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Christ's Flesh, Our Flesh - Part 1

As you have promised... my eyes have seen your salvation, which you prepared in the sight of all people.
– Luke 2:29-31

This study is about Christ's flesh, and how intimately our flesh is related to it. The truths I seek to bring to light here are truly mysteries of Christ. But they are not mysterious in the sense that they are so obscure and complex that no one knows them. Certainly not: They are mysterious in the sense that not many people have taken the effort to understand them, even though God's word makes them clear, over and over again. God reveals mysteries. There is one word I'd like to define before we move on:

Prophets and Kings

In Luke 10:24, Jesus says to his disciples, "For I tell you that many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it." How incredible: To talk about prophets and kings in this way! Perhaps he has in mind the people who wrote the Old Testament, people such as David, Moses and Isaiah. Those guys longed to see what the disciples saw, but never did.

Of course, what Jesus is referring to is Himself. He's talking to the Seventy-two, whom he had just sent out, and He's saying to all of them, "You know what, people like David and Moses longed to see what you're looking at right now, but they never did. You're seeing me, Jesus Christ, God in the flesh. That's special, you'd better remember it."

The question, though, which this verse raises is, "Does this verse apply to us?" Does it apply to you and me? Have we seen something that David never saw? What about Moses? Have we seen something that they longed to see? Well, we've never seen Jesus in the flesh. So, perhaps the answer is "No, Luke 10:24 only applied to people who where around during the Incarnation. Only if you saw Jesus in the flesh could you claim this promise." Maybe that's what people would conclude if they thought about it.

But I disagree. I think the verse does apply today, and the two parts of this study are about this very fact.

In my flesh...

This is not the first time I've used this subtitle, but it's just so often appropriate! In Colossians 1:24, Paul writes,

Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still
lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.

This has got to be one of the most difficult passages in the Bible. It's so mysterious, that I wonder how many people would dare to delve into what this passage is really saying. It will take me until the very end of this study to fully reveal it.

My conviction is that this verse needs to be our mission statement: "Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church." We're always taught, of course, that Christ is enough. When He died, He said, "It is finished" (John 19:30). His death is enough. The debt is paid – cancelled, forever. Everything that we need to be saved was achieved at Calvary. Jesus' death is sufficient to take away all our sin. He suffered so that we will never have to pay for our sins ourselves, which we simply can't do. To be saved in Christ is to be saved completely (Hebrews 7:25).

So, God is enough: To say anything less would be a denial of the Gospels. But, ultimately, this is just a basic truth – a building block. You need to know this in order to even become a disciple: You need to study the cross and understand that it is what saves us. And, amen, we study that with people, which is a good thing. But when we enter a verse like Colossians 1:24, we're entering a deeper teaching, because Paul clearly implies that something is lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions. Something's lacking. And that's why Paul made it his goal to fill up in his flesh what is lacking in Christ's sufferings. And if Paul did it, we need to do it as well – it's not like there's a standard for him and another standard for us – there is one standard for everyone.

So you need to fill up in your flesh what is lacking in Christ's afflictions, and so do I.

The question is, "What is lacking in Christ's afflictions?" That's what I want to reveal, but in order to do so we'll need to go to the heart of the Gospel. Now, I'm not the first person to reveal this (in fact I lifted this answer out of "Victory in Surrender" by Gordon Ferguson). But I was so inspired that I wanted to put it in my own words.

Christ: The Fullness of God

In Colossians 1:19 it says "For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell" (NKJV). This refers, of course, to Jesus - the fullness of the Father dwells in Jesus, because He is God, through and through. Maybe we read verse 24 and think, "Oh no, Paul's forgotten that Christ is the fullness of God..." But how could he have forgotten? He just said it a few verses ago. Is Paul that absent-minded? If we're tempted to attribute error to Scripture, it often helps to ponder just we are accusing the author of.

The fullness of God dwells in Jesus. We should always remember that, and I'm not here to deny it, because it's absolutely true. We can look more into that in John 1:18: "No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known." There is much debate about this verse, as evidenced by the footnotes, but the basic meaning is clear: Jesus made God known. Remember that "God the One and Only" is not the Father - He is "at the Father's side" (v18); He "came from the Father" (v14). He is none other than Jesus Christ.

Why did Jesus have to make God known? Because no one has ever seen God (v18), so Jesus had to come to earth to make Him known. That's a powerful thing: John's effectively saying that no one understood God in the way that we can, since we know, or at the very least, known about, Jesus Christ.

It is worthwhile asking at this point what, exactly, Jesus did reveal about God. Well, I think one of the biggest things that Jesus revealed about God is His empathy. Throughout the Old Testament, people could always know that God sympathizes with us. We have David, crying out "O Lord, how long will you look on? Rescue my life form their ravages... Do not be far from me, O Lord. Awake, and rise to my defence" (Psalm 35:17; 22-23). He was down in the depths, and he knew that God could look down and have mercy on him, and stoop down to rescue him. He knew that God could sympathize with him, and give him strength.

But that's not the whole story. We know Jesus, and we know that God is not someone who just looks down and strengthens us when we're in need. No. God is right there with us (Hebrews 4:15). He is an empathetic saviour. Jesus has been in the depths, in Gethsemane, feeling all the pain that we feel when life is tough and tragedy hits us. He feels our pain, when we're out there in the desert, crying out for answers - Jesus has been through the desert, fasting for forty days, He knows exactly what it's like, and He'll be there, with us, no matter what. In the depths, in the desert, God is there. This reminds me of a story I'd like to share, it occurred in the Nazi concentration camp named Auschwitz:

A Jewish prisoner was being executed while the rest of the camp was forced to watch. As the prisoner hung on the gallows - kicking and struggling in the throes of death, refusing to die - an onlooker was heard to mutter under his breath with increasing desperation, "Where is God? Where is He?" From out of nowhere, Wiesel says, a voice within him spoke to his own heart, saying, "Right there on the gallows; where else?" Theologian Jurgen Moltmann, commenting on Wiesel's story, astutely observed that any other answer would have been blasphemous.
– Zacharias, page 135.

Absolutely. God was right there, in the gallows. Jesus suffered death. He tasted death, he experienced it. God can empathize with us. That's what Jesus revealed when He became a man.

Now I think that Jesus revealed many other things about God as well. And I think that's something that you should really think about. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to explore the question of what else Jesus revealed about the character of God that no one ever knew before He came to earth. I think you could do a pretty incredible study by scanning through the Gospels and thinking about that very question.

But for now, let's just remember that Jesus came to earth in order to make God known. It's often taught that Jesus came to earth in order to save mankind (John 12:47), but I think that this is oversimplifying.

Jesus died in order to save mankind, but He was born in order to make God known.

If all He needed to do was die, then He could have made His job a lot easier than He did. Now obviously, Jesus could not have died unless He became Incarnate, but I do believe that His purpose in coming to earth was to make God known, as per John 1, and due to the infinite wisdom of God, it worked out that He was also able to cap that mission off by dying, which achieved another ultimate purpose of God as well.

For reasons of space, I will end part one of this study here. By all means, think deeply about the many questions which have been raised so far. By thinking about these questions for yourself first, finding some answers will be far more rewarding.

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