Epiphany: Joining the Dance

6 January 2026

I love Epiphany. Christmastide is a celebration of the Divine Word becoming flesh, with all that entails. But in those first couple years, only a few people knew, all of them Jews: Mary and Joseph, of course, Elizabeth and Zacharias, Simeon and Anna, some shepherds. That’s pretty much it. At Epiphany, we celebrate the good news going to the Gentiles, to the astrologers, to the world beyond the “known world” of the Roman Empire. 

1400 years before Jesus was born, Balaam (another Gentile prophet) gave a prophetic word: “A star will rise out of Jacob.” In 586 B.C., the people and treasures of Israel, including their scriptures, were carried away to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar. There Daniel and the three Hebrew children—vocal devotees of the God of Israel—became leaders among the Magi, a leadership that survived the fall of Babylon and the rise of the Persian empire. About a hundred years after that, a Hebrew girl named Hadassa became Esther, the queen of Persia, once again bringing the Jews to official attention. And nearly 500 years later, a star appeared in the East, bringing the Magi to Bethlehem, and here we are: the Divine Word became flesh. Blasphemy to the Jews, foolishness to the Greeks, and sedition to the Romans, but it happened all the same.

The very fact that such a thing is even possible demonstrates the central promise of Christianity: that we human beings, just as we are, can partake of the divine nature, just as it is, without any fudging, equivocation, or dismal compromises. Any and all of the resources of heaven—whatever you might need to face the natural and supernatural challenges of your life—will fit into a human being.

We know this, because it has already happened. And when Jesus proved it possible, He also invited you to join Him in the dance. Want in? Ask, and it will be given to you, like the Man said.

If you’ve enjoyed these reflections on Hebrews over the past 12 days, you might want to hear the Hebrews Overview that concludes my Hebrews podcast with Chris Morrison of Gulfside Ministries.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Incarnation in Your Life Today

25 December 2009

The charge from this past Sunday’s sermon follows:

Gregory the Theologian said, “What is not assumed cannot be healed,” and this is true.  For exactly that reason, Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Triune God, assumed full humanity at His incarnation.  In Jesus, we have a spectacular demonstration that man, the image of God, is an accurate image, and can partake in the divine nature.  Nothing human is foreign to Him; there is no part of you that you can point to and say, “Jesus didn’t have to deal with this.”

The Incarnation strips us of our excuses, but in exchange it gives us hope, hope that we can be holy as He is holy.  God designed every part of you to partake of the divine nature.   God in Christ redeemed every part of you in order to cause you to fulfill God’s design.  In the coming week, you will face the temptation to keep parts of yourself, or parts of your life, to yourself, and to keep the divine nature away from them.  The charge I leave you with is simple: Don’t give in to that temptation.  Hand that area to Christ, so that you may say with Paul, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

You Can’t Leave Out the Dirt

2 August 2009

In the preceding post, I concluded by claiming that an abstract proposition is not the story “boiled down to essentials” because God made the world ex nihilo, entered it Himself in a body, and will resurrect it all one day.

Why would I say that?

God made the world.  Created it all from nothing, spoke it into existence.  In that world, things happen.  God enters into the world He made and acts within it.  God put us in that world — this world — and we act within it.  This is what really happens.  The stories are accounts of what really happened.  The abstractions are short summaries or interpretations of what really happened — but it’s the happening itself that is the reality.

When we say that “by grace you are saved through faith” is the gospel, stripped down to bare essentials with all the extraneous information left out, we are saying that it’s the idea — make that Idea — that matters, and not the incarnational reality.  We are moving, in other words, from Yahweh’s world to Plato’s.

This is a problem, because Plato’s world doesn’t exist.

Yahweh made dirt.  The Word of Yahweh became flesh and dwelt among us, and got dirt under His fingernails.  In the resurrection, redeemed men will get redeemed dirt under their redeemed fingernails, and glory to God for all of it.

Abstractions, important a tool as they are, are not the thing itself.  They always leave out the dirt.

13 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Controversies, Meditations, Person/Proposition, The Free Grace Food Fight | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols