A Reflection on "God With Us"

Hello, everyone! As I sit here typing, it is a quiet Sunday afternoon, which was preceded by a relaxing extended weekend spent in the mountains with my family. I had a lot of time to reflect, a minute fraction of which I actually did use for reflection instead of sleep. As such, I have enough cohesive thoughts gathered that I decided a short blog post would be in order.

First, credit where credit is due. I have really been loving watching the Chosen.

For those of you who don’t know what that is, just allow me to say, from one semi-hermitized being to another, that there is a time for living under a rock and there is a time to cast that rock aside. You do not want to remain oblivious of this show. For all the evils that technology and media have brought into the world, this beautiful series is proof of God’s redemptive power. You don’t want to miss this, I promise.

Anyway, I’ve been watching the episodes of Season Two as they come out, and I won’t spoil anything for you, but there were certain scenes that got my gears turning about the Incarnation.

The Incarnation as a whole is something that I’ve been awed by recently and may talk about in more detail in the future, because it’s incredible and moving and one of the most conclusive testaments to the nature of God that we have.

Just think of it. Immanuel. With us is God. Our creator became his creation, physical, mortal, enduring suffering, exposing himself to our pain. Just to walk with us again and repair the rift that was broken by sin in the days of Adam and Eve.

Wow.

In any case, The Chosen’s portrayal of Jesus has done so much to show the realities of what it meant for the Word to become flesh. One fundamental facet of this is that Jesus became constrained to a physical body and locked into linear time. He was endowed with the Holy Spirit and through that line of communication and power modeled how we can have fellowship with the Father. Although he was God, the power he displayed came through communion with the Father and the workings of the Holy Spirit. In this way, the member of the Godhead that was Jesus was no longer omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent in and of himself. And in one particular episode of Season 2, his physical limitations really struck me.

When I was child, I didn’t have much for friendships. I wasn’t entirely friendless, but what friendships I did have were usually distanced by an age gap, actual physical distance, or the fact that many of the kids I hung out with were actually my brothers’ friends and probably didn’t want me around to begin with. ;)

In any case, there were quite a few years in which I was incredibly lonely and felt rejected by a lot of my peers. There was a looming sense of distance between myself and pretty much every other person I came into contact with. It seemed impossible to me to ever find true connection.

That’s part of why Jesus came to mean so much to me. He was always there. He loved me. And his love wasn’t one that would go away if he got to know me better, because he already loved me through and through and saw every single part of me.

There was also a sort of distance in that relationship, though. While I could depend on God for everything, and while we had real communication between us, there were so many times that I longed for him to be physical. Sometimes I wanted him to be there as a physical person just so that I could sit down with him and audibly hear his voice, which would be a lot easier than having to quiet my spirit and wait to hear the gentle leanings of his Spirit. I also just wanted to look him in the eyes and watch his face. But perhaps the biggest thing that I wanted was to be held by him. When I would get stressed or lonely, that was all I wanted. Just to be physically embraced by him and stay there forever.

Which may be why Jesus did not allow me to exist until 2,000-ish years after his time on Earth. He walked a lot of miles in his ministry, and I don’t think he would have appreciated the extra burden of having to drag a beaming, six-year-old ankle-magnet disciple through the dust with every step.

The Chosen, which was designed to portray Jesus through the eyes of those who knew him, reawakened that childhood dream of face-to-face communion with God in me. How incredible it would be to see Messiah in the flesh! To hug him and be held by him! To laugh with him and take my problems to him directly!

But there was a flip-side to the disciples’ situation. Again, I won’t spoil by sharing which episode in particular I’m thinking of or what exactly happened, but as Jesus’ ministry was picking up, so were the number of people wanting his time and energy. And the fact of the matter is that if I lived back then and was one of his disciples, I may very well have not gotten as much time with him as I wanted. There is only so much that someone 100% human (even if he is simultaneously 100% God) can give. There is only one place that he can be at one time. And if I had something weighing on my heart that I wanted to speak with him about, of course he would care, but he wouldn’t necessarily be able to drop everything at a moment’s notice to counsel me for an hour.

This made me think of a verse (which I had to comb through all of the gospels to find, since I couldn’t remember the reference). John 16:7. The words of Jesus. “But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.”

There have definitely been times in my life in which I begged to differ. How on earth am I supposed to believe that we are better off without our physical Jesus here with us? I would be okay with it if he had stayed. I want God in a physical form. I want Immanuel, the Word made flesh.

But upon seeing a representation of Jesus’ physical limitations in episodes in which he is kept busy enough that the disciples are left to their own devices (not always a good thing), I realized why Jesus had to ascend and send the Holy Spirit in his stead. Because as precious as an incarnate God was to the world during the time that Jesus walked the earth, his growing kingdom required Immanuel (God with us) to be with us in a different form.

The Holy Spirit is our lifeline, the personal touch of Jesus combined with the omnipresence of God the Father. I can receive counsel from God at any time, regardless of who else in the earth is also in need. I don’t have to compete for his time, energy, and attention. Nor am I ever tempted to feel guilty for calling on him, because I know that he has all of time, energy, and attention to spare. With Jesus, those limitations would be there. With the Holy Spirit, though I miss out on the joy of getting to touch him and see his face, I can still hear his voice regularly and know that his presence is with me always.

There is no need for me to ramble further. I just wanted to share with you some of my thoughts on the nature of God as they come to me. And hopefully coerce you into watching The Chosen, because you absolutely should. I have been studying for a few months what the Bible says about Jesus’ deity and have recently embarked on my long-anticipated deep-dive into Messianic prophecy by starting a read-through of Isaiah, so I hope to share some of my findings on God the Son in the future. Today, however, I realized the blessing of the Holy Spirit in a new way and so decided to talk about that instead.

Thank you all for reading, and I hope this blessed you in some way. My thoughts have been brief, so if you have anything to add, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment on this blog post or on the Facebook post in which you may find it. And seriously, watch The Chosen. It’s good. ;)