Hark Yet Again!

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see. Hail, the incarnate Deity!

I love that phrase, "veiled in flesh". Think about what a veil does. It covers body parts you don't want the world to see outright. But those parts are still there, and what you see gives you hints of what's hidden. A Muslim woman may hide her body, but her eyes are still visible, giving evidence of the beautiful woman attached to them.

God "veiled himself in flesh" -- he put on a physical human covering to hide the deity inside. But his real nature still peeked out. In his words, in his miracles, in his loving glances . . . the idea of Jehovah God becoming a human being would have positively scandalous to first century Jews -- downright heresy. Yet, those who knew him best came to believe just that.

Pleased as man with man to dwell -- Jesus, our Emmanuel!

Every year at Christmas, I am struck again by the idea of Jesus choosing to become our Emmanuel -- God with us. Becoming one of us.

I remember hearing a story once of a boy watching ants scurrying around an anthill which was directly in the path of another boy's Big Wheel barreling down the sidewalk. "I wish I could become an ant," he thought, "so I could warn them of what's coming and tell them to get out of the way!" The gap between the nature of a human and that of an ant is simply dwarfed by the gap between the nature of God Almighty and that of his human creation. I think because we are made in God's image, we sometimes don't remember what a monstrous gulf lies between us and our Maker and what a monumental sacrifice it was for Christ to give up so much of his own nature to veil himself in flesh.

Hark -- Yo! Listen up, folks! -- the herald angels sing, "Glory to the newborn King!"