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Title:
"Immanuel:
God With Us"
Author: Michael
Horton
"And the Word was
made flesh,
and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory,
the glory as of the only begotten of the Father full of grace and
truth."
John 1:14
I BELIEVE.....
... AND IN JESUS CHRIST HIS ONLY SON OUR LORD;
WHO WAS CONCEIVED BY THE HOLY GHOST,
BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY,
Do you really believe that God was one of us?
Has it settled in (your heart and mind) that the Almighty Creator and
Ruler, the Eternal Son and Sovereign Lord, has actually become and
remains this very moment "one of us."?
"Once we grasp the message of the New Testament, it
is impossible to read the Old Testament again without seeing Christ on
every page, in every story, foreshadowed or anticipated in every event
and narrative. The Bible must be read as a whole, beginning with
Genesis and ending with Revelation, letting promise and fulfillment
guide our expectations for what we will find there.
We have seen that the Old Testament anticipated a
Messiah who was no less than Yahweh himself, God the Son and yet also
the Son of man. The Gospel writers, especially Luke, labor to make
the point that Jesus Christ is not only God, but fully human as well.
To be sure, Israel was looking for God himself -- Immanuel: God
with Us -- but this coming Redeemer also had to be from a particular
line of genealogical descent. He was not only to sit at the
Father's right hand in heaven, but on the throne of his father David, as
a legal descendant of the royal house. God had faithfully
preserved a royal seed, and he was born king of the Jews regardless of
imperial permission.
The Old Testament itself required a Messiah who was
legally descended from God's chosen royal line. He had to be not
only God by nature and human by appearance, but both God and man by
nature. Not only was this expected in the biblical narrative, but
it was required by theology of the Old Testament. As Anselm argued
in the eleventh century, the Saviour had to be God in order to achieve
our salvation by paying an infinite price and rising again, but he had
to be man in order to be a true legal representative of Adam and his
chosen seed. Only God could save, but only a man should
save. It was, after all, humanity that owed the debt. In his
person, therefore, we have the union of two distinct natures, divine and
human, so that the child of Mary was nothing less than God and nothing
less than man."
___________
Excerpt from "We Believe, Recovering the Essentials of the Apostles'
Creed" by Michael Horton, Word Publishing, 1998, p. 78
Reference: Apostles' Creed:
http://www.ccel.org/creeds/apostles.creed.html
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