Everything Is Different
“Those who are justified by grace, by faith in Christ, are the only ones who really know that they are lost sinners apart from Christ. Those who have not received Christ’s forgiveness and the verdict it entails upon their humanity are the ones who regard themselves as able to justify themselves.”
According to Torrance, only those who have been found know what it’s like to have been lost. Or, as I heard Paul Miller once say, “Part of the human problem is that we don’t know how desperate we are for mercy until we experience mercy.”
The same idea applies to the incarnation of the Son of God. We will fail to grasp how desperate we were to know God until we are shocked by the wonder that God has made himself known this way. The Word made flesh, the very self-expression of God in our skin and bones, is the greatest miracle in all of history.
And, now, we cannot fathom history without him.
We can’t.
Could you imagine the darkness of a world in which Jesus has not come? Could you imagine the lostness? What would we do with ourselves?
We take for granted that we have never had a thought about God apart from the reality of Jesus (I’d argue we haven’t and we shouldn’t!). Jesus turned on the lights, once for all. We cannot talk of God now without Jesus being in the room, as it were. He’s there — he’s right there! — even if some try to ignore him. The coming of Jesus, God made man, was a gift through and through, revealing the self-giving heart of God who has never stopped giving.
The Heidelberg Catechism instructs us to boost our gratitude to God by considering the sin and misery from which he saved us. But the reverse could also be true, especially in the case of the Incarnation. If we consider the pure miracle of the Word made flesh, we are shocked to realize how lost we are without him. Doesn’t that also increase our praise?
