God With Us
Matthew 1
18 This is how Jesus the Messiah was born. His mother, Mary, was engaged to be married to Joseph. But before the marriage took place, while she was still a virgin, she became pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit.
19 Joseph, to whom she was engaged, was a righteous man and did not want to disgrace her publicly, so he decided to break the engagement quietly.
20 As he considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream. “Joseph, son of David,” the angel said, “do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit.
21 And she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
22 All of this occurred to fulfill the Lord’s message through his prophet:
23 “Look! The virgin will conceive a child!
She will give birth to a son,
and they will call him Immanuel, which means ‘God is with us.’”
John 1
1 In the beginning the Word already existed.
The Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 He existed in the beginning with God.
3 God created everything through him, and nothing was created except through him.
4 The Word gave life to everything that was created,
and his life brought light to everyone.
5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.
Genesis 1.27 (Genesis 5.2; Matthew. 19.4)
So God created human beings in his own image.
In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Hebrews 11.3
By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.
Genesis 2.16-17
15 The Lord God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it.
16 But the Lord God warned him, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden—
17 except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.”
Genesis 3
4 “You won’t die!” the serpent replied to the woman.
5 “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.”
6 The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it, too.
7 At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves.
- Athanasius pg. 4
“Our wrongdoings sparked His love for us, making him eager to help and appear among us. It was our actions that caused Him to take on human form, and it was for our salvation that He was born and revealed in a human boy out of His immense love.”
Their disobedience to God’s commandment was causing them to revert to their original nature, and just as they had initially come into existence from non-existence, they were now on the path to returning to non-existence through corruption.
Naturally, humans are mortal since they were created from nothing, but they also carry the likeness of God. If they maintain that likeness through constant contemplation, their nature loses its power, and they remain uncorrupted.”
1 John 3
4 Everyone who sins is breaking God’s law, for all sin is contrary to the law of God.
5 And you know that Jesus came to take away our sins, and there is no sin in him.
The law of death is in place at Genesis 3.
Athanasius pg. 7
“What is the good and just God to do? Should He allow corruption and death to take over? If so, what was the point of creating them in the first place? It would have been better for them never to have been created than to be created, neglected, and left to perish. Furthermore, such indifference to the destruction of his own work right before His eyes would suggest not goodness in God but limitation, even more so than if He had never created humans at all. Therefore, it was impossible for God to leave humanity to be swept away by corruption, as it would be unfitting and unworthy of Him.”God had made place to meet the people He made, Eden.
- Disobedience and sin broke that union and created shame and hiding from God.
- Now all people are born into sin, and all are under the power of sin and death.
Athanasius:
“What or rather Who was needed for the grace and redemption we required? Who else but the Word of God Himself … It was His role, and His alone, to restore the corruptible to incorruption and uphold the Father’s consistent character.”The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
Athanasius:
“He, the Mighty One and Creator of all, prepared this body within the virgin as a temple for Himself and took it as His own, using it as the instrument through which he was known and in which He lived. By taking a body like ours, which were all subject to the corruption of death, he sacrificed His body to death on behalf of everyone and offered it to the Father. He did this out of pure love for us, so that through His death, everyone might die, and the law of death would be abolished.”
Hebrews 2
14 Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death.
15 Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.Athanasius pg.14:
“God moved to “restore His Image in humanity, so that … people could once again know Him. How could this be achieved if not by the arrival of the very Image Himself, our Savior, Jesus Christ.”
“He first had to eliminate death and corruption… so He took on a human body, so that death could be destroyed once and for all, and people could be renewed according to the Image”Athanasius pg. 16
“The Savior of us all, the Word of God, in His great love, took on a body and moved as a human among humans, meeting their senses, so to speak, halfway. He became an object for the senses so that those who were seeking God in sensory things could understand the Father through the words that He, the Word of God, did in the body.”
1 John 1
We proclaim to you the one who existed from the beginning, whom we have heard and seen. We saw him with our own eyes and touched him with our own hands. He is the Word of life.
2 This one who is life itself was revealed to us, and we have seen him. And now we testify and proclaim to you that he is the one who is eternal life. He was with the Father, and then he was revealed to us.
3 We proclaim to you what we ourselves have actually seen and heard so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.
4 We are writing these things so that you may fully share our joy.
- Jesus is the most unique meeting place of God and humanity.
- In the garden of Eden, separate persons.
- In the tabernacle, separate persons with a priestly go- between.
- In the Temple, same thing.
- Now in Christ, God and humanity together in meeting and now in unbroken union, showing us what we were all intended for in relationship to God, a union unbroken by sin!
John 8.29
Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man on the cross, then you will understand that I am he. I do nothing on my own but say only what the Father taught me.
29 And the one who sent me is with me—he has not deserted me. For I always do what pleases him.”
People must see the truth of Emmanuel, God With Us in Jesus:
Athanasius pg. 16:
“Were they amazed by creation? They saw creation acknowledge Christ as Lord–He demonstrates superiority over all the created world, its physics, laws, broken-ness and limitations.”
For this reason, He was both born and revealed as a human; for this, He died and rose, so that by His works, He could overshadow all other human deeds and lead people away from all paths of error to know the Father.”
He “allowed Himself to be seen, performing actions and giving signs that demonstrated He was not only human but also God the Word. So, the Savior did two things for us by becoming human: He removed death from us and made us new.”
Galatians 2.20
I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
21 I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless.
Athanasius:
“Through ordinary actions like being born and eating, He showed that He was truly present in the body. It was through extraordinary actions performed BY the body that He proved Himself to be the Son of God.”This is evident from the very beginning of His time as a human.
- He formed His own body from the virgin, which is no small proof of His divine nature since the One who created that body is the Creator of everything else. - Wouldn’t anyone conclude from the fact that His body was born of a virgin, without a human father, that the One who appeared in that body is also the Maker and Lord of everything else.
- Consider “the miracle at Cana.
- Wouldn’t anyone who saw water transformed into wine understand the the one who did it was the Lord and Creator of the water that was changed?
- It was for the same reason that He walked on water as if it were dry land - to show those watching that He had control over everything.
- And when He fed the large crowd, turning a small amount into a lot so that five loaves of bread fed five thousand people - didn’t that prove that He was none other than the Lord, who is over everything?
John 10.18
No one takes my life from me, I lay it down willingly…
John 20.30
Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book.
31 But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
