Audio Transcript

I really love today’s question: “Hello, Pastor John. My name is Alex and I live in Alabama. I was just thinking today about all the things that run out. Money runs out, food runs out, sex runs out, cars run out, time runs out, and people run out of time and die. But God never runs out. Can you elaborate on that subject? It seems like a reminder to not rely on things, but on the eternal God.”

I am so eager for this question. I’m so thankful that Alex simply threw open the door for me to talk about the inexhaustibility of God. Here are a couple of reasons why I’m so excited to talk about this.

Inexhaustible Fountain

One is that my introduction to Reformed theology fifty years ago was not mainly through secondary theological sources, but through texts of the Bible that elevated the self-sufficiency, the inexhaustibility, of God as high as it possibly could be elevated. In other words, what struck me is that the very Godness of God is that he is absolutely free, absolutely self-sufficient. He has no needs from outside himself, but is completely and eternally sufficient in himself, and not just sufficient but a Vesuvius of joy in the fellowship of the Trinity, so that he has absolutely no need of me whatsoever, but is so full that he is prone to overflow with a river of pleasures toward those who will have him as their supreme treasure. That picture of God years ago from the Bible was ravishing to me.

The second reason this is such a golden invitation to me is that just the day before yesterday, I received an email from a friend who has gone through years of very, very hard times. And he wanted to thank me, even though I was part of the hard times, for something from a message years ago. I’ll just quote what he sent me: “Grace is the overflow of God’s self-sufficiency. So, you can’t have grace if you don’t have an utterly, infinitely, gloriously self-satisfied, all-sufficient, overflowing God who does not need you at all.” That’s the picture of God that he was sustained by. That’s the meaning of grace that held him and kept him from making shipwreck of his faith. Grace is the overflow of the self-sufficiency of a God who doesn’t need him.

“God is on the lookout for anyone who is humble enough and weak enough to let him be strong for them.”

That’s what grace is: it’s the overflow from an inexhaustible fountain, which means that the only way we can relate to God so that he’s pleased and so that it glorifies him is not by hauling buckets of human labor up the mountain and pouring our supply into the pure, inexhaustible mountain spring of God, but rather by falling on our face exhausted, and putting our faith and our face in the water, and coming up and saying, “Ah, that’s so good. Thank you, God, for the overflow that you are for me.”

Giver of All

Now I’ve eaten up half my time telling you why I’m so excited to talk about this question. So, let’s consider, in the time that remains, just a few passages of Scripture that celebrate the fullness of God to the point where he doesn’t need us at all, and where it would be an offense to him if we tried to become his benefactors. For example, Acts 17:25: “[God is not] served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.”

And that’s not just true of God the Father; it’s true of Christ as he comes into the world. Mark 10:45: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” We don’t serve him — he serves us, or we die.

Romans 11:34–36: “Who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” Nobody — you can’t give God counsel. “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” Nobody — you can’t loan God anything to put him in your debt. Why? “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.”

Owner of the Earth

Or Psalm 50:10–15 — Spurgeon calls this “Robinson Crusoe’s text” because, if you read that novel, you realize Crusoe used these verses to get himself through.

Every beast of the forest is mine,     the cattle on a thousand hills. . . .If I were hungry, I would not tell you,     for the world and its fullness are mine.Do I eat the flesh of bulls     or drink the blood of goats?Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,     and perform your vows to the Most High,and call upon me in the day of trouble;     I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me. (Psalm 50:10, 12–15)

That’s amazing. So, how do we glorify a God who has absolutely no needs and has all resources in himself? Answer: By not being his benefactors, but his supplicants. By calling on him for help. Then we get deliverance; he gets the glory. Or as the psalm says, “I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.” “You get the deliverance; I get the glory.”

“The very Godness of God is that he is absolutely free, absolutely self-sufficient.”

This is what stunned me years ago: the bigger God gets, the more self-sufficient he becomes, and the less he needs me, then the more resourceful he can be for me, and the more riches of glory he has to pour out freely on me, and the more glorious he looks when we find our joy in him. What a God! That’s exactly the way God wants us to experience his absolute fullness and self-sufficiency. He wants us to experience it as the source of inexhaustible grace.

Helper of the Weary

Listen to the way Isaiah 40:28 makes the connection:

The Lord is the everlasting God,     the Creator of the ends of the earth.He does not faint or grow weary;     his understanding is unsearchable.

What’s the consequence of all that self-sufficiency?

He gives power to the faint,     and to him who has no might he increases strength. . . .     They shall mount up with wings like eagles;they shall run and not be weary;     they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:29, 31)

So, the inexhaustible hand of God is good news for the exhausted.

Sustainer of the Humble

I remember in those early days when I was first being amazed by this kind of self-sufficient, inexhaustible, overflowing God, two of my passages were 2 Chronicles 16:9 and Isaiah 64:4.

The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him. (2 Chronicles 16:9)

In other words, he’s on the lookout — he is actually on the lookout — for anyone who is humble enough and weak enough to let him be strong for them.

From of old no one has heard     or perceived by the ear,no eye has seen a God besides you,     who acts for those who wait for him. (Isaiah 64:4)

In other words, God’s uniqueness — nobody’s seen a God like this — is that in his overflowing fullness, he delights to work for us, rather than have us work for him. The giver gets the glory.

No Help Wanted

So, not surprisingly, this kind of absolutely self-sufficient, inexhaustible, overflowing God is where the gospel comes from, the gospel of our salvation. For those who have absolutely no way to save themselves, he says,

Come, everyone who thirsts,     come to the waters;and he who has no money,     come, buy and eat!Come, buy wine and milk     without money and without price. (Isaiah 55:1)

It’s like the machine shop that I jogged by for years until it closed recently. It had a permanent “Help Wanted” sign nailed to the wall on the side of the building. Every time I’d go by, almost, there was a big, permanent “Help Wanted” sign. But some days there was a big red diagonal line through the sign with a big No in the middle of it: “No Help Wanted.” And I used to leap for joy while I was jogging, saying, “That’s my God! That’s my gospel! No help wanted. No help needed. No help demanded. ‘I exist to be inexhaustible and to help those who will trust me. That’s my glory.’ That’s the glory of the gospel.”

So amen, Alex. Everything else runs out, like you said. But God never runs out. He will be giving and giving and giving to all eternity as we receive and receive and receive like little children with joy.

Motherhood’s rescue mission outside the gates of hell was supposed to look tidier.

But here we are.

One child has just yanked another’s hair. Sticky hands and messy bottoms (of two different children) have been wiped, but someone just somersaulted through another’s drawing space. Picture ruined, sadness abounds. Another child is hungry but — phew — distracted, scouring five bottomless laundry hampers for underwear. We hurriedly search for shoes to rush to lessons of all kinds. But we will be even later because a shoeless child rages after a half-dressed one to hijack back a pen identical to ten others in plain sight.

How can mothers possibly intercede for their children during little moments of chaos?

God in Small, Chaotic Spaces

Like her life “hidden with Christ” (Colossians 3:2), the glory of a mother’s rescue mission hides in small moments. Even if no one else sees and delights in a mother’s labor of love, God does. In fact, no one sees more or delights more than him. The mundane, however, will not last forever — God “has made everything beautiful in its time.” Though mothers now yearn for eternal assurances for their children, it is not for us to know “what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11–12).

Anxieties pile on because the weight of eternity presses in. How will today’s messes translate into eternal joy with our children in the presence of the King? Little moments offer opportunities for big prayers — not as an oppressive obligation but as a way of casting anxieties on the God who cares for us (1 Peter 5:7).

God has promised our labor in Christ is not in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58), so we cast our anxieties at the throne during moments when it seems his kingdom has not yet entered our homes. Prayer surrenders our desire for certainty about their salvation and frees us to share gospel hope with our children without measuring results.

Massive prayers are more than an invitation for God to hear our pleas; they also invite him to speak back to us. When we pray, the indwelling Spirit counsels moms toward Scripture’s glorious promises to us and our children (John 14:26). He exchanges our proneness to unravel for eternal eyes, power, and joy to labor and trust him as we continue to intercede for the little hearts in our care.

Big Prayers for Small Moments

One day mothers will see what now remains hidden in heaven — golden bowls of incense filled with the massive, intercessory prayers of mothers crying out to God on behalf of their children (Revelation 5:8). Consider these three massive prayers for your mundane and messy little moments.

1. ‘Lord, save my children!’

Prayers for a child’s salvation are so massive and redundant that perhaps we tend over time not to want to bother God with them anymore.

The weight and value of our children’s eternities peek through in little moments. He is “not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness,” but is patient toward them, “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:8–9). So we pray, “Lord, remove my child’s heart of stone and give him a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26)!” Messes do not need to hinder mothers. They are brief windows in which we can plead for salvation and fuel patient, tender gospel-preaching to the eternal beings we shepherd. “Lord, I see the sin in them (and in me!), and I know I cannot save them. Break in and capture their hearts. Help them to see!”

“When mothers pray, we invite our children into our desperation before the God of salvation.”

When mothers pray, we invite our children into our desperation before the God of salvation. Charles Spurgeon never forgot his mother’s unwavering plea: “Oh, that my son might live before thee!” (Devoted, 91). With consistency and fervor, we can invite our children in as we pour out our hearts to God.

2. ‘Jesus, fill us with your Holy Spirit.’

If there is one thing I have learned in motherhood about prayer, it’s that I often don’t know how to pray.

Jesus is unhindered by moms who yearn for communion with him but falter or abandon these hopes in little moments. Here’s good news for yearning moms: the resurrected King reigns in our inability. He promises that when we ask to be filled with the Holy Spirit, he will fill us (Luke 11:13). A mother’s plea invites the power of Christ to replace our anxiety with peace to know him more, and authority to display his glory in little moments. So we pray, drawing on Ephesians 3:14–21:

You have named and formed my family (verse 15).
You have endless riches to supply all my needs (verse 16).
Strengthen me and my children with power through your Spirit (verse 16).
Do for me what I cannot do on my own; do what your Spirit is meant to do — show us Christ, and fix our eyes on him (verse 17).
Be our firm foundation whether we see any fruit from our faithfulness (verse 17).
Through your powerful Spirit, show us “what is the breadth and length and height and depth” of your endless love (verse 18).
Empty us of anything less than your fullness (verse 19).
Do far more than we or our children even think to ask, through the power of your Spirit at work within us (verse 20).
May we, our children, our children’s children, and all generations glorify Christ (verse 21).

Mothers can pray child-specific verses. We can pray that our service, gifts, and teaching in the name of Christ will bear fruit. We can pray that our children would grow into men and women of the word, mighty warriors for Christ’s kingdom. We can pray that they would live for Christ, die for Christ, be all in for Christ. But let’s also pray for ourselves, that we would be filled with the Spirit, who enables us to pray and love well.

3. ‘Holy Spirit, give us more of Jesus.’

Jesus delights to fill us with his Spirit. And the Spirit delights to satisfy us — with more of Christ.

“Jesus delights to fill us with his Spirit. And the Spirit delights to satisfy us — with more of Christ.”

Jesus is our eternal portion (Psalm 73:26–28; John 6:35), but also our daily bread (Matthew 6:11). He is “good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him” (Lamentations 3:24–25). Little moments with our children now will turn into bigger moments after they have left our homes. Mothers want the gospel to one day pour out from their children’s hearts and lives. So we pray and ask the Spirit to satisfy us and our children (and our children’s children!) toward the day when we will fully know him (1 Corinthians 13:12).

Spirit, use this hair-yanking. Grow our children to beg you for more of Jesus until they get him.

Spirit, move in sticky hands and messy bottoms. Grow our children to be satisfied in the kind, gentle hands of our shepherd when they’re confronted with their own messes (Romans 2:4).

Spirit, shine behind sinful somersaults. Grow our children to be satisfied in the quieting presence of Christ, who sees their pain (Psalm 56:8), as they long for the day when sin and sadness will be no more (Revelation 21:4).

Spirit, fill hungers and reveal yourself in underwear searches. Grow our children to not distract their appetites but invite the bread of life to fully satisfy them (John 6:35).

Spirit, tardiness does not steal your power. Grow our children to be content in Christ when their plans don’t match your purposes (Proverbs 19:21).

Spirit, don’t waste our unnecessary pen collection. Surprise our children in their yearnings by teaching them the secret behind hunger and plenty (Philippians 4:12) — more of Jesus.

And as you do these things in them, Holy Spirit, do them first in me.

He Prays for Us

We live in a dark world. Massive prayers now for more of Jesus may prepare our children and generations to come for persecution, or for a time when they are stripped of all things but the one who never leaves. Whatever comes their way, may our children grow into godliness and contentment because a praying mom pleaded that Jesus would be enough.

Mothers, we don’t need to collapse under the weight of our mission, or pretend that only majestic prayers can intercede for our children. The Spirit helps mothers in their weakness when words fail us — the Spirit himself prays for mothers “with groanings too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). And one day, what were once massive prayers in little moments will, in the light of glory, usher in massive praise forever.

Christ is the heart of Christianity. It is hardly surprising, then, that from the beginning of church history his own person has been the target of foes from without and heretics from within. Early on, some attacked the doctrine of his eternal deity, others the belief that he had a real physical body, and yet others that he had a real human mind.

This last attack is particularly fascinating because it was driven by a bishop, Apollinarius (310–390), who had previously distinguished himself as a defender of the deity of Christ. Most likely, he hesitated to acknowledge Jesus’s full humanity because he feared compromising the Lord’s deity. He took John 1:14, “The Word became flesh,” to mean only that the eternal Word took a human body: he did not take a rational human soul. The incarnation thus involved a union between the Son of God and only part of human nature. Jesus did not have a human mind.

Apollinarius’s doctrine eventually was condemned as heresy, but only after a keen debate. A key figure in this debate was Gregory, bishop of Nazianzen (in what is modern-day Turkey). Gregory (329–390) famously summed up his argument in the statement, “The unassumed is the unhealed” (Letter to Cledonius the Priest Against Apollinarius). His logic was simple: a rational soul is as essential to human nature as a human body; if Christ didn’t take such a soul, he didn’t take the whole of human nature; and if he didn’t take it, he didn’t redeem it. Without a human mind, Jesus would have saved only a part of man, and not the most important part.

Side by side with Gregory in this debate stood his friend, Gregory of Nyssa (about 335–395), who also bequeathed to us a memorable image. Starting from the premise that it was not the body only, but the whole man that was lost, he proclaimed that the Good Shepherd, who came to seek and to save the lost, “carries home on his shoulders the whole sheep, not its skin only” (Against Eunomius, 2.13). Thus did the Good Shepherd make the man of God complete, redeemed in both body and soul.

Tempted Yet Triumphant

We shouldn’t overlook how tempting it is for those who are sensitive about the deity of Christ to follow the path taken by Apollinarius and to shrink from giving the humanity of our Lord its due place. Indeed, we already see the temptation confronted in the epistle to the Hebrews, where some in the early church found it hard to believe that the Son of God could sympathize with us in our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15). This is likely why the writer has to stress that Christ was “made like his brothers in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17).

“Jesus endured temptation to a degree that we shall never know because, unlike us, he never gave in.”

Before we go any further, however, we have to remind ourselves there is one exception to this: Christ was without sin. This fact is all the more remarkable when we recall that he not only shared our nature: he also shared our temptations (Hebrews 4:15). Indeed, he endured temptation to a degree that we shall never know because, unlike us, he never gave in. Though the devil pursued him relentlessly — through family, friend, and foe — Jesus would not yield, even when faced with the cursed death of the cross.

These temptations were real and protracted, sometimes cunning, sometimes violent, but from them all Christ emerges with his integrity inviolate. But the very fact that he was tempted is fatal to the idea that he had no human mind. A mere body cannot be tempted. The divine Logos cannot be tempted. Omniscience cannot be tempted. We are tempted by what we know, by what we shrink from, by what we fear, and by what we love. So it was with Jesus, as we see from his experience in Gethsemane. He knew something (but not all) of what the cup involved, he shrank from it, and he wished, as man, there could be some other way. But in the end, he prayed, “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). This was not mere submission. It was the keynote of his life.

Real Human Mind

When we turn to Jesus in the Gospel accounts, we are immediately aware that here is someone who not only lived in a human body but one who also had a real human mind. This is made plain at the beginning, when Luke tells us that Jesus grew not only in physical stature but in wisdom (Luke 2:52). God doesn’t grow in wisdom. He is eternally all-knowing, but the child Jesus was not.

His physical development was accompanied by a normal human intellectual development. His mother would have taught him what every human mother teaches her child, but she would have shared with him, too, what she had been told by the angel who had been sent to announce his birth. He learned from the Scriptures, which he clearly read for himself and which he cherished as a font of wisdom all his life. He learned by attending the synagogue, and by questioning the rabbis at the temple (Luke 2:46). He learned from his father, Joseph, to whom he was apprenticed. And he learned by observing the world around him and the ways of his own people.

Yet this human mind, acute and probing as it was, was also aware that it didn’t know everything, and couldn’t answer every question that might be put to him. The prime example of this is his confession of ignorance about the time of his own second coming (Mark 13:32). He was never ignorant of anything he ought to have known, or of anything his people needed to know. From that point of view, the Father had delivered to the Son everything that would be helpful to the “babes” (Matthew 11:25 KJV). But on such a detail as the date of the end, all that Jesus could say was that the Father had set it by his own authority (Acts 1:7).

The fact that Jesus had a real human mind and confessed himself ignorant on certain matters doesn’t mean, however, that his knowledge was never more than ordinary. He clearly had supernatural knowledge, as appears, for example, in his conversation with the woman of Samaria. He has never seen or heard of her before, yet he knows all that she ever did (John 4:29). Yet supernatural knowledge is not omniscience. It was a normal adjunct of the prophetic office, as we can see clearly in the ministries of men like Elijah and Elisha.

Deep Affections

If we see in Jesus a man possessed of a real human mind, we also see in him a deeply affectionate human being. Above all, of course, this affection is directed toward his heavenly Father, whom he now loves according to his two natures, human and divine. But alongside this affection, the Gospels highlight Jesus’s love for his fellow humans.

Perhaps the most fascinating instance of this is Jesus’s love for the rich young man who approached him to ask what he had to do to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17–23). The man went away sad, we are told, because he was unwilling to part with his possessions. We have no reason to believe that he ever chose eternal life, but we have very good reason to believe that Jesus loved him (Mark 10:21). Jesus was drawn to him, it seems, as one human to another.

It is clear, too, that Jesus loved company, and in this respect he was a marked contrast to his cousin, John the Baptist. John was a solitary who preferred life in the desert to life in the city and was happy to live on his diet of locusts and wild honey. Jesus never found fault with John’s lifestyle, nor did John with his, but they were men of different temperaments (Matthew 11:18–19). Jesus readily accepted invitations to enjoy the hospitality of others, even when they came from tax collectors and sinners.

But he also had his own circle of intimate friends. Its nucleus was the original band of twelve disciples, whom he called apostles “so that they might be with him” (Mark 3:14), but within this band there was another even more intimate circle consisting of Peter, James, and John; and even within the inner three there seems to have been one who was special: John, “the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved” (John 20:2). This also bears the mark of humanity. Some were close to him, others were even closer, and one was closest of all. But they were all his friends (John 15:14). He loved them as the Father loved him (John 15:9), and his love for them was to be the paradigm for the way they were to love one another (John 13:14, 34).

There was another group, too, to which Jesus was especially close: the Bethany household of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. Jesus, we are told explicitly, loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus; and in the sisters’ message to Jesus informing him of Lazarus’s illness, they refer to their brother as “he whom you love” (John 11:3).

There was clearly a close bond here: a bond that embraced the sisters as well as their brother, and a love so deep that when Jesus saw Mary stricken with grief, he was profoundly moved in his spirit, and wept (John 11:33–35), even though he knew that Lazarus’s illness would ultimately lead not to his death, but to the glory of God. The sight of human heartbreak convulsed his soul.

Human Emotions

Then we see, too, that Jesus experienced ordinary human emotions.

He was moved to anger, for example, by the hardness of the human heart, by the hypocrisy of the religious, and by the desecration of his Father’s house. More typically, however, the emotion we see in Jesus is compassion. He feels pity for the crowds, living aimlessly like sheep without a shepherd (Matthew 9:36), and it is pity that moves him to raise the widow’s son (Luke 7:13) and to heal the leper who approaches him imploring, “If you will, you can make me clean” (Mark 1:40).

In fact, as B.B. Warfield points out in his splendid essay “The Emotional Life of Our Lord,” compassion is the emotion most frequently attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, and it was no shallow feeling. The Greek verb used to express the Lord’s pity (splanchnizomai) is closely related to the word for the inward parts (“bowels,” in the older English versions) and underlines the fact that Jesus’s compassion was visceral. He was deeply upset, stirred to his depths, by the misery he saw around him, whether in the state of society in general or in the plight of individuals, and his distress was frequently accompanied by clear physical symptoms such as, for example, his weeping at Lazarus’s tomb and his tears over the doomed city of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41). Jesus felt, and felt deeply.

Nor is compassion something that Jesus, now that he has risen, has left behind as not fit to be taken back to heaven. After all, compassion is an emotion clearly ascribed to God himself (Psalm 103:13). Indeed, it is a key attribute in the name revealed to Moses when he hid in the cleft of the rock and the glory of God passed him by (Exodus 34:6). Pity is a part of the glory, and it is perfectly consistent, then, with the exaltation of Christ that he still sympathizes with his people in their weakness (Hebrews 4:15). He knows how they feel, he feels with them, and he feels for them, because he has stood where they stand.

Yet the fact that he can follow our experiences doesn’t mean that we can always follow his, because he has plumbed emotional depths that none of his brothers or sisters has ever known. The supreme example of this is Gethsemane. The cross had long occupied Jesus’s mind, but in Gethsemane, “Today is the day,” and the full horror of the cup he has to drink is well-nigh overwhelming. He cannot hide his anguish. “My soul,” he declares (speaking of his human soul), “is very sorrowful, even to death” (Mark 14:34); and he prays, not once but thrice. He wanted the cup removed. Could there not, he asked, be some other way?

These, as John Calvin put it, are the feelings of a condemned and ruined man (Institutes, 2.16.11), and when what he dreaded in Gethsemane became a reality on Calvary, they found expression in the dreadful cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). What did they mean? That is between himself and the Father. Only they know what our salvation cost them each. But let’s never forget that while we have all, at one time or another, cried from the depths (Psalm 130:1), we have never cried from such depths as these: the depths of the curse of the law (Galatians 3:13).

Does the Whole Sheep Matter?

Back, then, to the two Gregorys. Why was it important that the shepherd should carry the whole sheep — or, more prosaically, that the Redeemer of the human race should take to himself the whole of human nature, and not just a human body?

“The sins of the human soul need to be atoned for as well as the sins of the body.”

First, because the sins of the human soul need to be atoned for as well as the sins of the body. This becomes clear the moment we look at such a passage as Galatians 5:19–21, where Paul lists the sins of the “flesh.” It is doubtful that any of these is exclusively a sin of the body, but some — such as enmity, jealousy, envy, and fits of anger — are clearly sins of the mind; and the bearer of the sins of the world had to bear these sins of the mind as surely as he bore the sins of the body.

Second, the human mind had to consent to the sacrifice offered on Calvary. It was not merely a physical act, but a voluntary act; otherwise it would have had no moral value. The power of the cross lies not in the degree or quantity of the pain it involved, but in the fact that Christ offered himself in love. In the very act of delivering himself up, Christ loved the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, strength, and mind. Like Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, the cross was an act of worship (Genesis 22:5).

Third, the soul, no less than the body, had to bear the cost of redemption. This is the great truth highlighted by the Puritan theologians: “The suffering of his soul was the soul of sufferings” (Christ’s Famous Titles, 124). And just how real these soul-sufferings were, we have already seen. The cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” came from the depths of Immanuel’s soul.

Fourth, the soul, no less than the body, needs a full salvation. It needs renewal and cleansing as well as forgiveness. But just as the resurrection of the body presupposes our union with Christ, so does the transformation of the soul. We are sanctified in him, our souls united to his soul, and drawing on one and the same Spirit.

Full Propitiation

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the two Gregorys provide a complete understanding of the atonement. There was a tendency among the great Greek theologians to see the union of the two natures in the person of Christ as itself the defining atoning act.

But the incarnation, magnificent as it was, was not an end in itself, as the writer to the Hebrews makes clear when he tells us that Christ took flesh and blood “that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). Or, as he puts it a moment later, the reason that Christ became like his brothers and sisters in every respect was that he might make propitiation for his people’s sins. The propitiatory act was not his incarnation, but his death. He is a propitiation by his blood (Romans 3:35).