When Christians talk about the Incarnation, they rightly focus on God’s love for us which is so great that He was willing become human Himself, being born into a poor family in an obscure and troublesome province in the Roman Empire, to save ungrateful people who were in open rebellion against Him. It was part of a divine rescue mission motivated by love, grace, mercy, compassion.

If saving us from the consequences of our sin was all the Incarnation would accomplish, that would have been more than enough to give us cause to celebrate. But the Incarnation did much more than that.

With the Incarnation, the Second Person of the Trinity took on a human nature in the person of Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ has this human nature permanently. Right now, in Heaven, Jesus continues to have His human nature, and He will have His human nature into all eternity.

Think about that: God now shares a nature with us.

Humans were given a unique dignity and role when God created us in His image, and this had always been the foundation of the high value that God set on human life. With the Incarnation, however, God has raised us up even higher. We are told that God’s people will reign with Christ in the New Heaven and New Earth, that Jesus will share His glory with us, that angels are ministering spirits sent to us, that we will judge the angels, that we are seated with Christ in glory, that we share in the love and intimacy of the Persons of the Trinity, that the Father loves us just as He loves the Son, that we are in God and God is in us, that we have become partakers of the divine nature.

With the Incarnation, God shares in our nature, and so we are connected to God in a deeper, more intimate way than anything else in all creation, visible or invisible.

And that is cause for awe, worship, and celebration.