God Came Down

It is timely that I am reading K. Scott Oliphint’s God With Us during this Christmas season. I’ve been returning to it in between some other reading projects. My brain hurts while I read it, and yet I keep coming back for more. One emphasis in Chapter Three, “Before Abraham Was…,”  is that while the incarnation is a unique revelation of God in Christ that cannot be overstated, every time God has condescended to communicate with humanity it has been in the Son. Another related theme is the aseity of the Son.

Jesus is the “I am,” the a se God. He is Yahweh. As a matter of fact, the most primitive confession of the church in the New Testament is that “Jesus is Lord” (cf. 1 Cor. 12:3). To make that confession is not simply to say that he is the One who rules heaven and earth, though it is certainly saying that. To say that Jesus is Lord is also to say that the One who names himself in Exodus 3:14, who is revealed throughout the Old Testament, who is himself self-complete, has a revelatory focus in the One who has assumed a human nature. That is, by the time we get to the revelation of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, it becomes clear that this Yahweh, of whom the entire covenant history speaks, is the same One who is the Son of God now come in the flesh.” (176)

Even before he assumed a human nature, the Son of God was still the mediator between God and man. Oliphint explains that every time God condescended, beginning with creation itself, it was in the Son. Every time he appeared to one of the Old Testament saints, it was a covenantal condescension, revealing God in the Son. But in this condescension, “the Logos was not acting simply as the second person of the Trinity; he was acting as the one God. Thus, the Son of God condescending is the condescension of God” (179). It is amazing to contemplate the wonder of the condescension of God to man. The almighty God has humbled himself to assume human properties so that he can reveal himself to us, to even ”relate to us in a way that would be suitable to who we are” (212), and he ultimately humiliates himself beyond comprehension so that he can save us from our sin and commune with us for eternity. And this has been his intention from the beginning of creation. During this advent season, it has been marvelous to think about how “the incarnation is the pinnacle and climax of a process of God’s revealing himself since the time of creation.” Oliphint explains how we particularly learn this in John’s prologue. And while the incarnation is “sui generis...God began the process of revealing himself via the Logos ‘from the moment of creation’” (169). As Oliphint digs deep into the theology of this, and my heart is in awe and my mind is stretched, I wholeheartedly affirm with him: “Surely if the ways of God are beyond our comprehension, then the fact that he unites himself to his creation is among the chief of those ways” (209).