As we approach Christmas, my thoughts turn to the significance of Jesus’s incarnation. Our annual celebration of Christ’s birth is a valuable tradition. Yet we do well to remember why He came. Yes, He came to show us the way to live. Yes, He came to heal our sicknesses. Yes, He came to be our Lord, our Ruler, our King. But above all, He came to save us. He came to redeem us from sin by His propitiatory death. The central purpose of His incarnation was to die for us. As Hebrews 2:11 says, “Jesus was made a little lower than the angels…that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone.” In context it is quite clear that His being made lower than the angels is His taking on human flesh. He became one of us. Why? To taste death for us.
The world would rather forget this part of Jesus’s birth. The unregenerate are all too happy to sing of a Jesus away in a manger. But they willfully forget that the Jesus who came in the manger suffered death for their sins. They are not offended by the baby in the manger; they are offended by the man on the cross. But the incarnation is meaningless without the cross. The manger is only rightly understood in the shadow of the cross.
As we must keep before us the purpose of the incarnation, we must also keep the Who of the incarnation before us. The great miracle of the incarnation is the fact that the eternal, immortal, infinite, self-sufficient God became human. He took on flesh. Jesus is God; Jesus is human. We mock the Christ when we deny either of these truths. Holding this paradox requires a vigilant commitment to Scripture, and when the church has failed in this it has wavered on one of these Christological truths. In our generation and context, it is the deity of Christ that again needs buttressing.
Some doctrines tolerate a measure of disagreement between sincere believers; Christ’s deity is not one of those. This is not an issue on which we have freedom to choose between several acceptable beliefs. The Church historic has always held to the dear truth of Jesus’ divinity; to abandon belief in His deity is to abandon the faith as delivered to us by the one true God. More bluntly, those who question or deny Christ’s divine nature deny the faith and heap up eternal judgment for themselves. This theological point is both pertinent and practical. If we get this wrong, the gospel is compromised.
Why is the deity of Jesus so important? Precisely because He came to save us. Our salvation is impossible without a divine Savior. Our Savior needed to be God Himself in order to save us. A mere man is not just disqualified to save because of his sin, he is incapable of saving because of his nature. Only an infinite person can satisfy infinite punishment. Jesus absorbed the infinite punishment we deserved for our sin. Were He not eternal—were He not divine—He could not atone our sin. Only the divine Son was able to propitiate our sin.
His divinity was necessary not only so He could atone for our sins (expiate) but also so He could clothe us in righteousness. The exchange spoken of in 2 Corinthians 5:21 includes our sins being taken away and righteousness being given to us. It’s a double exchange. He takes our sin; we receive His righteousness. We are not just given a clean slate and set free. We are clothed in Christ’s righteousness. His perfection is counted to us (Rom. 4:24). Since none but God is good (Matt. 19:17), none but God can be righteous. Christ, the divine Son, kept the law and lived in perfect righteousness. Through His obedience, “many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19).
In many ways, the issue is quite simple. Does the Bible get the last word? Christ’s divinity is not difficult to discover in Scripture. It is not hidden away in a dark corner but is written plainly throughout the New Testament. Jesus said He was God. He showed He was God. His words and His works point to His divinity. His followers testified the same. Those who question Christ’s divinity also question the veracity of the inspired Scriptures. If we are committed to the inspiration, inerrancy, authority, and clarity of Scripture, we will have no difficulty finding and believing that Christ is truly God.
I’m curious about your antepenultimate paragraph, specifically regarding where you find in Scripture statements such as “Jesus absorbed the infinite punishment we deserved for our sin.” I don’t find this idea in Scripture, and it seems that there are good reasons for thinking otherwise.
To start with, why do our sins deserve infinite (or eternal) punishment? It is not because they are in themselves infinite (according to the act itself or what might be called the material element of the sin), but we can say that they are infinitely evil in a certain respect because they are offenses against God who is infinitely holy. In other words, sin is an infinite evil according to the dignity of the person who is offended, namely God.
Now, considering Christ who made satisfaction for our sins, He was not infinitely punished, if we are considering the actual suffering that He endured. (I’ll bypass the related question of whether or not it may be truly said that he was punished *simpliciter*, or rather underwent a form of punishment). This (infinite punishment) is certainly not indicated by the Scriptural descriptions of His Passion. For example, he suffered for a finite amount of time, and could have suffered longer. As to whether His divine nature “absorbed an infinite punishment,” it does not seem that His divine nature, as divine, could “absorb” anything at all, if we are to preserve the immutability of God. But can it still be said that Christ’s satisfaction was infinite? Yes, in a way analogous to saying that our sins are infinite. Our sins are infinite according to the dignity of the person who is offended, and the satisfaction (or sacrifice) of Christ is correspondingly infinite according to the dignity of the person making satisfaction, namely Jesus Christ (a divine person). It is for this reason that someone once said that a tiny drop of His blood would have sufficed for the redemption of the whole human race. This preserves the idea that Christ had to be divine in order to accomplish our redemption (the suffering of a merely human person could not provide this infinite sacrifice for our infinite sins, but the suffering of a divine person can), while not requiring extra-Scriptural speculation about “infinite punishment.” (I am, of course, deliberately presenting the argument in terms that I think you would accept given your preferred treatment of theological loci.)