Christianity Today

The central character of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Little Mermaid dreams of giving up her life in the sea to find love on dry land. The agony she undergoes exchanging her tail for a fully human form is poignant. It makes one wonder what it would be like to become another sort of thing, something we've desperately wanted to become.

Even before the Fall, human beings longed for dramatic change. In Genesis we see that Eve longed to be like God, to share in his very wisdom and goodness (Gen. 3:5-6). That longing was not the problem, since we see that in Christ, we are destined to "participate in the divine nature" (2 Pet. 1:4). Rather, the problem was that Eve grasped at God's wisdom and goodness instead of waiting and trusting God to fulfill her God-given longing. After the Fall, that longing is now utterly frustrated in human beings. This is one gracious reason God has given us the moral law—to show (a) that it truly is our destiny to live godly lives as outlined in the law, and (b) that it is now impossible to live in accordance with God's law without divine grace.

Thus we find ourselves in a desperate situation. We long to know and experience truth, beauty, and love in perfect fulfillment—the very wisdom and goodness of God. This yearning is what drives human beings relentlessly to create, to write, to ponder, and to love. But history and our everyday experience show we fall so far short of this goal as to lead us to despair; we are, as Paul put it, in a "wretched" situation, destined to live and die in futility (Rom. 7:24).

In the midst of our desperate situation, the gospel announces some startling news: In Christ, God has done that which is necessary for us to be changed, to enjoy the life we were created to enjoy, to participate in his being, to know and experience divine wisdom, beauty, and love—the very things we have longed for all along.

Future articles in this series will examine how one can personally participate in this dramatic transformation. Here I want to examine one crucial event that makes this dramatic transformation possible: the Incarnation.

Many assume that the Crucifixion and Resurrection make our transformation in Christ possible. And of course, there is a great deal of truth in this assumption. But we often think of the Incarnation as the warm-up to the real drama: Jesus needed to become human so he could die for us. What many Christians have forgotten is that our redemption began with the Incarnation.

In the Incarnation, God the Son stoops down to gather up our humanity, becoming one of us so that he may reconcile us to God. He takes up our humanity in addition to his divinity—he unites what makes us human to what makes him divine. As the church father Athanasius puts it in the first chapter of The Incarnation of the Word of God, "He has not assumed a body as proper to his own nature, far from it, for as the Word he is without body." Rather, "He has been manifested in a human body for this reason only, out of the love and goodness of his Father, for the salvation of us men." Then he makes the startling claim that God the Son assumed humanity so that we might become divine. Not that we should lose our individual identity in total fusion with the Godhead, but that we can be united with God through Christ.

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