Why God Became Man
Two thousand years ago, the first Christmas was the loneliest and the most hidden Christmas. But two thousand years later, the whole world celebrates it. In Jakarta alone, millions celebrate Christmas, including us tonight. Yet we do not celebrate Christmas in order to be the biggest or the most festive. We come to hear the word of God. What good is it if Christmas becomes only a place of crowds, a place of joking, a place of noise and commotion, a place filled with sins, where God is not glorified?
From the start, the Reformed Evangelical Church of Indonesia was not established to chase popularity, the size of the congregation, or wealth. We are not obsessed with those; we are obsessed with quality. Quality in truth, in teaching, and in obedience to the word of God. From the start, this church was built with prayer and struggle. Many opposed us when we started. But I know this was a burden from God: to establish a church that holds to true doctrine and teaching that is in accordance with Scripture.
Many establish churches for the sake of size and numbers. As long as the congregation is large, the branches are many, and the offerings are abundant, that is enough. But is that what Scripture demands? Is that what the apostles taught? Is that what is pleasing in the heart of God? No. The Lord calls us to bear much fruit, to love one another, to be his witnesses, and to bring people back to the word. He calls us to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.
Paul says to Timothy in 1 Timothy 4:16, “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.” Doctrine matters. Every time I read those verses, I am very afraid. What if the church I lead is teaching what is not from God, replacing what is important with what is unnecessary? So I kneel and pray that this church would be true, not only in name, but in its teaching.
This is the spirit of the Reformation. After centuries of corruption within the church, teaching had to be brought back to the word of God. Martin Luther saw that corruption and longed for reform, so that true doctrine would be upheld and the Christian life would be corrected, sanctified, and set as an example. He wrote the 95 Theses exposing the church’s errors and nailed them to the door of the church in Wittenberg. From there, the Reformation shook many places. Many began to realize that they must repent and return to true teaching.
But to know true doctrine, there must be those who search the Scriptures earnestly, study them deeply, and faithfully defend the truth, even if they must pay a price. Pastors like this are rare, and faithfulness like this is scarce, but that is what God requires. In our day, many pastors live in luxury, indulging themselves and driven by greed. They handle money carelessly, they do not guard the holiness of their lives, and some are even unfaithful to their wives. Yet they still dare to step into the pulpit.
At the WEA General Assembly service in Korea recently, I called for thousands of pastors in attendance to repent. The Holy Spirit was at work powerfully, like a fire burning in the heart of everyone present. All were moved, all were touched by the Holy Spirit. They wept, repented, and pleaded with God to sanctify their lives, to sanctify their families, to sanctify their hearts, minds, and bodies, so that they would be fit to be used by God and so that the church would not be cast away.
I want to share one sentence from the Jesus film distributed by LPMI: “Christianity started from very humble beginnings.” That sentence made me weep. Christianity did not begin from a palace, not from political power or military strength, but from a baby born in a manger. Manger is a place for animals, a place that is filthy and foul-smelling. He denied himself. He sacrificed himself. Though he is God, he humbled himself, came down from heaven, was born as man, and even went up to the cross and died at Golgotha.
So when we celebrate Christmas in this place without a Christmas tree, without decorations and gifts, it is intentional, because this place is for worshiping Jesus. Christmas is not about dazzling lights. The lights on Fifth Avenue in New York, in Central District Hong Kong, or on Orchard Road in Singapore are not put up for Jesus, but for profit. Jesus was born in poverty and simplicity. He came with nothing, wrapped in swaddling cloths, and laid in a manger, in a place that was the foulest, the filthiest, the poorest, and the simplest.
Why God became man? This is the heart of what we preach today. For the Muslims, this makes no sense. There are three main things that Islam rejects. First, the doctrine of the Trinity. The teaching that God is three in one is considered nonsensical. Second, the incarnation, that God became man. Third, the teaching that the blood of Jesus can cleanse human sin. In their view, sin is spiritual, while blood is material. How can something material cleanse what is spiritual? For these three reasons, they regard the Christian faith as illogical.
But I want to remind you, brothers and sisters: many things God does do not make sense to us, because God is far beyond human reason. Precisely because we cannot fully comprehend him, it shows that God is greater than our reasoning. If we want to know God, it is not enough to rely on reason alone. We need the Holy Spirit. Only when the Holy Spirit leads us can we enter the depth and riches of the word of God.
We read in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And in John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” This was written around 610 years before the Quran. A thousand years before Jesus was born, there is a sentence written in Psalm 2:7: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” The Bible is the word of God. God is truth. He is honest and does not lie. Thus, however difficult it may be for us to accept, we must receive it.
This is the foundation of our conviction in celebrating Christmas: God has sent his Son into the world. Is it true that God became man? Is it possible for God to become man? The answer is this: because God is almighty. Nothing is impossible for him. If we believe that God is almighty, then there is no reason to object to believing that he is able to become man.
To become the Son of Man, Jesus had to be born of a human mother. He was born of a woman who had never been with a man. This is a great miracle. 1 Timothy 3:16 says, “Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh.” God became man. You may reject it or refuse to believe it; that is your personal choice. But this truth has been written from long ago, and this is what we believe and celebrate at Christmas.
When Adam sinned, immediately after that he also damaged the environment. He tore off leaves and made a covering to hide his nakedness. He felt ashamed because he realized that he was naked. God called out, “Where are you?” Adam said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid.” Here, for the first time in human history, the word ‘afraid’ appears. A sinner will surely be afraid. If you break the law, you will be afraid of being arrested. Sin brings fear. And after fear comes hiding.
Adam tried to cover his sin by making clothing from leaves. After humanity fell into sin, the glory of God that had once covered them was gone. They became aware of their nakedness, aware of shame. God saw Adam covering himself with leaves. He then made garments of skins for them to replace the leaves as the covering. Adam was astonished. Where did those skins come from?
If no animal had died, there could be no skins. It meant that God had slain an animal. Blood was shed, and its skin became clothing. God was teaching one great truth: the forgiveness of sin demands a sacrifice that dies. Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. Leaves have no blood. But an animal has blood. In other words, God was saying, “You are the one who sinned, but the animal dies in your place.”
This is the first picture of substitution. Because you have sinned, someone must die for you. God was preparing a Savior who would die in our place. We are the ones who sinned, but the Lamb of God is the one who dies. The one who dies is not the guilty. God uses the Lamb of God, who is innocent, to redeem us who are guilty. He sheds his blood, takes our place, and dies.
So if we truly want to understand Christmas, we must understand this: why did God become man? Nearly a thousand years ago, in the eleventh century, a man named Anselm wrote a book in Latin titled Cur Deus Homo, which means, Why God Became Man. God became man in Christ, who came down from heaven and was born in a manger at Christmas. Why did God come down and become man? There are four answers to this question.
The first answer to the question of why God became man is found in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” This is the first foundation: love. God so loved the world that he was willing to send his Son into the world. He allowed his Son to be born as man, to live among us, to suffer, to die on the cross, and to rise from the dead. God loves sinners and sent Jesus into the world so that we who would believe in him should not perish but have eternal life.
The second answer comes from Paul: Jesus, who knew no sin, was made to be sin in our place (2 Corinthians 5:21). The righteous one took the place of the unrighteous. Jesus came to substitute himself for us. We should have perished under the wrath of God, but Jesus took that wrath upon himself. We should have been condemned, but he bore our punishment on the cross and we are set free. This is what we call the doctrine of substitution. God loved sinners, and so Christ came down into the world. And because Christ loved us, he took our place and bore our punishment.
The third answer comes from Anselm. He said that we owe a debt to God, and no human being can pay it. What do we owe? God is holy, God is just, God is glorious. When we sin, we fall short of the glory of God. And so we owe God his glory. Can we ever pay back that debt to God? No, we cannot. We can only sin. We cannot live without sinning. Every day our sin only increases; it never decreases. We cannot possibly repay what we owe to God. We can only add to the debt.
So who can pay our debt? No human being can. Only one person is able to pay it: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who is infinitely rich. Anselm wrote that only Christ is able to satisfy the demands of the justice of God. The unlimited richness of Christ can pay our debt. Christ is able to pay the entire debt of sin for his people, and he did it at the cross. Anselm said that God requires the debt to be paid in full before we can be set free. So, God had to send Jesus, because he is the only one able to pay the debt of all who believe, on the cross, in their place.
The fourth answer is this: Jesus came to wage war against the devil and to defeat the power of death. Hebrews 2:14 says, “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil.” As God, Jesus did not have flesh and blood. He could not die. But he became man so that he could taste death. This is what other religions do not understand. This is found only in the Christian faith.
Jesus had to become flesh and blood so that he could die. Why did Jesus enter into death? To wage war against the devil. In the realm of death, the devil holds sinners captive. The devil holds the power of death. We have sinned, and the devil grips us and rules over us. We cannot set ourselves free. But Jesus came to fight the devil, and Jesus won because he never sinned.
If Jesus were not truly man, he could not die. But if Jesus were only man, without divine nature, he could not rise again. He became man so that he could die, and to die he had to take flesh and blood. Yet after he died, he had to rise again. Psalm 16:10 is very important: “For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption.” Jesus is the only one who entered into the place of death and yet could not remain there. His body did not decay, and his soul was not left in the realm of the dead. He truly died, but he was not overcome by corruption. Jesus rose again because he could not remain among the dead.
Through these four answers, we see how deep and wide the meaning of Christmas truly is. God became man because he loves us. Christ took our place. He paid our debt. He defeated the devil and delivered us from the power of death. Having triumphed over the devil, he brings us out and sets us free, so that we become the children of God. If we understand this, we will no longer celebrate Christmas merely with lights, gifts, and decorations. We will celebrate Christmas with deep gratitude, because we have been redeemed.
After Jesus defeated the devil, he rose again and he spoke two sentences. First, “Because I live, you also will live” (John 14:19). Second, “That where I am you may be also” (John 14:3). This is eternal hope. No other religion speaks of someone who dies in our place, who pays for our sins, who fights for us, who gives us victory, and who gives us the final hope. Jesus cannot be compared with other religious founders who can only hope, perhaps, to obtain a good place before God. For Christians there is no ‘perhaps’. We will surely be with the living God, because Christ is already there.
Why did Jesus come down from heaven to earth? Why did Jesus, God himself, become man? Because he loves you, because he took your place, because he paid your debt, because he fought against the devil to set you free. So today, through the celebration of Christmas, we know that we have eternal hope. Christ has come, he has conquered, he has triumphed, and he has risen again. Therefore we will triumph with Christ, we will live with him, and we will be with him there forever. Amen. (T.F.L.)