Grace and peace to you from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The text on which this morning's message is based comes from our Epistle lesson (Colossians 1: 13-20) read earlier.

Have you ever watched a blacksmith work with iron? He takes a normal piece of cold, gray iron. He pumps air into the bellows into the coals and fire, heating the metal hundreds of degrees. Eventually the metal becomes so hot that it begins to glow a deep orangey-red. The blacksmith pulls it out of the fire and for several moments fire and metal are joined together. Cold gray hard iron remains fully iron, but changes its character and becomes red and molten. Normally flames of fire are wispy, shifting, intangible. But for a few moments the two are joined together, the wispy, shifting fire is contained within the iron itself. If you're like me, whenever I see a blacksmith, I am fascinated, mesmerized by the joining together of the two into this red hot, glowing mass. In the iron there is a new power, a power to shine and to burn, a power that is the characteristic of the fire. The natural characteristics of the iron have not changed. The iron has not become transformed into fire only, nor has it been transformed into another substance like lead or water. Both remain what they were, fire and iron, but the two are joined together as mesmerizing fire-iron, iron-fire.

For centuries now this image of the joining together of fire and iron has been used as a partial explanation of something much more fascinating, much more mesmerizing. For two thousand years now people have wondered how God could take on humanity, how Christ could be both fully human and fully divine. For unbelievers, Jews, Muslims and others, this joining together of Godhood and manhood seems impossible. Even to us, whom the Holy Spirit has called and enlightened with the Gospel, this welding together of humanity and divinity can seem difficult at times. How could the Great King of the Universe, who created all that is with his Word, take on the form of his lowly creation, the form of man? How could an almighty, all-knowing God of the cosmos become a humble-looking, limited human being? How could these two natures, God and human, come together into one person, one Christ? <>It does boggle our human mind that God has revealed Himself to us in this way. But the image of fire and iron capture Christ's nature in an important way. Our human nature is like the iron, tangible but in its normal form cold and gray. But when that human nature was entered by God in Christ Jesus, its normal form took on new qualities, the red glowing qualities of divinity. The fire, representing the God-qualities of Christ, was no longer just intangible, spiritual, but now was touchable, concrete within the creation itself. The creator became part of the creation. Both parts, both aspects of Jesus Christ, his humanity and his "godness", his divinity, are mysteriously and mesmerizingly woven together. As Paul proclaims in our text: For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him (v. 19). Jesus is the man in whom God fully does God. In this God-Man we can be truly fascinated, truly mesmerized.

But it's hard for us to hold these two natures of Christ together in our minds. We tend to overemphasize one against the other. If we overemphasize Christ's "god-ness" we tend to view him as aloof, as somewhere out there, as uninterested in us personally. We then tend to think like the people in our Malachi 3 lesson, that God is no more interested in the righteous people than in the evil ones. But we can rest assured that Jesus is as interested in each of us as He was the faithful thief on the cross, assuring him of his place in paradise. If we overemphasize Christ' humanness, we tend to see him only as one of the world's great religious teachers, just another like Buddha or Confucius. Then we tend to forget how truly different and cosmos-changing Jesus Christ actually is. We forget that simply touching him brings healing, deliverance, that trusting in him brings forgiveness and new life. When we see only the fire or only the iron, the fascination with the uniqueness of the God-man Christ can be lost. But when we allow ourselves the opportunity to hear and read words like those in our Colossians text, we do become mesmerized with this union between the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ.

We don't even know for sure what He looked like. No drawings or paintings that might have been done by people who actually saw him have survived. Classic conjecture is that He looked something like this, a picture we routinely show to our Early Childhood Center Students so that they have a tangible image to picture in their minds.

But while we don't really know what He looked like, Scripture reveals to us what He was like, and what He came to do. He didn't come just to mesmerize us by joining together God and man like fire and iron. That would have been amazing enough for us. But he came not just to be unique, but to do the completely unique. As our text says, He came to rescue us from the dominion of darkness, to bring us into His own kingdom, to forgive and redeem us.

It is fascinating, mesmerizing to consider that God himself took on the form of man. The creator became part of the creation. But even more fascinating, even more mesmerizing is the purpose for his coming. He didn't come just to show us He could become a God-man combination. Jesus, the God-man, came for an even more amazing reason.

In 1790, near the town of Rosetta, Egypt, an officer in Napoleon's Army found a black basalt slab with writing on it. He had stumbled over an archaeological discovery that unlocked many of the mysteries of ancient Egypt. You see, this stone, now called the Rosetta Stone, had a royal decree written in three languages hundreds of years before Jesus' birth. The first language was Greek, which was known. The other two languages were ancient Egyptian scripts, languages that linguists at that time had been unable to decipher. But because the same decree was in a writing that the linguists knew and could compare to the unknown languages, they could then decipher other writings in the pyramids and other places, unlocking the mysteries of ancient Egypt at that time. Jesus is like that Rosetta Stone. In Jesus God provides the key to understanding God's way of peace and life for us, to the rescue and forgiveness that he brings to us. (from Chris Carlson, "The Key to Truth," in The Lutheran Message, 1996, p. 58). In Jesus we can tangibly read God's language of love in our own human language.

Jesus, the God-man came to reveal the ultimate purpose of God. Jesus didn't come to simply teach us about the wisdom of God, to make us better people. We were, we are too far gone for that.   Our human nature is in rebellion against God and is bound to death. Jesus the God-man came to make peace between God and man, "through his blood shed on the cross." God came to earth for a purpose, to die – to die in our place. This too is amazing and perplexing, that Christ our Lord, King of the Universe, the Creator of all life, came to die, to give up his life for criminals, for sinners, for me, for you. God came to earth -- to die, to die for you. He came to die, and to be the first man to be resurrected, "the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead" (v.18). For God to join his nature together with human nature is truly mesmerizing. For him to do it for the purposes He did is truly astonishing.

(Luke 9: 20) Christ asked the disciples ""But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?" Peter answered, "The Christ of God."
21 Jesus strictly warned them not to tell this to anyone. (at that time).
22 And he said, "The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life."

The Christ of God, the Son of Man comes and asks each of us and everyone in the world: "Who do you say that I am?" Peter blurted out the fine confession that Jesus was the Anointed One of God, the Messiah. But we learn later that Peter didn't really understand the full meaning of his words. The Christians in Colossae were apparently confusing who Christ is and what he did also. That is why Paul wrote to them the words of our text. We can give thanks that God's Word still continues to mesmerize us with who Christ is and shock us with what He has done for us.

The grace and peace of our God-Man Jesus Christ, the God who died for us, the man who rose again for us, be with us always. Amen.