God doesn’t hand us data about Himself; He gives Himself. He gives Himself in Jesus Christ. And in Christ, God is revealed. God’s self-revelation brings about reconciliation. How can it not? His self-revelation and His presence are one in the same. It is not abstraction; it’s the real deal. That was Part I. Then Part II pressed the next question: if God isn’t just one more thing in the universe, the usual tools for understanding things in the universe won’t work. So, only His own move toward us—mediated in Jesus Christ, who even heals our ability to know Him—opens the way. Then Part III carried us into history. God didn’t drop Christ in from nowhere at some random time. He formed a group of people, Israel, across centuries. All the sacrifices, the prophets, the kingship, the Law, even exile—none of it is wasted; all of it is preparation. Then at the fullness of time, at just the right time, Jesus comes, not as a stranger but as the One these long patterns were shaping us to recognize.
Now, Part IV asks: if the problem isn’t only that we are finite but that we are fallen—distorted in thought, desire, body, and soul—how deep must God’s reconciling work go for us to be healed? We’ll now explore how Christ assumes the whole of our broken humanity, healing it from the inside out.
Jesus wasn’t the messenger. He was the Message.
For centuries, God had been forming a people—through covenants, the Law, prophets, kings, exile, and return—all to create the conditions in which His final self-revelation could be recognized. That long history was about preparing us to recognize a person. That person was Jesus Christ. We were prepared not to confuse Him as merely a prophet, a moral teacher, or a messenger. We were prepared to see God in Him.
He became the Incarnate Son. He didn’t bring us a message from God; He is the Message,1 the Mediator, the Revelation embodied in person. He is God.
God the Son becomes human—fully, truly, completely human.
From all eternity past, the Son was of the same being with the Father. He was not a lesser being. He was not a created being. He fully shares the same being. There is no space or gap of any kind in the Godhead. One wasn’t first, and then the other. The Son is co-eternal of one being with the Father. This is sometimes expressed like this: He is true God from true God.2
And then God did something new. Something new even for Him. Something unimaginable. God the Son became God Incarnate. He literally stepped into human history and, at that moment, began to share our human nature fully and truly. He did not merely appear human. He did not possess a human for a time, or inhabit a human body, or simply assume a human shell. He did not use a human as a tool. He did not fuse with a human mind. He did not descend into a body as a spirit. He did not temporarily act as if He were human. He was not God in disguise. He was not pretending to be one of us. He was not a hybrid, a mixture, a blend of half-human and half-God. He was not a spirit who animated human flesh. He truly became one of us.3
In the Incarnation, God the Son, who was eternally of the same being as God the Father, became of the same being as we humans without ever un-becoming one in being with the Father. He was made like us in every respect. Every respect. This is the Incarnation. Jesus Christ—the Incarnate Son, of the same being with the Father in His divinity, and now of the same being with us in His humanity.
This is why the Incarnation is not the delivery of information but the event of Revelation itself.4 God did not reveal further content about Himself; He revealed Himself. Many believe God’s revelation means God reveals knowledge about Himself. But the Incarnation is not a delivery system for truth—it is truth in person. Jesus Christ is God’s self-revelation. Jesus said, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
The Incarnation is not a carrier of revelation; it is not God sending a message; it is not symbolic; it is not pointing to truth. It is God entering fully into our creaturely existence. It is the living presence of God Himself in our human reality. It is the actual coming of God into human life and being. It is the astonishing act by which God joined Himself to our humanity. And did so forever.
However deep our ruin goes… that’s what God stepped into. And healed it.
In Jesus, the Son assumed fallen human nature.5 God the Son took upon Himself our broken, mortal, suffering condition. He did not remain distant from our corruption; He entered it (without Himself being corrupted or sinning, as only He could do). He shares our frailty, our temptation, our weakness, our vulnerability, our sorrow, and our mortality—even unto death (this is how we know he assumes fallen human nature: He dies6). He assumed all of who we are so that he could heal all of who we are from the inside out—from within our own broken, ruined human nature.
Our problem isn’t that we are finite—it is that we are fallen. We are not merely weak; we are distorted in our very being—in the deepest parts of who we are. Sin broke us all the way down—our thinking, our feeling, our willing, even our bodies.7
And so, in His assumed human nature, God addresses every fallen and broken part of our human condition—neurons, axons, chromosomes, hormones, bones and marrow, joints and sinews, heart and vessels, lungs, stomach, skin and scars, eyes and ears and tongue and hands; our minds, our memories, our imaginations and our judgments, desires and fears, shame and pride, habits and addictions, wills and affections; our speech, tears and laughter, sexuality and fertility, loneliness and belonging; our histories and hopes, wounds and betrayals, friendships and enmities, guilt and grief, weakness and pain, sickness and dying. All that he became, he healed. So that all of who we are, can be reconciled to Himself.
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. A small girl lies in a big bed. Emily Whitehead8is eight. Leukemia has taken her marrow; chemo has failed.
Her parents sign the paperwork. It feels to them like they’ve jumped off a cliff. The team draws her blood, separates out her T-cells, genetically reprograms them to recognize what she cannot fight, and sends them back into her body to do the work from within. A “living drug,” the papers call it—her own cells, now remade, returned to her failing system, and remaking it.9
The fix goes as deep as the problem.
Then the storm. Fever like fire. Blood pressure dives. All the machines speak in beeps, tones, alarms. Doctors name it cytokine release syndrome; everything in her seems to turn on at once. “She might not make it through the night,” her dad remembers. They race a diagnosis inside the diagnosis; they see IL-6 spiking. A nurse hangs tocilizumab. Hours pass like days.
The turn arrives quietly. The numbers lift. The fever breaks. The room exhales. Days later, they scan and cannot find what owned her body. Not a hint.
The cure for Emily wasn’t more data about cancer. It wasn’t more advice. It wasn’t a bandage on the surface. It wasn’t another drug. It was an embodied intervention that joined her biology and fought as her—cells that went all the way down to where the disease lived and met it there. Her own biology, taken up, remade, and returned to do what she could not do for herself.
Later, she walks the halls with a stuffed animal and a grin too big for the moment. Reporters ask what it means. The doctors answer: remission.
The remedy entered, met the disease at its depth, and healed Emily from the inside—the same life, remade, fighting for her from within. Not cosmetic.
The Incarnation is not cosmetic; it is redemptive. Jesus didn’t put a divine bandage on a surface problem. He entered all the way in—as deep as we go, to the bottom of our being. He goes to all the places where we are estranged from God. And there, He reconciles us—unites us to God—from within our shattered condition.10
And what is united to God is what is reconciled to Him. What is united to God is what is healed.11 It is what is saved. How could it otherwise be?
Assume, for a moment, that in Christ, God had taken on only unfallen humanity. What, then, would reconciliation be? What would there have been to heal? Instead, He reached the deepest and darkest places of our alienation and reconciled us there. Nothing left untouched. Nothing left unhealed. If healing us in these places could happen without entering these places, then why the Incarnation at all? It could have all happened from a distance. Any coming, then, would have only been for us an example of unfallen life—something we could maybe admire—and His death merely a transaction.
Instead, He took fallen human nature and united it to Himself, so that in the deepest place of our estrangement, His healing life can flow, and there we can be reconciled to Him. That is worth stating again! In the deepest and darkest places of our being, in the places we are most broken, most ashamed, most fearful to ever be known, he went, and there we were healed, there we were reconciled, there He forged a bond between Him and you.
He became the human we couldn’t be.
And in all of this—in the fullness of our fallen flesh—Jesus remained sinless.12 He became subject to weakness, temptation, suffering, and even death—all fallenness. He became Sin. But He remained perfectly faithful, obedient, and loving. And in so doing, He offered the perfect human response to the Father from within our own same condition!13
So, not only does He heal us, reconcile us, and redeem us, He also lives for us, from within our own broken humanity, the way we have not and could not. And He gives that lived life to God on our behalf as a perfect lived life that God receives as if it were from us. So, then, he now also justifies us (not merely by declaring us righteous, but by being our righteousness), sanctifies us (not merely by declaring us holy, but by offering His perfect humanity as the true shape of ours), and represents us forever, before the Father, as our true humanity.14
This is why our redemption in Jesus Christ is far more than a transaction—it is a living, healing union. Salvation is not an external legal transaction15 happening apart from us, somewhere out there between the Father and the Son in a divine conference room.
Salvation is a profound reconciliation of our human nature with God. Christ doesn’t redeem us by standing apart; He redeems us by entering our actual existence, uniting it to Himself, recreating it, and reordering it in communion with the Father.
Imagine again if the Son only took on Adam’s pre-fall state. He would then be untouched by our pain, untouched by our temptation, untouched by our shame, and even our death. He could, perhaps, offer a perfect life for us (which might satisfy something transactionally), but not a healed life in us which is what enables communion with the Father through the Spirit of Christ, who can now take up residence in us.
By assuming it all—our pain, our fear, our failure, our mortality—He sanctifies it all. Christ takes what is ours—our broken humanity—into Himself, so that we may receive what is His: communion with the Father, holiness, life, and sonship. So not only does He heal us, reconcile us, redeem us, and justify, sanctify, and represent us, but He recreates us (thus restoring the true image of God in us—restoring the capacity for us to be in communion with the Father—and doing so through His union with our humanity), and He intercedes for us (because of His unbroken communion with the Father, while at the same time bearing our true humanity in Himself), and He unites us to Himself (by the Holy Spirit—His Spirit, the Spirit of Christ—who now indwells healed, recreated us, thus bringing us into a participation in Christ’s own life16), and He brings us into communion with the Father (because the Spirit of Christ is in us—who has communion with the Father—and so there is communion from within the very depths of our human condition).
By sharing our condition, all the while remaining sinless, he becomes for us the perfect High Priest and our perfect Substitute.17 Jesus took our place not only on the cross, but He took our place throughout His entire life. He lived a life of perfect obedience that we are unable to live. He becomes the human being we cannot be. And in His humanity, He offers back to God the faithful response that we fail to render. Jesus is not only God’s Word to us, but our obedient response to the Word, actualized in Himself on our behalf back to God.
Boston, pre-dawn. You can feel the April cold on your skin. Dick Hoyt tapes a note to the pushchair—emergency contacts, Rick’s meds—then checks the tires with his thumb. Rick—his son, born as a spastic quadriplegic with cerebral palsy—sits in the pushchair, zipped into a red windbreaker, eyes forward. The corral hums. The horn goes.
It isn’t a coach shouting splits from the curb. It isn’t advice. It’s breath and muscle and pace. Mile after mile, he leans into the New England hills with a chair in front of him. Crowds see one bib number and two lives moving as one. (On triathlon days, it’s a rope through dark water and a bike tandem on the flats, the same vow in three acts—he runs, swims, cycles for and with his son. Dick does the work from within a real union—chair, boat, bike—so Rick’s race is genuinely his.)
They learned this years back, after their first 5-mile charity run. Rick went home and typed to his dad: “Dad, when I’m running, it feels like I’m not handicapped.” That sentence never left Dick. It became a way of being.
“Team Hoyt” completed over 1,000 endurance events—including 72 marathons (32 Bostons) and 6 Ironman triathlons—with Dick supplying the strength (pushing the chair, towing the boat, pedaling the tandem) and Rick truly participating and being counted as the finisher.
Dick supplies what Rick cannot, and somehow, Rick truly runs. The medal says “Team Hoyt.” The newspapers tally the marathons and Ironmans, but the math is simpler: Dick’s strength, counted as Rick’s.
At Heartbreak Hill, the chair does not lighten. Dick does not lecture the grade; he shoulders it. He keeps form when Rick cannot. He holds the line when Rick wearies. He answers the course for both of them. At the finish, the clock stops on one time. Father and son cross under it together.
No amount of tips about marathoning could give Rick what his father’s embodied participation gives. This is not an inspirational Post-it pinned to a corkboard. It is substitution you can hear in footfalls. Dick’s love is not an abstract sentiment; it arrives as muscle, breath, and pace—love taking up Rick’s effort and offering it, whole.
He doesn’t just point the way; he carries you through it—faithfulness for you, counted as yours. Inside another’s faithfulness, our incapacity is borne, and our true participation becomes possible.
Not some distant legal deal. A union—union with Christ Himself.
Salvation becomes a personal substitutionary participation (not a simple transaction). He lives our life for us. He offers our worship for us. He suffers our death for us. He rises in resurrected new life for us. He ascends into Heaven for us. And now we sit in the heavenly places with Him.19
God did far more than come toward us; He acts for us from within our own humanity.20 Jesus didn’t merely show us what perfect human obedience looks like, as an example to follow; He accomplished our perfect obedience for us.21 He doesn’t show us the way; He is The Way. He doesn’t point us toward truth; He is The Truth. He doesn’t set our life straight; He is The Life.22 He offers up perfect faith, perfect trust, perfect prayer, perfect worship, perfect obedience—not as an example we must now attain, but as a real substitution on our behalf.23
He mediates both sides of the relationship. He is God to us; this is revelation. He is us back to God.24 He is our response; this is reconciliation.
God’s “Yes!” to us in Christ becomes our “Yes!” in Christ to God.
Our problem was deeper than guilt that needed to be covered and debt that needed to be paid; it included incapacity. We are incapable of offering the obedience God requires.25 Even our repentance is insufficient; even our faith is weak. So, Christ provides the perfect vicarious response on our behalf.26 His faithfulness substitutes for our unfaithfulness.27 His trust substitutes for our doubt. His love substitutes for our selfishness. His prayer substitutes for our prayerlessness. Jesus takes up our cause from within our humanity and carries it through to fulfillment in His obedient life.
In Jesus Christ, God Himself assumes fallen human nature (without sinning, as only He can) so that He may stand in our place (as only He can) from within our existence (as only He can)—this is vicarious humanity. In Jesus, God not only reveals Himself to us but also provides, in His own humanity, the perfect response to God on our behalf. He lives out the obedience, trust, and worship that we fail to render.
Salvation is a person! It is Jesus Christ who both reveals God to us and brings us into communion with God by acting vicariously on our behalf from within our humanity.28
You’re reading Part 4 in a series on how God makes Himself knowable. We watched the beautiful descent: the Son does not send a memo; He comes Himself. He takes our ruined humanity—all the way down—lives our life for us, answers for us, heals us from within, and carries us into the Father. Not a distant deal, but a vicarious, living union: His faithfulness counted as ours, His holiness shared with us, His communion opened to us.
Next up, Part 5: the ascent of knowing—how the healing becomes ours. We’ll see why all knowledge of God is mediated through Jesus Christ and made real in us by the Spirit, so that we don’t just hear about God’s love but share in His own knowing and communion. Revelation fulfilled. Participation begun. Walk with me.
Revelation is personal and personal communion; God gives Himself in the Son. John 1:14, 18 — The Word became flesh … the Son has made the Father known. John 14:9 — “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Hebrews 1:1–3 — God has spoken by the Son; the Son is the exact imprint.
The Son is of one being with the Father. John 1:1–2 — The Word was with God, and was God. John 10:30 — “I and the Father are one.” Colossians 1:15–19 — In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. Philippians 2:6 — Being in the form of God.
True God becomes truly human—without mixture, confusion, or disguise. Philippians 2:7–8 — He took the form of a servant, being born in human likeness. Luke 1:35 — “The holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.” Hebrews 2:14 — Since the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things. 1 John 4:2 — Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.
Revelation is not data; it is the presence of God in person. John 1:14 — The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. John 14:9–10 — Seeing Jesus is seeing the Father. 2 Corinthians 4:6 — The light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ.
He took on our whole humanity to heal the whole of it. Hebrews 2:17–18 — He had to be made like his brothers in every respect … to help the tempted. Romans 8:3 — God sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin. Isaiah 53:4 — He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Matthew 8:17 — He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.
He entered our death to heal our mortality. Hebrews 2:14 — Through death he destroyed the one who has the power of death. 1 Corinthians 15:3–4 — Christ died for our sins … he was raised. John 11:25 — “I am the resurrection and the life.”
Our crisis isn’t creatureliness but corruption: sin has warped us at the core and all the way down. Jeremiah 17:9 — “The heart is deceitful above all things… desperately sick.” Ephesians 4:17–19 — Darkened in understanding, alienated from the life of God. Romans 8:10–13 — The body is dead because of sin.
Not a distant transaction but reconciling union. Colossians 1:19–22 — Reconciled in his body of flesh by his death. Ephesians 2:13–18 — Brought near by the blood of Christ; access to the Father in one Spirit. John 17:21–23 — That they may be one … I in them and you in me.
Union with Christ is reconciliation, healing, salvation. 1 John 5:11–12 — He who has the Son has life. 2 Corinthians 5:17–19 — In Christ, new creation. Hebrews 2:11 — “He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one origin” (oneness that sanctifies).
Sinless in our fallenness; tempted yet without sin. Hebrews 4:15 — Tempted in every respect as we are, yet without sin. 1 Peter 2:22 — He committed no sin. 2 Corinthians 5:21 — He who knew no sin was made sin for us.
Vicarious humanity: He lives our response to the Father for us. Romans 5:19 — By the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Hebrews 5:7–9 — He learned obedience and became the source of eternal salvation. Galatians 2:20 — I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.
Christ our righteousness, sanctification, and representation. 1 Corinthians 1:30 — Christ Jesus … became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption. 2 Corinthians 5:21 — That we might become the righteousness of God in him. Hebrews 7:24–25 — He always lives to make intercession for them.
Salvation is participation in Christ, not merely legal fiction. Romans 6:3–5 — Baptized into Christ … united with him in a death like his. John 15:1–5 — Abide in me and I in you. 2 Peter 1:4 — Partakers of the divine nature. John 17:3 — This is eternal life: to know you … and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
The Spirit indwells to unite us to the Son’s life and communion. Romans 8:9–11 — The Spirit of God dwells in you … life because of righteousness. Galatians 4:4–6 — God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 1 Corinthians 12:13 — In one Spirit we were all baptized into one body.
High Priest and Substitute in life and death. Hebrews 4:14–15 — We have a great high priest … tempted yet without sin. Hebrews 7:26–27 — Holy, innocent, unstained … offered up himself. 1 Peter 3:18 — Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous.
Seated with Christ: substitutionary participation extends through resurrection and ascension. Ephesians 2:4–6 — Made us alive with Christ … and seated us with him in the heavenly places. Colossians 3:1–4 — Raised with Christ; your life is hidden with Christ in God. Hebrews 10:12–14 — By a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.
God didn’t just draw near—He stepped inside our plight: the Son took our flesh, stood in our place, and from within our very condition condemned sin and redeemed us. Hebrews 2:14–17 — He “partook” of flesh and blood; made like us “in every respect” to act as our merciful High Priest. Romans 8:3–4 — God sent His Son “in the likeness of sinful flesh” to condemn sin in the flesh. John 1:14 — The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Galatians 4:4–5 — God sent forth His Son, born of woman… to redeem.
Not a mere example of obedience—He accomplished our obedience for us. Romans 5:19 — By the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Philippians 2:8 — He became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Hebrews 5:8–9 — He learned obedience and became the source of eternal salvation.
Real substitution on our behalf. 2 Corinthians 5:21 — He who knew no sin was made sin for us. 1 Peter 3:18 — The righteous for the unrighteous, to bring us to God. Isaiah 53:4–6 — He bore our griefs; the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all. Mark 10:45 — The Son of Man gives His life as a ransom for many.
The one Mediator who mediates both sides. 1 Timothy 2:5 — There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. John 1:18 — The only-begotten Son … has made him known. Hebrews 2:11–13 — He is not ashamed to call them brothers (our human side gathered up in him). Ephesians 2:18 — Through Him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.
Not just guilt; we’re incapacitated. Romans 3:10–12, 23 — “None is righteous… no one seeks for God… all have sinned.” Romans 8:7–8 — The mind of the flesh “does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” Ephesians 2:1–5 — “Dead in trespasses and sins… by nature children of wrath.” John 15:5 — “Apart from me you can do nothing.”
Christ gives the Father the perfect human “Yes” in our name—his obedient life counts as ours, so that in him we are made righteous, sanctified, and redeemed. Romans 5:19 — “By the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” Hebrews 10:5–10 — “Behold, I have come to do your will”… by that will we are sanctified. 1 Corinthians 1:30 — Christ “became to us” righteousness, sanctification, redemption.
Where we were unfaithful, Christ was faithful unto death—his steadfast obedience becomes our righteousness. Romans 3:22 — “The righteousness of God through the faith(fulness) of Jesus Christ.” Galatians 2:16, 20 — Justified through (the faith/faithfulness of) Christ… “who loved me and gave himself for me.” Philippians 2:8 — “Obedient to the point of death.” Revelation 1:5 — “Jesus Christ the faithful witness.”
Salvation is a Person—Jesus Christ Himself. John 14:6 — “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Acts 4:12 — Salvation is in no one else. 1 John 5:11–12 — He who has the Son has life.
