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Luke 1:35
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.”
When we think about persons and natures, it is important to remember that the natures of personal beings—God, angels, humans—exist as personalized, acting subjects. God’s nature is personalized as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, though unlike other personal beings, the three divine persons subsist in the one divine nature, not three distinct natures. An individual human being is a human nature personalized as Allen or Carl or Rick or Irene or Katherine and so on. An individual angel is an angelic nature personalized as Michael or Gabriel and so on.
Ordinarily, a human nature is personalized as a human person. With the Lord Jesus Christ, however, we have a unique reality. Here the human nature of Christ is personalized in the acting subject of the one divine person of the Son of God. If this were not so, we would end up with the Nestorian heresy of two persons in Christ or perhaps the adoptionist heresy of God’s adopting the human person of Jesus into divinity. Furthermore, the human nature of Jesus has never existed on its own apart from the divine person of the Son of God. Theologians have developed a technical vocabulary to describe this. Reformed theologian Robert Letham writes in his Systematic Theology that “the human nature in Christ is both anhypostatos—having no independent existence—and enhypostatos—subsisting in the single hypostasis (person) of Christ, the Word.” All this is to say that Christ is the person of the Son of God (Luke 1:35).
Therefore, Letham continues, “all operations of both natures are attributed to the hypostasis (person) of the divine Word.” This means that whatever belongs to the humanity of Jesus and whatever belongs to the deity of Jesus is true of His person but not of the other nature. We conclude as much from passages such as Acts 20:28, which says that God obtained His church by the price of “his own blood.” For Christ to be both truly human and truly divine, one of His natures cannot take on the attributes of the other. Yet because each nature truly belongs to the single person of Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, all the attributes of each nature belong to Jesus. So does the Son of God have blood? If by “the Son of God” we mean the incarnate Son, then yes, the Son of God has blood. Why? Because He has a human nature that is truly His own, and blood is a property of human nature. The Son of God, however, does not have blood in His divine nature, for the divine nature has no blood.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
That the human nature of Christ never existed independently of His divine person means that our Savior has experienced every stage of human development from embryo to adult. Therefore, He is able to fully sympathize with us in every way and at every stage of life. He knows our human weaknesses and limitations, apart from sin, so we know that He deals gently with us even in our ignorance and waywardness (Heb. 4:14–5:10).
For further study
- Psalm 139:1
- Luke 2:40
- 1 Corinthians 2:8
- 1 John 3:16
The bible in a year
- Psalms 36–37
- Acts 23:1–11