The Man-Savior’s incarnation was mainly to bring God into man. His incarnation was also to restore, to recover, damaged humanity. God made Adam in His own image and after His own likeness, but Adam became fallen. Now within the fallen humanity there is sin—the evil nature of the Devil (Rom. 7:17; 1 John 3:8). Nevertheless, the humanity created by God still remains. When Christ, who is the very God, was incarnated, He restored the lost and damaged humanity. God sent His own Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin (Rom. 8:3), that is, in the likeness of fallen humanity.
Christ became flesh not only to save man but also to restore the fallen humanity. Yes, He came to save man. But He will not save man and then leave him unrestored. The Lord will not save a fallen person without restoring him.
Christians look forward to going to heaven. But anyone who goes to heaven will be a restored person, a transformed person. To be transformed is to be restored, recovered.
When the Lord Jesus was on earth, He had a humanity that had been rescued from the state of the fall. Through incarnation, He put on a recovered, restored, humanity. As the God-man was living in such an uplifted humanity, all those around Him, including His disciples, were living in a fallen, damaged, humanity. Their humanity was not the humanity originally created by God. On the contrary, it was a damaged and deformed humanity. For example, after the Lord Jesus told the disciples that He was going up to Jerusalem and would be put to death and raised up on the third day, they were debating among themselves concerning who was greater. Here we see two kinds of humanity—the uplifted, restored, and recovered humanity of the Lord Jesus and the deformed, damaged, and lost humanity of the disciples.
Through the Man-Savior’s death and resurrection, the fallen humanity of His disciples was recovered. In chapters one and two of Acts we see that the disciples had another kind of humanity, an uplifted and restored humanity. In the Gospels they were arguing about who was greater. But in Acts 1 they could pray persistently and perseveringly in one accord for ten days. They could do this because they had another humanity. Their humanity had been uplifted, restored, and recovered. Not only had they been saved, but their humanity had been restored, recovered, through the Spirit’s regeneration and transformation.
Adam should have lived in the garden of Eden the kind of life Peter and John lived in the first chapters of Acts. But because Adam failed in God’s purpose, God came through incarnation to be the second Man. This second Man uplifted, restored, and recovered the deformed, damaged, and lost humanity. Through the Man-Savior’s restoring, Peter, John, James and the other disciples participated in His humanity. How marvelous!
We should not think that the Lord Jesus came down from His glory merely to save us and bring us to heaven. If this is His intention, then heaven will eventually be filled with people with a deformed humanity. This, however, is not the Lord’s intention. Do you think that the one thief who asked the Lord to remember him in His kingdom will be brought to heaven still with a thief’s fallen nature? To be sure, no one in heaven will have the nature of the thief. Every person brought to heaven will be a restored human being. The restoration of our humanity was made possible by God’s incarnation to be our Man-Savior. The Man-Savior’s incarnation was for the fulfillment of God’s purpose in the creation of man.