God Made Man
On Sunday night, one of our pastors preached on Hebrews 4:14-5:10. In 4:14-15 (HCSB), we read:
14 Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens—Jesus the Son of God—let us hold fast to the confession. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tested in every way as we are, yet without sin.
This led one of our members to ask the following question on her connect slip during the service:
If God is an all-powerful and all-knowing God, wouldn't he be able to be sympathetic or empathetic with humanity anyway? Why did Jesus have to be on earth to be able to understand? Is that undervaluing God's power?
Here is my brief answer.
1. Yes, God is All-Powerful and All-Knowing
God is all-powerful, working out “all things in conformity with the purpose of his will” (Ephesians 1:11). Similarly, he is all-knowing. “ As David writes in Psalm 139:4, “Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely.” Because he is all-knowing, he therefore knows what we’re going through and understands it. So, Jesus doesn’t just take on human flesh to fill a knowledge void.
2. In Jesus, God’s Sympathy and Empathy Takes on Flesh
While God always understood what we were going through, in Jesus, he entered into our experience in a bodily way. Previously, he could relate to our experience in that he had knowledge of what we were going through. When Jesus took on flesh, he bodily experienced the kinds of things we now go through. He doesn’t just know our experience and suffering from a distance—he experiences the range of things we experience in bodily form.
Why did he need to be able to empathise and sympathise with us in flesh, as well as just generally “knowing” what we’re going through? In Hebrews 2:14-15 (NIV), we read:
14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.
Jesus took on flesh and blood because humans are flesh and blood. He had to take on human flesh—to be like us—in order to defeat the devil and death.
To paraphrase St Anselm, since sin is a human problem, it needs a human to deal with it. Since sin is such a huge problem, only God can deal with it. Hence, we need a God-Man. Enter Jesus, the God-Man.
Jesus becomes like us—and this includes being able to empathise and sympathise with us—to deal with our sin problem.
3. The Incarnation Reveals—Not Reduces—God’s Power (and Love)
In doing things this way, God reveals his power. As we read in Romans 1:16, the Gospel reveals the power of God for salvation. In Romans 5:8, we see that it also reveals his love.
Rather than limiting God, the incarnation demonstrates his greatness. What kind of God voluntarily becomes weak, vulnerable, and killable? Not a powerless God, but one so powerful that he doesn’t need to cling to his status (see Philippians 2:6-8).
