Everything I’ve said so far in this book has been about God as Author. God as the Mind behind reality. God as the Thinker of every thought, the Planner of every decree, the Sustainer of every atom. And if I stopped here, you’d have a philosophy. An impressive one, maybe. But just a philosophy. A system about a God who is infinitely powerful and infinitely sovereign and infinitely remote.
But the God of the Bible did something that no philosophy could ever predict. He stepped into His own story.
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
The Word was made flesh. Let me say that in the language of this book. Information became matter. The thought that sustains all of reality compressed itself into a human body, entered the filmstrip as a character, and lived among the other characters for thirty-three years. The Author didn’t just write the story. He joined it.
And this, more than anything else in the entire framework, is what separates Christianity from every other system of thought that has ever existed. No other religion, no other philosophy, no other worldview proposes that the ground of all being entered His own creation as a participant. Pantheism says God IS the creation. Deism says God MADE the creation and left. Atheism says there’s no Author at all. But Christianity says the Author wrote Himself into the story. And the chapter where He appears changes everything that comes after.
“Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature.” (Colossians 1:15)
Christ is the image of the invisible God. Think about what that means in the framework. If the invisible is more real than the visible, and if the physical world is a rendering of God’s thought, then Christ is the highest resolution rendering of God that has ever existed in physical reality. He is God’s thought about Himself, expressed in flesh. He is the invisible made visible. The substance taking on the formality. The covenant becoming the ceremony.
And this is not a diminishment. The rendering is not less than the thought. Christ in the flesh is not less God than the Father in eternity. “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9). ALL the fulness. Not a reduced version. Not a watered-down projection. The FULL Godhead, resident in a human body. The Author, fully present in the character, without ceasing to be the Author.
This is the mystery of the incarnation. And I’m not going to pretend I can fully explain it, because I can’t. Henry Mahan used to say, “That man is a fool who denies the Trinity and that man is also a fool who tries to explain the Trinity.” The same applies to the incarnation. I can describe it. I can show you what it means in the framework. But I can’t explain how infinite consciousness fits inside a human skull without the skull exploding. That’s a question for eternity. And the framework predicts its own limits here, the same as it does with eschatology. Some things exceed the rendering resolution of the current hardware.
But here’s what I can say. The incarnation is not a contradiction of the framework. It’s the climax of the framework. If the invisible is more real than the visible, then the moment when the invisible becomes visible, when the thought puts on matter, when the Author enters the story, that’s the highest expression of the entire system. It’s the principle of operational idealism taken to its ultimate conclusion: the substance doesn’t just precede the formality. The substance takes on the formality. And in doing so, the invisible makes itself known in a way that nothing else in creation can.
Fully God. Fully man. Two natures in one person. Not half and half. Not switching back and forth. Both. Simultaneously. All the time.
In the language of this book: the Author simultaneously being the character without ceasing to be the Author. The filmmaker stepping into the film while the film keeps running. He doesn’t stop directing the movie because He’s now in the scene. He directs and acts at the same time. The Author writes the next page while He’s living on the current one.
Christ got hungry. Christ got tired. Christ wept. Christ bled. These are real experiences of a real human nature. The Author subjected Himself to the rendering constraints of His own story. Gravity applied. Hunger applied. Fatigue applied. Mortality applied. Not because He had to. Because He chose to. Because the story required it. Because the covenant of redemption, the Trinitarian agreement from before the foundation of the world, required the Son to enter the story and live it from the inside.
And at the same time, Christ calmed storms. Christ walked on water. Christ healed the sick. Christ raised the dead. Christ knew men’s thoughts before they spoke. These are the Author’s prerogatives, exercised from inside the character. The rendering constraints applied to the human nature. They didn’t apply to the divine nature. And both natures existed in the same person at the same time.
“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.” (Philippians 2:5-7)
He made himself of no reputation. He took upon him the form of a servant. These are active choices. The Author chose to enter the story. The Author chose to submit to rendering constraints. The Author chose to experience hunger and thirst and betrayal and death. Not because He was forced. Because the plan required it. And the plan was His.
Christ holds three offices, and each one maps to the framework:
Prophet. As Prophet, Christ reveals the Author’s thought. He IS the epistemology of God. “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18). The word declared means explained, made known, brought out of hiddenness. Christ doesn’t just teach about God. He is God’s self-revelation. The thought explaining itself. The information making itself accessible. The invisible rendering itself into a form that ears can hear and eyes can see.
Priest. As Priest, Christ renders the atonement in blood. He IS the soteriology of God. “Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Hebrews 9:12). The eternal thought of justification, which we discussed in Chapter 2, was collapsed into history through the blood of Christ. The Priest didn’t create the redemption. He rendered it. The cross is the ceremony of a covenant that was made in eternity.
King. As King, Christ reigns over both seeds in the re-rendered reality. He IS the eschatology of God. “And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS” (Revelation 19:16). The reign didn’t begin at the ascension. The reign was always the plan. Christ’s kingship is the final frame of the filmstrip, the destination from which every other frame was planned. And the saints will reign with Him, as we’ll see in the chapters on eschatology.
Every office derives from the ontology. The Prophet reveals the thought. The Priest renders the thought in blood. The King reigns from the thought’s final frame. One Person. Three functions. One system.
Theology traditionally speaks of Christ’s two states: the state of humiliation (incarnation, suffering, death, burial) and the state of exaltation (resurrection, ascension, session at the right hand).
In the framework, the humiliation is the Author subjecting Himself to the rendering constraints of His own story. He constrained Himself to human limitations, hunger, fatigue, locality, mortality, without ceasing to be God. He didn’t lose anything in the incarnation. He chose to experience the story from inside the rendering constraints.
And the exaltation is the Author resuming the resolution He never lost. The resurrection body is the prototype of the higher resolution rendering, which we’ll discuss in a later chapter. Christ after the resurrection could eat fish AND walk through walls. Same information. Fewer constraints. He didn’t become more after the resurrection. He stopped limiting Himself. The rendering constraints were removed. What was left was what was always there: God in flesh, at full resolution.
And He is seated now at the right hand of the Father, which is not a physical location in a physical throne room, but a statement about authority. The Author is back in His director’s chair. The scene He entered is over. The story continues. And He’s directing it from the position He never actually left.
In most systematic theologies, the doctrine of Christ comes after the doctrine of salvation, or alongside it. I’ve placed it before the covenant chapters, and I want to explain why.
Christ IS the covenant. He doesn’t just fulfill the covenant. He doesn’t just mediate the covenant. He is the covenant. The Person precedes the promise. The Author precedes the story. You can’t understand what God promised until you understand who God is. And you can’t understand who God is until you see Him in the flesh, walking through His own filmstrip, living out the story He authored.
“The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” (Revelation 13:8)
The Lamb was the first thought. Not the first event, because the Lamb was slain before the world was founded. But the first thought. The destination from which everything else was planned. The supralapsarian decree begins with Christ. The Person precedes the purpose. The Who precedes the what and the how and the when.
And so the covenant chapters that follow, the promise, the overarching covenant of grace, the progressive rendering, the covenant before the ceremony, all of them rest on this chapter. All of them rest on the Person. Because without the Person, the covenants are just ideas. With the Person, they’re the thoughts of a God who loved His people enough to step into His own story and die in their place.
“The hypostatic union is a mystery. You can’t explain it.”
Correct. In the same way you can’t fully explain the Trinity. But the framework gives vocabulary for what it IS: the Author entering the story. The filmmaker stepping into the film. That’s not a full explanation. But it’s more than “it’s a mystery, stop asking.” And the framework is honest about where the explanation ends: some things exceed the rendering resolution of the current hardware. We’ll understand more at higher resolution.
“If Christ is God’s thought rendered in flesh, is He less than the Father?”
No. The rendering is not less real than the thought. “In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9). The rendering didn’t diminish the thought. It expressed it. The Author entering the story doesn’t make the Author less than the Author. It makes the story infinitely richer.
“Kenosis (Philippians 2:7) means Christ gave up divine attributes.”
He didn’t empty Himself of deity. He submitted to rendering constraints. The Author constrained Himself to the character’s limitations without ceasing to be the Author. He didn’t lose anything. He chose to experience the story from inside. The emptying was of reputation and privilege, not of nature.
“Where does this leave the virgin birth?”
The Author doesn’t enter the story through the story’s normal mechanisms. A character who arrives through the usual biology is just another character. The virgin birth is the Author’s signature. It declares: this character has a different origin. He didn’t come from the story. He came from the Author. The rendering constraints apply to the character’s experience. But the origin is the Author’s direct act, bypassing the mechanisms of the story He wrote.
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