The Humility and Exaltation of Christ
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2013 · 24 March 2013
The question, "Who is Jesus Christ?" is the most important question that needs to be answered. Peter answers in Matthew 16:16-17, "You're the Christ, the Son of the living God." And Jesus said to him, "Flesh and blood didn't reveal that to you." That didn't come from a human source. "But My Father who is in heaven revealed that to you." And that is the great revelation of Christianity that Jesus is God in human flesh, that is to say the eternal God becomes a man. And in Philippians 2 we learn how God explains who Jesus is.
Phillipians 2:5 ends with Christ Jesus and then it describes Him in these words: “6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
C.S. Lewis writes, "In the Christian story, God descends to re-ascend. He comes down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity, down to the very roots of the humanity which He Himself created. But He goes down to come up again and brings ruined sinners up with Him.”
This is the central miracle of Christianity. This is the defining reality of our faith. It is about the incarnation. It is the most grand and the most wondrous of all miracles. It is the theme of the text that I just read to you. This text is about the descent of God the Son. And on this Palm Sunday I want to just walk you through it one phrase at a time.
Let's begin with Philippians 2:6, "Christ Jesus, who although He existed in the form of God," let's stop there. The Bible is written in two languages, the Old Testament originally written in Hebrew and the New Testament originally written in Greek. And so we need to consider what the Greek words meant for they are the original words for the New Testament.
The word “existed” in Greek is a word that was used to express the continuance of a state or condition. It is not the common Greek word for being. It describes the essential nature of a person. It describes that part of a man which in spite of all the changes of life and all the circumstances remains the same. Paul is saying that Jesus existed as to His essential unchangeable nature in the form of God.
Now what does form of God mean? Whatever the form that God takes, it is all a reflection of His deepest being, what is in Himself. And God as to His form may appear as shining light in the garden, known as the Shekinah glory. He may appear as fire, He may appear as a cloud, He may manifest Himself in a number of ways. God the Son even manifested Himself visibly in the Old Testament as an angel called the angel of the Lord.
So we learn that Jesus is in the essential form of God. He never has been and never will be any other than God. Now His outward form changed. He was a fetus in a womb. He was an infant born. He was a child. He was a youth. He was an adult. But Paul is saying, Christ Jesus exists as to His nature in the unchanging character of God.
He is equal to God because He is God. And so He can say in John 10:30, "I and the Father are one." Or He can say in John 14:9, "If you've seen Me, you've seen the Father." He is the Word who created the world in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” He is the Word who became flesh, the form of God becomes the form of humanity.
People still are trying to figure out who Jesus is, and here it is clear who He is. Colossians 1:15 states, "He is the image of the invisible God." And if you go back to verse 6, the Apostle Paul begins to explain the incarnation. And now he says, "Even though He is God,” although He is God in true nature and essence, “He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.”
Jesus in every sense equal with God refuses to cling to that equality, to the privileges and the rights that go along with that equality. The incarnation begins with Jesus willing to let go of the glory that He had with the Father before the world began. This is the way He expresses it in His prayer in John 17:5 when He says, "And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.” He is unselfish.
And because He is not selfish we see the third statement, verse 7, "He emptied Himself." The verb "to empty" is keno from which we get this theological term, kenosis, the self-emptying of Christ. He emptied Himself of the privileges and the rights that were His by His divine nature. He refused to hold it to His own advantage and emptied Himself in order to benefit others.
But understand that it does not mean that He emptied Himself of His deity. He is eternally God and never less than God. Even hanging on the cross in the midst of His suffering, even in the moments when He was under the judgment of God His Father, even when He was bearing the weight of sin and the wrath of God against that sin, He did not for a second cease to be God.
The issue is that He did not demand His rights as deity. In John 5 He says He set aside His independent authority and He acted only according to the will of the Father. He had willingly humbled Himself, and He set aside the things that He was entitled to. For example, He says in Matthew 24:36, "Of the day and the hour when He will come again, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only."
He set aside His omniscience on occasion and then at other times He knew what was in the heart of man. He limited His omniscience and He limited His omnipotent power. If He wanted to, He could have called a legion of angels to rescue Him from the crucifixion at any time, right? But He didn't do that, He willingly paid for our sins.
The next statement explains this self-emptying. It says in verse 6-7, "He did not regard equality with God something to be grasped, He emptied Himself and taking the form of a bondservant." Paradoxically Christ who is God and never ceases to be God now becomes the servant of God. He says, "I only came to do what the Father shows Me to do. What I do the Spirit does through Me." His kenosis was not a subtraction of His nature but it was a subtraction of His privileges.
And that's not all. Verse 7 also says, "Emptying Himself, taking on the essential nature of a servant, He was made in the likeness of men." It means that He was given the essential attributes of humanity. It wasn't until He was twelve years old that it really fully dawned on Him, when Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man (Luke 2:52), that He was to do His Father's business. He was truly human in every sense.
And He was at all points along that human chronology tempted like all people are tempted, yet He was without sin. It says He was born of a woman, born under the Law, subject to the law of God like all other men are. Colossians 1:22 says of Him, "He has reconciled you in His fleshly body through death."
Jesus took the form of a servant to serve the purposes of His Father and came down to become like men. But He didn't just come down to show us how men ought to live. Verse 8 takes it further, “And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross."
Having become man, Christ was then recognized as such by those who saw Him. In the days of His flesh, they couldn't see His deity. That was the judgment of the world that He was nothing but a man. The people rejected Him as God, they thought His claims to deity were blasphemous, whenever He said He was God they picked up stones to try to kill Him.
Today is Palm Sunday and in Luke 19 we see how Jesus came into Jerusalem riding a colt which is a picture of a King for He is a King but not an earthly King like the Jews wanted. Five hundred years earlier, the prophet Zechariah had proclaimed that fact in Zechariah 9:9, “Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, riding on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
By waving palm branches they were showing that they expected Jesus to be another king, another general of the army, one who would lead them to overthrow the Romans. They were saying that they were ready to pick up their swords and shields and go to war if He would lead them! They did not understand who He really was and what He really came for.
That is how the world still looks at Him as a good man, a noble man, a religious man, a peaceful man, or a peace loving man, a man who wanted to help, etc., etc. But there is more in verse 8, "Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself." He was already humiliated just being on this planet, but He wasn't humbled as far as He was going to be humbled.
He didn't say stop, this is as far as I'm going. He didn't fight back. He didn't kill His enemies and those who plotted His death. Even when they took Him into a sequence of trials prior to His crucifixion and they had false witnesses and false testimony, He never ever responded. When He was reviled, He never said to God, "That's enough humiliation, I'm not taking anymore."
At the end of verse 8 it says, “He became obedient to the point of death.” This is something completely foreign to God. God is life, He cannot die. This was His ultimate "yes" to God. This was His ultimate act of service. This is His lowest hour. It was not a natural death either, it was an execution. It was an unjust slaughter of the Son of God.
And it wasn't just death, "He became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." This is the most shocking feature of Christ's humiliation. Crucifixion, you see, was the most horrific way to die. Developed by the Persians, the Romans had picked up this form of execution. It was the most painful, the most humiliation and the most cruel form of death imaginable.
A person basically was nailed by hands and feet to a wooden cross. They hung suspended like that, being held basically only by two wounds through the hands. The feet usually nailed together with one nail against a little block so the victim hanging on the cross is pushing up trying to catch breath. The sun is blazing, the mouth is parched, the blood loss through those four great wounds is great.
Crucifixion was only for the worst criminals and the non-Roman citizens. It was hated by the Jews, and the Romans had filled Israel with crucifixions. Some historians think there were as many as 30 thousand people crucified around the time of Jesus. That is how the Romans kept everybody in line. And they lined all the highways with crosses and they stripped the land of trees to make those crosses.
The truth is that Jesus on the cross not only paid for the sins of the world physically but also spiritually where He took the wrath of God the Father for all the sins of those who believe. He knew He had to face separation from God the Father (Matthew 27:46, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). And the people, all they can think about is He's going to come and bring them glory. But there couldn't be any glory until there was a cross. There couldn't be a Kingdom until there was a sacrifice of blood for sin.
Verse 9 says this, "Therefore also God highly exalted Him." What did God do to exalt Him? The Father raised Him from the dead, didn't He? The first deed of the Father's exaltation was the resurrection. And by God raising Christ from the dead, God affirmed the validity of His sacrifice. God raised Jesus to show that He accepted His sacrifice. Jesus said on the cross, "It is finished."
And then forty days later, He ascended into heaven. And when He reached heaven, He sat down at the right-hand of the Father in His exaltation. The Bible says that when He went to heaven, He took His place on His throne. He was exalted in His resurrection. He was exalted in His ascension. He was exalted in His coronation. And He's also exalted in His intercession, for He ever lives to intercede for all who come to Him.
And then verse 9 says, "God gave Him a name, He bestowed on Him a name which is above every name." Some people think that is the name Jesus. That's not it, because there are many people named Jesus even today. That's not the name above every name. And God gave Him a name which is above every name, in Revelation 19:16 that name is King of kings and Lord of lords.
God sat Him on His throne; and verse 10 says, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. At the name given to Jesus, the name Lord, every knee bows, those who are in heaven, angels numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands (Revelation 5:11). And the glorified saints who are there will bow. And on earth, men and women, they don't all bow by choice, some do, but most will bow by compulsion.
The day will come when those who refuse to bow to Christ as Lord in life will bow to Him in judgment. And even those under the earth, demons, damned fallen angels, they bow, they bear His wrath, they feel His fury forever. Everybody bows eventually.
And eventually, verse 11 says, “every tongue confesses Jesus Christ is Lord.” Nobody escapes that. You do it willingly, or you're forced. You do it now and you're forgiven and you will gladly bow in heaven. You reject Him now and you will bow one day at the seat of judgment and feel His wrath forever. The word "confess" means to acknowledge, every tongue will one day acknowledge Jesus as Lord.
You want to be a Christian? Here's how. Confess with your mouth, Romans 10:9, Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, which is the affirmation of His lordship. That is the heart of Christianity. He came down that He might go up. All of this, it says, to the glory of God the Father.
We live in a world where you go down before you go up. And certainly the greatest truth in that regard is the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is God, the God/Man who came all the way down to die on the cross to pay the penalty for your sins.
The question now that you know who Jesus is, is what will you do with Christ? Do you remember what the Pilate said to the people in Matthew 27:22, "What then shall I do with Jesus?" That's the question you have to answer too. You either acknowledge Jesus as your Savior and bow your knee willingly, or you reject Him and one day you will acknowledge Him as judge and bow your knee unwillingly.
How many times has Jesus knocked on the door of your heart? Don’t be like many who say, later, later, I can always do that later. Hebrews 3:15 says, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” Don’t worry about the consequences of becoming a child of God, whatever the negatives, they do not compare to the positives. Ephesians 3:20 states that God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us, Amen?