looked like one externally. This is surely too trivial to even consider. In "emptying

Himself", He so stripped Himself that He not only became man (even if he became the

greatest of men it would be a tremendous condescension for One Who was God) but He

became a Man Who had the lowest status, that of a slave. Can we ever fully appreciate

this? Surely this is part of the "love that passes knowledge"! (Eph. 3: 19). How He

became man the Bible nowhere fully states. Luke 1: 34, 35 and Heb. 10: 5 go as far as

we shall get an explanation.

Paul, in writing his first letter to Timothy, declares that Christ's taking upon Himself a

human body is a great secret (I Tim. 3: 16), and how do we finite creatures ever expect

to fully comprehend a great secret of God?

The language of Scripture is very careful and guarded when it touches the Lord's

humanity. "Being made in the likeness of men." This is parallel to Rom. 8: 3, "God

sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh". God most certainly did not send His

Son in sinful flesh, for if Christ partook of Adam's sin, He would have needed a Saviour

Himself; He could never have been a Saviour for others. The sinlessness of the Son of

God is of the utmost importance in the Divine plan of Salvation. The whole scheme of

God collapses if this is not true. We are amazed at the light way some evangelicals treat

the Virgin Birth as though it is of little consequence.

The angel, speaking of His birth to His mother, Mary, declared: "therefore also that

holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God". There has been no

other holy baby since Adam's fall. The germ of sin is in everyone born into this world,

and in due time surely manifests itself. The Lord Jesus could say with truth, "the prince

of this world (Satan) cometh, and hath nothing in Me" (John 14: 30), a statement which

would be a lie if made by any other human being.

That His body was a real one, there can be no doubt. "A body Thou hast prepared

Me" (Heb. 10: 5), and nowhere in the Scriptures is there any hint that this was not so in

actual fact. It was a body that could eat and sleep and manifest weariness, a body that

could be seen, touched and heard. But it was a body that owed nothing to a human

father, and everything to the action and overshadowing of the Holy Spirit (Luke 1: 35).

The early Docetic doctrine was an error of the first magnitude, for if Christ did not

possess a real body, He could not have really died on the cross, and again the whole of

God's redemptive plan would have been brought to nothing. "And being found in

fashion (schema) as a man. He humbled Himself" (8). In this verse we now have

schema, meaning an outward appearance only, and not the deeper meaning of morphe.

The Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich Lexicon gives a good illustration from Josephus of a King

who exchanged His royal robes for sackcloth and took on a schema tapernoin, "a lowly

appearance". He obviously did not relinquish his position as king in so doing. It was his

outward appearance that changed. So it was with the Lord Jesus.