Goldsworthy: the Incarnation is "the substitution of God's righteous history in Christ for our fallen and condemned histories of rebellion."

"The movement from creation to new creation is inevitable. The incarnation as historical event is the focus of God's rule in world history...the incarnate Word of God brings history to its goal and interprets it." In the gospel, the "Incarnate God as the Word becomes flesh. This historic Word-event is God's fullest and final word to mankind."

But it's not simply revelation. The Incarnation is a "redemptive word-event that has the power to break through our self-imposed, sinful darkness... Redemption is in the event by which God reconstructs an acceptable human history while judging the unacceptable." We must have the Incarnation for our Redemption... it is "the substitution of God's righteous history in Christ for our fallen and condemned histories of rebellion....to be clothed in the righteousness of Christ is to be redefined, not by our own failed histories, but by his perfect history." The message of the Incarnation proclaims "a message of hope which sees both the end to the history of fallenness and the new beginning of a history that merges with eternity." -- Graeme Goldsworthy, Gospel Centered Hermeneutics, pp. 222-228