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December 2015
C.S. Lewis placed great weight on the significance of the Incarnation and wrote about it on a number of occasions. In Mere Christianity, he stated succinctly: “The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.”1
In the book Miracles, Lewis explained:
The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. Just as every natural event is the manifestation at a particular place and moment of Nature’s total character, so every particular Christian miracle manifests at a particular place and moment the character and significance of the Incarnation. There is no question in Christianity of arbitrary interferences just scattered about. It relates not a series of disconnected raids on Nature but the various steps of a strategically coherent invasion—an invasion which intends complete conquest and “occupation.” The fitness, and therefore credibility, of the particular miracles depends on their relation to the Grand Miracle; all discussion of them in isolation from it is futile…
In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity… But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him…2
One of Lewis’s admirers, theologian J.I. Packer, says that “the supreme mystery with which the gospel confronts us” lies in “the Christmas message of incarnation.”
He explained: One of Lewis’s admirers, theologian J.I. Packer, says that “the supreme mystery with which the gospel confronts us” lies in “the Christmas message of incarnation.”
He explained: The really staggering Christian claim is that Jesus of Nazareth was God made man—that the second person of the Godhead became the “second man” …, determining human destiny,… and that He took humanity without loss of deity…3
As we worship God and meditate on the Incarnation this Christmas season, let us remember the love He showed in coming down from Heaven to become one of us, for our salvation.
“who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
PHILIPPIANS 2:6-11 (ESV)
1 C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Touchstone, 1996), p. 155.
2 C.S. Lewis, Miracles (Touchstone, 1996), pp. 143, 147-148.
3 J.I. Packer, Knowing God (InterVarsity Press, 1973), pp. 45-46.
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