Providential positioning refers to movements by God’s spirit whereby human beings (unbelievers as well as believers) are placed or moved into particular positions and situations to accomplish some aspect of God’s work in the world. The biblical record draws attention to such movements at work in the lives of Moses, David, Joseph, Daniel, Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah as well as in the lives of an Egyptian pharaoh and the kings of the Medes and Persians. It was in reference to such providential positioning that the Jewish exile Mordecai posed the haunting question to Esther when she rose to the position of queen in Medo-Persia, “Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”4
In the entire record of God’s dealings with humanity, however, there is no more dramatic and consequential instance of providential positioning than the positioning of Jesus of Nazareth in a particular human family and community within an obscure province of the Roman Empire at a particular time in human history.
The physician Luke begins his Gospel by describing the work of Jesus’ advance man, John the Baptist. He does so by positioning the time of their public ministry politically:
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene—during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah.5
Jesus himself, speaking in the synagogue of his hometown of Nazareth, describes his positioning as fulfilling the ancient prophecy of Isaiah:
He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”6
On several other occasions, Jesus implies that his decisions to refrain from certain activities also involved providential timing and positioning. “My hour has not yet come,” he tells his mother when she asks him to intervene miraculously at the wedding in Cana.7 “My time is not yet here,” he tells his brothers when they want him to publicly display himself at a feast.8
The apostle John, who seemed to be especially aware that the events and circumstances of Jesus’ life were providentially ordered, tells us that Jesus was acutely conscious of God’s timing and positioning just prior to his arrest, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension: “It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father … that he had come from God and was returning to God.”9
With respect to all the events and acts of Jesus’ life one might ask, Why then? Why there? Why in that way? We can speculate, but only God knows the definitive answers to these types of questions. What is clearly taught in Scripture is that there was providential purpose in Jesus’ being placed at a particular place and time in the history of the world to say and do the things he said and did, just as I believe there is providential purpose in the placement of you and me in the particular places and times in which we find ourselves. The challenge for us is to discern that purpose and to live and act in the light of it, just as Jesus did.
Incarnation
How do you make the existence and nature of a being as lofty, mysterious, and spiritual as God real and understandable to human beings? God’s answer to that question, according to the New Testament writers, is through “incarnation”—by embodying deity in flesh, by incorporating deity into a body, in particular a human man, Jesus of Nazareth.
The apostle John describes it this way: “In the beginning was the Word … the Word was God … The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us … the one and only … who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”10 Similarly, the apostle Paul: “When the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman … to redeem.”11
It is at this point that I am in danger of losing the interest and attention of some of my political friends and others of you who simply cannot bring yourselves to believe in the deity of Jesus. He was a good man, you say. He may have been a great teacher. He didn’t deserve the cruel fate that he suffered. But he was not divine, you say, and those who believe so are deceived.
Rather than part company over the deity of Jesus, let me try to persuade you to linger a little longer in his company. Because if you are a person with any interest at all in learning how to be effective in public life, particularly in communicating substantive and complex ideas and propositions to ordinary people, there is much to be learned from Jesus of Nazareth and the concept, if not the reality, of incarnation.
To incarnate means to embody in flesh, to put into a body, especially a human form. In Jesus’ case, this included not only his physical birth, which Christians consider miraculous, but also his un-miraculous upbringing in a humble family; his apprenticeship, likely beginning at age 12, in a trade; his many years (up to 18) toiling in a carpenter’s shop interacting with farmers, fishermen, merchants, and the like; until at age 30 he began to speak and teach in public as an itinerant rabbi, a public ministry that would last only three short years.
The time ratios here are important and worth noting. Up to six years in the community, the carpenter’s shop, the marketplace—interacting with the types of people who will one day constitute the bulk of his public audiences, hearing about their troubles and hopes, listening to their stories and conversation, absorbing their vocabulary and reference points—for every one year of teaching and communicating in the public arena. Six to one is the ratio of private preparation to public communication.
Incarnational Communications
When Jesus finally stepped into the public arena, he was an “incarnational communicator” and surely one of the most effective public communicators this world has ever seen—someone from whom any public communicator can learn a great deal. He embodied, became the personification of, the truths he sought to communicate. He was fully immersed in the community of human beings he had come to influence. And his choice of words, phrases, and illustrations put flesh upon, made intrinsically human and tangible, spiritual truths and realities so that his audiences could better grasp and accept—virtually see, feel, touch, and embrace—what he was talking about.
Note first of all the lofty and seemingly otherworldly ideas and truths that it was the purpose of his public ministry to communicate: ideas and truths about the nature and will of God, a spiritual kingdom, the foundations of happiness (blessedness), spiritual illumination, the laws of God, spiritual communication (prayer), retaliation and reconciliation, spiritual temptation, heaven and hell, the spiritual consequences of human actions, judgment and justice, spiritual direction, the power and meaning of faith, spiritual deprivation and nourishment, the agents and consequences of evil, the spiritual roots of pain and suffering,