JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

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Notice how Paul uses the very same Greek word for man (anthropos) in reference to men
in general and to Jesus specifically. The early followers had no hesitation in using the word
"man" of Jesus. After all, they found Him to be fully and naturally a man.
Jesus did not seem to be some kind of intermediate person in which both the human and
the divine was intermingled. Jesus did not impress these early disciples as a kind of demigod—
neither fully human nor fully divine—proposed by many Greeks. He did not strike them as
someone so divine as to be inhuman. There simply was nothing unnatural or abnormal about
Him. It simply cannot be denied that those who lived with Jesus, those who traveled with Him,
talked to Him, and ate with Him found Him to be genuinely human. He was one of them. Any
Christology that denies such an historical fact is heretical.
EARLY CHRISTIAN HYMN
The humanity of Jesus lies at the very core, the very foundation, of the Christian religion.
One of the early Christian hymns states:
"Beyond all question,
the mystery of godliness is great:
He appeared in a body,
was vindicated by the Spirit,
was seen by angels,
was preached among the nations,
was believed on in the world,
was taken up in glory" (1 Ti 3:16).
Jesus Christ is here called "the mystery" of our active piety or godly living. Christ is the
mystery not only because had He not been revealed to us, we would not have known Him
("mystery" being a "revealed secret"), but also because He transcends our comprehension (Eph
3:18-19). The more we know Him, the better will we be able to discern the mysterious,
unfathomable character of His love and of all His attributes, yet never fully in this life.
It is this immeasurable greatness of Christ which forms the subject of the hymn from
which Paul quotes.
The hymn begins with the humanity of Christ:
"He appeared in a body" or as the King James Version has it:
"He was manifested in the flesh."
We will focus on this declaration later and develop it more fully.