When Colossians 2:9 says, “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,” we are meant to stagger in wonder. Will the Empire State Building occupy a doghouse? Will a killer whale fit inside an ant? Yet the Gospels tell us that omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, utter eternality, and holiness dwelled in a tiny, unformed person. “The head of all rule and authority” (Col. 2:10) had one of those wobbly baby heads. The government rested on his baby-fatted shoulders (Isa. 9:6). The miracle of the incarnation is vitally important to Christian faith. We must hold it tightly or we lose some of the majesty of God’s glory in Christ. God came as unborn child, as helpless babe, as dawdling toddler, as awkward teenager, as breathing, sweating, bleeding man so that Christ would experience all of humanity. And he experienced all of humanity so that we might receive all of him for all of us. Surely if God came as a vulnerable, needful, weak baby, we have no need to fear for our own

The New Testament teaches that Jesus was God come in the flesh—“in him all the fullness of the Godhead dwelled bodily” (Col 2:9). He was God yet he suffered. He experienced weakness, a life filled “with fervent cries and tears” (Heb 5:7). He knew firsthand rejection and betrayal, poverty and abuse, disappointment and despair, bereavement, torture, and death. And so he is “able to empathize with our weaknesses” for he “has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet without sin” (Heb 4:15). On the cross, he went beyond even the worst human suffering and experienced cosmic rejection and a pain that exceeds ours as infinitely as his knowledge and power exceeds ours. There is no greater inner agony than the loss of a love relationship. We cannot imagine, however, what it would be like to lose not just a human relationship that has lasted for some years but the infinite love of the Father that Jesus had from all eternity. The separation would have been infinitely unbearable. And so Jesu

The writer to the Hebrews, purporting to expound the perfection of Christ’s high priesthood, starts by declaring the full deity and consequent unique dignity of the Son of God (Heb. 1:3, 6, 8–12), whose full humanity he then celebrates in chapter 2. The perfection, and indeed the very possibility , of the high priesthood that he describes Christ as fulfilling depends on the conjunction of an endless, unfailing divine life with a full human experience of temptation, pressure, and pain (Heb. 2:14–17; 4:14–5:2; 7:13–28; 12:2–3). Packer, J. I. (1993). Concise theology: a guide to historic Christian beliefs. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House.