-Standing in stark contrast to the empty traditions of men, vain philosophies which deceive and ultimately lead people away from a true knowledge of the Creator, Christ is fully and really God, and thus He is the ultimate reality. You can trust Him, you can commit your life to Him, you can base your life entirely upon Him. He is the filter through which we can and should evaluate our lives - our choices, our relationships, our use of time, our values and priorities. We owe our very existence to Him, and as we will see, we owe our entire salvation to Him.
-The incarnation is one of those antinomies, those wonderful impossibles, a situation where two things must be true but which for all intensive purposes cannot simultaneously both be true. There are others, core tenets of the Christian faith. The trinity is one - God is both three and one. Another is the wondrous intertwining truths of God’s sovereignty and the free will of man, a both-and. And this - that the infinite fullness of almighty eternal God would somehow be confined to a finite human body which died. That is precisely what Paul says here - in the person of Jesus Christ, all the fullness of deity (which is eternal and infinite and spirit, i.e. non-material) inhabits a finite physical body. He is both fully God and fully man. Infinite and finite. Limitless, and yet He is confined. Eternal and yet He did die. Utter nonsense, this - incomprehensible and impossible to explain, it becomes foolishness in the fallen mind of man in all his supposed learning and acquired wisdom. It is a sublime and impenetrable mystery, to be sure, and yet attempts to satisfactorily explain away the seeming contradiction have tended to result in heresy. The arian focuses on a verse like John 14.28 and suggests that Christ was created, resulting in either a lesser god (essentially polytheism) or simply a man (called modalism or unitarianism - precisely where Jehovah's Witnesses land). The docetic counters that Christ was purely God and that His body was a separate entity or perhaps only a kind of phantasm. Yet Scripture again and again clearly presents both, and if the Word of God is true, then both must also be true. Indeed, rather let God be found true though every man be found a liar. CS Lewis perhaps puts it best:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
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