Hark to the Hidden



“Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see,
hail th’Incarnate Deity!
Pleased as man with men to dwell,
Jesus our Immanuel.” (Hark! The Herald Angels Sing)


God in the flesh, God with us, is the deepest of mysteries. How can it be? But what has been most striking to me about these lines for years is the reminder that God’s entry into the world was not obvious. Those who came to see Jesus at His birth were those whom God showed (the shepherds through the announcement of the angels and the Magi through the signs in the heavens and the words of the Prophets). There was no halo around Jesus’s head in the manger. There was nothing in the face of a squalling baby that gave the hint that God had done the impossible and become what he had created.

For the baby in the manger, this may be easy to acknowledge, but it is also true of the man Jesus, preaching and teaching. We might wish to think that somehow Jesus’s deity was obvious to those who saw him or heard him. He spoke with authority, yes. He performed miracles, yes. But not everyone believed. As the prophecy applied to Jesus in the New Testament stated, “he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him" (Isaiah 53:2). It has sometimes been easy for me to just wish that I could see Jesus in the flesh, that somehow that would solve all my struggles of faith. It wouldn’t. Those who saw Jesus for who he was did so through the eyes of faith.

God is always veiled to us to a degree, even as we encounter him in the Bible. An infinite being cannot be fathomed by the finite creature. He can only be worshipped. An infinitely wise plan of history and salvation can be accepted but not fully understood. And an infinite being embodied in a tiny baby wrapped up in some cloth in a feeding trough? Maybe the only word for it is wonder.

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