In Divine Missions, God Gives Us Himself

Christianity’s central character is a divine person who has come down to earth. This isn’t a unique claim. Mythology is full of divine and celestial beings who visit our world, from Zeus to Thor to Vishnu. What distinguishes the Christian story from these “visits” is that it doesn’t sacrifice the transcendence of the One who comes down from heaven.

To clarify the true nature of the sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit into the world, and to refute heretical misunderstandings, theologians formulated the doctrine of the divine missions. Simply expressed, a divine “mission” refers to the sending of a Trinitarian person into the world. The doctrine is intended to explain how this divine person has entered the world without changing.

Students of theology are often puzzled by this doctrine. Because our understanding is finite and earthly, we struggle to understand the sending of the infinite and heavenly Son. How can the finite contain the infinite? This same difficulty of understanding was characteristic of the first witnesses of Jesus, as we discover in one of the most revealing episodes about the mission of the Son.

Speaking to largely the same crowd as had just seen him multiply bread and fish and feed 5,000 men, Jesus proclaims himself as “the bread of life” (John 6:35). He’s met with consternation by “the Jews” (v. 41), who couldn’t understand how he could claim to have come down from heaven while having human parents. Jesus declares, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (v. 44). Even though he was sent by the Father, he couldn’t be understood by ordinary human faculties. How could the true bread of heaven have human parents and a human body?

Here’s where the doctrine of divine missions can help.

Analogy from Magnetism

There’s a deep logic in this language of sending. Jesus’s language of “drawing” (v. 44) implicitly suggests the idea of a magnet (cf. John 12:32; Jer. 31:3; Song 1:4). Some theologians have appealed to this imagery to indicate a divine causality that’s working more through attraction and persuasion than through brute force. Analogies have limits, but we can compare divine missions to a magnet.

To clarify the true nature of the sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit into the world, theologians formulated the doctrine of the divine missions.

First, in a mission, God does much more than move things around, such as splitting the Red Sea or miraculously multiplying bread. In a mission, we confess that “to us a son is given” (Isa. 9:6). A mission is much more than God doing something; it’s God giving us someone. The various effects that God brings about in the world are indivisible between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit (per the doctrine of inseparable operations). But missions are unique and proper to the divine persons.

This means only the Son was sent to be incarnate and only the Holy Spirit was sent at Pentecost. While the whole Trinity creates Jesus’s human nature (this is an inseparable operation), only the Son is clothed with it (a mission). A magnet helps us understand this distinction: A paperclip is moved and attracted by the whole magnet, but it attaches specifically to one of the poles.

This reveals the heart of a mission: The Son allows humanity to share in his sonship. The Son on his mission truly gives himself to the creature without ceasing to be himself. In the incarnation, Christ’s human nature exists as the Son on earth. Remaining human, it shares in the operations of the divine nature.

Consider how a paperclip receives the magnetism of a magnet. Physicists call this an induced magnetism—the original magnet’s polarity is transferred to the paperclip. Without becoming a magnet, the paperclip is elevated above its natural operation (clipping paper) to draw other paperclips to itself. This only happens as long as it remains attached to the magnet. Jesus’s humanity remains unaltered, but now it has become the bread of life: “And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:51).

The Son on his mission truly gives himself to the creature without ceasing to be himself.

Finally, with this analogy, we can think of Christ’s human nature as the first in a string of paperclips clinging to a magnet. Christ is the last Adam (1 Cor. 15:45, 47–49), to whom we cling and from whom we’re all “magnetized” with eternal life.

Imagine here a whole string of paperclips, glued to one another by the magnetism flowing through them from a single source. The divine life and energy aren’t confined to the incarnate Lord but communicated to all those engrafted into the vine (John 15:5). Rivers of living water (7:38)—in other words, the Spirit—flow not only from Christ but from those attached to Christ. From the head, the whole body grows with a growth from God (Col. 2:19), as eternal life is given to the members. It isn’t by their own power that members are added to the body; they’re drawn into it.

Conduits of Christ and the Spirit

The Jews couldn’t understand how this son of Joseph and Mary could be the manna from heaven, the bread of eternal life. They only saw the flesh but never felt its magnetism, never tasted its heavenly nutrients. They saw the miracles, which displayed God’s mighty power, but they didn’t recognize the Son. Until they were drawn to feed on his flesh and drink his blood, they wouldn’t abide in him (John 6:56) and thus wouldn’t know him.

This is the true supernatural power of the Christian life, that the very life of the Son pulsates through our veins, that in some sense we become little Christs to others (Gal. 2:20), as long as we hold fast to him.

Here’s one immediate practical implication. Because we’re thus united to Christ, our primary desires shouldn’t be for earthly things but for the heavenly. While our natural operations continue—going to work, eating, drinking, perhaps even clipping papers together—we’re empowered to rise above these realities and embrace our heavenly citizenship and spiritual vocation. That means cultivating the gifts of the Spirit, precisely in and through these mundane tasks.