The Inclusivity Of Christ EP104

From the transcript...

You were asking about John 3:34—the one whom God has sent to represent Him will speak the words of God, because God has poured out upon Him the fullness of the Holy Spirit without limitation. The Father loves His Son so much that He has given all things into His hands. Those who trust in the Son possess eternal life; those who don’t obey the Son will not see life—God’s anger will rise up against them. That’s John 3:36. He gives all things—is that what He’s doing? Yeah. Now O’Brien says that “all things” can be translated as all things, or all authority, or all people—all means all. I wonder if it’s the same phraseology used in John 12 or John 17. I’m thinking about John 12 where He says, “If I be lifted up, I will draw all to Me,” and in John 17 at the very beginning He says the Father has given Him authority over all flesh. So Jesus comes from the Father and He has all power—He is Lord, He has all authority. John 1 talks about Him becoming flesh, and we were talking earlier about everyone being included. What I’m saying is that when Jesus became a man, He inhabited humanity—He gathered up humanity—because Scripture says more than once that He tasted death for every person. This is the purpose of His coming: to save the world. So when I say Jesus became flesh, I’m saying He affected all flesh—every person, humanity as a whole. That’s the incarnation. I’m learning to think about the incarnation not as a single man who came and died to satisfy the wrath of an angry God for me, and if I do something right I can get in on it, but as God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—invading our sinful darkness and lostness and saving us as a man. Because sin entered by a man, life had to come through a man; resurrection had to come through a man. That’s how I’m beginning to understand it better. The significance of the incarnation is that in becoming a man, He related to every person—connected to every person, representative of every person—and every person is included in Him. By “man” I mean mankind, humanity, all of humanity.