Christmas celebrates the most audacious claim in human history: that the eternal God became a specific human being, in a specific place, at a specific time, for a specific purpose. Not a spiritual influence. Not a divine metaphor. A person — born, breathing, hungry, tired — who was simultaneously the One through whom everything that exists was made.
I remember the first time that claim stopped being background noise and became something I actually had to reckon with. I was reading John 1 slowly, probably for the hundredth time, and the fourteenth verse landed differently than it ever had before: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” I remember putting the Bible down and sitting with it. The Word. Became. Flesh. Not visited. Not appeared. Became.
That’s what Christmas is actually about. And it’s worth recovering — not from commercialism, but for what it actually is.
What John Is Actually Saying
John opens his Gospel not with a birth narrative but with the eternal reality behind it:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”
(John 1:1–3, ESV)
The “Word” — the Greek is Logos — is not a title John invented. It carried enormous freight in both Jewish and Greek thought: the rational principle underlying all reality, the expression of God’s mind and purpose, the agent through whom creation came into being. John applies this title to Jesus deliberately and precisely.
And then verse 14: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
The word translated “dwelt” is literally “tabernacled” — it’s the same word used for the wilderness tabernacle, the tent where God’s presence rested among His people in the desert. John is making a specific, loaded claim: the presence of God that once dwelt in a tent in the wilderness has now taken up residence in a human body. The eternal has entered the temporal. The infinite has become finite. The One through whom all things were made has become one of the things He made.
That is what happened at Bethlehem.
Why the Incarnation Is Load-Bearing
This isn’t a decorative doctrine. The incarnation is load-bearing for everything else in the faith — which is precisely why the apostle John, in his first letter, makes it the test of true teaching:
“By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.”
(1 John 4:2–3, ESV)
Why would John make this the test? Because if Jesus didn’t genuinely become human, He didn’t genuinely suffer. If He didn’t genuinely suffer, the cross means something different. If the cross means something different, the resurrection means something different. A Jesus who only appeared to be human is a different Jesus — and a different gospel follows from a different Jesus.
The incarnation is the hinge on which everything turns. God becoming flesh means that human flesh has been taken up into the life of God — that the divide between Creator and creation has been bridged not just relationally but personally and bodily. When Jesus rose from the dead, He rose in a body. When He ascended, He ascended in a body. The eternal Son of God is, right now, a human being seated at the right hand of the Father. That is what the incarnation set in motion.
What This Means for How We Celebrate
Christmas is the entry point of the story that runs through Good Friday and Easter Sunday and forward to the return of Christ. The manger isn’t a sentimental scene — it’s the opening act of a rescue that reconfigures everything.
The shepherds were told “good news of great joy that will be for all the people” (Luke 2:10) — and the joy is proportional to what they were being told. The Savior had arrived. Not a prophet. Not a reformer. The Savior — the One who would accomplish what no human effort could accomplish, the reconciliation of humanity to God.
That’s what “Immanuel” actually means. Not that God is nearby. Not that God is interested. God with us — present in the most direct way imaginable, sharing our nature, entering our condition, taking on everything it means to be human so that what it means to be human could be transformed from the inside.
Recovering Christmas means recovering that claim. Not as a slogan, but as a reality that took place in history at a specific address — Bethlehem, in the days of Herod the king — and whose implications are still unfolding.
Key Takeaways
- The incarnation — “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14) — is the most audacious claim at the center of Christmas. The eternal Son of God, through whom all things were made, genuinely became a human being. Not a spiritual appearance. Not a metaphor. A person.
- John’s language is precise: the Word “tabernacled” among us, deliberately echoing the wilderness tabernacle where God’s presence dwelt with Israel. The claim is that God’s presence, once in a tent, has now taken up residence in a human body.
- The incarnation is load-bearing for everything else in the faith. First John 4:2–3 makes the confession of Jesus Christ coming in the flesh the test of true teaching — because a Jesus who didn’t genuinely become human didn’t genuinely suffer, and a different cross follows from a different Jesus.
- The joy of the shepherds in Luke 2 is proportional to what they were being told — not that a good man had been born, but that the Savior had arrived, the One who would accomplish what no human effort could.
- Recovering Christmas means recovering the claim at its center: that the Creator became a creature, that the divide between God and humanity was bridged personally and bodily, and that those implications are still unfolding — through the cross, the resurrection, and the return of the One who became flesh and will come again.
Questions Worth Sitting With
John opens his Gospel by identifying Jesus as the Logos — the Word — the eternal rational principle through whom all things were made, who was with God and was God from the beginning. Verse 14 then makes the staggering claim that this eternal Word genuinely became flesh — not appeared to be human, not took on a human form temporarily, but actually became a human being. The word translated “dwelt” literally means “tabernacled” — the same word used for the wilderness tent where God’s presence rested with Israel. John is claiming that the presence of God that once dwelt in a tent has now taken up permanent residence in a human body. That is what Christmas is celebrating.
Incarnation comes from the Latin in carne — “in flesh.” It refers to the doctrine that the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, genuinely became a human being in the person of Jesus Christ. He didn’t temporarily inhabit a human form or appear human while remaining only divine. He became human — fully and genuinely — while remaining fully divine. This is what John 1:14 is claiming and what the early church fought to protect against teachings like Docetism, which denied that Jesus genuinely came in the flesh.
Because it’s load-bearing for everything else in the faith. If Jesus didn’t genuinely become human, He didn’t genuinely suffer. If He didn’t genuinely suffer, the cross accomplishes something different. If the cross accomplishes something different, the resurrection means something different. A Jesus who only appeared to be human is a different Jesus — and a different gospel follows. This is why the apostle John in 1 John 4:2–3 makes the confession of Jesus Christ coming in the flesh the doctrinal test of true teaching. The incarnation isn’t a secondary detail. It’s the foundation.
Immanuel is the Hebrew name Isaiah uses in Isaiah 7:14, meaning “God with us.” Matthew applies this name to Jesus at His birth (Matthew 1:23). The significance is precisely what the words say: not that God is nearby, not that God is paying attention, but that God is with us — present in the most direct and intimate way imaginable, sharing our nature, entering our condition. The incarnation is the fulfillment of everything Immanuel points toward. At Christmas, we celebrate not a general divine interest in humanity but a specific, historical, bodily arrival
No — and this is important. The incarnation didn’t end at Bethlehem. The eternal Son of God took on human flesh and kept it. When Jesus rose from the dead, He rose bodily. When He ascended to the Father, He ascended bodily. The eternal Son is right now, at this moment, a human being seated at the right hand of the Father. The incarnation is a permanent feature of reality, not a seasonal event. Christmas is the annual remembrance of when it began — but its implications run through the cross, the resurrection, and forward to the return of the One who became flesh and will come again.
The claim at the center of Christmas doesn’t need defending against commercialism. It needs recovering for what it actually is — one of the most staggering things ever said about reality: that the eternal God became one of us, and that everything changed because of it.
That’s worth sitting with every December. And every other month too.
Christ reigns. Christ restores. Christ will return.
Longing for Christ, learning to wait faithfully.
Your brother in Christ,
Duane