How can Jesus be both God and man at the same time?

All is plain until the inborn rationalism of fallen and carnal man gets to work on this unfathomable mystery. May it not be said that error as to the Person of Christ often proceeds from the audacity that tries to dissect TWO NATURES in the One Person, and thence to define which is the Divine and which is the Human? JESUS IS GOD, and JESUS IS MAN. The inscrutable mystery to which reference was made at the beginning of this paper, lies in this, that both these glories are true, but inseparable, in the One Person. He may be viewed, now in the light of the one glory, now in the light of the other, but He is the same Christ throughout, body, soul, and spirit. His Godhead was not a distinct entity from His Manhood. He was not two persons. but One. It would be totally wrong to limit the Sonship of Christ, the glory of the Son, to any one part of His glorious Being. He is One, and indivisible. If any difficulties are alleged, let them remain difficulties, for how else can it be when "No one knows the Son but the Father."

Seeing that Christ is Man, we find that in each and every particular the Scripture speaks of Him in language such as, would be used of man, while ever apart from sin and with holiness innate. It speaks of Him as to His body, Matt. 26:12; Luke 23:52; John 20:12; Heb. 10:5. It speaks of His soul, Matt. 26:38; Mark 14:34; John 12:27; Acts 2:27, 31; In the Old Testament also, as in Ps. 16:10; Ps. 22:20; Isaiah 53:10-12; etc., etc. It speaks of His spirit also, Mark 2:8; Mark 8:12; Luke 10:21; Luke 23:46; John 11:33; John 13:21. All these speak of Him in Manhood, the Son having become Man; even as we in the constitution of our manhood are said to have spirit, soul and body (1 Thess. 5:23). The same words are used in His case as are used in our case. Yet how every heart that knows Him, while adoring the absolute identity of our Lord in nature with man, sin apart, yet feels the holy mystery, the infinite glory, indissolubly true, that He is the Son incarnate.

The opposite error to saying that He is two persons is to say that His two natures have combined into one. It was an ancient heresy that the two natures, Manhood and Deity, merged together. For this reason the writer does not like the expression the “God-man”. It implies to him (though not to many orthodox Christians) that He is half man and half God. Such an idea must be resisted. He is wholly Man and wholly God. He possesses all the attributes and properties of real, unfallen, holy Manhood, and at the same time possesses all the infinite attributes and properties of Deity. The unity consists, not in the amalgamation of essence, but in the Oneness of His Person.

He took up humanity into union with deity in His Person; yet His incarnation did not in the least detract from His deity nor His eternal relationship as Son to the Father but only gave to His humanity His infinite perfection. Each of His two natures retained its own proper character without any confusion. His human nature as well as His divine nature possessed each their excellent characteristics and both united to form His glorious Person as incarnate Son. Scripture never divides the Person nor confounds the natures. They are united in His Person by a unique and inscrutable bond. He is the God-man He is God in all that God is and He is Man in all that man is, apart from sin. Such is the Son of God come in flesh — the God-man — that He might manifest the Godhead in the flesh and by His obedience unto death, even the death of the cross, might redeem us unto God.

Scripture never divides His Person into two parts, one human and one divine, but reveals Him as having taken up perfect humanity into union with His eternal deity so that they are united in one unique, inscrutable and indissoluble bond in His Person. While Scripture never confounds the two natures it never divides the Person. Even what He does in manhood is still the action of Himself, the eternal Son, who has of His own self, and without giving up His personality as eternal Son, "taking a bondman's form, taking His place in the likeness of men" (Phil. 2:7, J. N. D. Trans.). It is He the eternal Son that is there as Man. It is this fact of His Person as the eternal Son of God, having taken His place as Man, that gives the infinite perfection of His unique Person to all that He does as incarnate Son. It is this indissoluble union of perfect manhood with eternal deity in His unique Person that constantly comes out in all that He does as God (the Son) manifest in flesh.

He was a Man here before the eyes of men; Man in the whole texture of His bodily and spiritual being, but God and Man in the complex and inscrutable unity of His adorable person; as truly God as Man; nothing lacking as to Godhead, for its fullness was there; and nothing lacking as to Manhood, for perfection characterized Him in whatever way He may be viewed. How the human and divine were from the moment of the conception of this glorious Person formed in unity and mysteriously blended, so the two were not separate existences, but intervolved and combined in the most perfect oneness, no one knows but He who could say of Him: “The Man that is my Fellow” (Zech. 13:7).

I say all this to emphasize the fact that the various ways in which the perfect life of this heavenly Man is portrayed in the Gospels, shows, not the activities resulting from a dual personality, though we see the divine and the human perfectly blended, but those activities flowing forth from one spring; their overwhelming testimony carrying conviction to heart and mind, that the One from whom those actions flow is both God and Man, but in one person.

Now who does not know that a person among men consists of both parts and unity? There are spirit and soul and body; and yet they constitute the person. There may be temporary dissolution of the outer tie by death; there will surely be their unity in one person for eternity. But for the true believer Christ's Person is distinguished from every other by the infinite fact of God and man united thus. These are in Him for ever indissoluble, though no saint doubts that He is Son of God and Son of man. Whatever His profound emotion in spirit, whatever the conflict when He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat became as great drops of blood, that Man was inseparably God; and as from His conception, so fully in His death and resurrection. Thus had His every word, work, thought, and suffering divine value. It is not the Son alone, but "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever." The man Christ Jesus is not only the one Mediator, but the true God and eternal life; the sent Servant, and the "I AM"; Christ of the fathers as according to flesh, yet He that is over all, God blessed for evermore. Amen.

Beyond doubt the union of God and man in one Person is the wondrous and unfathomable One revealed, not for our comprehension, but for unquestioning faith, love, and honour as we honour the Father. He is thus at once the weary man and the only-begotten Son that is (not "was" merely) in the Father's bosom; the Son of man here below that is in heaven, and the "I am" on earth threatened by the Jews with stoning because He told them the truth. He must have been the Logos to have been what He was here as man. His soul was united to the Logos: else the Person had been doubled or severed, and He could not be true and complete man. He cried, Let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt. There was His holy will; and it was right to lay it before His Father, but in entire submissiveness to His will and glory; of which none but a divine Person was capable. It was not therefore the Logos superseding the spirit (still less the soul), but perfectly associated with the soul in His one Person. He was true man and true God in the same indivisible Person. In Him dwelt and dwells the fulness of the Godhead bodily.

How perfect was this! How perfect, surely, was everything; and each in its generation! — the human virtues, the fruits of the anointing that was on Him, and His divine glories. The natures in the One Person are unconfused; but the effulgence of the divine is chastened, the homeliness of the human is elevated. There is nothing like this, there could be nothing like this, in the whole creation. And yet the human was human, and the divine was divine, Jesus slept in the boat: He was man. Jesus quelled the winds and the waves: He was God.

The blessed Lord in assuming manhood took all that was necessary for manhood, spirit, soul, and body; the spirit of a man, the soul of a man, the body of a man—in other words a human spirit, a human soul, a human body—full complete manhood. And yet, united to Deity there was but one indivisible Person. Such is the teaching of Scripture, such the mystery that our Lord declares none can know but the Father.

In His person we find a perfect combination of these two extremes—the lowliest in grace and the highest in glory—and yet the two extremes combine in the same Christ, so that in viewing the varied conditions into which He may have been pleased to enter we must always remember that He was never less than God. Truly man, and at times weary or hungered as man, He was none the loss God. And it is just this that makes His Person, ever inscrutable, so infinitely precious to us. His one hand touches without usurpation the throne of God, and the other meets the need of the sinful soul of man.