For to which of the angels did He ever say: “You are My Son, Today I have begotten You”? And again: “I will be to Him a Father, And He shall be to Me a Son”? But when He again brings the firstborn into the world, He says: “Let all the angels of God worship Him.” And of the angels He says: “Who makes His angels spirits And His ministers a flame of fire.” But to the Son He says: “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever; A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your Kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You With the oil of gladness more than Your companions.” (Hebrews 01:05-09, NKJV).
There is something extremely moving about our Savior being the Son of God. It is ennobling to think that the Father considered our redemption so vitally important that He sent not just an Emissary, or a Servant, but the Uniquely-Begotten One (monogenes in Greek) to save us creatures from the penalty of sin.
Some have argued that the Eternal Second Person of the Trinity became the Son at the precise time appointed before the foundation of the world. Others have concluded that He was always, and eternally, the Son, since Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. While I tend to agree that the first position aligns more closely with all that Scripture reveals about Christ Jesus, in the end, what matters most to me is the fact of His Sonship.
Of course, to satisfy God's perfect justice, the payment for Adam's sin had to be made by a man, because Adam was a man. Since the wages of sin is death, and since every soul that sins must die, the only way for a man's death to be the propitiation for more than that man's own sin, is for a sinless Man to voluntarily die on behalf of sinful others. It had to be a Man to take away sin precisely because it was through a man's rebellion that sin entered the world, and death through sin.
That part of the equation is tragically brilliant and fitting.
Further, since all men are conceived in sin by virtue of their being descendants of Adam, the "federal head of the human race", thus inheriting his fallen nature, a mere human could never qualify. The only perfect, sinless Man could not be born literally as a son of man genetically or existentially, but yet had to be born as a Man. Again, the divinely brilliant, surprising, and perfect solution is that the Savior would be born of a virgin under the Law. He would be the paradoxical Seed of the woman promised in Genesis 3, conceived not by a fallen man, but by the Holy Spirit of God.
Two age-old skeptical objections instantly arise. How can a virgin give birth? And, why are Adam's descendants held accountable for his long-ago rebellion?
The response to the first objection is simply this: why think it difficult for an Omnipotent Being to decree a Virgin Birth? He created all of reality by merely speaking it into existence. Sidestepping a couple of procreative laws does not seem to be that big of a deal. And logically, it makes little sense to insist that God, being God, think and act within the narrow confines of our paltry ideas of divine consistency.
Now, if you disbelieve that God is Creator, I get your heartache. But then my question is why try to believe any part of God's redemptive plan at all, since it stands or falls on the literal existence of a First Man created in God's image who willfully rejected Him? Incidentally, this is also the answer to the second skeptical objection. For if God did not ordain that we were all represented in Adam, and thus guilty of original sin, then we could likewise not be represented in Christ, the sinless, propitiatory sacrifice who paid for our sin.
We'd be on our own, and as soon as we fell short of even one jot or tittle of God's moral law, we would be guilty of violating His absolute standard of perfection without hope of redemption. Picture a chain suspending us over the chasm of Hell. If one of the links is broken, it matters not at all how secure all the other links may be. The end result is that we fall screaming into the pit.
Do you see the mercy and grace and justice in all this?
But what makes the gift of grace in Jesus more spectacular still is that the prerequisite of being a sinless man could conceivably have been met by a holy angel incarnating as a human though a virgin birth. That man could then have been sacrificed on behalf of humanity, and again, speaking from a merely human perspective, the debt paid. But thinking along these lines is where we would go very wrong. For consider that it is not just the sacrifice, but our personally appropriating that sacrifice through faith that makes us righteous before God. We would then be required to have faith in an angel (some cults make this very mistake). And in gratitude for that sacrifice, the next natural step would be adoration and worship. But only God is worthy of worship. Do you see one of the problems? Angels are created beings unworthy of worship.
Secondly, from the very beginning God reveals that He is the only One mighty enough to save. Only He, the Uncreated One, the Uncaused First Cause, has the intrinsic power to take away the sin debt, forever. It is only the life of God Himself that is of sufficient value to offset the eternal debt of man's sin.
Only by God dying on the Cross could man be saved, and only by becoming fully Human would it be possible for Him to suffer death, and be the sinless Substitute that takes away the sin of the world.
Yet, the glory of all this goes further still by Scripture informing us that it was the Son of God - who is the express image of the Father, and in whom all the fulness of the Godhead dwells bodily - who came to save by dying. His own Son lovingly became the payment of the Father's divine and perfect justice.
His Son.
Please don't miss the meaning of that.
What relationship would a God who is love value more than that of Father and Son? What better way of informing us of His value (and ours!) than by having Him become the Uniquely-begotten Son? I submit that the very concept of father, son and family, as well as human love and marriage, were expressly ordained for this very purpose - to show the depth of the Father's love, the loving obedience of His Son, and the utter heinousness of sin.
I do not think it is possible to understate the importance of understanding what it took to enable us to escape the fires of Hell.
It took love beyond measure.
It took obedience beyond description.
It took humility beyond imagination.
It took a sacrifice beyond price.
It took The Son.
