ever to cut up my three sheets of paper and paste them into a polygon. It was the only shape I could make to fit the circular nature of my project while staying within his limit of 3 sheets of paper. He also chided me for choosing the primaries for my 3 colors, but I told him my composition needed them.

I wanted my art-piece to preach, and I think it did by displaying Earth’s dependence on the Triune Godhead. God is Creator: “HE ART!” God is Lover: “HEART!” God is Teacher: “HEAR THE ART!”

The magnificent beauty of creation came from the mind and hand of an Almighty Father. The gracious redemption of Earth’s wayward human population came from the bleeding heart of God’s loving Son. The call and counsel for us to see and enjoy the divine artistry of Earth’s Designer come from the Holy Spirit. All Three Members of the Trinity are personally connected with the story of Earth, and Earth itself, as a uniquely designed and carefully placed planet, points to our need for personally connecting with its Triune Creator. (addendum) Some months after posting this blog article, I wrote a poem about it.... EARTH, EARTH, EARTH

He Art, He Art He Art He Art,
before . . . behind our earthly start,
when—by His strong creative hand
that formed the sea and motherland—
He sculpted dust for lasting worth:
He Art, HE art made EArtH EartH Earth.

His Heart, His Heart, His Heart Heart Heart,
seeking a world that fell apart,
pursuing souls who breathed His breath
to rescue them from realms of death—
re-image them by second birth:
His Heart, Heart Heart for eartH earth Earth.

Now Hear the Art . . . yes, Hear the Art,
Who sings, a course divine to chart!
Inspiring Guide for human tales
blows living breeze to hoist our sails!
His wind instills artistic mirth:
O, Hear the Art call eArtH EartH Earth!

Lost children of this groaning Earth,
return and find your pristine worth
as portraits of the Triune Love
in Father, Savior, Spirit Dove:
re-taste what Life and Light impart
from He Art, Heart, and Hear the Art!

— David L. Hatton, 6/28/2016

GOD’S INTERACTION WITH HUMAN WILLS

Triune Deity enjoys perpetual fellowship. Other concepts of God are lonely ones. The Trinity has no essential need for personal relationship beyond Their eternal Society of Three. Yet Scripture reveals that God desires to interact with the world He created, especially with faith decisions made by the world of humanity (John 3:16).

The Bible never bothers explaining any theological problems raised by its descriptions of this divine desire or by its expectation of true responsiveness between divine and human wills that make this desire genuine. Some forms of theology actually reduce the freedom of human choice—and God’s interaction with it—to an illusion. God’s Word, they reason, reports these mutually free dealings as authentic only to accommodate our limited understanding of His omniscience and sovereignty.

Such theological reasoning about God is human-unfriendly. The Bible, on the other hand, is not. In fact, Scripture often depicts God legitimately interested in how we respond to His directives, to His Presence, to His Person. If the biblical revelation is accurate, then God has sovereignly chosen to let human decisions inform His omniscience, and human actions in time move His will in eternity. Otherwise, biblical narratives of God’s activity seem as fictitious as fables or as illusory as the maya of Hinduism.

For instance, was God merely play-acting when, after having “formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky,” He “brought them to the man to see what he would name them”? Genesis 2:19 says that “whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” God made but did not name any creatures. He let man name them. This verse literally shows God desiring to learn those names. Later, not only does He use them Himself whenever talking about animals, but He also adopted at least two for His own incarnate identity: “Lamb of God” (John 1:29) and “Lion of the tribe of Judah” (Revelation 5:5). Man invented those names. God responded to their invention in time by incorporating them into His own eternal vocabulary and by later naming Himself with a couple of them. That thought is something to chew on.

There’s an even greater biblical example of God identifying Himself with a human response to Him. Coming to Jacob in a dream, God announced, “I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar and where you made a vow to me.” (Genesis 31:13a). He was referring back to the time when Jacob did those things in response to His self-revelation (Genesis 28:10-22). Jacob renamed the location where it happened from “Luz” to “Bethel,” he performed a ritual anointing to consecrate a stone, and he made a solemn vow to the Lord. God told him to do none of these things. They were all Jacob’s own ideas. Yet God adopted Jacob’s creative responses to Him, making them into part of His own identity. The Lord, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, will forever be “the God of Bethel.” He sovereignly chose it as one of His titles for eternity, because of his interaction with human faith in time. He may have done exactly the same thing with many of your own faith encounters with Him. How human-friendly that is!

Another report of God’s reaction to our response to Him is given in Malachi 3:16 (ESV), “Then those who feared the LORD spoke with one another. The LORD paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the LORD and esteemed his name.” This verse is amazing! It shows that an eternally omniscient God is listening in on our conversations in time, because He’s concerned about what we have to say to each other about Him. He’s so excited about our discussion that he makes sure it gets it eternally recorded!

God certainly needs no notebook to jot down our devotional conversations to jog His memory. They probably were not written to remind Him, but to educate us. Some of us have a stubborn theology that undermines the authenticity of His open-ended interactions with humans. He wants it known in eternity that He did not determine our responses—He danced with them. His earthly interactions with us were all real, not just contrived accommodations for the frailty of our fallen and depraved human minds.

During His heavenly review of our lives and of the many unworthy trusts we held sacred, God may have to point out to many this human-unfriendly belief adamantly held and taught about His dealings with humans. This “book of remembrance” mentioned by Malachi will forever condemn the shame of such a theological allegiance.

When we live in a world where its Creator treats our decisions and actions with as much integrity as He expects us to treat His own, we live in a human-friendly world. In the midst of the trials and troubles brought about by human sin, faith in such a God makes the journey not just tolerable but joyous.

SEX IS CENTRAL TO GOD’S SALVATION PLAN

Evangelical pulpiteers can shout louder than ever about sexual morality, but most are still reluctant to frankly address the physical aspects of human sexuality, even at a time when society desperately needs to hear a Christian voice. Why this characteristic shyness about sex? Believers have no biblical warrant for it. Such a squeamish attitude certainly didn’t come from our Maker. Neither in Scripture nor in orthodox Christian theology is there even a shred of support for our long history of embarrassment about the body’s sexual nature. In fact, a careful review of the Bible itself—done in the fear of God and not in the fear of tradition—will actually show that our reasons for avoiding the anatomy of gender and its physiological purposes in sexuality are not only unscriptural but may have heretical roots.

Why not boldness rather than bashfulness in our approach to sex? Christians, of all people, should be so open about the physical wonders of human gender and reproduction that it makes the world’s treatment of these subjects seem prudish in comparison. We owed it to the Designer of the human body to have developed such expertise and excellence in the realm of sex education that secular authorities would resort to us for in-depth informational and audio-visual teaching materials, rather than vice versa. In this crucial area of stewardship, the church has not only failed our Lord but left a promiscuous modern society to flounder in a more diabolical degree of sexual confusion than history has ever known.

Why didn’t we take our cue from God’s Word in this area? The very first words God uses to state how humans reflect His image are not the commonly assumed aspects of personality (ie., reason, emotion, volition, etc.), but physical gender! (Re-read Genesis 1:27, and if you don’t say “Ouch!” you’re in theological denial!) Yes, He did equip us rationally for the task of governing creation, but His very first command to us in Genesis 1:28 was what? To reproduce!

If God’s very first words about His purpose for humans—that is, procreativity from sexual union between complementary genders—aren’t sufficient to gain our attention, maybe we’ll listen to His last words. There’s someone who joins the Holy Spirit in the last few sentences of Scripture (Revelation 22:17) to invite sinners to salvation? It’s “the Bride,” the Church, the corporate “wife of the Lamb.” The present symbolism of gender and sexual union ultimately find fulfillment in our spiritual union with Christ the Bridegroom. But until then, God has placed marriage as the Bible’s bookends for the redemption story, and right in the middle of it all is an erotic drama portraying just how sensually passionate He means for His symbolism to be (Song of Songs)! If both temporal and eternal marriage have such centrality in God’s mind, where have our minds been? When it comes to dealing with the fleshly dust from which God fashioned sexual body parts and their physical union, it’s obvious that our minds have been in the gutter.

Far from honoring the human body and it’s gender distinctions as sacred ground, we’ve religiously depicted them as avenues of temptation and lust. Our confident legalisms and manmade scruples to insure purity and morality have basically pornified the body! By redefining our physical forms and our sex organs as obscenities, we’ve paved the way for pornographers to defile that which was meant to be part of our Trinitarian Maker’s Self-portrait. With a prudish brush we’ve painted a lewd image of the sexuality through which God intended to proclaim His message of redemption. If this theological error is not sin, then missing the mark has lost its meaning!

Sexuality wasn’t created as an end in itself. It was intended, first, to image the Trinity’s unity in divine love and cosmic creativity through marital love and human procreativity. The sexuality of our complementary genders was meant to prophetically display the future one-flesh union we will enjoy with the incarnate Son of God, our Bridegroom. Why have we neglected or ignored these aspects of God’s emphasis on sexuality in Scripture? Perhaps they would have been more easily recognized, if Christian minds had not been culturally mesmerized through early Gnostic influences that heretically despised the material world and the physical body. But just as heretical, and even more blinding, has been the Protestant church’s wholesale religious embrace of the false standards of Victorian prudery.

It’s way past time for Christian repentance in this area. The need for reformation in the church’s view and treatment of the body’s gender and sexuality has never been greater nor more urgent. Embarrassing as it may be for Christian leaders to confess to bowing down for so long before the idol of cultural Victorianism—difficult as it may be for the average believer’s mind to be purged of the rituals of such idolatry—we can still return to the healing Word of God. The truth in Scripture about our bodies and their gendered sexuality has the power to set the church free from an unholy prudery and to equip saints with the transforming message our sex-obsessed, gender-confused, marriage-deforming world needs to hear.

[For an even more thorough critique of our failure to deal properly with the human body and its sexuality, I challenge you to read my doctrinal paper on this subject: “Incarnational Truth about Humanity’s Sexual Nature (Doing Body-friendly Theology Free from Gnostic Prudery).”]

MY REWARDING DOUBTS ABOUT THE TRINITY

A couple years out of Bible College, for a short time, I questioned the doctrine of the Trinity. My doubts led me into an intense study to see if Jesus and the Holy were ever called Yahweh (Jehovah) in the Bible. If so, then the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit would all three be the great “I AM” of Exodus 3:14, as well as the “US” of the Godhead Who said, “Let us make man in our image...” (Genesis 1:26). It could not logically be otherwise, if Yahweh is God.

My investigation was extremely complicated. Following Jewish tradition, most translations of the Old Testament (OT) substitute “LORD” for Yahweh, but spell it “Lord,” if the Hebrew word adonai, (a lord or ruler) is used as a name for God. However, when the New Testament (NT) quotes the OT, both Yahweh and adonai become only the Greek word kurios (a lord or ruler). To find if Jesus and the Holy Spirit are ever called Yahweh, the NT must attribute the name kurios to them in the context of a quote from the OT, AND the kurios referred to in the quote must, in the original Hebrew text, be God’s name Yahweh, not adonai, which could mean only a ruler.

There were no personal computers at this time, so my research depended on many hours of wading through the pages of Strong’s Concordance. But at last, in Romans 10:9-13, I had my first success! There, Jesus is called kurios (“Lord”), and the significance of that title is directly explained by a quote from Joel 2:32, where the NT translation kurios means Yahweh (“LORD”) in the original language. This proved the deity of Jesus. I was totally thrilled!

But what about the Holy Spirit? It took less time for a similar thrill! In 2 Corinthians 3:12-18, the Holy Spirit is called kurios (“Lord”) not once but twice (vs. 17-18). But which kurios is Paul talking about, Yahweh or adonai, a ruling lord? The passage refers to the OT story about Moses removing his veil upon entering the presence of “the LORD.” In 2 Corinthians, it's kurios; in Exodus 34:34 it's Yahweh. No adonai anywhere in the context. This completed my study and forever confirmed my faith in the Christian doctrine of the Trinitarian nature of God.

I admit, it was a complicated study, and perhaps hard to follow. But after doing this research, I realized I could have saved myself the trouble. In Matthew 28:19, where Jesus instructs the disciples to baptize converts, He says to do so “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” All three have one name. The Father is fully Yahweh, the Son is fully Yahweh, the Spirit is fully Yahweh. God is a Trinity. I wrote up my findings into a tract called, “WATCH OUT! Are You Truly Jehovah’s Witness?” It was published by Gospel Outreach of Northern California, back in the heyday of the Jesus’ People Movement.

Many years later, I thought of another argument to support a Trinitarian theology. It’s based in logical reasoning, less complicated and easier to explain. In a later blog, I hope to share it and another very interesting one that I’ve thought about recently. I may even mention a third.