A meditation on what it cost Jesus to become a man.
This article is based on the slides produced for a recent Boxing Day talk at church.
John 3:16 demonstrates the scale of God’s love towards us in that He was willing to give us His Son. ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.’
Phil 2:6 ‘who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God,…’ The following two verses demonstrate the scale of this statement.
John 1:1-4 ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men’. This is an amazing description of Jesus as creator of all that exists including our vast Universe and all the marvellously designed life that we have on earth. The next verse from Colossians confirms this truth. (The following videos shed light on the size of our universe and the hallmarks of design we see in the natural world.)
Col 1:15-17 ‘He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.’
Interestingly the Bible indicates that as a man Jesus clearly understood His position in the Godhead. In Luke 2:49 Jesus at the age of 12/13 tells His parents that He must be about His Fathers business. When talking to Nicodemus (John 3:13) Jesus declares that He knows heavenly things because He comes from heaven. Likewise in John 8:14 Jesus tells the crowd in Jerusalem that He knew where He came from and in verse 58 He tells the same crowd that before Abraham was I AM. When the Pharisees challenged Him about the crowd praising Him during His triumphal entry into Jerusalem Jesus remarked that had they not praised Him the very stones would have cried out (Matt 17:5). This is very similar to the situation when Jesus healed 10 lepers and only one returned to worship Him – rather than rejecting His worship instead He asked where were the other nine lepers. (Luke 17:17). Another example of Jesus’s implicit knowledge of His Godhead is the time He said to the women at well if only you knew who was asking you for a drink (John 4:10) – this is similar to Jesus’s comment to Martha that Mary had chosen the better part by sitting at His feet listening to Him rather than being busy serving Him – the assumption being that Jesus, being God, had something so important to say that it took precedence over everything else. (On the Mount of Transfiguration God witnessed to Jesus’s identity by saying the He was His beloved Son in whom He was well pleased and that we should listen to Him (Luke 9:35) – God also demonstrated Jesus’s divine status through the many miracles He did (Luke 7:19-23) and as the following video shows modern miracles are still a way that God continues to testify to the fact Jesus is the Son of God.
Therefore it is in the light of this self-knowledge of His Godhead that we can see how much Jesus sacrificed by coming to earth as a man – which the next few verses will illustrate.
Phil 2:7 ‘but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a
bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men.’
Heb 10:5 ‘Therefore, when He came into the world, He said: “Sacrifice and offering You did not desire but a body You have prepared for Me.”’ This meant that Jesus would experience all our physical limitations e.g. tiredness and pain – as Hebrews 4:15 states He ‘was in all points tempted as we are…’.
Isaiah 53:2 ‘For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.’ This verse demonstrates His humility in that He grew up in a poor home, was a social outcast as He appeared to be born out of wedlock and as Nathanael commented “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:47). In coming to earth Jesus divested Himself of all His outward glory.
Isaiah 53:3 ‘He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not.’ Alongside the animosity of the religious leaders even His own family did not understand Him (John 7:5); the people of Nazareth were offended by Him (Matt 13:57) and Jesus was grieved at the unbelief of the people of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum (Luke 10:13-15).
Hebrews 12:3(a) ‘For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself,’ Throughout His public ministry, despite the mighty miracles He performed which testified to His divinity, almost all the religious leaders kept on contradicting what He said and did so to His face – yet He was the creator of heaven and earth. This point is clearly made in His conversation with Nicodemus (John 3:10-13).
As the following verses show, our meditation on what it cost Jesus to become a man, should encourage us to persevere in this race of life with all its trials and temptations – we will do well to remember the final request of the Lord’s Prayer ‘do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’ (Luke 11:4).
Hebrews 12:3 ‘Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted’.
Rev 2:10 ‘Do not fear any of those things which you are about to suffer… Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.’
James 1:12 ‘Blessed is the man who endures temptation; for when he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him.’
Revelation 2:7 “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes I will give to eat from the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.”