Our scripture lesson this evening is from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1, verses 26 through 38. We'll also read the 18th article of the Belgic Confession of Faith on the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Before we read that, I want to just give you an encouragement that I came across recently in A book that's coming out soon on some of the letters of Cornelius Van Til, the editor cites a statement by J. Gresham Machen, who was the founder of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and he commented in the 1930s, the late 1930s, about the faithfulness of the Christian Reformed Church in the face of modernism and as a fairly rare exception to all of the churches of that day that were denying the fundamentals of the faith. And Machen said there are at least five reasons why the Christian Reformed Church to that point in the 1930s was a bastion of orthodoxy. And one of the reasons was the church's commitment to confessional preaching. to set the confessions, the catechism, the Belgian confession, the Canons of Dort in front of the congregation week in and week out. He said the people of that tradition know what they believe, and we think that Machen is right, and so we want to continue in that tradition, and where even in that named denomination, that tradition has not held strong. We see the potential effects of that, and we want to resist those as well. So be encouraged to be built up in the faith in a day in which these same fundamentals, like the incarnation of Jesus Christ, are being denied, and with a sense that there's no consequence to denying them. We do doubt that. We do deny that in the strongest of terms. Luke chapter one. beginning at verse 26. In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, to the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you. But she was greatly troubled at this saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And 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 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 answered 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 And her old age has also conceived a son. And this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God. And Mary said, Behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be according to your word. And the angel departed from her. Amen. Article 18 of the Belgic Confession on the Incarnation says this. So then we confess that God fulfilled the promise which he had made to the early fathers by the mouth of his holy prophets when he sent his only and eternal son into the world at the time set by him. The Son took the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of man, truly assuming a real human nature with all its weaknesses except for sin, being conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit without male participation. And he not only assumed human nature as far as the body is concerned, but also a real human soul in order that he might be a real human being. For since the soul had been lost as well as the body, he had to assume them both to save them both together. Therefore, we can fast against the heresy of the Anabaptists who deny that Christ assumed human flesh from his mother, that he shared the very flesh and blood of children. that he is the fruit of the loins of David according to the flesh, born of the seed of David according to the flesh, fruit of the womb of the Virgin Mary, born of a woman, the seed of David, a shoot from the root of Jesse, the offspring of Judah, having descended from the Jews according to the flesh, from the seed of Abraham, for he assumed Abraham's seed and was made like his brothers, except for sin. In this way, he is truly our Emmanuel, that is, God with us. Amen. The ancient church struggled to believe that God could become a man. And so there are not just the heresies mentioned in this article of the Confession, but others Early in the history of the church, one heresy called Gnosticism claimed that matter is evil, the physical world is evil, the spiritual world is good. And so surely, according to that thinking, God could not become a man, not a real person, not a physical flesh and blood being. Other people The docetist in particular said that the incarnation was an illusion. It looked like this messiah was a real person. human, but he only appeared to be human. He was really pure spirit and other errors like that. Now, I think, in our day, the errors regarding the incarnation of Jesus Christ would be on the other side of the spectrum. I think today the more common view is just the opposite. Jesus is often presented as merely a very good man. Certainly human. Absolutely human. No trouble in the broad church today accepting that. Jesus is not just a good man. Both of these views, these errors, miss the truth and the beauty of the incarnation. The great mystery of godliness, as the Apostle Paul puts it in 1 Timothy 3.16, is this. God was manifested in the flesh. Real God, true God, eternal God, was in fact manifested in real flesh, in real humanity. And so we mustn't find ourselves theologically on either end of that that spectrum of errors regarding the incarnation of Jesus Christ. He didn't just appear to be a man, but he is more than a man. And so the lesson before us this evening can help us understand and value the incarnation of God's Son, not, of course, just as a doctrine, but as God with us. We want to know, Christ as he truly is. And to do that, we must listen to the word of God. And this lesson is very helpful. It walks us through not only the redemptive historical aspect of the incarnation, but also the doctrine of the incarnation and the application of the truth of the incarnation. So I wanna take those three things as they're presented in our lesson this evening. First of all, focusing on the promise of the incarnation. This is not a thing that happened out of the blue. totally unannounced, unexpected. In fact, we could say in thinking about the promise of the Incarnation that all of the positive promises in Scripture aim at the renewed fellowship between God and man. And so the incarnation fits right into that promise that God and man would have a new relationship, that God would be with his people. As we heard this morning from Ezekiel 37, that I will be with you, and I will be your God, and you will be my people. That's what all of the positive promises of scripture are all about. renewed fellowship with God. And at the heart of this promise is the idea of Immanuel, God with us. The God from whom we have alienated ourselves promises to live in sweet fellowship with us. Again, that is the gospel. And Immanuel, God with us, is at the heart of that. This is an old promise. God promises to the patriarchs, to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and many different places that he says, I will be with you. I'll be with you, Abraham, when you come out of this strange land and come and wander where I would lead you. I'll be with you, Isaac. I'll be with you, Jacob. And surely God kept that promise. He was with them. but not in the same way that he was with Adam and Eve before the fall when he walked with these first people and talked with them face to face. In fact, throughout the Old Testament, godly people often lamented, as we find the words in Lamentations 1, verse 16, that a comforter is far from me. A comforter is far from me. That's a verse that depicts the alienation that the gospel is given to eliminate. Comforter is far from me. God heard those laments in the days of the Old Testament. Where is the Lord? Why does he seem so far from me? The writers would sometimes say. And so he promises to be with his people again. Isaiah in chapter seven verse 14 offers this promise, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel, which Matthew would interpret for New Testament readers means God with us. And so even to go back to that first promise, the promise in Genesis 3.15 that a savior would come and crush the head of the serpent. It's more than that. It's more than just that a deliverer will come and take care of the problem, the tyrant, the bully, the deceiver. It's more than that. The promise is that God would come for his flock and care for them as a good shepherd, not as a hireling, not as a mercenary, not one who would just come and take care of the intruder, but to come like a good shepherd and live with the sheep, to dwell with his people. This promise is given in so many places in Scripture that God would come among his people again. Just think, for example, of something that King David believed, as recorded in Psalm 110, which Jesus interacts with the Pharisees. David believed that Messiah would be both his son, or his heir, and his Lord. So Jesus puts that puzzle to the Pharisees, who did not believe that this man who was in front of them, whose father they knew and mother they knew, could possibly be the son of God. But Jesus says, then what did David mean when he says that the Messiah would be both his son and his Lord? Well, that quandary is answered by the incarnation, by God himself coming in the flesh and being with his people. God's promise to David was not simply that a king would sit on his throne, but that God himself would descend from David according to the flesh and reign over his people. So this is the ancient promise of the incarnation. And so for generations, godly Jewish people looked forward to the coming of the Messiah. Imagine living in those days before Christ and you would be constantly, if you're godly at least, be wondering, is a child who's born among us recently, could that be the Christ? And there's this waiting and wanting and yearning for God to be with them. They were looking for God to personally shepherd them. They're being shepherded so often by ungodly people and people who take advantage of them. And they're looking for God himself to come to bind up their wounds, to wipe the tears from their eyes. They believe that God always keeps his promises, even when he requires his people to wait a long time. And it does seem that the people waited a long time. If the promise of the Messiah is made in the Garden of Eden and continued to be spoken to the prophets, listen, I will come and I will be among you and I'll shepherd you. They waited a long time. Paul speaks to this waiting and to God's fulfillment of his promise. He says in Galatians 4 verse 4, but when the fullness of time had come, when that promise had fully matured, like perhaps you've Witnessed in a in a way by way of analogy when you've planted a fruit tree and You the thing is so little at first and it couldn't possibly bear fruit, but it is a fruit tree It's going to bear fruit you hope one day and then you nurture it and you care for it and you prune it and finally Finally, in the fullness of time, you get some fruit off that tree. And that's what God is, how He's describing this promise. In the fullness of time, in the maturity of the plan of God, when that time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, just as He'd promised, God with His people. In Jesus, God had finally become intimately, physically, with his people. And so the life and ministry of Jesus, as God in the flesh, fulfills all of God's promises. That's what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1, verse 20. All of the promises of God are in Christ. Yes, they're, amen, in Christ. And so the incarnation is not something, as I mentioned earlier, that can be dispensed with, as the modernists did in the days of Machen, and as people will today say, well, you have to look for a nugget of truth or some practical concept in the Bible, but we can't have We can't have miracles. We certainly can't have God becoming a person while remaining divine. But this is exactly what Scripture teaches, not just as sort of a side promise, not as something incidental to the ministry of God, but right at the heart of it. The apostles recognized that Jesus was the Savior of Israel who was raised up from David's seed according to the promise. So there is this promise of the incarnation that the confession introduces us to early in the lesson. It's not new, it's old because it's at the heart of what God is communicating to his people. But what does it mean for God to take on flesh? That question is important also. And we want to engage that under the point of the principle of the incarnation. What can this mean that God took on flesh? Well, the incarnation, the word incarnation, simply means in the flesh. It comes from the Latin word incarnate. And maybe when you hear the word carne, you think of a carnivore, someone who eats flesh, something that eats flesh. That idea may just help you remember that incarnation means in the flesh. And by this term, incarnation, we mean that God truly came to earth in the flesh to be our Savior. And so to understand incarnation, you have to make two affirmations, two parallel affirmations. First of all, that in the incarnation, God becoming a man, Christ retained full deity. The Godhead doesn't become vacated for a time of the second person or of... Jesus doesn't lose his divinity. The second person doesn't lose his divinity. Jesus Christ, as we learned in a previous article, Article 10, is true, eternal God. This must be our starting point. True eternal God. Jesus was not a man who did wonderful things or who became divine. but he's the second person of the Godhead, God's eternal son, who became man without losing his divinity. And that's why the confession stacks these verses that affirm that what we have in Jesus is God in the flesh, according to the seed of David, came from his mother's womb really and truly the way that children do. He assumed human flesh from his mother. genetically related, we would say, to his mother. And yet the holy conception was achieved by the power of the Holy Spirit without male participation. And that's why when the angel Gabriel told Mary that she would give birth to the Christ, that this ancient promise has finally come to fruition in her. She understood The promise, she's a godly young woman. She understood this is what people have been waiting for, but she just didn't understand how it could apply to her. She's a young girl. She'd never been sexually active. She was engaged to Joseph, but was godly. They were respecting the Lord in their physical relationship. And so she says, I don't understand how this thing can be. And so, The angel answered 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. What we believe then, as Scripture teaches it, is that true God entered into the womb of the Virgin Mary. Christ retained his full deity. I really don't know, in terms of teaching this, where is the best place to start. I said you have to affirm the eternality of the Son of God. That is a good starting point. But on the other hand, we absolutely have to affirm that Christ became a real man. And so whichever you put first in your articulation of the incarnation, second we need to say that Christ became a real man. He didn't merely take the shape of a man, performing the illusion of humanity, adorning human flesh the way that a person puts on a coat that you can take on or put off, or costume. Maybe you've seen someone before with an unbelievably good costume. Or maybe it's a person in a movie who's wearing a mask and they peel the mask off and you say, oh, I see you really weren't that person that you appeared to be. That's not at all what Jesus does with humanity. He doesn't put on humanity like we'd put on a costume or a disguise. He took the form of a human servant, Paul says in Philippians 2, even as he was eternally in the form of God. And so in that one passage, Paul notes that both are true. He takes the form of a servant, not like a disguise or a mask, but in the same way that he is in the form of God, the stuff of God. He also became a real man. And that means two things as the confession helpfully delineates for us. It means body and soul. If he's a real person, he took on a real body and a real soul. When the eternal son came into the world, Hebrews 10 verse five says, God prepared for him a real body. It's not an unusual kind of body, it's an unusual conception. But the body of Jesus Christ is human, through and through. The writer to the Hebrews puts it this way in chapter two, verse 14, since the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things. He's a real savior to real people, taking on real flesh, a real body. And for this reason, John the Apostle makes as one of the most basic tests of orthodoxy, the affirmation that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. If you can't say that, if you would say Jesus is a person but, Not really a person. You're not a Christian, John says. 1 John 4 verse 2, he says it again in 2 John 1 verse 7. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. If you can't confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, you are not from God. Real body. Second, Jesus took a true human soul. Jesus didn't become half a man. a real man in his body, but having a different kind of soul. He's not merely physical. He's a true human. He says, for example, in Matthew 26, verse 38, my soul is very sorrowful. He's grieved. He's offended. He gets justly angry. He's able to rejoice in his soul, as we're told in Luke 10 verse 21. Jesus experienced all the human emotions from the time of his infancy through his teen years and into adulthood. Jesus experienced full humanity, body and soul. So what does this mean for us? If we understand the the promise, the redemptive history of the incarnation. God spoke to the fathers, fulfilled that promise in time, the fullness of time. And if we can say that I believe in the incarnation, I believe that the eternal Son of God came in time into the womb of the Virgin Mary by a miracle, miraculous conception, and that he did so taking on a real human body and a real soul. What does that mean for us? as believers. So let's consider then finally the power of the incarnation or the prophet we could say perhaps of the incarnation. There's something to be said here, though the incarnation is a glorious mystery, but we don't have to fully understand it. You can be sitting here as a child or as an adult or someone who's been in the church for 50 or 60 years and say, I don't fully understand the incarnation, I believe it, as Christians always have. That's okay, you don't have to fully understand it. You can trust in Christ and draw deep comfort from it, though you may not fully understand it. I want to focus on just three applications, three examples or three instances of the power of the incarnation. First of all, this doctrine, this core Christian doctrine teaches us that God is trustworthy. God is trustworthy. And that's why I'm thankful that the confession brings in the history, that this is an old promise. thousands of years old this promise was before it is confirmed and fulfilled. This promise, sometimes you make a promise and then circumstances change and you don't fulfill that promise. Or you can't fulfill that promise in the moment and so things have to change for the better in order for you to be able to fulfill that promise. Well, just think of all the changes in the history of Israel. I mean, all of the perils that this people endured. Think of the Pharaoh who turned against Israel and commanded that the babies be put to death, the Hebrew midwives even participate in putting the children to death, Pharaoh being followed in principle years later in the person of Herod who puts to death all thousands and thousands of little Hebrew boys in an attempt to kill this Christ child. How does this promise get fulfilled after thousands of years? Because God is trustworthy. He's true to his word and he's able to keep his word regardless of the changing circumstances, which of course are in his hand as well. It may Of course, seemed that God waited a long time to send his son, but his perfect patience. I don't know how else you call it for something like a 4,000 year promise. I mean, that's perfect patience to keep a promise for that long. That perfect patience encourages us as we see him doing just what he said despite fierce opposition. Isn't that encouraging? And if God is reliable in fulfilling His greatest promise to come to earth in true human flesh to defeat the devil, can we not trust Him in all things? Can you trust Him? with your health, with your marriage, with your finances, with your future, with all the other things that we really do cast upon the Lord because we can't fulfill them ourselves. Do you trust God with the big things in your life? Do you trust Him with your sin? Do you trust Him with your eternity? And if God also got the timing right in sending his son, and Paul assumes that God got the timing right, he says, in the fullness of time, and there are reasons that you could say, even from a historical perspective, the timing was just right. You could mention the Roman Empire, which as probably middle schoolers have studied for generations, brought in the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, the freedom to travel on the seas and the roads, making way for missionaries and the transmission of the gospel. There's a common language, a simple common language in Greek. There is a widespread dissatisfaction with the current religions of the time, the Greek and Roman religions, where people were making sport of their gods because they knew that they were not real. And all those things are accurate, they're all true, but we look at those in hindsight. But even without any of those, we could say that this was perfect timing. So the question is, to get back to the question, if we can trust that God's timing on this was perfect, Can we not trust Him to work at the right time in our lives too? You want something to happen in your life. You're praying for someone's salvation, or you're praying for a spouse, or you're praying for children, or you want this good thing to come into your life. And you keep praying for that, you keep wanting that thing, but trust the Lord's timing. You can trust him for the incarnation, you can trust him for whatever the thing is. A second thing that we can draw from this vital doctrine is a wonderfully important truth, that Christ understands you. He understands you. Eternal God became fully man, Hebrews 2.17 says, like his brothers in every respect. Like us in every respect. He is, as the confession puts it, man. He is man from the essence of his mother born in time. He has a body like ours. Unlike the first Adam, think about this, we think of the first Adam being just like us as well. but his body was made in paradise. He lived for a time in a body that wasn't prone to any kind of defect, the first Adam did. That's not true of the second Adam. From the moment of his conception, he's born into the womb of a fallen young woman who herself got sick and had troubles and made mistakes in parenting along with her husband and all the rest. He's born, as Romans 8.3 says, in the likeness of sinful flesh. He's never sinned, but he comes into this world in the likeness of sinful flesh, vulnerable to suffering and to shame and to death, all the things that sin leads to. And so because of all this, you can tell Jesus what you are tempted with, what you are troubled by, what you are desirous of, and Jesus will understand those desires, understand those troubles, understand those temptations. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Hebrews 4.15. You ever find it where you're talking to someone about, or maybe you're thinking about talking to someone about a trouble that you're going through? But the person that you're talking with, you have such a high estimation of them, and they seem to have their life so well in order that you think to yourself, I'm not even gonna tell them about this thing. I'm not gonna tell them about the way that my wife and I talk to each other, or the problems that we're having in this area of life, or whatever. They wouldn't understand. They wouldn't know the trials that I go through. They've had an easy life from the beginning, and that may not be true, of course, but you can never say that of Jesus. You can never say he doesn't understand. There's nothing that he has gone through, that you will go through, that he has not faced as well. Christ understands you. But I know you hear that and you say, well, that is absolutely wonderful and true, and I believe that, but that true, that too is not enough, is it? The third thing, though, is that Jesus is qualified to save us. The main message about Jesus is not that He gets us. That is true, and that's a wonderful comfort, but that's not the main message about Jesus. And even today, there are campaigns that are promoting this really as, at least on the lead side of things, the main thing about Jesus, that he gets us, he understands us, he knows just what you're going through as well. But the main thing about Jesus, that he's able to save us. He's like us in every respect. Hebrews 2.17 says, so that. And what is the so that? It's not just that he would be understanding and sympathetic, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest. A different kind of high priest, of course, not one who offers the blood of a bull or a calf or anything that was given to him in a certain sense then, that high priest in the Old Testament has very, very little skin in the game acting as a priest. But that's not true of Jesus. He put his whole skin, his whole flesh, his whole soul into the priesthood. And so, in the service of God, he makes propitiation for the sins of his people, Hebrews 2.17. Or as the next verse says, since he himself has suffered being tempted, he is able to aid those who are tempted. In the body and in the soul, Christ obeyed the law for us, the law that you will never keep entirely. He also, as 2 Corinthians 5.21 says, he was made by God to be sin. Who knew no sin, who committed no sin himself, but he was made to be sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Jesus is qualified to save you, no matter your sin, no matter your upbringing or whatever it is. Jesus is qualified to save you. When God took on flesh, He proves his trustworthiness. He proves that he understands us. He proves that he's able to save us. He proves that he's willing to be our God, to come back to us. We who have alienated ourselves from him, he says, I will come back to you and be your God. And one day soon, Christ, who is ascended into heaven with our flesh, representing us there, here and there, even now, he will come again and bring us into the real presence of the triune God forever. And so the beauty of the incarnation is in a large measure pointing to what hasn't happened yet, that God will come to be with us. to gather us, to bring us back into His realm where righteousness will dwell and every sin will be cast out. And then, John saw in the Revelation, the dwelling of God will be with His people. And so that is what we look forward to as we trust in Jesus Christ. Let's pray together. Lord, we worship you as the eternal God and who in Christ took on flesh so that we might know your tenderness and your love and your understanding of us, your reliability, and that your qualification to save us. Thank you for offering yourself, Lord Jesus, in our place on the cross and keeping the law for us. We pray that we would put our whole trust in you. not just in strictly spiritual, religious, or theological matters, but our whole lives. May we entrust them into your care, knowing that you care for us. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.