Henderson Hills Baptist Church

The Humiliation of Christ

We are looking this week at the humiliation of Christ…that is Christ moving from His heavenly throne to the manger and then on to the cross…

Before His incarnation, Jesus, as part of the Trinity, held a position of prestige and independence that we cannot begin to fathom. He was and is God. He lived in heaven with His heavenly Father with all the honor and glory due His name. But, in His kindness and His love, He humbled Himself so that He might live a life we could never live to die a death that each of us deserves to die. This is the gospel. This is the love story of God.

Let’s think today of how time works. Time is the concept that we use to talk about the progression of existence. We are creatures of time. Everything in our life revolves around time. We have divided the cycle of the earth’s movement around the sun into 24 hours, each hour has 60 minutes, and each minute has 60 seconds. We use this calculation to refer to events that have already occurred, are currently occurring, or that we anticipate happening in the future. So, we say something happened 6 hours ago. That is time. We tell someone we will see them tomorrow. That is time.

We also use the word beginning to set a point in time when something starts and we refer to the end as a point when it will stop. There is a lot of discussion about when the world began. But, what about before the world began? What happened before the beginning began?

Jesus preexisted before time began. He was and always will be. When we talk about Jesus leaving heaven and coming to the earth, our minds cannot comprehend this concept without first considering time. Jesus was. Try to grasp that today. Jesus left all that heaven held to express His love for you individually. Jesus preexisted as God before time began. Philippians 2:6 says, “who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped”. What does in the form of God really mean? God is a Spirit, therefore, how could Jesus be in the form of God? Jesus was and is by nature, all the God is. He was fully God, in every way. He was holy, just, eternal and unchanging, just to name a few of His attributes. Paul writes in this passage that Jesus “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped”. That means that although Jesus was fully God, He refused to hold on to, or grasp, His rights as God. Jesus existed before time began as fully God. But, He was willing to release His rights for a period of time.

Most of us have packed away our ornaments, garland, wrappings, and our nativity sets. We carefully wrapped baby Jesus in tissue and gingerly placed Him in our attic boxes. I challenge you today, to unwrap that token of remembrance and consider watching Him grow up this year. Jesus didn’t stay a baby. He grew as a toddler, became a child, a teenager and then an adult. He willingly lived His human life with the ultimate goal of dying on the cross to pay the penalty for each of us to have a relationship with God. I cannot fathom such love. Can you? 

2 Peter 3:18

Dennis

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