There is a verse in Isaiah that names God three ways in a single breath, and there is a verb in Exodus that most readers pass over without noticing it carries a future tense at all. Put them together and something emerges that most treatments of the Incarnation never quite say out loud: becoming is not a small thing. It is not something any being can simply do. It takes the full weight of omnipotence to become anything at all without loss — and only One has ever had that weight to spend.
Judge, Lawgiver, King
Isaiah writes to a people who have watched their government collapse, their kings fail, their law courts corrupted. In the middle of that ruin, he says this:
“For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; he will save us” (Isaiah 33:22).
In the Hebrew, the name YHWH is repeated three times in one verse, once for each office — Judge, Lawgiver, King. That repetition is not decoration. Isaiah is telling Israel that every human government they have ever trusted was only ever a shadow. Their true government was never seated in a palace, never carried by a scepter made of wood or bronze. Israel’s government is YHWH Himself, worn in three offices at once.
Six centuries later, the New Testament will not let that verse rest as poetry. Jesus is presented as the righteous Judge who will judge the world (John 5:22). He climbs a mountain and teaches with an authority that reinterprets and fulfills the Law itself (Matthew 5–7). John sees Him on a white horse with a name written on His robe: King of Kings (Revelation 19:16). Judge, Lawgiver, King — the three offices Isaiah pinned to the name YHWH, worn openly by a man from Nazareth.
That is the doorway into this study. What lies behind it runs deeper still.
The Name That Cannot Be Loaned
When the Greek translators of the Old Testament, two centuries before Christ, came to the name YHWH, they did not transliterate it. They translated it — every time — as Kyrios. Lord. Not a polite address, not a term of respect the way we might call someone “sir.” Kyrios in the Septuagint became the standing, settled way of naming the covenant God of Israel Himself.
So when the New Testament calls Jesus Kyrios Iēsous — Lord Jesus — it is not offering Him a compliment. Paul quotes the prophet Joel, who wrote that whosoever calls upon the name of the LORD shall be delivered, and applies it, without hesitation, to Jesus (Romans 10:13; Joel 2:32). Paul writes to the Philippians that every tongue will confess Jesus Christ is Lord — deliberately echoing Isaiah’s own declaration that every knee will bow to YHWH and every tongue swear allegiance to Him alone (Isaiah 45:23; Philippians 2:11).
This is not a name shared by accommodation. It is not borrowed. The New Testament writers are doing something that would have been unthinkable blasphemy to them if it were not true: placing the covenant name of Israel’s God on a man they had watched eat, sleep, weep, and die.
Which raises the real question underneath all of this. What kind of being could actually carry that weight?
A Question the Text Itself Provokes
Go back to the bush.
When God tells Moses His name, He does not give him a noun. He gives him a sentence: ehyeh asher ehyeh — “I AM WHO I AM,” or, just as faithfully, “I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE” (Exodus 3:14).
Sit with that second rendering before moving past it, because it invites a question the first rendering does not. The Hebrew imperfect behind ehyeh does not map neatly onto English tense, and Exodus itself supplies an immediate, ordinary reason for the future-oriented sense: two verses later God says, “I will be [ehyeh] with you” (Exodus 3:12) — a straightforward promise of future presence and faithfulness, nothing exotic about the grammar. So the future dimension is not a puzzle the language forces on us. But once that legitimate future sense is granted on its own grammatical terms, a theological question still remains worth asking: if God is already the First and the Last, already complete in His own being with nothing to develop or still arrive at, what is that future self-disclosure actually for? What is God’s freedom to “prove Himself” across history in service of, if not His being’s completion?
That tension is worth staying inside rather than resolving too quickly. The answer Scripture gives is not that God’s being is incomplete. It is that His freedom is not. The future carried inside ehyeh names God’s sovereign liberty to act, reveal, and prove Himself faithful across a history that has not yet finished unfolding. But a harder question waits underneath: if the future tense in God’s own self-disclosure is not describing incompleteness, what, precisely, does the completed canon let us see it was pointing toward?
Held that way — not as a grammatical puzzle but as a theological one — the phrase becomes something worth calling mystery-laden: not a coded prophecy of what was to come (the text will not bear that weight, and no honest reading of Exodus 3 hands Moses foreknowledge of Bethlehem), but a self-disclosure that later revelation allows the reader to see with a canonical depth Moses himself could not yet have perceived. That is the shape sensus plenior actually takes at its best: not meaning smuggled into the text from outside it, but a fuller resonance the completed canon uncovers in words that were always, on their own terms, true.
Only He Who Is Could Become
Consider what a future tense for God’s own self-revelation could possibly answer to, once you set aside the idea that His being needs completing. Consider, too, what becoming itself actually requires — for anything, anywhere.
Every creature that changes must borrow the power to change from somewhere outside itself. A child grows because food, time, and a body not of his own making do the work. A seed becomes a tree because sunlight and soil the seed did not create act upon it. Nothing in creation can become anything without something else holding it up while it changes. Scripture says it plainly: “in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). He forms us in the womb: “my substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret” (Psalm 139:15). He sends forth His Spirit and things are created; He renews the face of the earth (Psalm 104:30). Every act of becoming, anywhere, at any time, is Him holding it up. He is not merely independent of that dependence — He is, at every moment, the sustaining reason any dependent thing manages to become anything at all.
Which means only one kind of being could ever become something new without being propped up by someone greater. Only the One who already possesses full being — already was, already is, already will be, with nothing lacking in any direction — has the standing to enter into becoming on His own power rather than borrowing it. Any lesser being that tried would simply be reshaped by something outside itself. Only the One who is the source of all becoming could become and remain entirely, uncompromisingly, Himself.
Put plainly: only the One whose being encompasses was, is, and is to come — all at once, none of it successive, none of it still arriving — could pull off the feat of becoming. Everything else that changes is being changed. He alone can become and still be the one doing the becoming.
That is not a small theological flourish. That is the whole reason the Incarnation is called a mystery rather than simply an event. Paul later says of Christ that “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9) — not a diminished deity fitted into flesh, but the full weight of divine being, entirely present. The writer of Hebrews states the becoming just as plainly: “he also himself likewise took part of the same,” speaking of flesh and blood (Hebrews 2:14). Full deity, undiminished. Full humanity, genuinely assumed. Only omnipotence could accomplish such a union without diminution of deity or unreality of humanity. (This is not a claim that human growth or change is unreal — only that it is never self-sustaining. Creatures genuinely grow and change; they simply do so by borrowing the power to exist at all from the One who does not.)
Say plainly what that should sound like from where we stand: it is, on its face, absurd. The Source of all created existence entering the very condition He Himself sustains. The One who holds up every becoming choosing to become. Not because He needed to. Because the God who had already shown Himself Provider to Abraham, Deliverer to Israel, King to David, and Redeemer through the prophets — one facet of His freedom revealed at a time, across a history not yet finished — was preparing to show something no earlier age had seen: not another word about Himself, but Himself, entering the world His own sustaining power still holds together.
Being-Language Meets Becoming-Language
John’s Gospel gives us two verbs, placed side by side on purpose, and something genuinely happens where they meet.
“In the beginning was the Word” — ēn in the Greek. Not began. Not came to be. Was — continuous, uncreated, without a starting point (John 1:1). This is the vocabulary of being — conceptually the same ground ehyeh and hayah occupy in Hebrew, though the words themselves share no lexical descent across the two languages. Hayah, the root behind God’s own name, carries the ideas of to be, to exist, to happen, and, remarkably, to become, all folded into one word.
Then: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” — egeneto, from ginomai, marking a real, dated, historical entry into a new condition (John 1:14). This is the vocabulary of becoming — a different family of words entirely, with no claim of etymological descent from the Hebrew ehyeh. But the concepts these two unrelated vocabularies name collide directly at Bethlehem, and the collision is the whole point. The language of eternal being and the language of historical becoming, which have no reason to ever occupy the same sentence, are made to occupy the very same verse.
There is no contradiction in that collision, because the two verbs are not competing for the same job. John never says the Word became God. The Word already was God, and that was never in question, never undone. What the Word became was flesh — true humanity, genuinely entered into, without surrendering one particle of what He eternally was.
This becoming is not merely one more instance of something God had already done before. Across the Old Testament, God had shown Himself in many forms — a bush that burned and was not consumed, a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, the Angel of the LORD meeting His people on the road, His glory filling the tabernacle until the priests could not stand to minister. Every one of these was a manifestation, a true and gracious showing of His presence. None of them was a becoming. The fire did not become God, and God did not become the fire. But at Bethlehem, for the first time in the story, the Word did not merely appear in a form. He entered one. He took to Himself a human nature He had never possessed before, and He has not laid it down since.
Paul describes exactly this descent: though He existed in the form of God, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men (Philippians 2:6–7). Read carefully, this is not a divine being visiting in disguise, and it is not deity setting aside any of its own attributes. It is God genuinely becoming what He had never been, while remaining, without interruption, all that He eternally was. The emptying is not subtraction from His deity; it is the taking on of a servant’s form and a mortal condition He had not previously known — an addition, not a diminishment.
The God who said “I will be” at the bush now stands at the center of that becoming — Immanuel, God with us. The promise of presence is fulfilled in flesh and blood.
And here is the fact this study most wants to leave with you, because it may be the strangest and least examined part of the whole mystery. While the eternal Word was entering a womb, taking on cells, growing bone and blood and breath the way every human infant does, He remained, at that very moment, the sustaining power beneath the womb He was entering, the cells He was forming, the breath He had not yet drawn. He did not step outside His governance of creation in order to become part of it. The hands that were being knit together in Mary’s womb were being held in being by the very Word who was, at the same instant, becoming those hands. Nothing else in all of Scripture asks us to hold two truths quite that close together.
The Mystery of Godliness
Paul has a name for exactly this. He calls it, without qualification, a mystery: “Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh” (1 Timothy 3:16).
It is worth being honest about the text here, because a careful study owes its reader honesty even in small things. Some of the oldest manuscripts read differently at this point — rather than “God was manifest,” a number of early witnesses read “He who was manifest,” a pronoun rather than the word God spelled out. The argument of this study does not need to settle that textual question, because it does not depend on it. Whichever reading is original, the passage confesses exactly what John already told us in his prologue: the Word who was God became flesh. Whether Paul’s sentence names Him explicitly or simply says “He,” John has already told us who “He” is.
So the sequence stands, compact and complete: He was. He became flesh. He was manifested in the flesh. Being, without beginning. Becoming, at a point in history so real it could be dated. And manifestation — the invisible God made visible, touchable, woundable, in a body that bled. What had been mystery-laden at the burning bush came into a depth of clarity at the manger that Moses could not yet have seen.
Not Because He Lacked — Because He Loved
Here the argument has to stop being only about power, because power alone does not explain why any of this happened.
There was nothing lacking in God that becoming man could supply. The Incarnation added nothing to the perfection of His divine being — but through it He purposed to bring a people to Himself: a redeemed household, a family, many sons brought to glory. What He gained was not something His deity lacked, but those whom His love determined to make His own. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). Not compulsion. Not necessity. Love — spent by the only One who had an infinite supply of power to spend, on creatures who had nothing to offer Him in return.
That is the answer beneath the mechanism. The mechanism explains how becoming was even possible for God at all. Love explains why He was willing to pay a price He never owed.
Judge, Lawgiver, King — and Now, With Us
Return to where this study began. Isaiah’s Israel needed a Judge who could not be bribed, a Lawgiver who could not be repealed, a King who could not be dethroned. What Isaiah could not have told them — what he simply declared as trustworthy fact about YHWH — is that the God who holds those three offices would one day hold them from inside a human body, having entered our condition without losing an ounce of the authority that seated Him on the throne in the first place.
That is the wonder underneath every page of this study. Not simply that God can do all things — Scripture never doubted that. But that among the things His omnipotence makes possible is this: to become, and in becoming, to lose nothing of who He eternally is — while sustaining, at that very moment, every creaturely process caught up in the humanity He assumed, even as He was personally undergoing that becoming. The womb, the cells, the breath He had not yet drawn: all of it dependent on Him, as every creaturely process always is. The becoming itself was His own sovereign act, owed to no cause outside Him. No creature can do that. Only He who is, was, and is to come could ever become — and remain, entirely and forever, Himself. And He did not become for His own sake. He became for yours.
He is. He was. He is to come. And because He is all three, He alone could become — and He became, out of love, for you.
See also: I AM and Became — tracing how the same divine name, Ehyeh, echoes through Isaiah’s declaration “I am He” and into Jesus’ own words in John, with the crowd’s reaction in the temple courtyard as living proof the connection was heard and understood in the first century.