Good News!

The Spirit has been teaching me about the good news of Jesus Christ. For years, I have been labouring under a misapprehension about Christ, tempted to believe the lie that in His incarnation, He somehow 'cheated'. It would present sthg like this: there was only ever one human being who managed to live without sin, but, hang on a minute - isn't it strange that this unique individual also just happened to be Almighty God in human form? I knew that God is good, and that this formulation represented a warped perspective, but I struggled to see the right viewpoint, exactly. T. F. Torrance (in works such as Atonement) points, instead, to Christ's vicarious humanity. It is not just that Jesus died for me, it is that He lived for me. When the Son of God took the nature of a man, assuming the humanity of Jesus into His divine self, he did not merely assume the nature of Adam before the fall, but the fallen nature of Adam inherited through Mary. If this is so, then every moment of Christ's existence was both God's judgement on the sin ingrained in human nature and a demonstration of His righteousness. Like the twin strands of DNA, the divine and human natures co-existed in Christ. At every moment, the perfect eye of God beheld unflinchingly the sinful tendency of what was truly now His own nature, and yet refused to be controlled by it. Salvation is therefore in the very person of Jesus Christ, not merely in His death. In fact, His cross can make no sense without His life. He could only be the spotless lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world if He did, in fact, lead a perfectly spotless life in the presence of the fallible humanity He had made His own. Suddenly this becomes my gospel. Suddenly He becomes my Saviour. Suddenly the gospel is Good News. The Cross then becomes the clincher, the perfect end to the perfect life. It is the end of the reign of Sin, and three days later, it will be gloriously confirmed as the end of the reign of death. It was God's mercy that Jesus had to live no more than the requisite 33 years. What He did proved that I can defeat sin, because He has given me a new nature – His nature. In union with Him, just as He is in union with the Father, and empowered by the same life-giving Spirit, I can live my life in all righteousness. There is nothing stopping me from triumphing over sin. I can look every temptation, every urge, every lazy passion, in the eye, saying: It is finished! No more! In Christ, I am a new creation! If He became fully human, if He really suffered the same burden of sinful flesh as I do, then I can do nothing but rejoice and praise Him. The Spirit brought to mind the interwoven blue and scarlet threads in the High Priest's ephod. How they were closely, inseparably interwoven, and yet distinct. The human and divine natures of Christ were perfectly united, yet never commingled.