THE PERSON OF CHRIST
[p. 519] THE PERSON OF CHRIST
The same Person abides, though the condition be changed, in His coming of a woman. He is a real Man, body, soul and spirit, but still God’s Son (that same Person).
If you carry the thought of the incarnation beyond the scriptural limit, that is, form (that of a servant) and condition (flesh and blood), you cannot avoid, that I can see, reaching distinct personality, and so making two personalities in Christ, a divine and a human. These may be said to be mysteriously blended in one, the unity of the Person, but that is as great an error as if they were spoken of as distinct and apart in Him. The mystery of the incarnation and the true sense in which the union of God and man can be spoken of is that in one and the same Person God was made manifest to man (in flesh), and man was presented for the good pleasure of God. Unity of Person, or indivisibility, is not, I believe, a thought found in Scripture.
John 3: 13 and John 6: 62 are simply the Lord speaking of Himself, as commonly, under an official name. Every scripture which definitely refers to the incarnation speaks of it as the assumption by Christ of a form or condition. One who is in Person divine and existing in the form of God emptied Himself in grace and took on Him a form and condition not commensurate with the greatness of His Person. But the Person never changes (so J. N. D. says), and any line of teaching that gives the idea of change in any way as regards the Person is, to my mind, dishonouring to the Son, and interferes with what He calls “My glory”, John 17: 24. ‘His complete person’ is an expression I do not at all like.
I only now add that if ‘human condition’, “bondman’s form”, ‘likeness of men’, “flesh and blood”, do not describe what the Son took in becoming Man, it raises the question, whence did the rest come? I should certainly have thought that what was spiritual was of Himself. Certainly there was no creation in Him, as in us, of an intelligent moral being (in which the true idea of “person” lies), for we are “the offspring of God”.
The idea of union, or unity of Person, appears to me to have greatly clouded in people’s minds the truth of incarnation.
In the expression, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”, I judge that the Lord takes up an expression suited to the position in which He was. But it is the Person who left the condition, which He had assumed, to take it again, and not as flesh and blood but still as Man, and meantime He was in paradise.