Some people really hate the truth that the man Jesus Christ was also God. In Matthew 8:24 we discover Christ sleeping. “Wait a minute,” say His enemies, “this really proves that He was not God for,” they say, “the God of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.” But, these would be troublers of the faith, fail to grasp that this scripture, and others like it, are there to establish His true humanity, not His Deity. The same man who was hungry was the God who fed the five thousand. The same one who on the cross was parched with thirst, as God stands up and cries, “If any one thirst let him come unto Me and drink.” The same man who was tired and slept, as God issues the invitation to the weary and heavy laden to come unto Him and rest! So if He is not God we are left with a man who gets hungry yet claims to be the bread of life: a man who gets thirsty yet tells us to come to him and drink and a man who gets weary yet tells us to come to him and rest. If these are not the words of God, this man Jesus is nuts! The only way to make sense of Jesus is to receive that He is both God and man!
It was necessary that Christ should be a man for we needed someone to represent us. We needed a human being to live in our place. Why? Because all of us have sinned and have fallen short of God’s holy standard—-- that’s why! When God came to earth, He came as one of us. He divested Himself of His glory, veiled his Deity and became our substitute in His birth, life, death and resurrection. It was a real man who lived for us; it was a real man who died in our place, and it is one of us, a real man, who now intercedes for us in Heaven.
We needed a life of perfect righteousness to present to God, and our flawed efforts did not make the grade. That’s one of the principal reasons why Christ came. He came as our substitute, the substitute man. If He were not a man, truly a man, then there is no gospel, no redemption and no salvation. It was man who had sinned and man who was guilty; therefore, it had to be one of us, a human representative who would take the punishment on our behalf. But more than that, we needed a representative, a human being to stand in our place and produce a perfect, flawless righteousness that could be reckoned as ours. An angel could not represent us or become our substitute in life and death. The representative had to be one of us, otherwise there is no good news. For there to be any gospel at all, Christ Jesus had to be one of our race, a human, descended from Adam.
Adam, the first human being, as the head and representative of humanity, brought condemnation upon us all. Christ Jesus, in order to become the Last Adam, had to be totally human; He had to be one of us. We had to be rescued by one of our own! But where would God find such a human? Where would He find someone untainted with Adam’s sin? His eyes ran throughout the whole world, and his verdict was, “There is none righteous no not one, there’s none that doeth good, there’s none that understand, there’s none that seeks God” (Romans 3:10-11), “their whole head is sick” (Isaiah 1:5) and “their heart is divided” (Hosea 10:2). Man had been so totally ruined by sin and had fallen so far short of God’s glory that no qualified redeemer could be found. A qualified redeemer, by law, had to be a near kinsman therefore, since no perfect, sinless man could be found, God came here Himself, assumed a true and genuine human nature, became one of the human family, and yet remained God.
And that’s the Gospel Truth!