The Incarnation Tells Me The Most Important Thing I Need To Know About God

By MICHAEL BROWN Published on December 22, 2021

For the last 50 years, as a Jewish believer in Jesus, I have interacted with Jewish rabbis and scholars, all of whom have a major issue with the doctrine of the incarnation. “God is not a man,” they tell me, pointing to verses like Numbers 23:19 for support. “And,” they say, “it is the height of idolatry to make a man into God.” Yet it is this central truth, namely, that the Lord entered our world as a fully human child, that tells us the most important thing we need to know about our Creator: He has not left us alone. Instead, He has come right into our world to suffer with us and for us. He has come to redeem us.

These rabbis and Jewish leaders are right, of course, to emphasize that God is not a man. He certainly is not.

But can the infinite and eternal God visit us in human form while remaining fully God, sitting enthroned in heaven and filling the universe with His presence? Of course he can.

He will enter into our filthy, polluted, often ugly and vicious world.

And these Jewish thinkers are right in saying that it is the height of idolatry to make a man into a God. But it is quite another thing if the one and only God decided to make Himself known through a man. That is exactly what happened in the person of Jesus-Yeshua, and as we worship Him, we worship God.

As John 1:18 explains, “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known."