"He Is Risen" Part 4

"He Is Risen"

Part 4

     

    

  

   Without relinquishing His divinity, the Lord Jesus Christ lived as a man, died as a man, and rose again as a man.

    "He is the Son of man" (John 5:27). 

    "Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil" (Hebrews 2:14).

    "Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I myself: handle Me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see Me have. And when He had thus spoken, He showed them His hands and his feet" (Luke 24:39-40).

    Our Lord is the God who became man, and the man who remains God.  His very being constitutes perhaps the greatest of all mysteries as infinite Deity and finite humanity somehow unite in one glorious Person.  He is the second Person of the eternal Trinity - "Unto the Son He saith, Thy throne, o God, is forever and ever" (Hebrews 1:8).  He is also the "second man,"  the progenitor of a new race of the resurrected - "the firstborn from the dead" (I Corinthians 15:47; Colossians 1:18).  According to finite human understanding, the Lord Jesus should not even exist.  Solomon of old wondered how God could dwell in a temple made of earthly material.  "The Heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee" (II Chronicles 6:18).  What would the king have said had He known that the eternal Creator would somehow dwell in and as a man?  "Great is the mystery of godliness.  God was manifest in the flesh" (I Timothy 3:16).

    Our present consideration leads us to focus on our Lord's resurrection in term of His humanity.  He possesses hands and feet as the risen Christ, albeit wounded hands and feet.  Our Savior bears the heart of the indentured servant of old, liberated from bondage in legal terms, but who in order to remain with his wife, declared "I will not go out free!" (Exodus 21:5). The Lord Jesus will forever be human - "I will not go out free!" - because His redeemed will forever be human.  He was raised from the dead as such, and He evermore lives as a man because we have no standing with God apart from union with the Christ who "ever liveth to make intercession for us" (Hebrews 7:25).  Thus, His resurrection means all the more when we realize that the Lord who partook of our flesh and blood was raised accordingly, and lives forevermore as the God who became man, and for our sakes, eternally remains man.

"There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus."

(I Timothy 2:5).

Weekly Memory Verse

   Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor: for we are members one of another.

(Ephesians 4:25)