Jesus became for us the perfect model of humiliation, one who does nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, one who with humility of mind regards others as more important than himself, one who looks not on his own things alone, but on the things of others also, and in that he is our example. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Today the word miracle describes everything from an underachieving student who passes chemistry to the buzzer-beating shot in a basketball game to the power of compound interest. But what is the greatest miracle of all, and how does it affect you? Answering those questions is John MacArthur's focus today on grace to you as he takes an in-depth look at the humiliation of Christ. That's the title of John's message, and John will be in the book of Philippians today, so if you have a Bible handy, turn there now. Will you open your Bibles for our look at God's precious word to Philippians chapter 2, and we want to look again at verse 5 through 8, this very, very significant portion of Scripture which describes for us the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. Listen to verses 5 through 8 as I read. Have this attitude in yourselves, which was also in Christ Jesus, who although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondservant and being made in the likeness of men.
And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. I reread portions of a book that I had read a couple of times years ago. The title of the book is Miracles. It's author C.S.
Lewis. He has a chapter in the book entitled The Grand Miracle. It's a chapter on the incarnation. And in that chapter, in his inimitable way, he draws some rich analogies for us by which we can view the incarnation.
Let me read you a somewhat extended portion of what he says because it is so rich. In the Christian story, God descends to reascend. He comes down, down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity, down further still, down to the very roots and seabed of the nature He had created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. He must stoop in order to lift.
He must also disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders. Or one may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay. Then up again, back to color and light, his lungs almost bursting till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover. He and it are both colored now that they have come up into the light.
Down below, where it lay colorless in the dark, he lost his color too. In this descent and reassent, everyone will recognize a familiar pattern, a thing written all over the world. It is the pattern of all vegetable life. It must belittle itself into something hard, small and death-like.
It must fall into the ground. Thence the new life reassends. It is the pattern of all animal generation too. There is descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoan and ovum and in the dark womb, a life at first inferior in kind to that of the species which is being reproduced, then the slow ascent to the perfect embryo, to the living conscious baby and finally to the adult. So it is in our moral and emotional life. The first innocent and spontaneous desires have to submit to the death-like process of control or total denial.
But from that there is a reassent to fully formed character in which the strength of the original material all operates but in a new way. Death and rebirth, go down to go up. It is a key principle. Through this bottleneck, this belittlement, the high road nearly always lies."
End quote. With those words, Lewis then approaches the incarnation, the central miracle of Christianity, the most grand and wonderful of all the things that God ever did. That is the theme of these great verses before us. Jesus became for us the perfect model of humiliation. He is the perfect fulfillment of verses 3 and 4, one who does nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, one who with humility of mind regards others as more important than himself, one who looks not on his own things alone but on the things of others also, and in that He is our example.
But there is more here than just that. Let's begin in verse 6. It says in verse 6, He existed in the form of God. That's where the incarnation begins.
That's the point from which He descends and condescends. Now what does He mean by the word form? By the way, He uses it again in verse 7 as we shall see in a moment, but this is crucial. Morphe is the word. We use that as part of a word in English, endomorph, ectomorph and various other things. Morphe signifies a form which truly and fully expresses the being which underlies it. In other words, it is a word that refers to essence or essential being or nature. Here applied to God, the form of God, it means His deepest being, what He is in Himself, His essential being. The statement then is saying that Jesus Christ existed in the essential being of God.
And He has always and continuously and unalterably existed in that essence. You can perhaps understand the word Morphe if you compare it to another Greek word, schema. Both of them could be translated in English, form.
That's really the best English word, but it loses something unless it's split into those two Greek words. Let me show you the distinction. Form or morphe is the essential character of something, what it is in itself. Schema is the outward form that it takes. The morphe never changes, the schema changes.
Perhaps a simple illustration would be this. I am a man. I possess manhood. I have possessed manhood since I was conceived and I will possess manhood until I die. That is my morphe.
But that essential character of manhood is manifested in many different schema, if I can transliterate a bit. In other words, there was a time I was an embryo. There was a time I was a baby. There was a time I was a child. Then I was a boy. Then I was a youth. Then I was a young man. Then I was an adult. And someday I will be an old man. And right now I am in the prime of life.
I could feel your impulses on that one. But you see, my morphe is manhood. My schema changes. And when Paul selects the word morphe, he is saying something very specific. He is saying that Jesus has always existed in the unchangeable essence of the being of God. To make it simple, he is saying Jesus is God. He possesses the very being and the very nature of God and He has always possessed that. And that interpretation of that first phrase is certainly strengthened by the second phrase in which he speaks of Jesus having equality with God. And thereby he describes, of course, what he meant by being in the form of God. He meant being equal with God.
Why is it that we have so much discussion on this issue? Because it is the heart and soul of the Christian faith. And inevitably when people attack the Christian faith, when forms of religion other than the truth attack us, they attack at the point of the deity of Christ. In John's gospel, it seems to be his particular concern and burden and passion under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to leave the reader with absolutely no doubt at all in his mind that Jesus is God. And so he even begins with that statement, in the beginning was the Word referring to Christ and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And then to demonstrate that, he says, all things came into being by Him and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.
In Him was life and the life was the light of men. He is Creator. In verse 14 he says of Christ that He became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory and the glory that He had was that of the only begotten from the Father.
He is God. John has Him saying, of course, in the wonderful record of John 8 and verse 58, that before Abraham was, I am. And therefore taking on Him the very name of God who said, I am that I am hath sent you. And in Colossians, the Apostle Paul in that wonderful first chapter in verse 15, speaking of Christ says, He is the image or the exact replica of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. By Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things have been created by Him and for Him and He is before all things and in Him all things hold together.
Twice then, John and Paul, we find that the great evidence of the deity of Christ is His ability to create and he gave evidence of that, plenty of evidence. If you ever wonder whether Jesus is God, look at how He can create. Not only in the past, not only at the point of creation, but look at His creative miracles in His life. He created fish. He created bread. He created an ear when Peter chopped one off. He created new legs and new eyes and new ears and a new mouth. He created new internal organs to replace the diseased ones, acts of creation. He is the Creator. He is God. In Hebrews chapter 1 verse 3, do you remember this?
He is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His nature. That's where it all starts. It all starts with the recognition that Jesus Christ existed in the very essence of the eternal God.
That's where it starts. Christianity then is a tremendously simple and yet infinitely profound truth that God became man and we now follow the path of His incarnation. Look back at verse 6. Although He existed in the form of God, He did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped.
He did not consider it something to clutch. That word equality is interesting. The Greek word is the word Isis.
It's a very interesting word. It means exactly equal in size, quantity, quality, character, number, whatever. But it means exactly equal. We use it that way even in English. Are you familiar with terms like isomer?
Some of you in science are. An isomer is a chemical molecule having very slightly different structure from another molecule but being absolutely identical with it in terms of its chemical elements and weight. It's equal.
We could say its schema may be different but its morphe is the same. Isomorph means having the same form. Isometric means equal measures.
And an isosceles triangle, you will remember from your days in school, is a triangle that has two equal sides. The word means equal. It was equal with God, exactly equal with God. He is in the form of God. He is God. That's what Paul is saying. In fact, literally the Greek text reads in verse 6, He did not regard the being equal with God a tremendous statement. He is equal with God.
Here's the first step down. He didn't grasp that. He didn't clutch it. He didn't seize it.
He didn't hold it. He didn't possess it as something not to be yielded up even though He was equal with God. There's no question about this in the Scripture. There was no question that Jesus claimed this and there was absolutely no question that the people who listened to Him knew He claimed it. In John 5 18, it says the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him.
Why? Because He was not only breaking the Sabbath but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. And when any of those people come along who want to deny that Jesus is equal to God, it's most interesting to say to them, it's strange to me that you don't even know what His worst enemies knew. Because His worst enemies, the apostate, Christ-rejecting Jews who were bound up in self-righteousness didn't miss what He said.
They knew exactly what He was claiming. He was claiming to be equal with God. No one can miss that who reads the New Testament. In John 10 33, the Jews answered Him again, For a good work we do not stone you, but for blasphemy.
Why? Because you, being a man, make yourself out to be God. They knew what He was claiming.
Patently obvious. And He said to them, You ought to look at the things I do and know and understand that the Father is in Me and I in the Father. And He says to His disciples, Have I been so long with you and you don't yet know who I am? If you've seen Me, you've seen the Father. And Thomas in chapter 20 verse 28 says, My Lord and my what? My God.
But here's the first step down. Though He had all the rights and privileges and honors of being God, He didn't clutch them. That word originally meant robbery or a thing gained by robbery or a thing seized.
But it came to mean anything clutched, embraced, held tightly, prized, clung to. He existed as God, but He refused to cling to that favored position. He refused to cling to all the rights and honors that went with it. He was willing to give them up.
That's the idea. That's the incredible message of Christianity. In Christianity, you see God looking down on wretched sinners who hate Him and are His enemies and willingly yielding up His privileges to come down for their sake. That's the attitude of humility that begins the incarnation. It begins with the unselfishness of the second person of the Trinity. And then what follows, please notice verse 7, but emptied Himself. A profound statement introduced by a Greek term that means not this, but this. He didn't think this something to be clutched, but rather on the other hand emptied Himself.
It's a contrastive kind of connection. The being equal with God didn't lead Him to fill Himself up, it led Him to empty Himself. The verb empty is the verb from which we get that classic theological term, the kenosis, which is what theologians have called the self-emptying or the incarnation, the doctrine of the kenosis, the self-emptying of Christ.
It's a very graphic expression. He emptied Himself. Self-renunciation, refusal to use what was rightfully His, refusal to cling to His advantages and privileges as God.
Can you imagine? God who owns everything, who can do everything, who has a right to everything, who is fully satisfied within Himself, but He emptied Himself. Now what does that mean?
This, of course, has been discussed much. What does it mean He emptied? What did He empty? First of all, will you note this?
Don't ever forget it. He did not empty Himself of His deity. He did not empty Himself of His deity or He would have ceased to exist. And if He ceased to exist, so would God the Father and so would God the Holy Spirit because their life is one life. He did not empty Himself of His deity or of any portion of His deity because He couldn't be less than who He was.
He is eternally in the morphe of God. He did not cease to be God. He didn't exchange deity for humanity. He didn't stop being God and start to become man. If He had done that, He would have died on a cross and stayed there in the grave because only God had the power to die and in dying conquer death. Only God could create and do the miracles that He did. Only God could say the words that He said. He did not stop being God nor was there any part of His essential divine nature at all that was given up.
None of it. He couldn't cut out some piece of who He was. There are those who would advocate such a blasphemous view. Say, what did He give up? First of all, He gave up His heavenly glory. He gave up His heavenly glory.
He dove into the water and went all the way down through the black, cold water to the slime and the ooze of this world. And that's why He cries out in John 17 and says, Father, restore Me to the glory I had with you before the world began. Glory when He was face to face with God. He gave up His glory for the muck of this earth. He gave up the worship of angels, the adoring presence of angels for the spittle of men. He gave up all of the shining brilliance of the glories of heaven. Yes, He emptied out His glory in that sense. Another way to look at it is that He covered up His glory.
He veiled it. They saw a glimpse of it on the Mount of Transfiguration. There were glimpses of it in all His miracles. There were glimpses of it in His attitude. There were glimpses of it in His words. There were certainly glimpses of it even on the cross. There was a blazing manifestation of it in the resurrection, the ascension. But He emptied Himself of some of the outward manifestation and the personal enjoyment of heavenly glory.
Is it any wonder that the psalmist says in Psalm 36, 6, Thy judgments are like a great deep. This is too much for us. We can't understand this. How unsearchable are His ways, untrackable. You can't find the end of them.
You can't get to either the source or the goal. You don't understand it. Such profound truth, such deep, divine purpose. And this God has done for us, for us.
That's John MacArthur showing you the world's greatest example of humility. Along with his ministry here on Grace to You, John is the chancellor of the Master's University and Seminary in Southern California, and he is titled today's message, The Humiliation of Christ. Okay, John, in addition to today's message, I know you have preached countless other sermons about Christ. In fact, you've told me several times that your favorite subject to preach on is Christ.
You've written books about Him. You have written commentaries on the four Gospels. After five or six decades of studying everything the Bible reveals about Christ, do you still have those wow moments when you're caught off guard when you discover something maybe you'd never before seen about Him? Well, we were talking about that earlier today, Ephesians 3, and there's a lot in there about the unity of the Church, and then Paul closes the chapter with that great prayer.
The believers would understand the unity of the Church. But I came to verse 8, where Paul is just overwhelmed with the privilege of preaching to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ, and I just stopped and said, I can't get past this verse. What are the unfathomable riches of Christ? So you're asking me if I've discovered something never seen before in Christ?
Of course, because they're unsearchable, they're unfathomable, they're beyond comprehension. And this goes back to Job 5 and 9, where Job says that we could never plumb the depths of God's nature. And then in Romans 11, 33, the apostle Paul says his ways are unsearchable. His thoughts are unfathomable. So no, you never, ever, ever exhaust the riches of reality in Christ, and you always come up short of what is there.
Only in eternity will we begin to really grasp what that unfathomable reality is. Along that line, I want to mention a little book that is kind of a good starting point on understanding the riches that are in Christ. It's called The Jesus Answer Book.
It's really a beautiful little hardcover book, and we would be glad to send it free to anyone who's never contacted us before. Maybe you're saying, I want to know about Christ. I want to know more about Jesus Christ. He is the most amazing person who ever lived. There's no one more important, no other one who can save, no other one who is Lord.
I want to know about him. And maybe you're just kind of getting started, or maybe you feel like your knowledge is limited. This would be a wonderful little, helpful, compact hardcover book in a question and answer format, The Jesus Answer Book, that we will send you free of charge if you've never contacted us before. Limited time offer while supplies last, but you can request your free book.
Do it now. If you've never contacted our ministry before, we'll be glad to send it as a gift. That's right, and nothing is more critical than knowing the truth about Jesus. The Jesus Answer Book is great for studying his life on your own or with your family. To get your copy, again, it's free if you've never contacted us before.
Get in touch with us today. Call our toll-free number, 800-55-GRACE, or go to our website, gty.org. The Jesus Answer Book can help you understand, and maybe better than ever, Christ's parables, his claims about himself and why he came to earth. It's also a valuable resource for evangelism. Again, The Jesus Answer Book is our gift to you if you've never contacted us before.
Call our customer service team at 800-55-GRACE, or visit our website, gty.org. And friend, if you've been strengthened by this ministry, we'd love to hear from you. Let us know if you're listening on the radio or online or through the app, and we'd like to know what you're learning when you email your thoughts to letters at gty.org. Once more, that's letters at gty.org. Or if you prefer regular mail, you can send a letter to Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for tuning in today, and be here tomorrow when John looks at Christ's astounding humility and how you can follow in his steps. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-05-28 01:33:40 / 2023-05-28 01:43:09 / 9