Part 1: The Most Important Thing | Part 2: Moving to the Dump | Part 3: It Gets Worse | Part 4: And Worse | Part 5: Reversal | Part 6: Risen | Part 7: Ascended

Seated at the right hand of the Father, in a position of infinite glory and authority, Christ—surprisingly—serves his people. He intercedes for us, we are told (He 7.25); he acts as our attorney before God’s throne (1J 2.1).

I wonder—why does he do that? The Father is propitiated, is he not (Ro 3.25; 1J 2.2, 4.10)? He’s not angry; the Son doesn’t have to hold him back from pouring out his wrath on us, because the Son himself has absorbed that wrath in our place. The Father looks on us with love, with grace, with shalom. When you, as his child, sin, he doesn’t regress to rage, as though you’re a stranger. He’s your Father, the most perfectly loving father you’ve ever had.

Further, the Father is omniscient; he doesn’t need the Son to remind him of his death on the cross and the consequent forgiveness of our sins and statement of our justification. He hasn’t forgotten, because he cannot forget.

So why the intercession? Why the presence of the attorney?

I think we should be tentative about our logical extrapolations from Scripture; we should recognize when the Scripture directly states things, and when it doesn’t. So my most precise answer to my own question is that I don’t know why.

But I suspect—and this is just a guess—that it’s a reflection of the fact that God is One. The persons of the Godhead are indeed distinct, and they do carry out different roles—theologians refer to that as “separability of operations”—but those separate operations are quite limited (typically confined to eternal generation for the Son and eternal procession for the Spirit—although those restrictions are speculative as well). The triunity of the Godhead does not contradict God’s essential unity. And I suspect that the visible presence of the Son at the Father’s throne, metaphorically pleading our case, is an expression of that unity. The Father and the Son are not at cross purposes; they act together to accomplish, recognize, and delight in our justification, our presence at the table.

In the end, we are one with the One God.

And so even in his exaltation, he ministers on our behalf.

Astonishing.

But he is, in fact, infinitely exalted. As the millions of angels sing around his throne, he is worthy—because he was slain (Re 5.11-12).

• He is before all things, and by Him all things consist; He is worthy.
• All things were created by Him, and for Him; He is worthy.
• The government shall be upon his shoulder; He is worthy.
• His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace; He is worthy.
• He is the beloved Son, in whom the Father is well pleased; He is worthy.
• He who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him; He is worthy.
• He has blotted out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, nailing it to his cross; and having looted principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it; He is worthy.
• He is our peace, who has made both Jews and Gentiles one, and has broken down the middle wall of partition between us; He is worthy.
• He is declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead; He is worthy.
• He is by the right hand of God exalted, and has shed forth his Spirit at Pentecost and in all the days since; He is worthy.
• He is man; He is God; He is worthy.

Worthy is the Lamb to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.

Amen. Let it ever be so.

And still, there’s more.

Part 9: Coming Again | Part 10: Final Thoughts

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Part 1: The Most Important Thing | Part 2: Moving to the Dump | Part 3: It Gets Worse | Part 4: And Worse | Part 5: Reversal | Part 6: Risen

The exaltation continues.

For forty days and nights the risen Christ walks among His disciples, collecting witnesses to His resurrected glory (1Co 15.5-7). Then, Luke writes, “while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9).

He was taken up. This is a fitting end to His earthly ministry. Surrounded by those He loved to the uttermost (Jn 13.1), He is lifted up from among them to take His place as the glorified Son of God.

His great humiliation comes to an end. He is not left in the garbage dump of earth, to rub shoulders with sinful mankind and suffer the revulsion of sin forever.

The New Testament writers see this moment as a significant event, a major development beyond what the resurrection has already declared. Paul tells Timothy that Jesus—whom, according to a significant manuscript tradition, he calls “God” (1Ti 3.16)—was “received up into glory.” It’s interesting to me that before the ascension, the resurrected Jesus doesn’t appear to exhibit any visible “glory”: at the empty tomb, Mary thinks he’s the gardener (Jn 20.15), and the two disciples on the Emmaus road think he’s just some guy walking in the same direction—and not a very attentive one at that (Lk 24.18), and the disciples on the boat take a minute to recognize the man tending the fire on the beach (Jn 21.7). But with the Ascension, the Son is glorified; his status visibly changes, not only by virtue of his physical ascension—that’s obviously not an ordinary phenomenon—but apparently in his appearance as well.

Peter likewise recalls for his readers the fact that Jesus “is gone into heaven” (1P 3.22) and notes the close association of that event with his reception of cosmic authority.

Which brings us to the immediate subsequent of the Ascension.

Repeatedly the New Testament writers connect the Ascension with the Session, or the fact that on his arrival in the heavenly dimension, the Son took a seat at the right hand of the Father (Ro 8.34; Ep 1.20; Co 3.1). I think the most elegant statement of this concept comes from someone whose name we don’t even know, the anonymous author of Hebrews:

¹ God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, ² Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; ³ Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; ⁴ Being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they (He 1.1-4).

That act—sitting down in the presence, and indeed on the right hand, of the Father—is the most impressive and astonishing event in this whole series.

No subject sits in the presence of majesty. Refusing to rise for the king will get an earthly subject’s head removed. How much more an offense it is to sit in the presence of the Majesty on high.

Yet Christ does sit, and it is no offense. He is not subject to His Majesty; He is His Majesty.

He has completed His great work—“It is finished,” he cried on the cross—and now, in an ultimate act of exaltation, He sits down in the presence of the Majesty on high.

There is much more yet to say. We have departed somewhat from our initial text in Philippians 2, and Paul there tells us more about this phase of Christ’s ministry. And the next one.

We continue in the next post.

Part 8: Enthroned | Part 9: Coming Again | Part 10: Final Thoughts

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1: The Most Important Thing | Part 2: Moving to the Dump | Part 3: It Gets Worse | Part 4: And Worse | Part 5: Reversal

And now begins the Father’s work in making visible—making obvious—all that had been implied in those earlier prophecies and private events.

The body of the executed “blasphemer” and “seditionist” has been removed from the cross and placed in a borrowed tomb—a really nice one, apparently, but one that gives no hint of what is about to happen. The corpse has not been sufficiently prepared for burial after the Jewish custom, because the preparations have been hurried and then interrupted by the arrival of the Sabbath rest.

His followers return dejectedly to their homes, wondering what has happened, and how, and what could possibly be next.

The cosmos waits.

And very few know, when it happens early Sunday morning, about the earthquake and the rolling away of the stone, opening the view to the interior of the tomb, and thus revealing that there’s nothing there.

The body is gone and unaccounted for—but there is an unearthly presence (Mt 28.2-4).

The sentries collapse, and probably later hightail it to headquarters and begin to make arrangements to protect themselves from the execution that should certainly come for their dereliction of duty.

And as daylight slowly rises, a small group of women comes to the tomb to finish the burial procedure, to wrap the body in fabric strips that hold in place the spices that will delay decomposition and disguise the inevitable odor.

They are surprised that the stone has been moved, and the sentries are apparently nowhere to be seen. But the unearthly one says to them, “Don’t be afraid. I know you’re looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here, for he is risen, as he predicted. Come in, and see where the body was.”

Apparently a few seconds later, he continues, “Now go, and tell his disciples that he is resurrected. He’s going into Galilee and will meet you there, I promise.”

Some of those who insist on disbelieving the obvious have an interesting theory here. They have devised the “wrong tomb” theory. The poor ladies, they say, were too upset by the emotions of the preceding days to understand what was being said to them. “He is not here,” they were told; “You have come to the wrong tomb. Come over here, and see the place where he is really buried.”

I do not understand why this theory isn’t roundly condemned for the sexist, misogynistic assertion that it is. A theological conservative would be laughed off the stage for suggesting such a thing.

You know how women are. Emotional, hysterical. Can’t follow directions, and all that.

Silly women? No. Silly scholars. The angel’s words are clear and unmistakable. He was crucified; He is risen. You shall see Him.

Death could not keep its prey, Jesus my Savior;
He tore the bars away, Jesus my Lord.
Up from the grave He arose
With a mighty triumph o’er His foes;
He arose a victor from the vast domain,
And He lives forever with His saints to reign.
He arose; He arose; Hallelujah, Christ arose!

Paul tells us that “had the princes of this world known” what was happening at Calvary, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (I Co 2:8). They thought to destroy their Great Enemy; instead they destroyed themselves. They were no match for the Lord of Glory, even at His lowest point.

He is risen.

But the exaltation has just begun.

Next time.

Part 7: Ascended | Part 8: Enthroned | Part 9: Coming Again | Part 10: Final Thoughts

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1: The Most Important Thing | Part 2: Moving to the Dump | Part 3: It Gets Worse | Part 4: And Worse

We’ve traced Paul’s description of Jesus’ humiliation in Philippians 2, all the way to “even the death of the cross” (Php 2.8). It is a deep humiliation indeed.

But the Father does not leave the Son in that abyss. With just one word, we learn that all we have seen so far is just prelude—or more precisely, it is simply the ground for an earthshaking conclusion.

“Therefore,” Paul writes (Php 2.9). “Therefore.” You can feel the atmosphere of the room crackle electric; you can all but hear the power of Paul’s voice as he speaks to his amanuensis. “Therefore, God has highly exalted him.”

Some years ago, I was walking on the beach at the Isle of Palms near Charleston, SC, when I spied an old man clambering over the boulders of a jetty as he worked his way up the beach toward me. He had on swim trunks and no shirt. As he approached I realized that I recognized him. It was Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings. At the time Hollings was a very powerful political force, in his third term in the US Senate. Just two years later he would be a candidate for president—though he got trounced in New Hampshire and then endorsed Gary Hart, who was (unsuccessfully) battling Walter Mondale for the nomination.

But what I remember about that scene was how ordinary—in fact, weak and vulnerable—the man looked. If I’d been closer when I saw him on the jetty, I probably would have run over and offered to help him.

People are like that. The most powerful of us are ordinary and weak outside of our carefully controlled public manifestation.

The man on the cross is not like that.

To begin with, he is the Son, the beloved one. His exaltation began long before He ascended to heaven, even before he rose from the dead. It springs, of course, from His person, who He is, and He has always been worthy and exalted, from eternity past. But even during His earthly ministry, in the midst of His humiliation, we see the light of His glory shining through.

We see it even before his birth, from the very first prophecy in the Bible, when God promises that “the seed of the woman” will crush the serpent’s head. We see it at his birth, when the aged prophet Simeon calls him “a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel” (Lk 2.32). We see it at his baptism, when a voice from heaven calls out, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Mt 3.17). We see it again on the holy mount, when “His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light” (Mt 17.2)—and the Voice came again (Mt 17.5).

And we see it hidden deep in his own words to Nicodemus, the great but benighted Jewish rabbi and Sanhedrist, when he says, in words dripping red, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (Jn 3.14). Here is a remarkable statement. What Nicodemus doesn’t see is that Jesus is speaking of his own death, the very death that we have described repeatedly here as his greatest humiliation. Speaking of the cross, Jesus says that He will be “lifted up.” At the very depth, as he dies the death of common criminal, bearing the sins of all mankind and being cursed while hanging on a tree, He is “lifted up.” Even his debasement is an exaltation.

In a very different context, speaking of Israel’s unbelief and the subsequent opening of the gospel to the Gentiles, Paul writes, “Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness?” (Ro 11.12). We can say here similarly, if the Son’s humiliation brings such glory and blessing, what will his exaltation bring?

More to come.

Part 6: Risen | Part 7: Ascended | Part 8: Enthroned | Part 9: Coming Again | Part 10: Final Thoughts

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1: The Most Important Thing | Part 2: Moving to the Dump | Part 3: It Gets Worse 

By becoming fully human—“in the likeness of men” (Php 2.7)—God the Son experienced restrictions that seem ordinary, normal to us, but they are utterly humiliating to the Eternal and All-Powerful God. We meditated on some of those in the previous post.

But now Paul takes it down to further, unimaginable humiliation.

Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Php 2.8).

It doesn’t get any worse than this.

He dies. And not at a ripe old age, surrounded by loving family who are singing him into the presence of the angels. Even that would be incomprehensible for God. He cannot die, and for him to die under the best of circumstances would still be abhorrent.

He dies young, in the prime of his life. He dies a criminal, convicted of things he has never done. I say “things”—plural—because the religious establishment changes the charge as they deem it necessary to the circumstance. Before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Supreme Court, the charge is blasphemy (Mt 26.65), because that’s the surest path to the death penalty from that body. But because the Romans have removed the Sanhedrin’s authority for capital punishment (Jn 18.31), they need to get a Roman judgment, and they know the Romans won’t care a fig about blasphemy, so they change the charge to sedition (Jn 19.12)—though even before the Romans they admit that the real reason is his claim to be the Son of God (Jn 19.7).

Whatever it takes.

There were lots of ways to execute a criminal in those days. None of them were as peaceful or nonviolent as taking too many sleeping pills. There’s stoning, and there’s beheading, which, if done expertly, is relatively painless—or so it appears. But God the Son is sent off to be crucified.

Crucifixion was intentionally designed to kill the victim as slowly and painfully as possible. I won’t go into details—you can find them in a few seconds on the internet—but put simply, there was not, and there never has been, a more painful way to die.

And that was the way he died.

Humiliation.

But there’s something else to be said.

I used the word victim a few lines up. It’s important to note that Jesus was no victim.

He said, “No one takes [my life] from me. I lay it down by myself” (Jn 10.18). As he stood before Pilate, who said “Don’t you know that I have authority to crucify you?!” (Jn 19.10), he responded, “You have no authority over me, except what has been given you from above” (Jn 19.11).

He had set his face like flint to go to Jerusalem (Is 50.7); he had said repeatedly that he “must” go to Jerusalem, and be rejected by the elders, and suffer, and be treated with contempt (Mt 16.21; Mk 8.31, 9.12).

And when it was time, when he knew that everything had been accomplished (Jn 19.28), when he had pronounced it “Finished!” (Jn 19.30), he mentally and volitionally reached inside himself, picked up his spirit, and delivered it over to his Father (Jn 19.30).

In a very real sense, he did not die from crucifixion; he died by an act of his will.

When the soldiers came to break his legs so that he would die before the onset of the Sabbath, they found that he was already dead. People usually lasted much longer—often several days, if there wasn’t a Sabbath to bring a merciful death.

So at his lowest—at the deepest valley of his humiliation—he was still calling the shots.

He was in charge the whole time.

Even the pagan centurion saw it (Mk 15.39).

Jesus obeys the Father, to the most extreme outcome—but without ever relinquishing his divine authority.

Now, we have none of that authority, except what the Son has delegated to his people (Mk 13.34; Jn 1.12; 1Co 8.9; He 13.10). But Paul tells us to have the mind that he had (Php 2.5).

If the Son can walk that path, which was infinitely deep, certainly we can trace the comparatively gentle slope of laying down what rights and privileges we have for the sake of the gospel.

Part 5: Reversal | Part 6: Risen | Part 7: Ascended | Part 8: Enthroned | Part 9: Coming Again | Part 10: Final Thoughts

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1: The Most Important Thing | Part 2: Moving to the Dump 

So now Christ has left the “ivory palaces” and moved to the dump. Let’s talk more specifically about what that was like.

Paul describes this change as taking on “the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men” (Php 2.7). That word form, by the way, is the same Greek word as form in the previous verse; you may recall from the previous post that Greek scholar J.B. Lightfoot defined it as “that which is intrinsic and essential to a thing.”

That means that he became just as much a servant as he was God before the incarnation. He became a human being, with all of the limitations that human beings have—with the one exception, as the author of Hebrews tells us, of being “without sin” (He 4.15).

So, to start with, he became embodied; he lived “here.” And “hereness” is not something he had known before, being spirit, and being omnipresent. Now, this is puzzling to us, because we’re not good at wrapping our finite minds around the concept of infinity. I said in the previous post that Jesus remained fully God throughout his incarnation—and that means, logically, that he retained all the attributes of God, which would include omnipresence. How does that work after he assumes a human body?

I dunno.

I’ve written before of the heaven-shaking nature of the (verbally, anyway) simple statement that God became man. How does Jesus experience omnipresence when he’s in a body that his disciples, who are pretty much always with him, can see is right there? Does he move with super speed? That’s not omnipresence. Does he just not go anywhere outside his body for 33 years? Well, “going” isn’t omnipresence either. Is he present bodily in Palestine, and everywhere else spiritually?

I dunno.

There’s a verse that seems to imply that his presence is not limited to his body. At one point he speaks of himself to Nicodemus as “the Son of man, who is in heaven” (Jn 3.13; note the present tense). But as it happens, there’s a significant question as to whether that final phrase is in the original text, so the case isn’t closed.

At any rate, the Son is now “placed”; he is located “here” or “there.” It appears to me that that’s a significant restriction. Even as he heals the sick, calms the storm, and raises the dead, He works from within a prison that He has constructed for Himself.

Second, he experiences, as Shakespeare put it in the mouth of Hamlet, “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” If he doesn’t eat, he gets hungry (Lk 4.2); if he doesn’t drink, he gets thirsty (Jn 19.28); and if he’s active, he gets tired.

Arriving at the community well in Samaria, he’s too exhausted to draw enough water for a personal drink, so he has to wait for someone to come along—in the hottest part of the day, when people didn’t go out to draw water, and traffic there would be sparse (Jn 4.6). When the boat he’s in enters a storm so violent that the professional fishermen among his disciples believe they’re doomed, he’s sound asleep in the bottom of the boat (Mt 8.24). Have you ever been tired enough to sleep through something like that?

Theologian Millard Erickson compares the incarnation to a three-legged race. The racers have three legs instead of two, but that doesn’t make them faster; it slows them down. When the Son added to his divine nature a human one, he ran, so to speak, more slowly. He who had never experienced difficulty at all found everything more difficult.

In his prayer to the Father the night before his death, Jesus refers to “the glory that I had with you before” (Jn 17.5).

“I had.” Past tense. That’s poignant. He was remembering the way it “used to be.” The everlasting, unchangeable God speaks of “used to be.”

This is a humiliation.

But Paul is not done yet.

Next time.

Part 4: And Worse | Part 5: Reversal | Part 6: Risen | Part 7: Ascended | Part 8: Enthroned | Part 9: Coming Again | Part 10: Final Thoughts

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1: The Most Important Thing

I have an exciting offer for you. I’m going to give you an opportunity to live at the dump. You’ll have your very own personal mound of trash, with all the rags you can wear and all the garbage you can eat. You’ll have lots of little companions—rats and cockroaches, mostly—to spend the night with. And best of all, you’ll be freed from the pesky necessities of bathing and brushing your teeth.

How many would like to take me up on this offer?

Hmm. Don’t see any takers.

I thought so. Surely no one would do such a thing.

But someone has. For you.

In our passage in Philippians 2, Paul writes that Jesus “emptied himself” and joined the human race. Have you thought about how great a step that was?

The passage begins (Php 2.6) by noting that the Son gave up a long, comfortable life.

That last sentence is an intentional understatement. His life was infinitely long, and it was infinitely beyond comfortable.

He existed in the form of God.

Now, that English has an unhealthy, even heretical implication. It sounds like he looked like God, but he wasn’t.

That’s most definitely not what Paul was saying, first, because the Greek in which he was writing doesn’t carry that implication, and second, because Paul is not an absent-minded sort of person who’s going to contradict both himself—

In Him [Christ, v 8] all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form (Co 2.9)

And the Apostle John—

The Word was God (Jn 1.1).

No, Paul is saying is that Jesus was in the same “shape” (morphe) as God—that is, he was just like him. New Testament scholar J.B. Lightfoot wrote on this passage that morphe is “that which is intrinsic and essential to a thing.”

Jesus didn’t “resemble” God; he was God.

Next Paul tells us that Jesus, incredibly, counted his heavenly abode and divine status as not “a thing to be grasped”—that is, not something he had to hold onto for dear life.

Picture a purse snatcher trying to seize a woman’s purse. This woman is a fighter; she hangs on. (A friend of mine did that once. I wasn’t surprised when she described her instinctive response.) This guy is not going to get my purse.

Jesus was so essentially God, so comfortable with his standing as God, that he didn’t need to be defensive; he didn’t need to hang onto it. He was fine with letting it go.

Now, that’s dangerous talk; I need to specify what I mean. I do not mean that he gave up his deity; he was still fully God for every minute he walked the earth. I do mean that it cost him something to join us here; he left “ivory palaces” (Ps 45.8) and perfect shalom (Is 6.1-3) to take up residence in a place that was anything but comfortable.

How uncomfortable?

Well, how uncomfortable would you be living in a garbage dump?

Does it bother you when you see sin all around you? How intensely do you suppose that sight discomfited the perfect Son of God, the one whose conscience, unlike yours and mine, was never hardened by the slightest sin?

Does it bother you when you’re rejected by people you care about? How much did it bother Jesus when he came to his own, and his own rejected him (Jn 1.11)? when a disciple of three years betrayed him with a kiss? when his own brothers didn’t believe in him (Jn 7.5)?

If sin is a stench in God’s nostrils, how repulsive was the human condition to Jesus every single day of his earthly life?

Next time we’ll look at the pain of the incarnation in a little more depth.

Part 3: It Gets Worse | Part 4: And Worse | Part 5: Reversal | Part 6: Risen | Part 7: Ascended | Part 8: Enthroned | Part 9: Coming Again | Part 10: Final Thoughts

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash