Mysterious God, Tangible Christ

As Advent draws near, we spend a lot of time thinking, teaching, and preaching about the great Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. In Christ, God comes to us, becomes one of us, "pitches his tent" among us. We talk a lot about why God does this, with most of those discussions orbiting the subject of our salvation. But I want to suggest another reason for God's gracious decision to come to us in Jesus Christ: the fact that most of us would rather be God's creator than God's creature.

I sense some head scratching at that last statement, so allow me to explain. Most of us understand that Israel's great temptation throughout the Old Testament is to idolatry; time and again they fail to center their hearts and their loyalty on YHWH alone, choosing instead to hedge their bets by slipping in the worship of other gods on the side. What too many of us don't understand is that this is a universal human tendency; we would all rather worship something lesser, something inferior, because we know that the Creator and Sustainer of all that is requires our full and final devotion, and on most days that just feels like too much work.

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