The Word Became Flesh
The Preexistence, Incarnation, and Hidden Years of the Lord Jesus Christ
1. The Word Who Already Was
We are tempted to begin the life of Christ at the manger. But the manger is not the beginning. Before Bethlehem, before Mary, before there was a single night for a star to shine over — He already was. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). John does not say the Word began in the beginning; he says that when the beginning began, the Word already was. Genesis opens, “In the beginning God created” (Genesis 1:1); John reaches back behind that opening and tells us Who was already there.
Mark how carefully John guards the mystery. The Word was with God — distinct, face to face, in fellowship. And the Word was God — not a lesser god, not a made thing, but God of very God. By Him “all things were made, and without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:3). Paul says the same: “by Him all things were created,” and “He is before all things, and in Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:16–17). The hands that would one day be pierced are the hands that flung the stars into space.
And He knew His own eternity. “Before Abraham was, I AM,” He said (John 8:58) — and they took up stones, because every man in that courtyard understood He had just spoken the name of God (Exodus 3:14). In His last prayer He asked the Father to restore “the glory which I had with You before the world was” (John 17:5). He had a glory before the world. Hold that, and the manger will never again look small.
2. And the Word Became Flesh
Now comes the sentence that ought to stop our breath: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The eternal One entered time. The Maker of the body took a body. The One who “upholds all things by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3) became a nursing infant who had to be upheld in His mother’s arms.
This is the heart of the whole course, so let us say it in the form that preaches. As God He was from everlasting, but as man He was “born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4). As God the heavens cannot contain Him, but as man He was “wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12). As God He is the great I AM, but as man He “increased in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52). As God He gives life to all things, but as man He would one day lay His own life down (John 10:18). He did not stop being God to become man; He “made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). He added our nature; He did not subtract His own. And so Matthew gives Him the name Emmanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23, citing Isaiah 7:14) — not God near us, not God over us, but God with us, in our skin, in our weakness, in our world.
Let me give you a picture — only a picture, for nothing on earth is large enough to hold this. Imagine the author of a great story, a man who has filled a thousand pages with kingdoms and people he has come to love. He knows every character better than they know themselves; he holds their whole world in his mind. Suppose he longed so to be among them that he did the one impossible thing — he wrote himself onto the page, not as the towering author, but as a child born in the poorest corner of his own story, subject to its dangers, able to bleed in its wars. He would not stop being the author; the whole tale would still rest in his hand. But now he would be in it, where his characters could touch him — and where, if the story turned cruel, it could kill him. That is only a shadow, and a small one: the Word is no fiction, and we are not ink. But it lets us feel the wonder — the One who wrote the world wrote Himself into it, “made Himself of no reputation” (Philippians 2:7), so that He could be touched, and so that He could die. That is condescension. That is love.
3. Two Genealogies, One Savior
Two of the Gospels open His life with a list of names, and the two lists are not the same. Honest study faces that plainly. Matthew begins, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1), and traces the royal line down through Solomon and the kings of Judah (Matthew 1:6–7) to Joseph. Luke runs the other direction — up from Jesus through a different branch, by way of Nathan rather than Solomon (Luke 3:31), past Abraham, all the way to “Adam, the son of God” (Luke 3:38).
The names between David and Joseph differ. The most widely held evangelical harmonization is that Matthew gives Joseph’s legal, royal line — Jesus’ lawful claim to David’s throne (fulfilling 2 Samuel 7:12–13) — while Luke gives the natural line, most likely through Mary.
But do not lose the doctrine in the puzzle. The two lists are saying two true things at once. Matthew makes Him Israel’s King — Son of David, Son of Abraham (Matthew 1:1) — the One in whom every promise to the fathers comes due. Luke makes Him humanity’s Kinsman — Son of Adam, Son of God (Luke 3:38) — bone of our bone, joined to the whole race He came to save. He is the King of the Jews and the Brother of every sinner who will have Him.
4. King and Savior: The Nativity in Two Portraits
The Gospels do not flatten His birth into one account; they give it to us in complementary portraits, and we should let each speak. Gabriel told Mary, “He will be great… and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David” (Luke 1:32–33). He was born in Bethlehem, exactly where Micah had said the Ruler would come from (Micah 5:2; Luke 2:4–7).
Then watch who is told. Luke’s angel goes first to shepherds keeping watch by night: “There is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). The gospel’s first hearers are the poor and the watching. Matthew’s portrait turns outward: wise men from the East arrive asking, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews?” (Matthew 2:2) — Gentiles drawn to the King, a first taste of the day all nations will come (Matthew 28:19). Luke shows the Savior welcomed by the lowly of Israel; Matthew shows the King sought by the Gentile world. Put the two portraits side by side and you have the whole gospel in miniature: a Savior for all.
And already the shadow of the cross falls across the cradle. Herod “was exceedingly angry” and slaughtered the children of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16), and the family fled into Egypt, “that it might be fulfilled… ‘Out of Egypt I called My Son’” (Matthew 2:15; Hosea 11:1). The world was hostile to Him from His first breath.
5. The Hidden Years and the Boy in the Temple
Then the curtain nearly closes. Of some thirty years, the Gospels give us one scene. At twelve, Jesus stayed behind in the temple, and when His mother found Him He answered, “Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?” (Luke 2:49). At twelve He already knew Whose Son He was. Yet in the very next verse He “was subject to” Joseph and Mary (Luke 2:51) — real obedience, real boyhood. And Luke seals the hidden years with a sentence we must not rush past: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men” (Luke 2:52).
Sit with the wonder of that before you tidy it. How does the One who knows all things increase in wisdom? Scripture does not explain it away; it lets both stand — fully God, and a truly growing boy who learned to walk, to read the Scriptures, to work the wood under Joseph’s hand. The silence over those years is itself a lesson: where curiosity shouts, Scripture is sparing. The later apocryphal “infancy gospels” rushed in to fill the quiet with sensational miracles; the Holy Spirit gave us instead only what we need “that you may believe” (John 20:31), not all we crave to know.
6. Why It Had to Be So
The Incarnation is not a curiosity at the front of the story; it is the foundation of the gospel. “Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14), becoming “a merciful and faithful High Priest” (Hebrews 2:17). Only One who is truly God could save; only One who is truly man could stand in our place. “For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5).
So we begin where the whole course will walk: with both hands on Him. Everything ahead — His words, His works, His cross, His rising — is the life of the God-Man. Never make Him so divine that He cannot weep at a grave (John 11:35); never make Him so human that He cannot still a sea (Mark 4:39). The Word became flesh — and dwelt among us.