Our Incomparable Christ—Incarnation; Col 1:15-20; Phil 2:5-11; Nov 15, 2015, p.m.; 2nd of 4.
It’s great to be with you, and I’m grateful for the op-portunity. We’re considering “Our Incomparable Christ” as we explore Colossians 1:15-20. So far we’ve noted that Christ is the agent of creation, and everything that was cre-ated was created “for him.” God made us with a purpose, which means our lives have value and meaning. And that purpose is to honor God. So we ask ourselves, WWHG, “What would honor God?”
A little kid was drawing a picture at the kitchen table. His mom studied it for a moment and asked, “Hey, bud, what are you drawing a picture of?” The child said, “God.” Mom said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” The child re-plied, “They do now.”
Our text says Jesus is, “the image of the invisible God” (1:15). We can’t see God, but Jesus came in the flesh so we could see him. And when we’ve seen Jesus, we’ve seen God. Verse 19 says, “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ].” All his fullness. Everything of God was in Christ. Christ was God in human form. Later in Co-lossians it says, “In Christ all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form” (2:9). The unique, true, and living God revealed himself to us in the bodily form of Jesus of Nazareth. We call it the incarnation, and it is as theologically significant as the crucifixion and the resurrection. Without it there is no Christianity.
Before I retired a year ago we lived in central Ohio. Traffic was terrible. I remember sitting in backed up traffic one day and thinking, “If other people in other parts of the country are dealing with this same kind of traffic and spend-ing this much time sitting in their cars, we are really becom-ing an in-car-nation.” Sorry. That’s not what we’re talking about tonight.
The incarnation is another factor that makes Christ “incomparable.” I want to dig into it a bit and then think about its implications for our lives. Again, we’ll invite your questions and ideas at the end, so keep them in mind.
Another excellent passage of scripture that talks about the greatness of Christ is in Philippians 2. It says, “Christ Jesus, who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped (or exploited)” (2:6). Jesus was truly God in every way, but he didn’t cling to his prerogatives and privileges as God. He didn’t “pull rank.” Another translation says, “Though he was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as God” (NLT). He certainly could have. He had every right to the full exercise of his sovereign power as God. But he did the unthinkable.
“He made himself nothing” (2:7). Literally it says he emptied himself. It can be translated, “He laid aside his mighty power and glory” (NLT margin). He didn’t stop being God, but he set aside or limited the exercise of his divine at-tributes in order to become human. It says he took “the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (2:7). It isn’t that he stopped being God, but he added human attrib-utes to who he already was. This is what theologians refer to as the dual nature of Christ. He was fully God and fully human in one person. How that works is a mystery and a miracle. We can’t really understand how it happens, but we can affirm it to be true. We would expect God to be able to do some things that we simply can’t explain, right?
So the infinite God became a finite human and was born to the Virgin Mary. Christ’s birth didn’t mark the begin-ning of his existence. He always existed, but his being was somehow funneled or crammed into human cells that devel-oped in Mary’s womb, and he was born as a real baby that had all the messy bodily functions that we know in babies today. As John puts it, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (1:14). The sovereign God became a vulnerable human being.
How can this be? Why would God do such a thing? It can only be the incomparable love of God that could moti-vate such sacrifice. In no other major religion is there such a concept. Other religions establish rules and laws for people to follow to try to earn their way to the favor of the gods. The founders of other religions are considered great teachers, but what is important is the teaching, not the person of the founder. But Christianity is not a religion of rules. It is a rela-tionship with a person. Christianity is Jesus, not rules.
A Christmas card captured this truth very well. On the front of the card was a montage of many kings and dictators who have appeared throughout history: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin. The caption on the front of the card said, “History is crowded with men who would be gods.” Then on the inside were the words: “But only one God who would be man.”
That is the uniqueness of Christianity. Other religions are people striving to reach for God. In Christianity God reaches out to people by becoming one of us.
When I was in seminary back in the Stone Age, I saw a film called “The Ant Keeper,” and it spoke powerfully to me. Granted it was a bit cheesy, but the concept was power-ful. There was an ant keeper who loved his ants, but the ants were hostile and cruel. The red ants went to war with the black ants, and there was great carnage. It broke the ant keeper’s heart, but what could he do? He couldn’t talk to them in a way that they could understand. He couldn’t rea-son with them. Finally through deep magic he sent his son, who became an ant, in order to try to establish a relation-ship. Of course, the ants attacked and killed the son, but somehow he was transformed and came back to life and even had a few ants believe in him and follow him.
It’s kind of corny, but it illustrates the amazing self-emptying involved in the incarnation. For a person to be-come an ant is less of a step down than for God to become human. Human to ant is from one finite being to another. But God becoming human is the infinite coming into the finite.
Let’s think about an even lesser step down. Imagine you could choose to become a dog. What would you have to give up to become a dog? (ask congregation…) You would lose the ability to speak and have conversations. You would not have hands. You couldn’t tell people what you want. You couldn’t read or write or use a computer. You couldn’t drive. … The list is long. You would set aside a lot of privileges and prerogatives that you enjoy now. And that’s a rather small step down. It’s hard even to imagine the kind of step Christ took when he emptied himself and took on the nature of a servant, made in human likeness.
A few years ago there was a movie called “Life of Pi,” based on a novel by the same name. It’s a story about a Hindu boy who endures a shipwreck and finds himself sharing a life raft with a Bengal Tiger! In the early part of the book the boy hears the story of Jesus for the first time. He is both awed and appalled. He contrasts Jesus’ incarnation with that of the Hindu avatars. He tells how the Hindu gods came to earth “with shine and power and might.” Then he says,
“This [Jesus], on the other hand, who goes hungry, who suffers from thirst, who gets tired, who is sad, who is anxious, who is heckled and harassed, who has to put up with followers who don’t get it and op-ponents who don’t respect Him—what kind of a god is that? It’s a god on too human a scale, that’s what.”
This Hindu boy seems to understand better than many Christians the great sacrifice God made in becoming truly human. He experienced the full range of the human struggle, willingly and humbly. God with us. There is nothing like it in any other religion. It’s the most amazing story ever told.
It’s totally unique. Why would God do this? It’s a story of love. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16). We heard this morning that God cre-ated us and put us on the earth for a purpose. We were made to honor and glorify God. But in order for our love for God to be genuine, he created us with the freedom to choose to love him or not to love him. And we chose to turn our backs on God. We chose to exercise our independent spirit and go our own way. Rather than honoring God, we sought to honor self. And this created a great gap, a vast gulf between God and people. But God didn’t stop loving us. God didn’t turn his back on us. He had a plan to span the gulf and provide a way to be restored to him.
How could that happen? Two elements were required. On the one hand a Savior would have to be fully God, because only God can forgive sin. But a Savior would also have to be human to be able to fully relate to the human struggle and to die for sin. God and man came together in the person of Jesus Christ, and in so doing he makes possible the reconciliation of God and humanity.
Christ’s coming says in an amazing way that God considers you to be valuable. You matter. You are worth saving. God was willing to go to that extreme for you to live. An early thinker in the church said, “He became what we are, to make us what he is.” People could never attain their own salvation, so God reached out to us to accomplish what we could never do. That doesn’t happen in any other reli-gion. Only our Incomparable Christ has bridged the gap and become the Savior.
Back to the Philippians passage: “And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross! (2:8). Not only did he step down from heaven to earth, but he further humbled himself and took our place in death on the cross.
“Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (2:9-11). Wow. What an amazing Lord and Savior!
And there’s another very real benefit from the incarnation. It helps you know that God understands when you suffer. He’s been there. He has faced the same kind of struggles himself.
We read in Hebrews 2:14-15: “Because God’s chil-dren are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying” (Hebrews 2:14-15 NLT). He had to be one of us in order to die for us. And by dying he set us free.
The passage goes on: “it was necessary for him to be made in every respect like us, his brothers and sisters, so that he could be our merciful and faithful High Priest before God. Then he could offer a sacrifice that would take away the sins of the people. Since he himself has gone through suffering and testing, he is able to help us when we are being tested. Hebrews 2:17-18 (NLT) He has been there, so now he can help us.
Jerry Sittser had a wife and four children and a happy life. Then one day they were in a car accident and his wife, his daughter, and his mother were all killed. He found himself alone having to raise three little children. His grief was immense, as you can imagine. Three years later he wrote a book that expresses some of what he went through and what he learned. I want to share an extended passage that speaks to our subject tonight. This is from Jerry Sittser, A Grace Disguised. He speaks of
“the peculiar relationship that exists between God’s sovereignty and the Incarnation. God’s sovereignty means that God is in ultimate control of everything. The Incarnation means that God came into the world as a vulnerable human being. God was born to a woman, Mary. He was given a name, Jesus. He learned to walk and talk, read and write, swing a hammer and wash dishes. God embraced human ex-perience and lived with all the ambiguities and strug-gles that characterize life on earth. In the end he be-came a victim of injustice and hatred, suffered horribly on the cross, and died an ignominious death. The sovereign God came in Jesus Christ to suffer with us and to suffer for us. He descended deeper into the pit than we will ever know. His sovereignty did not protect him from loss. If anything, it led him to suffer loss for our sake. God is therefore not simply some distant being who controls the world by a mysterious power. God came all the way to us and lived among us...
“The God I know has experienced pain and there-fore understands my pain. In Jesus I have felt God’s tears, trembled before his death on the cross, and witnessed the redemptive power of his suffering. The Incarnation means that God cares so much that he chose to become human and suffer loss, though he never had to. I have grieved long and hard and in-tensely. But I have found comfort knowing that the sovereign God, who is in control of everything, is the same God who has experienced the pain I live with every day. No matter how deep the pit into which I descend, I keep finding God there. He is not aloof from my suffering but draws near to me when I suffer. He is vulnerable to pain, quick to shed tears, and ac-quainted with grief. God is a suffering Sovereign who feels the sorrow of the world.
“The Incarnation has left a permanent imprint on me. For three years now I have cried at every com-munion service I have attended. I have not only brought my pain to God but also felt as never before the pain God suffered for me. I have mourned before God because I know that God has mourned, too. God understands suffering because God suffered.” (pp. 158-159)
Our Incomparable Christ took the giant step from heaven to earth to make a way for us to go from earth to heaven. And in the process, he identified with us. He suf-fered. I was going to say he suffered like us. Actually he suf-fered more than we ever will. So he understands. He can help. He’s been there. “Since he himself has gone through suffering and testing, he is able to help us when we are being tested” (Hebrews 2:17-18 NLT).
I don’t know what you’re going through right now, but I know there are people here who are struggling. Either you are struggling now, or you’ve just come through a struggle, or you are about to enter a struggle. The good news is, when you are suffering or tempted, when you are struggling, you have an Advocate and a Friend who understands and can help you through it.
A simple and practical bit of advice I have given to a lot of people is this: When you are struggling, or facing dan-ger or temptation, just say the name of Jesus. Say it out loud if you can, or say it under your breath. But it is a way of call-ing on his name and drawing on his power right in the mo-ment. It’s kind of a prayer to tap his power right when you need it. So when you are suffering, or having a hard time, or you are tempted to do something you know you shouldn’t, just say his name: Jesus.
He’s your Incomparable Christ, and he’ll be there for you.
Q-A
One Solitary Life
How do you explain the greatness of the One we call “Our Incomparable Christ”?
He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village, and worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty. Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher. He never went to college; He never wrote a book, He never held an office, He never owned a home. He never traveled 200 miles from the place where He was born. He never did one of the things that we usually attribute to greatness. He had no credentials but Himself.
Although He walked the land over, curing the sick, giving sight to the blind, healing the lame, and raising people from the dead, the top established religious leaders turned against Him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him. He was turned over to His enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was spat upon, flogged, and ridiculed. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While He was dying, His executioners gambled for the only piece of property He had on earth, and that was his robe. When He was dead, He was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.
Twenty wide centuries have come and gone, and to-day He is the central Figure of the human race and the Leader of the column of progress.
I stand far within the mark when I say that all the ar-mies that ever marched, and all the navies that have ever been built and sailed, and all the parliaments that have ever sat, and all the kings that have ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of people upon this earth as has that One Solitary Life.
(Source unknown)
