I promised an answer to this question in last night's Q and A, so here it is...
First of all, let me say, it's a mystery and words are not adequate to encompass what is known as the incarnation. That said, below is an excerpt from a tool I use quite often, The New Bible Dictionary.
The meaning of the New Testament claim that ‘Jesus Christ has come in the flesh’ may be drawn out under three heads.
a. The Person incarnate
The NT uniformly defines the identity of Jesus in terms of his relation to the one God of OT monotheism (cf. 1 Cor. 8:4, 6; 1 Tim. 2:5; with Is. 43:10f.; 44:6). The basic definition is that Jesus is God’s Son. This identification is rooted in Jesus’ own thought and teaching. His sense of being ‘the Son’ in a unique sense that set him apart from the rest of men went back at least to his 13th year (Lk. 2:49), and was confirmed to him by his Father’s voice from heaven at his baptism: ‘Thou art my beloved Son’ (Mk. 1:11; cf. Mt. 3:17; Lk. 3:22; agapētos, which appears in all three reports of the heavenly utterance, carries the implication of ‘only beloved’: so again in the parable, Mk. 12:6; cf. the similar words from heaven at the transfiguration, Mk. 9:7; Mt. 17:5). At his trial, when asked under oath whether he was ‘the Son of God’ (a phrase which on the high priest’s lips probably signified no more than ‘Davidic Messiah’), Mark and Luke report Jesus as making an affirmative reply which was in effect a claim to personal deity: egō eimi (so Mk. 14:62; Lk. 22:70 has: ‘you say [sc. rightly] that egō eimi’). egō eimi, the emphatic ‘I am’, were words that no Jew would take on his lips, for they expressed the self-identification of God (Ex. 3:14). Jesus, who according to Mark had used these words before in a similar suggestive way (Mk. 6:50; cf. 13:6; and cf. the long series of egō eimi sayings in John’s Gospel: Jn. 4:26; 6:35; 8:12; 10:7, 11; 11:25; 14:6; 15:1; 18:5ff.), evidently wished to make it perfectly clear that the divine Sonship to which he laid claim was nothing less than personal deity. It was for this ‘blasphemy’ that he was condemned.
Jesus’ references to himself as ‘the Son’ are always in contexts which mark him out as uniquely close to God and uniquely favoured by God. There are comparatively few in the Synoptic Gospels (Mt. 11:27 = Lk. 10:22; Mk. 13:32 = Mt. 24:36; cf. Mk. 12:1–11), but many in John, both in Jesus’ own words and in the Evangelist’s commentary. According to John, Jesus is God’s ‘only’ Son (monogenēs: 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18). He exists eternally (8:58; cf. 1:1f.). He stands in an unchanging relation of perfect love, union and communion, with the Father (1:18; 8:16, 29; 10:30; 16:32). As Son, he has no independent initiative (5:19); he lives to glorify his Father (17:1, 4), by doing his Father’s will (4:34; 5:30; 8:28f.). He came into the world because the Father ‘sent’ him (42 references), and gave him a task to fulfil there (4:34; 17:4; cf. 19:30). He came in his Father’s name, i.e. as his Father’s representative (5:43), and, because all that he said and did was according to the Father’s command (7:16ff.; 8:26ff.; 12:49f.; 14:10), his life on earth revealed his Father perfectly (14:7ff.). When he speaks of the Father as greater than himself (14:28; cf. 10:29) he is evidently referring, not to any essential or circumstantial inferiority, but to the fact that subordination to the Father’s will and initiative is natural and necessary to him. The Father is greater than he because in relation to the Father it is always his nature freely and joyfully to act as a Son. But this does not mean that he is to be subordinated to the Father in men’s esteem and worship. Just the reverse; for the Father seeks the Son’s glory no less than the Son seeks the Father’s glory. The Father has committed to the Son his two great works of giving life and executing judgment, ‘that all may honour the Son, even as they honour the Father’ (5:21ff.). This amounts to saying that the Father directs all men to do as Thomas did (20:28), and acknowledge the Son in the same terms in which they ought to acknowledge the Father himself—-namely, as ‘my Lord and my God’.
The NT contains other lines of thought, subsidiary to that of divine Sonship, which also proclaim the deity of Jesus of Nazareth. We may mention the more important of these: (i) John identifies the eternal divine Word with God’s personal Son, Jesus Christ (Jn. 1:1–18; cf. 1 Jn. 1:1–3; Rev. 19:13; *Logos). (ii) Paul speaks of the Son as ‘the image of God’, both as incarnate (2 Cor. 4:4) and in his pre-incarnate state (Col. 1:15), and in Phil. 2:6 says that prior to the incarnation Jesus Christ was in the ‘form’ (morphē) of God: a phrase the exact exegesis of which is disputed, but which J. B. Phillips is almost certainly right to render: ‘always … God by nature’. Heb. 1:3 (rv) calls the Son ‘the effulgence of his (God’s) glory, and the very image of his substance‘. These statements, made as they are within a monotheistic frame of reference which excludes any thought of two Gods, are clearly meant to imply: (1) that the Son is personally divine, and ontologically one with the Father; (2) that the Son perfectly embodies all that is in the Father, or, putting it negatively, that there is no aspect or constituent of deity or character which the Father has and the Son lacks. (iii) Paul can apply an OT prophecy concerning the invocation of ‘the Lord’ (Yahweh) to the Lord Jesus, thus indicating that it finds its true fulfilment in him (Rom. 10:13, quoting Joel 2:32; cf. Phil. 2:10f., echoing Is. 45:23). Similarly, the writer to the Hebrews quotes Moses’ exhortation to the angels to worship God (Dt. 32:43, lxx), and the psalmist’s declaration: ‘Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever’ (Ps. 45:6), as words spoken by the Father with reference to his Son (Heb. 1:6, 8). This shows that both writers regard Jesus as divine. (iv) The regular NT habit of referring to Jesus as ‘Lord’—the title given to the gods of Hellenistic religion (cf. 1 Cor. 8:5), and invariably used in lxx to render the divine name—would seem to be an implicit ascription of deity.
b. The nature of the incarnation
When the Word ‘became flesh’ his deity was not abandoned, or reduced, or contracted, nor did he cease to exercise the divine functions which had been his before. It is he, we are told, who sustains the creation in ordered existence, and who gives and upholds all life (Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3; Jn. 1:4), and these functions were certainly not in abeyance during his time on earth. When he came into the world he ‘emptied himself’ of outward glory (Phil. 2:7; Jn. 17:5), and in that sense he ‘became poor’ (2 Cor. 8:9), but this does not at all imply a curtailing of his divine powers, such as the so-called kenosis theories would suggest. The NT stresses rather that the Son’s deity was not reduced through the incarnation. In the man Christ Jesus, says Paul, ‘dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily’ (Col. 2:9; cf. 1:19).
The incarnation of the Son of God, then, was not a diminishing of deity, but an acquiring of manhood. It was not that God the Son came to indwell a human being, as the Spirit was later to do. (To assimilate incarnation to indwelling is the essence of the Nestorian heresy.) It was rather that the Son in person began to live a fully human life. He did not simply clothe himself in a human body, taking the place of its soul, as Apollinaris maintained; he took to himself a human soul as well as a human body, i.e. he entered into the experience of human psychical life as well as of human physical life. His manhood was complete; he became ‘the man Christ Jesus’ (1 Tim. 2:5; cf. Gal. 4:4; Heb. 2:14, 17). And his manhood is permanent. Though now exalted, he ‘continueth to be, God and man in two distinct natures, and one person, for ever’ (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 21; cf. Heb. 7:24).
c. The incarnate state
(i) It was a state of dependence and obedience, because the incarnation did not change the relationship between the Son and the Father. They continued in unbroken fellowship, the Son saying and doing what the Father gave him to say and do, and not going beyond the Father’s known will at any single moment (cf. the first temptation, Mt. 4:2ff.). His confessed ignorance of the time of his return (Mk. 13:32) should no doubt be explained, not as edifying pretence (Aquinas), nor as evidence of his having laid aside his divine knowledge for the purpose of the incarnation (the kenosis theories), but simply as showing that it was not the Father’s will for him to have this knowledge in his mind at that time. As the Son, he did not wish or seek to know more than the Father wished him to know.
(ii) It was a state of sinlessness and impeccability, because the incarnation did not change the nature and character of the Son. That his whole life was sinless is several times asserted (2 Cor. 5:21; 1 Pet. 2:22; Heb. 4:15; cf. Mt. 3:14–17; Jn. 8:46; 1 Jn. 2:1f.). That he was exempt from the entail of original sin in Adam is evident from the fact that he was not bound to die for sins of his own (cf. Heb. 7:26), and hence could die vicariously and representatively, the righteous taking the place of the unrighteous (cf. 2 Cor. 5:21; Rom. 5:16ff.; Gal. 3:13; 1 Pet. 3:18). That he was impeccable, and could not sin, follows from the fact that he remained God the Son (cf. Jn. 5:19, 30). Deviation from the Father’s will was no more possible for him in the incarnate state than before. His deity was the guarantee that he would achieve in the flesh that sinlessness which was prerequisite if he were to die as ‘a lamb without blemish or spot’ (1 Pet. 1:19).
(iii) It was a state of temptation and moral conflict, because the incarnation was a true entry into the conditions of man’s moral life. Though, being God, it was not in him to yield to temptation, yet, being man, it was necessary for him to fight temptation in order to overcome it. What his deity ensured was not that he would not be tempted to stray from his Father’s will, nor that he would be exempt from the strain and distress that repeated insidious temptations create in the soul, but that, when tempted, he would fight and win; as he did in the initial temptations of his Messianic ministry (Mt. 4:1ff.). The writer to the Hebrews stresses that in virtue of his firsthand experience of temptation and the costliness of obedience he is able to extend effective sympathy and help to tempted and distraught Christians (Heb. 2:18; 4:14ff.; 5:2, 7ff.). (*Jesus Christ, Life And Teaching of.)
Bibliography. J. Denney, Jesus and the Gospel, 1908; P. T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 1909; H. R. Mackintosh, The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ, 1912; A. E. J. Rawlinson, The New Testament Doctrine of the Christ, 1926; L. Hodgson, And was made Man, 1928; E. Brunner, The Mediator, E.T. 1934; D. M. Baillie, God was in Christ, 1948; L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology4, 1949, pp. 305–330; G. C. Berkouwer, The Person of Christ, 1954; K. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I, 2, 1956, pp. 122–202; V. Taylor, The Person of Christ in New Testament Teaching, 1958; O. Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament, E.T. 1960; W. Pannenberg, Jesus—2, E.T. 1968; C. F. D. Moule, The Origin of Christology, 1977.
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