“At the heart of the biblical vision of the incarnation is that the time, place, family, and particular body that Jesus inhabited were not a random accident but designed for the sake of his specific destiny. Jesus knew that everything about his earthly life, including the body he inhabited, was to fulfill God’s intended purpose.”

When God chose to come to the world embodied in Jesus Christ, he accepted life with all of its limitations, from his dependence on his mother Mary as an infant, to the ups and downs of adolescence, the need for food and sleep, the susceptibility to sickness, the inevitability of suffering, and the experience of death.

Apart from these more obvious realities of life in a body, at the heart of the biblical vision of the incarnation is that the time, place, family, and particular body that Jesus inhabited were not a random accident but designed for the sake of his specific destiny. Jesus knew that everything about his earthly life, including the body he inhabited, was to fulfill God’s intended purpose. In the following passage we gain a glimpse of Jesus’s self-understanding of his mission:

Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me. . . . Then I said, “Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—I have come to do your will, my God.” (Heb. 10:5, 7)

In that statement, destiny and the body are melded together in an inseparable unity in Jesus Christ, linking the concrete form of his life with the work he was sent to do. Accepting that this applies to the great and glorious mission of the Son of God, who is the Savior of the world, is a big thought; it becomes even bigger and much more personal when we extend it to every one of us as fellow embodied creatures. Let’s look at three consequences of seeing the body as gift and intimately connected to our destiny.

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