God has condescended to become Man, without giving up His full divinity. He is and remains fully human; man born of the Virgin Mary. He is and remains fully divine; God eternally begotten of His Father. The highest height has come down to the lowest status. This adoption of our human nature and the humiliation entailed in it, according to human reason is both impossible and unthinkable. That the Christ should be both God of God, seated at the right hand of the Father, and Man of Mary, seated in the presence of sinners and persecutors is a clash of the worlds, like the immovable object met by the unstoppable force. Unfathomable! How do we take this and fit it into our limited and perverted minds?

We humans take divinity and humanity and place them in a zero-sum matrix, in which by being human, divinity is diminished and by being fully divine, humanity is undone. But what makes us think that God is limited by our false either-or conceptions. Our heavenly Father is hardly constrained by our shockingly limited preconceptions about what is possible or impossible. The God whom we tell what He can do could hardly be God. The incarnation of the Son of God of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit is one of those things that no one could have conceived in His own mind. Isaiah summarizes this human incapacity and ever-expanding shock at the divine self-revelation. "No one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides you, who acts for those who wait for him" (Is 64:4).

We have also attempted to pack God off into His own sphere, shoving Him into heaven; the realm of saints and angels. We would like to lock Him away in a realm disconnected from our actual situation; way out there in heaven, � la Zwingli. By limiting God to His own place far from us we are protecting ourselves from the dangerous things that God will do if He actually comes among us. We are limiting Him to the crack in the rock and we are placing our hands over our own eyes to keep us from seeing Him in the gloriously humble incarnation of His Son. In our cowardly reversal of His gracious self-disclosure to Moses on Sinai we desire to keep Him hidden from our view (Ex 33:18-23). He is not stuck in heaven but the angels must descend and ascend so that they might see Him in both His natures, as the human and divine Person.

Our own unfaith is threatened by God's condescension in Christ. For the God who is nearby refuses to be packed off to unseen realms. It is one thing to ignore children and entirely another to ignore your own child. The Child born of Mary is not a generic child, but is the divine and human Person who confronts our sin, calls us to repentance, and redeems us by His own bloody sacrifice. He is God's own child, as we have become through Him (1Jn 3:1-2). He comes by cracking heaven open, breaking down the barriers we have erected between Himself and us. He won't allow us to exile Him to heaven. What a blessed sight is given us that we shall see heaven opened and the angels ascending and descending to look upon what has been granted to us. The divine fullness is ours unless in unfaith we close our eyes to it and demand that God retreat into heaven. No, God is with us and acts for those who wait for Him. He does not wait for our invitation for it will never come. He acts for us. Heaven is opened.