The Dust of Life
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

It is good and right and proper that when confronted with the heresy of the Mormons (or better yet, the center of the heresy of the Mormons, that they deny the deity of Christ) that we direct them to this passage. There is probably no passage more straightforward in its affirmation of the deity of Christ than John's opening chapter of his gospel. John doesn't hint at His deity. He doesn't sneak up on it. He doesn't even, in the very beginning, bother to defend it. He does, however, affirm it unambiguously. The Mormons, however, were not the first, and they will not be the last to fail the test of the person of Christ. The early church, in fact, may have had less trouble with the deity of Christ than it had with His humanity. We seem to make the same mistake. The difficult thing for us to fathom, I believe, is not that a man was God, but that God became man. The astounding thing was not that the humanity of Jesus was lifted up by being in union with the second person of the deity, but that the second person of the deity should be placed in union with a man.

Man is, after all, made in the image of God. From the start we were made to be copies of Him, to look like Him, to reflect Him. God, however, is the original. He is sui generis, in a class by Himself. He is the Creator, the one on whom all other things depend, in whom all other things cohere. It would be, were it not for the glory of His grace, not fitting that He should become a man.

Isn't it ironic that both the Jews, and the Muslims understand something of this? The scandal of the incarnation to the Jew is not that it is an unfitting raising of Jesus the Man, but the scandal that God on High should come and dwell among us, that His imperial majesty should be clouded, veiled, set aside. (And only later is the issue that the Son of God should suffer for us on the cross.) To the Muslim the stomach turns at the thought that God should have a Son, let alone that God the Son should be in union with man. Their god, were he not so immanently false, would be far too transcendent to condescend to tabernacle among us.

The Docetists in the early church, heirs of the gnostic mantle, made much the same kind of argument. Their name comes from the Greek verb dokeo, which means, "To seem." The Docetists claimed to be Christians. They had no trouble affirming that Jesus was God. But they argued that He only "seemed" to be human. His body, they argued, was a phantasm, a pretend body. This way, of course, they could keep Jesus, without having to embrace His creation. They could remake themselves in this image, such that they themselves only seemed to have a body. The good news is that the church fathers rightly affirmed in condemning this heresy that these folks only seemed to be Christians.

The incarnation is a scandal. It is a shock, an affront, a blitzkrieg assault on the normal order of things. Which is precisely what makes it so glorious. If it is not a strange thing that God should dwell among us, then, well, it's not a strange thing. We have lost the power of the shock. We have grown accustomed to His grace. We have presumed upon His grace. We do God no favors when we try to shield Him from the dirt. That, of course, is precisely what God took on in the incarnation. Dust we are, and dust He became.

How do we apply passages like this? There is in this verse no general law that we can parse, suggesting we keep it this way, but not that way. There is no narrative, whereby we can pick apart the decisions and actions of biblical characters, asking what should Jonah do. Instead we have this shocking announcement. And our calling is to be shocked. But that shock doesn't mean we are appalled, but that we rejoice. We do not, in the face of the news of the incarnation, grovel in the dirt, but roll around it in like a dog that can find no better way to express his joy. We shake, we leap, we dance. He has come and dwelt among us.

Which brings us back to the holiday season. We've argued it before, and we'll argue it again. There is no principle, whether biblical or historical, that says we must not celebrate the incarnation. We will not only celebrate that God became man, we will do so openly, fearlessly, and unapologetically. We will dance like David, that the glory has returned, that God sent not a symbol of His presence, but His own person to be with us. And we will invite every sour-nosed, no-dirt-under-their-fingernails Michel to come and celebrate with us.

This is why John wrote this, as he tells us himself, "And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, you may have life in His name" (John 20:30). This is the good news, that God has come and dwelt among us. This miracle is the font of all the others. Believing this, we have life, and we have it abundantly. If, that is, we aren't afraid of a little dirt. If, that is, we are prepared for a shock. If, that is, we have tasted and seen that He is good. If, that is, we will rejoice in the dust of life.