This past Sunday was the third Sunday in Advent. We’ve been looking at names, or designations, for the coming child. First was “Jesus,” so called because, as the angel explained, “he will save his people from their sins.” Next, was Christ (“Anointed”), indicating that the child is the long-awaited messiah who would inaugurate an eternal and blessed rule. For the third Sunday, we consider the extraordinary title “the Son of God.”
There are several ways we could go with this: a consideration of the Trinity, or the two natures of Christ, or how the label Son of God was used for earthly rulers but was of a different and superior order for Jesus. What catches my attention, however, is the coming together of the meaning of the names “Jesus” and “Son of God” in Paul’s language at the beginning of Romans 8: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus . . . For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh . . .”
The fact that the Son took on our human existence is integrally involved with his saving us from our sins. We’ve all been so profoundly and inherently affected by the failings of our first parents that we’ve been rendered incapable of meeting the demands of the law. This places us inescapably under God’s wrath. But with the arrival of the Son of God in the “likeness of sinful flesh,” there was one who could meet the law’s demands and thus break the power of the law, sin and death. By our faith union with him we share in that victory. And what a victory it is! Paul can emphatically say that there is “NO condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
And to add to this gracious outcome we are instructed by Paul that the Son’s taking the law, sin and death on, was so “the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” Not only are we saved from condemnation, we are also saved from a life of futile striving in our own strength to meet the law’s demands. We now have the power of the Holy Spirit at work in us enabling us to pursue the righteousness and holiness to which we are called.
What an amazing reversal of outcomes. A Christmas gift worthy of thanksgiving and celebration!
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