Ask Pastor Mike Live

Guest (Male): Timothy just wrote in. This is a new one here. Before Christ was incarnate—make sure everyone knows what we mean by that: puts on flesh. Talk about carne, even that word coming through various languages into English means flesh. Incarnate, putting on human flesh. When Christ was enfleshed in humanity, before Christ was incarnate, what form did he take? Knowing Christ is eternal, what was he like before the creation of human beings? How does that fit into the Trinity before the creation of man?

Focal Point Ministries: It is easy for us to think backwards and to think, "Okay, Christ, we picture him as human" in the sense that he is also God incarnate. He is all human and all divine, and so we think back before the incarnation that he must have taken on a form like that. We just need to get that out of our head. The incarnation was the beginning of Christ living in human flesh. Now we would say, of course, the exalted, ascended Christ is still living in human flesh in whatever state that is in terms of God's throne room, God's creative expression of his own dominion in heaven—the place where God dwells, which is one use of the word heaven.

The idea of Jesus being in that form has to start at the point of the annunciation. I would say not just the birth at Bethlehem, but go back to when the annunciation took place, when the angel announces that Mary is now bearing the pre-born human divine Son of God. That is the beginning of him taking on humanity. Before that, just like we see in John chapter 4, or more clearly throughout the Bible regarding the third person of the Trinity or even the first person, God is spirit. God does not have flesh and bone. Seeing someone as a human being, we do not have God in any form, and that was clear all throughout the Bible.

God is spirit. The second person of the Godhead, like the first and third, clearly was also spirit. We do not think about Christ taking on humanity in Genesis 1. We think about Jesus taking on humanity at the beginning of his ministry 2,000 years ago. That is when the second person of the Godhead took on humanity. The Bible says he took it on so that he might redeem humanity so that you and I might have an opportunity to respond to the gospel and put our trust in Christ. He fulfilled human righteousness as a human with divine qualities. With the divinity unmarred and uncontaminated by humanity, Christ then lives in our place.

He takes on all the temptation in our place. He dies and absorbs the penalty of our sin—human sin and human penalty—being declared guilty on a cross. All of that for our stead and in our place as a substitute for our sin, accomplishes all of that in his humanity as well as his divinity throughout the rest of eternity. God is spirit. John chapter 4 says that triunity of God in all the persons is spirit. Before the creation of the world, material time and space, we have God existing outside of that. God did not take on humanity as the permanent dwelling of his divine attributes until 2,000 years ago.

Some people may bring up what is called a Christophany, sometimes it is called a theophany. It is a conflation of two words: Christ or God and his form. We talk about God being in an appearance, which is really technically what the Greek word means, that there is an appearance of God in human form. There are passages in the Old Testament that are hard for us to see any other way than saying this seems to be God appearing in human form, whether we are back with God appearing to Abraham in Genesis chapter 15 or 17, or whether it is God speaking as first-person God in the burning bush.

The text says it is the messenger of God, the angel of the Lord, malak. This Hebrew word represents a message from God, but it is there personed in a messenger. That messenger speaks in the first person for God. Some people would say this seems to be a physical or material presence of God speaking to a human being, through the sound waves in the air to speak to Moses or speak to Abraham, and maybe we are dealing with the pre-incarnate Christ. We can get there, I suppose, but is that person that is speaking to Abraham or Moses looking like the Jesus that is born 1,400 years later? The answer, I would say, is probably not.

I do think, like angels sometimes are allowed as spirit beings to appear in material form in certain places in the Bible—like the annunciation, Gabriel to Mary—God just allows that. Who knows? Perhaps the second person of the Trinity was dispatched to speak at a couple of times in very special circumstances in the Old Testament to some very important characters. We do not know. We do not have it definitively laid out that this is the second person of the Godhead for all of eternity where God materializes in some way to speak to Abraham at his tent as he is sitting there having a meal with these three angels, and one of them speaking first-person for God.

That does not constitute the incarnation, even though that may be a manifestation of some material reality in front of them. When you see an angel in the Old Testament eating something, that food has to go somewhere, so there is some materializing of God's messenger, whether that is an angel or whether that is God himself or whether that is an angel just speaking in the first person and God utilizing that angel to speak to his people in those cases. If that is the case, we will one day find out.

But for now, when we are speaking of the incarnation, Timothy, do not picture Jesus prior to the incarnation as a human being. You might imagine someone with fingernails, as I often say, and eyelashes, eyebrows, and earlobes. We did not have that until the incarnation when Christ stepped into what we would know as a breathing baby in a manger.