This very God became incarnated in the flesh (John 1:1, 14). One day He entered into the womb of a virgin named Mary, and He accomplished a wonderful conception in that human womb. This happened nearly two thousand years ago. According to the record of the Bible, God created Adam approximately six thousand years ago. Then, after two thousand years God came in to call Abraham. God then waited for another two thousand years, and He came to visit a young virgin by the name of Mary. The very God as the Holy Spirit came upon Mary and entered into her womb to conceive the child Jesus. In Luke 1:35 and Matthew 1:18 and 20 we are told that a child was conceived in the virgin Mary, not of any man, but of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, who is the very God reaching man, entered into Mary’s womb and accomplished a marvelous conception. He remained in that womb for nine months and was finally born out of that womb as a little child. After His birth, that little child was put into a manger.
According to Isaiah 9:6, that little child born to us is called the Mighty God. Do you believe that a child born out of a virgin and put into a manger two thousand years ago was the Mighty God? Most of the Jews do not believe this. They say that their God, who is the very Creator of heaven and earth, could never become a little child who was born out of a human virgin and put into a manger. Therefore, the Jews deny that Jesus is their God. Even today, after twenty centuries, the Jewish people still reject Christ as God. Nevertheless, a small number of Jews were called by this Jesus. When Jesus came out to minister at the age of thirty, He called four disciples, Andrew, Peter, James, and John (Matt. 4:18-22). These four disciples were all Jews. Eventually, they believed that Jesus is God. Later, a strong one among the Jews by the name of Saul was opposing and persecuting the people who declared that Jesus was God. But one day, while Saul was on the way to Damascus to arrest all the people who believed that Jesus was God, all of a sudden a great light shone around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice from heaven say, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” (Acts 9:1-4). That was a great surprise to Saul. After hearing the voice from the heavens, he may have thought, “I never persecuted anyone in the heavens. I persecuted Stephen and other followers of Jesus, and I am going to Damascus to arrest all those who believe in Jesus. All of these people are on the earth, not in the heavens. Why does someone in the heavens come to me and tell me that I am persecuting him?” In his bewilderment, Saul said, “Who are You, Lord?” The answer was, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:5). In Saul’s concept, Jesus was crucified and buried. How could this Jesus now be in the heavens? The answer is that Jesus is actually the very God of Saul’s forefathers (Acts 22:14), the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Through this encounter, Saul was converted; Saul believed. He had no choice but to confess that Jesus is God. If Jesus were not God, how could it be that after He was crucified and buried, He spoke to Saul from the heavens? Saul, who was also Paul (Acts 13:9), became the strongest among the Jews not only to believe that Jesus is God, but also to preach this fact. Wherever he went, he told the Jews that the very Jesus whom they rejected is the very Christ, the Son of God (Acts 9:20-22).
In Genesis 18, one day Jehovah came to visit Abraham with two angels. While Abraham sat in the door of his tent on a hot summer day, all of a sudden three men came to him, and he welcomed them (vv. 1-5). One of these three was Jehovah in the form of a man. We know that Jehovah had a human body because Abraham prepared water that He might wash His physical feet (v. 4). Furthermore, Abraham asked his wife Sarah to prepare a big meal for them, and Jehovah ate that meal (vv. 6-8). Eventually, Jehovah talked with Abraham as a man would talk with a friend (vv. 17-33). Who was that man who visited Abraham? Yes, He was Jehovah, but He appeared to Abraham in a human body. Was He merely God, or was He a man? Whether you dare to say that He was a man or not, still He was in a man’s body. In John 13 Jesus washed the feet of the disciples. I do believe that while He was washing the feet of Peter and John, He still remembered how Abraham prepared the water for Him to wash His feet. You may say that this could not be true, because at the time of Genesis 18 Jesus was not yet born. The fact that God appeared to Abraham as a man before the birth of Jesus is indeed a mystery. This mystery points us to the fact that Jesus is Jehovah, the very eternal God.