The Advent season highlights some staggering, life-giving truths about infant Jesus. Scriptures call baby Jesus Immanuel (God with us) and the Savior.

Christmas itself is all about God becoming human—the incarnation. This central doctrine of our faith makes two amazing claims: Jesus is truly God, and Jesus is fully human. These two truths are essential to salvation, because only God can save, and as the early church theologian Gregory of Nazianzus wrote, “That which he has not assumed he has not healed.”

In other words, for Christianity to work, Christians need to be able to talk about Jesus as human and Jesus as divine. The divine nature and human nature “met” in the one person of Jesus Christ. George Herbert captures these two essential features of the Christian teaching about Jesus Christ: “In Christ two natures met to be thy cure.”

As fully human and fully divine, Jesus is God with us and God for us.

God With Us

Immanuel, God with us, shows us that Jesus came to show his love for us and to comfort us. A major theme of the Bible is God coming to live among his people: “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (2 Cor. 6:16b, ESV; see Lev. 26:12, Jer. 32:38, Ezek. 37:27, Isa. 7:14, Matt. 1:21).

Jesus is the fulfillment of this hope because he is both fully human and fully God. As John writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:1-5). And we see in Colossians that “in him [Christ] the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9).

But what is happening in the incarnation is not only metaphysics – it is also love.

God for Us

Jesus is the Savior who saves us from our sins. The name “Jesus” is the Greek version of “Joshua,” which means “the Lord saves” (Matt. 1:21). Jesus saves us by becoming our substitute. In his teaching, his ministry, his perfect sinless life, his death and his resurrection, he showed that God is not only with us, but he is for us. Martin Luther tells us, “The manger and the cross are never far apart.”

The greatest act Jesus did for us was his sacrificial death on our behalf. As Robert Capon writes, “Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works.”

John calls him “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29b), and Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. … No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again” (John 10:14-15, 18).

Colossians 2:13-14 tells us that when we were dead in our sins, God made us alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code – with its regulations – that was against us and stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.

As followers of Jesus Christ, we celebrate that he is God with us and God for us. The incarnation reveals God’s love, comforts us in this life and redeems us from our sins. The proper preface for Incarnation blends all these together:

“You gave Jesus Christ, your only Son, to be born for us; who, by the mighty power of the Holy Spirit, was made perfect Man of the flesh of the Virgin Mary his mother; so that we might be delivered from the bondage of sin, and receive power to become your children.”

Amen!