con carne

For my Spanish speaking readers my title is fairly easy to interpret. "Con" means with while "carne" means meat. Put them together, and the title of my post is "with meat." Why? Good question.

When speaking about the Incarnation of Christ pastor Mark Driscoll would always use chili as his reference point. He would make a joke about chili isn't quite as wonderful without meat. Therefore he would use the phrase "con carne" to simplify the miracle of Christ taking on flesh while retaining His divinity. Just like chili with meat is still chili only with something added on.

The Incarnation of Christ is the reason why Christmas is in the top three of Christian holidays. The Incarnation must be a reality in order for Good Friday and Easter to have any significance (which is the same for the others as well. We can't have one without the rest). The other day I read Packer's chapter about the wonderful mystery of the Incarnation. Given the time of year, I enjoyed it even more. It was a pleasant reminder of the full weight of that Christmas morning roughly 2,000 years ago.

As Packer put it, nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation. Reflecting on the full scope of the Incarnation does reveal something utterly fantastic. There aren't words or thoughts that can be used to capture the full magnitude of it, but our worship should be all the more joyous because of it. God entered into time as a human, leaving the glory and honor constantly surrounding Him in heaven. He came to be the perfect sacrificial Lamb in full submission to the Father's will. Through Him God is glorified, His name vindicated, and our sin atoned for. I am confident no writer could construe a story as wonderful as this.

Another reason Packer gives for its wonderfulness is its incomprehensible nature. The Incarnation makes every other truth about Christ believable. Because God becoming a man, yet remaining God, is such an outrageous concept all the other mysteries can make sense. In Packer's words, Once we grant that Jesus was divine, it becomes unreasonable to find difficulty in any of this (atonement, resurrection, miracles, etc); it is all of a piece and hangs together completely. The Incarnation is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains.

Simply put, this is the time of year when we celebrate the unfathomable. And this unfathomable mystery proves to be a wonderful display of grace.