Stephen Charnock and What God’s Power Tells Us about the Incarnation

In the Puritan Stephen Charnock’s magnum opus, The Existence and Attributes of God (1682), he devotes his tenth discourse (of fourteen lengthy discourses) to considering the power of God. To imagine a deity who lacks power to do whatever he wills is to imagine something less than the supreme being. For God to be unable to do what he wills leaves him weak and vulnerable to being overthrown. But the God of the Bible is portrayed as a God who is all-powerful, and that has all kinds of implications for the rest of Christian theology. 

Charnock explores the implications if God were not omnipotent and the implications that he is. In his wide-reaching reflections, he considers what God’s omnipotence means specifically for the incarnation. Meditating on God’s power in relation to the incarnation leads to a beautiful picture of what it meant for the omnipotent Son of God to take on weak human flesh for his creatures:

The terms of this union were infinitely distant. What greater distance can there be than between the Deity and humanity, between the Creator and a creature? Can you imagine the distance between eternity and time, Infinite Power and miserable infirmity, an immortal spirit and dying flesh, the highest Being and nothing? yet these are espoused. A God of unmixed blessedness is linked personally with a man of perpetual sorrows: life incapable to die, joined to a body in that economy incapable to live without dying first; infinite purity, and a reputed sinner; eternal blessedness with a cursed nature, Almightiness and weakness, omniscience and ignorance, immutability and changeableness, incomprehensibleness and comprehensibility; that which cannot be comprehended, and that which can be comprehended; that which is entirely independent, and that which is totally dependent; the Creator forming all things, and the creature made, met together to a personal union; “The word made flesh” (John i. 14), the eternal Son, the “Seed of Abraham” (Heb. ii. 16). What more miraculous, than for God to become man, and man to become God? That a person possessed of all the perfections of the Godhead, should inherit all the imperfections of the manhood in one person, sin only excepted: a holiness incapable of sinning to be made sin; God blessed forever, taking the properties of human nature, and human nature admitted to a union with the properties of the Creator: the fulness of the Deity, and the emptiness of man united together (Col. ii. 9); not by a shining of the Deity upon the humanity, as the light of the sun upon the earth, but by an inhabitation or indwelling of the Deity in the humanity. Was there not need of an Infinite Power to bring together terms so far asunder, to elevate the humanity to be capable of, and disposed for, a conjunction with the Deity? If a clod of earth should be advanced to, and united with the body of the sun, such an advance would evidence itself to be a work of Almighty power: the clod hath nothing in its own nature to render it so glorious, no power to climb up to so high a dignity: how little would such a union be, to that we are speaking of! Nothing less than an Incomprehensible Power could effect what an Incomprehensible Wisdom did project in this affair.

(See this quotation and Charnock’s entire book at Gutenberg.org.)