Show Notes
What does it really mean that the Word became flesh? In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland takes us on a deep dive into one of the greatest mysteries of the Christian faith: the incarnation.
From the opening words of John’s Gospel to the insights of ancient Greek philosophers and church fathers like Athanasius, Derek explores how Jesus is not just a historical figure but the very Word of God—the Logos—who “moved into the neighborhood” for our salvation.
Why John begins his Gospel with the profound phrase “In the beginning was the Word.”
How the Greek concept of Logos points us to Jesus as the unifying principle of all creation.
The paradox of the infinite God taking on finite flesh.
Why the incarnation isn’t just theology to understand, but a mystery to pause, reflect, and dwell in.
Athanasius’ timeless reminder that God came down to renew His image in us, because we could not do it ourselves.
How the incarnation opens a “wardrobe door” (à la C.S. Lewis) into the life of God, inviting us into intimate relationship with Him.
Scriptures mentioned in this episode:
John 1:1–5, 14
Genesis 1:1
Ephesians 3:5–6
John 17:3
Books mentioned in this podcast:
Incarnation: 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us, Derek Vreeland
On the Incarnation, Athanasius
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
Order Derek’s new book, Incarnation: 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us, here: https://amzn.to/42jSZAs
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Transcript
Narrator: Welcome back To another episode of Peaceable and Kind. I’m your host, Derek Vreeland, and I am glad that you have joined me for this episode because we’re going to do a deep dive on. A subject that I love talking about. We’re going to explore the mystery of the incarnation on this episode And before we get started, thank you for everyone who has reached out with positive comments, encouragement And if you are enjoying peaceable and kind, let me invite you to leave a rating or a review, subscribe, and share this episode. If you like this one or or share a previous episode. Today is going to be a bit of a deep dive. We’re going to do a deep dive in the area of theology and a little bit of philosophy. So you’ll need to get a notebook handy to jot some things down. And uh if you have questions about things I’m talking about today, because If you’re not one who is well versed in the history of Greek philosophy or Christian theology, some of the things that I talk about on this episode. Could be a bit confusing, and I love turning this monologue into a dialogue. So you can reach out to me on social media. I’m all over the socials. You can find me on Facebook. You can find me on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. I’m on Threads, Blue Sky. All those links are in the show notes. But if you have questions and you want a dialogue, I’m always happy to do that. So reach out to me. As you know, I have just released a Bible study uh called Incarnation. And it is not a Bible study that’s necessarily eight lessons on the mystery of the incarnation. Um, it is more of a Bible study that you can use devotionally on your own or in small group discussion. to explore the biblical story of God coming to us in Jesus. So we start in the Old Testament with some of the background and prophecies that lead us to Jesus. But lesson seven from incarnation is an exploration of the mystery of this fact that God came to us in the person of Jesus And so incarnation is a theological term. It’s a technical term. Incarnation speaks of God taking on human flesh. That’s what we mean by the word incarnation: Eternal Holy God becoming a human being in Jesus Christ. And this is one of the foundational bits of theology for Christians But don’t just accept and receive it into your brain as a fact, because as Christians, we hold this as a fact That at a definite point in history, God came to earth. That the eternal God, who is spirit, took on human flesh. That happened in history It is not a metaphor. It was a literal historical event. So we accept it as truth. We accept it as a fact. But let’s never lose sight of the absolute mystery that it is. Because if we begin to Work towards an understanding of who God is, there is in the Christian tradition a very classic line of demarcation between the divine and the human. That God is other than humanity, that God made human beings in God’s image, but God is not human And while human beings were created for a relationship with God, we are not God. There is creator, there is creation, and these are two separate things. And I think most people would accept that. We understand, even if you’re not a Christian, we understand that that human beings are flesh and blood, but then under the flesh and blood there is a heart, there’s a soul, there’s an emotional capacity, there’s intuition, there is a capacity within us to reach out to something bigger and greater than ourselves. So we understand human nature, and even non-Christians would say, well, if there is a God, that’s something very other. So, in our exploration of the mystery of the incarnation, I want us to start in John’s Gospel, and we’ll just start in the very beginning, John chapter 1, verse 1. Now we’re given four different biographies of Jesus in the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And Matthew, Mark, and Luke have a similar feel, a similar orientation, particularly Mark and Matthew. They really kind of flow together. John is Is altogether different. And I believe it’s John’s gospel that really helps us explore this mystery of God becoming a human being. So let’s look at the very first verse, John 1. 1. John writes, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It’s interesting that John doesn’t open with the name of Jesus, giving us the heritage, the lineage of Jesus, talking to us about the birth of Jesus. In fact, in this opening prologue, which is John’s first chapter, we don’t even see the name Jesus. So he doesn’t open with the name Jesus, rather, he gives us this. Philosophically rich title, the Word, which to me is a very daring way to open up your gospel to begin this announcement about King Jesus to start by referring to Jesus as the word. And here in John 1 1, we see the phrase in the beginning, which of course harkens back to the Jewish roots of the gospel. Anyone hearing in the beginning is going to think about Genesis 1-1. Interestingly enough, John begins his gospel the same way the Old Testament opens, and that is in the beginning. So that phrase is a reference to the Jewish roots of the gospel, but this philosophically rich title, the word. draws upon the resources of ancient Greece, ancient Greek philosophy. And it gives a bit of shape to John’s gospel. It lets us know where John is going in his gospel. That the good news about Jesus is not just a gospel announcement for Jewish people only, but for the non-Jewish world, for the Greeks. Paul called this the mystery of Christ. Paul uses that word mystery in a number of places in his gospel. But this idea that the gospel of Jesus is not just good news to the Jews, but also to Gentiles, to the Greek-speaking world. was a mystery that God was unfolding. So for example, in Ephesians three, verses five and six, the Apostle Paul says, in former generations this mystery that is the mystery of Christ, was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit That is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel And all of this we see in the very first verse of John chapter 1, that using the phrase in the beginning and using this reference to the word. is a revealing of the mystery that we see in Jesus. Now, mysteries weren’t just secrets that God kept to God’s self because he didn’t want us to know things. Mystery causes us to explore. And in the New Testament, Jesus is presented to us as the mystery of God. For so long, the people of God were defined by Jewish ethnicity, by observance of the Torah, with all of its rules and regulations. But now God is revealing that in and through Jesus, the non-Jewish world, they’re invited into the covenant family. So this phrase, the word, in John 1 1, is a single Greek word. Which is the word Lagos, which is not just a part of Greek vocabulary. It’s not just a Greek word, it’s a Greek concept. Now the only way to describe that concept is to do a little work with Greek philosophy. So if you’re not into philosophy, I apologize already. But we’re going to do a little bit of a deep dive. Because I don’t really think you can understand what John is trying to communicate to a Greek-speaking world without a little background in Greek philosophy. So let’s talk about this concept of Lagos. For the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, Lagos controlled the process of change in the natural world Now Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher living somewhere around 500 BC. So he’s pre-Socratic. So if you know anything about the big three in Greek philosophy, you have Socrates, Plato, Aristotle Well Heraclitus lived before all of them, and of course before Jesus. Heraclitus taught that the world is in a constant state of motion and change. So he taught that reality, life, nature, social connectivity was always moving. It was always in flux. He famously said, you never step in the same river twice. Maybe you’ve heard that. That’s been repeated. from different sources for thousands of years. You never step in the same river twice, which is interesting Because it really is true. So rivers have a name, and in one sense, a river is a concept and an idea. But if you dip your foot into a river and you pull it out, because of the current When you set your foot in that river again, it’s a different collection of water around your foot. Right? This is Heraclitus’s idea that this is a picture of all reality, that all life is moving. And so in Greek, Heraclitus called this Panta Ray, that is all things flowing. And doesn’t that seem consistent with our experience of life? I mean, life does not slow down. It is constantly moving and changing, surprising us, and at times frustrating us. Do you ever get that sense that life is just moving by so quickly? Things just keep changing and things keep popping up and So I think most of us would agree that our experience of life in reality is consistent with what Heraclitus taught, that things are always in flux. Now he went on to teach that there was a unifying principle that while reality and nature and life and relationships are moving and in flux There is a bit of order, right? So summer gives way to fall, fall gives way to winter, winter gives way to spring spring to summer, and this cycle continues. Particularly where I live, by the way, which is in the Midwest, where we have four definite seasons. We have hot summers, cold winters, everything in between But there is a cycle that there’s something that is behind this. It’s not random. So Heraclitus taught that the unifying principle that holds all things together while they’re shifting and moving is the Lagos. Now we begin to see a little bit of the background of the power and the mystery of what John’s doing in his gospel. So again, from a Greek perspective, from Heraclitus, Lagos described the unifying principle, the ordering principle, that thing which guides everything through everything. relating all things to all things. So John in his gospel is making this bold proclamation to the non-Jewish world that Jesus was that guiding principle, the Lagos. that that Greek-minded people had believed that was holding all things together that had existed even before the gods and humanity. So there’s an assumption for those who believed Heraclitus’ teaching on Lagos that while Pontus Re, while everything is in flux, There is above that something holding everything together, the Lagos. So you could hear John in his gospel like this: John 1:1. Taking a little bit of liberty here in our understanding of Lagos. So you could hear it like this. In the beginning was the unifying principle holding all things together. And this unifying principle was with God, and this unifying principle was God. Notice the massive philosophical and theological fusion John is creating here. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who was in the beginning worshipped by the Jewish people, is The Lagos, the unifying principle, holding all things together, believed by the Greeks. John is saying to the Greeks that what you have believed As a philosophical principle, we worship as a divine person. I gotta jump into this podcast episode to let you know I have a new book that’s out. Incarnation, eight lessons on how God Meets Us is available now. Go order it. Link is in the show notes. And John is just getting started. This is the first verse of his gospel. So you gotta hold on to your hat for just a little bit. So if we go on to the next verse, John chapter 1, verse 2, maybe we’ll look at verses 2, 3, 4, and 5. John goes on. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him, not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life. And the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. So, verse two begins with the pronoun he. The word, the logos, the unifying principle of change, is not just an unknowable force, but a very personal God. So we could work through all the verses of John 1, but let’s just skip down to the kicker. And that is John 1. 14. John writes, and the word became flesh and lived among us. And we have seen his glory, the glory as of a Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth So the word, the Lagos, this unifying principle, is the Father’s Son, the Son of God. The word is Jesus, a real human being who is God in human flesh and blood, and he lived among us. Or as Eugene Peterson famously translates in the message: the word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. This is what theologians call the incarnation, this holy mystery of God taking on flesh Think about it like this. The infinite, because God is infinite, the infinite took on the finite Immortality, for God is immortal, took on mortality. The eternal took on the earthly This is a great mystery because in our modern imaginations, the infinite, the immortal, the eternal, let’s call that heaven seems to be so far away from where we live here on earth. The finite, among mortality, the earthly. It just seems so distant, far away, as if these are different worlds that are never going to come together. But in the mystery of the incarnation, We see that the creator of all things. Nothing was created. Not one thing was created without him For the word, the Lagos, who is Jesus, is the creator of all things. The creator of all things became a creature The God of Mary became the son of Mary. The word beyond words learned to speak human words This is a mystery that it’s good to understand philosophical and historical backgrounds, but it there is a value as followers of Jesus to just pause. and to ponder on this great mystery, how is this possible that the God of Mary becomes the son of Mary that the word had to actually learn how to speak human words. It’s hard to answer these questions because I don’t think that an answer is necessarily what we need here. We just need to pause. We need to reflect. We need to take just a moment and let the mystery sit with us. In John’s Gospel, using the Greek word Lagos helps us to enter into that mystery Because what the Greeks believed as a guiding principle was life and light itself Jesus, the Word of God, who was with God and was God, took on flesh and blood God saw us in our miserable state, and God chose not to stand far off and aloof, but instead, God came to us in Jesus God came to us in order to rescue us. So as we reflect on the mystery of the incarnation, don’t lose sight of the purpose of the incarnation. Jesus, the word of God, came for us and for our salvation. The word moved into the neighborhood, and that’s from the message I absolutely love. That translation of John 1. 14, the word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. Love that. But the word moved into the neighborhood to save the neighborhood In the fourth century, the early church father Athanasius wrote, It is we who were the cause of his taking human form. And for our salvation, that in his great love, he was both born and manifested in a human body God came to us. And that trajectory is important. Because in moments of crisis In moments of stress, difficulty, overwhelming pain, in moments of existential crisis when we’re asking big questions like of identity and purpose and meaning It seems like people have an impulse to reach out and to connect to something beyond themselves Now, some people, when they go through difficulty and stress and pain, will just try to ignore it or to numb it out or to distract themselves. But if you don’t go that route of numbing or distracting, it seems to me that people have an impulse that we don’t have all the answers inside us. We need to go outside of ourselves. to ask someone else or to reach towards something greater than humanity Most religious systems and modern forms of self-help will tell you that what you need, if you’re in that moment of stress or pain, anxiety uh existential questioning is you have to go to work. You gotta reach up. You gotta reach out and lay hold of something because if you just sit there, you’re not going to find any help. You have to do something in order to reach Self-fulfillment or enlightenment or whatever they want to call it. But in the mystery of the incarnation, we see that at the heart of the gospel It is not us reaching up to God, but God reaching down to us We don’t have to work so hard to find God, to understand God, because God came looking for us. So let’s go back to Athanasius for a moment and his book on the incarnation. In chapter three, Athanasius says that God understands human limitations. That God made us in God’s image and made the world so that we could see God. God went so far as sending the law and the prophets, but it seems like people have just missed it. So he goes on to say that there are ways to learn about God, to learn of these higher things. He says there are three ways to obtain the knowledge of God. And when he says knowledge of God, he means experiential knowledge, not just head knowledge, but an encounter with God, right? It’s that kind of knowledge. He says, one, you can ponder the harmony of creation. This is what Heraclitus and a lot of the Greek philosophers were doing. They were observing the harmony of creation, and that was leading them to some knowledge of a transcendent being. Athanasius says, you can also have conversations with holy men. You can ask people who are holy who know God, and you can learn from them Or he says you can lead a good life by knowing the law, following the moral law of God, and there discover a good life. And then behind the good life is the good life giver. But the problem is that while God did all of these things for us out of love, the harmony of creation, there’s good holy men in our lives, he gave us the law and the prophets. God did all this for us, we, according to Athanasius, turn to pleasures of the moment, and frauds and illusions of evil spirits. So, in his book, Athanasius asks What then was God to do? What else could he possibly do, being God, but renew his image in mankind? so that through it men might once more come to know him. And how could this be done save by the coming of the very image himself, our Savior Jesus Christ? Men could not have done it. The word of God came in his own person because it was he alone, the image of the Father Who could recreate man made after the image? So Athanasius is telling us that God realized that we couldn’t figure things out on our own So God the Father sent God the Son. And our very salvation is a renewal of the image of God. And God knew that we could not be renewed in God’s own image on our own. And so Jesus came for us and our salvation So Jesus in the incarnation is how we experience salvation. Jesus became human to redeem humanity. But this is also how we come to know who God is. Jesus, in his high priestly prayer, in John 17, verse 3, said, And this is eternal life. that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. Eternal life is this experiential knowledge of God, to know God in a real, personal, and intimate way In this regard, incarnation is like a portal into another world. While we sometimes think that heaven is so far away, heaven and earth That is, heaven, God’s space, and earth, humanity’s space is really not that far at all. They’re actually closer than we would imagine. It’s just that there’s like a heavy theater curtain between heaven and earth. And God is on stage. Let’s call that heaven. We’re out in the audience in the theater. Let’s call that earth. And we’re actually really close to each other, but because of this thick, heavy curtain, we don’t see it. And so we imagine it so far away. But much like the story of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, this other world, heaven, where God is, is just on the other side of the wardrobe. And Jesus is that wardrobe. He is the word of God, the Lagos, Heraclitus’ unifying principle. He is, through the incarnation, our portal into another world where we can know God, where we can be known by God. where the image of God, which is the image of pure love, can be renewed in our hearts. We can experience God and receive his love and be transformed by that love. And so we don’t have to go searching for God because God has moved into the neighborhood. God has moved into your neighborhood and there is a wardrobe in every house. All we have to do is open the door and go exploring. Well, that’s probably enough for one episode. The incarnation is such a beautiful mystery. that I want to keep exploring. That’s why I wrote the Bible study. I hope the Bible study helps. And I hope that this episode helped. Helped you to understand a little of the background, particularly of that Greek word Lagos, and to explore the mystery of the incarnation because it is an unending mystery if you’ll keep exploring. This mystery that God has come to us. And this is the hope of the gospel. The hope in the gospel is not what we have done, but what God has done in Jesus for us, for our salvation. And indeed. for the world itself. Well that’s all that we have for today. Thank you for joining me for this episode.
Derek Vreeland: Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.