There is another most serious consideration which ought not to be forgotten. Fallen humanity calls not for amelioration but redemption, and it needed it wherever it might be. Were the notion true that the Word was united to fallen human nature here below, He must have died to redeem it —that is, to redeem Himself! — overthrowing not only His work of atonement for others, but His own person. In every point of view, the idea is as false as it is destructive — an intellectual trifling with the great mystery of godliness.
There was therefore no admixture of the minutest trace of that sad heirloom of inward evil which Adam had handed down to his posterity. Human nature there now was in His person, as surely as He was and is God, but, by God’s will and power, it was unsullied and holy. There was secured the absolute exclusion of the poison which sin had instilled into man’s nature in every other instance. Hence the Lord Jesus was born of the woman, not of the man, being in quite a peculiar sense the woman’s Seed. For thus it was the Holy Spirit was pleased to set aside for the humanity of Jesus every taint of sin inherent in fallen human nature (of course, in His mother herself, as in all others of the race). Being so born, even the humanity of our Lord was “holy,” as we have seen. Accordingly, in His person there was the most perfect suitability for the work on account of which He came, sent of the Father. On the divine side He could not but be perfect, for He was the true God and eternal life; on the human side there was miraculously effected the complete disappearance of all evil from the body which God prepared Him. The power of the Highest overshadowed His mother from the outset, and thus only was “that Holy Thing” born of her in due time. “Who can bring a clean [thing] out of an unclean? Not one,” says Job (ch. 14). This, and far more than this, was “that Holy Thing” which was born of the virgin. With God nothing is impossible. Thus, long afterwards, the angel disclosed what baffled Job of old and satisfied Mary on the spot. Christ alone is, in every sense, the power of God and the wisdom of God.
With this agree the types of the Old Testament. Take that most conspicuous one in Leviticus 2. In Leviticus 1 Christ is represented as the burnt offering; in chapter 2 it is Christ as the meal or cake offering. This (the minchah, a gift or oblation) had nothing to do with what we call “meat”; it was essentially bloodless. In the burnt offering there was the giving up of life, but in this there was no question of sacrificing animals or of anything that involved the shedding of blood. It was of fine flour, and thus aptly set forth what the Lord’s state was as connected with the earth (that is, in His body derived from His mother). There was, of course, no leaven or corrupt nature allowed, nor even honey or the mere sweetness of natural affection, pleasant as it is but unfit for an offering to God. Frankincense was there and the salt of the covenant of God, and, what is much to be noted in contrast with leaven, there was oil mingled with the flour in forming the cake. This answers exactly to the passage in Luke 1. It was the well-known emblem of the Holy Spirit of God, who shut out what otherwise must naturally have sprung from the virgin. Thus her child by His power was absolutely free from sin. Of necessity all the offerings of Israel belonged to the earth. The bullock, the sheep, the goats, the lambs, the pigeons and the turtle-doves were necessarily of this creation, if man had to offer them. But there could be nothing where there entered less suspicion of evil than in flour. It was expressly also “a thing most holy of the offerings of the Lord made by fire.” It was the growth of the earth, and set forth the Lord’s human nature.
I employ the expression “human nature,” as I presume is ordinarily done, abstractly for humanity, without a question of the state in which it was created originally or into which it quickly fell. Just so the word “flesh” is used sometimes in Scripture for man’s nature simply, as in “the Word was made flesh” (John 1:1414And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)), God was “manifest in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16), Jesus was “put to death in the flesh” (1 Peter 3:18) and “Jesus Christ . . . come in the flesh” (1 John 4:2323But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. (John 4:23)). The special doctrinal sense of the term, as characterizing the moral condition of the race, particularly in the Epistles of Paul, looks at the principle of self-will in the heart. But what believer, thinking of our Lord, would contend for, who does not shudder at, such a meaning in His case? By the context we discern its proper bearing.
Thus, ordinarily, “human nature” is, or may be, used irrespective of its actual evil state, unless morally contrasted with the new nature. Human nature was in unfallen Adam, it was in Christ, and we, of course, have it now. But however really in all, it evidently was in a totally different state in Adam before the fall and in Adam as in us since the fall; in Christ alone Scripture pronounces it holy. There are thus three distinct phases of humanity here below: innocent, fallen and holy. Christ’s manhood was not in the condition of Adam either before or after the fall.
Plainly, therefore, the state of human nature is altogether independent of its real existence. The fall altered the condition of Adam’s humanity, but humanity remained as truly after that as before. In like manner the Son of God, the Word, could be made flesh, and did become man, though ever infinitely more than man, taking human nature into union with the divine, so as to form one person, but the condition of His humanity must be ascertained from the scriptures which treat of it. Thus in Luke 1 we have seen that, from His conception and all through, Christ’s humanity was “holy” in a sense never said of any other — not merely that the Holy Spirit was poured out upon Him, but that He was “that Holy Thing,” born of His mother and called the Son of God.
Is it now asked, What was the object of the outpouring of the Spirit on Christ when He began to be thirty years of age? Assuredly it was in nowise for resisting inward liability to evil or for any moral dealing with His human nature, for in Him was no sin. The Spirit was poured out for the testimony and display in man of God’s power over Satan and his works. It was the Holy Spirit, not regenerating nor cleansing (for there was nothing in Him, no, not in His human nature, that needed or even admitted of any such operation), but in power. Thus the Lord Jesus, going forth to be tempted of the devil or in the public service of God, was pleased to act in the might of the Holy Spirit. Enduring temptation, working miracles, preaching — all was done in that divine energy. We alas! may enter into temptation by the flesh, but in the Holy Spirit the Lord repelled evil, yet endured all trial. Hence the anointing with the Holy Spirit was a question of divine power, as it is said, “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with Him” (Acts 10:3838How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him. (Acts 10:38)). Ignorant irreverence gathers from this that Christ had fallen human nature, and that, being liable to sin, the anointing of the Holy Spirit was given to keep Him from yielding! All who say this unwittingly blaspheme His person and moral glory. That Adam unfallen was peccable [liable or prone to sin], the fact itself proved; that Christ ever was peccable, denies the truth of what He was and is, both in His Deity and in His holy humanity.
And here weigh the deeply instructive type of Leviticus 8. Aaron alone is anointed first without blood (vs. 12); when his sons come into question, he is with them, and then the blood of consecration is put on him and them (vss. 2324), as the righteous ground for their being anointed with him (vs. 30). So Jesus alone could be and was anointed (and as man, mark, it was) without blood-shedding. The Holy One of God, He needed no offering to receive the Holy Spirit thus. But if He would have us enjoying the fellowship of that unction from on high, blood there must be and was. So He, first anointed before His death, enters the holiest for us with the virtue of His blood, and being by the right hand of God exalted and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, shed forth what was seen and heard at Pentecost and thereafter. What a testimony, first to His holy manhood, next to the value of His blood for us!
That Christ was made “in the likeness of sinful flesh,” Scripture declares, but even this shows that fallen nature, peccable humanity, was not in Him, though truly a man, without anything to single Him before the outward eye from others — a man who could be buffeted, spit upon, crucified and slain. The Lord Jesus, thus viewed, had nothing apparently to mark Him out from the crowd. It could not have been said that He was in the likeness of flesh, any more than that He was in the likeness of God, for this would have denied the truth of His humanity and of His Deity. “The Word was God”; “the Word was made flesh.” The one was and is His eternal glory; the other, what He deigned to become in time and will not give up forevermore. But it could be and is said also that He was made in the likeness of sinful flesh, which, as far as it goes, proves that He had not the reality of sinful flesh, but only the likeness of it. Otherwise He could not have been a sacrifice for sin; He could not have been made sin, as He was, on the cross. In “a body hast Thou prepared Me” the same truth is indicated, as we have already seen. Christ’s body, though as much a human body as that of any man, was not generated and made after the same fallen fashion as ours. Even in this His humiliation, God prepared Him a body as for none else, that it should have a specific character, suited for the singular work He had to do (Heb. 10). It is all a blunder to suppose that the reality of the incarnation involves the condition of either Adam fallen or of Adam unfallen.