The Muslim objection: God is separate from man. God does not sleep, get tired, hunger, or suffer. Jesus did all of these things. A God who needs food and rest is no God at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. God became man. A man did not become God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the starting point, and it changes everything. The objection assumes Jesus was a man who somehow got promoted, a prophet elevated to divinity, a holy man given divine status after the fact. That is not the Christian claim. The Christian claim runs the other direction entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us\u201d (John 1:14). He did not appear to be human. He was not playing a role. He became a real man, subject to hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and grief. The Greek word in Philippians 2 is \u201cmorphe\u201d: the very nature, the essential form. He was in the very nature of God, and he took on the very nature of a servant. Not a disguise, not a vision. The same essential reality, two natures held together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWho, being in very nature God… made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness\u201d (Philippians 2:6\u20137). The Muslim objection is actually pointing at something real: Jesus wept, got tired, asked for water, and died. Yes. That is the whole point. He was not pretending. Hebrews 5:8\u20139 says he learned obedience through what he suffered. A God playing human would not learn. A God who genuinely became human would.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He is called the \u201clast Adam\u201d for a reason. Adam, before the Fall, had no sinful nature; he was fully human and fully capable of obedience. Jesus entered human life at that same level. Not fallen humanity. Humanity as it was meant to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Love requires giving yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of God\u2019s defining attributes, acknowledged in both Christianity and Islam, is that He is Al-Wadud, the Loving. But love that never costs anything, love that stays at a safe distance and simply commands, is not really love in any sense that tradition would recognize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
True love gives itself. It does not merely manage from above. If God is love in the deepest sense, then what he did in the Incarnation was not strange; it was entirely consistent with who He is. He revealed Himself by becoming one of us. Not a message from a distance, not a word shouted across a gulf, He crossed the gulf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You could put it this way: a God who could enter human suffering and chose not to would be harder to explain than a God who did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Adam, Eve, and Jesus share one humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The connection goes back to the beginning. When Adam first saw Eve, he said: \u201cBone of my bone and flesh of my flesh\u201d (Genesis 2:23). Shared substance, one humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hebrews 2:14\u201315 picks up that thread directly: \u201cSince the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The logic here is not abstract. The same flesh and blood that entered bondage at the Fall had to be the flesh and blood that walked free. A representative from outside our humanity could not stand in for us. He had to be genuinely one of us, not a stand-in, but a kinsman redeemer, bone of our bone. That is why the Incarnation matters. That is why it had to be real.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"