God became Man

The reality of God is far from the reality of man. The Bible says that the thoughts of God are as much higher from the thoughts of man as the heavens are higher than the earth. (Isaiah 55:9) A person who has moved from his or her own country to another can understand something about being different and getting over it.

It is difficult to learn a foreign language as an adult. Sometimes an immigrant may think how much easier it would be if he or she had been born in this country. How much more difficult it is then to understand God. A man cannot understand anything more of God than what God has made known of himself. But God wants us to know him. Therefore he has given us the Bible, in which he speaks to us in the language of men. God has been born among us as a man. Therefore Jesus is called the Word, who has “become flesh” (John 1:14-18,1. John 1:1-4). Jesus emphasizes that he really was a man. He calls himself the Son of Man. Jesus was humanly limited also in his knowing, and he was not omniscient while on earth (Matthew 24:36). Not even with his many miracles did Jesus emphasize his own divinity, but says instead that someone who believes in God may do even greater miracles than he did. The real humanity of Jesus can be seen also in that even though he was tempted he refused to use his divinity (Matthew 4:1-11). He lived awful human life from birth until death totally without sin. Jesus was totally human and totally God. The divinity of Jesus can be seen in the fact that his origin is not part of the creation (John 1:3), and in the fact that he sits on the throne of God (Hebrews 1:3). In front of Jesus kneel down both men and angels (Philippians 2:9 and Hebrews 1:6), even though the Bible says that one should kneel only before God (Revelation 22:8-9 and Matthew 4:8-10). In Jesus God became man, so that he could die for the mankind (Philippians 2:6-8). When man cannot climb to God, God came to man. Jesus is the bridge from God to man.

Jesus is also a bridge from man to God. He makes heaven our home country. Even if an immigrant has obtained Finnish citizenship, people still ask “where are you from?” and “how long have you been in Finland?”. The children whose parents are Finns but who have been raised abroad feel themselves as strangers in this land. Can anyone become truly Finnish any other way than being born in Finland?

One can become a citizen of the kingdom of God only by being a child of God. How can one become a child of God, when one has been already born once? This was the question of a man named Nicodemus as he was discussing with Jesus. Jesus told that man must be born again (John 3:1-16). Jesus gives mankind a second beginning. Adam was the first beginning. He had a relationship with God and the paradise which he ruled. Because of sin Adam lost his inheritance. From then on everyone has been born outside the paradise and is without a relationship with God. Jesus did not get this inheritance of sin on his shoulders because he is not the son of Joseph. By being born as the son of the virgin Mary, Jesus gets his humanity, but from the beginning he has been the Son of God. (Luke 1:35) In the person of Jesus, God and man are in total unity and harmony. Jesus has all the riches of heaven as his own. He has what to give to us as an inheritance. In Jesus we are offered a relationship with God, the position as a child of God and eternal life as an inheritance. Jesus came to take us to our real home country to be with God.

We change all the time. Even though we do not want it, the environment affects us. Jesus wants to make us better human beings. Man was created in the beginning in the image of God. Because of sin the image of God has been distorted in us. We have almost lost our humanity. Everywhere the history of mankind is full of bloodshed and oppression. Man is a sinner in the history of the nations, in the history of the family and in the history of each individual at this moment. Christ is perfectly the image of God. He brought back the original humanity. He is more genuinely a human being than anyone else. He was born as a helpless baby and died like a miserable criminal. However in the midst of limitations and misery his human life was a good and complete life. In him we can be hidden in a humanity that is acceptable to God. Christ brings about in us the healing of our own lives. We become gradually more the kind that God created us to be: the images of God.

What is your real home country? What will be the home country of your children ? What does the Bible say about the home country of Abraham (Hebrews 11:13-16)?