Hypostatic Union

You know, I get why there are mormons and jehovah's witnesses and other Christ-based cults in this world.

I mean, we have this amazing and beautiful figure, Jesus. He is a savior and an example of love and an all around great guy. Who wouldn't want him as a founder and leader of their religion?

Then, He claims to be God. The line is drawn in the sand, and you are either all in or all out.

"To be a Christian is to believe the impossible. Jesus was human. Jesus was God." -Madeline L'Engle

The disciples even said this was a "hard teaching". The technical term is "Hypostatic Union", the dual nature of Jesus as fully human and fully divine. It is a huge thought, if you really think about it... that Jesus had full omniscience and omnipotence and yet was still fully Human. Many consider uncertainty and weakness parts of the human experience, and they are.

Jesus had these at His disposal, and yet did not touch them except at the Holy Spirit's leading. This is what "life abundantly" is... and this is what full humanity is. To be led by the Holy Spirit is something we can all aspire to, albeit imperfectly.

That is a huge idea, and if you've never struggled with it, you've probably never really looked at it. I assume that at some point, people said to themselves, "You know what? I bet there is more to the story." I mean, we constantly try to explain our world without a shred of actual knowledge, and present our assumptions as fact until they are proven wrong.

So, Joseph Smith has his burrito-induced dream about an angel he heard of in the bible, and a leading figure who sounds disturbingly like an italian entree (is that just me?), written on tablets that conveniently vanished, in a language that conveniently never actually existed (seriously? reformed egyptian?) that could only be translated by Smith himself in what appears to be an attempt at King James English, 300 years too late. His new "scripture" presents a God who we can literally become just like, and a Jesus who was just the first of many "spirit-children".

And people eat it up. It's easier to have a God who was once completely human without that pesky "fully God" business at the same time.

Then you have the Jehovah's Witnesses, claiming that Jesus was created by God, and THEN everything was created through him. Jesus is actually an angel, according to them... specifically, the angel Micheal (who, I am sure, is quite flattered but slightly confused at the attention he's recieving).

This is much easier to wrap the mind around, rather than a Jesus who is the Son of God yet somehow equal and eternal and trinitarian and not a created being.

I believe that these two beliefs, along with many cults and divergent teachings, are a result of people coming to Jesus Christ from a non-spiritual viewpoint, and deciding he needed to be fixed. In the show "Firefly", a ridiculously smart and severly troubled young lady goes to a preacher's bible and begins ripping out pages and rewriting things to "fix" the "inconsistencies" of the Bible.

The truth is, without faith in Jesus Christ and the Spirit's help in understanding, the Word will eventually be too big to accept on it's own. Hypostatic Union is too big an idea for us to truly understand or even fathom without a bit of the supernatural inside of us, which is why Jesus told his disciples to wait for the Spirit.

I encourage those of you who doubt, or those of you who are not believers, to reconsider Christ. I know He's a big idea to wrap your mind around, but I promise you He is an even bigger and infinitely more beautiful Savior, Lord, and Friend. Don't stop just short of the truth, because anything outside of truth is a lie, no matter how many of the same terms and ideas it uses.