The Sovereign Became a Slave

He gave up the right to live like God. He gave up the right to act like God. He gave up the right to look like God. And he gave up the right to be treated like God.

Why? The apostle John explains it. But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God. He gave up his rights to give you a right. He gave up everything he deserved to hold to give us something we do not deserve to have. We live in a world that celebrates power, wealth, and success.

Lists like the most powerful people dominate the headlines. But what about those who choose to give it all up? Today, we'll dive into an ancient hymn about someone who did just that. Jesus Christ, who had the highest power, gave up his rights to become a servant, even to the point of death. Stay with us as we uncover how the Sovereign Lord chose the path of ultimate humility. This decision not only changed history, but has profound meaning for your life today. Would you like to know more?

Keep listening. Now in keeping with the context of Paul's use of Christ's incarnation as the ultimate illustration of humility, the laying down of his rights, I've suggested as we've studied our way through this ancient hymn text, four different personal rights that Jesus gave up, that he relinquished when he came to earth. First, we've covered that Jesus gave up the right to live like God, to live like God. Verse 6, we're told that even though he existed in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God. This is God the Father, a thing to be grasped. The original language is much more expressive to declare that even though Jesus pre-existed as God the Son in the very nature and essence of God the Father, he didn't clutch it. He didn't grasp his equal rights with the Father.

Who in our culture doesn't seize their equal rights? He gave them up. When he came, he gave up his legitimate right to live like God. Secondly, we explored the fact that Jesus gave up the right to act like God. Verse 7 tells us he emptied himself, taking the form of a doulos, literally a slave. So the sovereign Lord becomes a slave in his humility. Because of that unbelievable reversal, he now refuses to demonstrate the power that he has, the attributes of who he still is, where he didn't cease to become God.

It isn't subtraction, it's addition. He took on the nature of man. And he doesn't use his power or attributes for his own convenience or comfort, but for the benefit of others when he every so often pulls back the veil. He gave up his legitimate right to live like God and to act like God. Thirdly, Jesus gave up the right to look like God.

We covered this in our last session together, we don't think of it often. In verse 7 and then the first part of verse 8, Paul sings these ancient lyrics that Jesus was made in the likeness of men being found in appearance as a man. In other words, prior to his incarnation, he's clothed with this unspeakable, unimaginable splendor. But then with incredible humility, Isaiah gives us the only physical description of our Lord. He chooses the face and the physique of an unattractive, unimpressive male of Jewish kin.

Isaiah 53 verse 2. I mean, and we talked about it a little bit, he could have chosen everything about himself. He did, in fact. The height of his stature and the size of his nose. He could have been the most handsome man to walk the planet. Yet he adds to the demonstration of his humility by not only becoming a man, but choosing to become an ordinary, literally Isaiah says, a homely man. In fact, he's so run of the mill, ordinary and unimpressive when he announces who he is, the Jewish leaders said, isn't this the carpenter's son?

We know who you are. And they took offense at him. Matthew 13. I mean, listen, we would have agreed with the sentiment of our culture had we lived in that one. We would have echoed the sentiment of everybody around him. We would have said to him, listen, we've never seen God the son, but you are not it.

You are not it. Which leads me to the fourth and final rite that Jesus gave up in his humility. He gave up the right to be treated like God.

Let's go to the middle part of verse 8 where we left off. He humbled himself, literally he laid himself low by becoming obedient to the point of death. That is, he lays himself low in obedience, in obedience to death.

Don't hurry past that. This is one more of those signature phrases that tells us there is more to Jesus than meets the eye, if you take time to explore it. His death requires his obedience. Your death and mine doesn't. We don't have to obey anything to die.

We die. We don't have to come to some point where we say, okay God, I am now willing and obedient and then we die. It's not how we die. For us, death is not a matter of obedience. We die whether or not we want to. It isn't an elective. It's required to certain, Franklin said, as taxes, right? And we'd rather not think about it.

We'll do anything we can to avoid it. My parents told me sometime after it happened of an event when I was in middle school and we were traveling as a family on deputation and going to church after church to raise support for the mission and typically we didn't stay overnight in the hotel and not sure how this particular event happened but all six of us, four boys, two, a mom and a dad, were packed into one little room in a hotel and they said I was sharing a bed with one of my brothers, unfortunately. But at any rate, I had to share it. But we were lying there and around midnight I suddenly sat up and shouted death and laid back down and went to sleep. I mean I just sat up, looked at the wall, shouted death and laid back down.

My mother, it rattled her so badly it ruined her night. No idea what in the world I was thinking. Death is a mystery, isn't it? And we aren't all that eager to engage in it even though we know it's on the other side according to scripture.

We do not know when it's going to happen. Jesus did. That's what he's saying. Jesus did. He became obedient right up to the point of death, encompassing that. In other words, it will require the obedience of Christ in order to experience death. See this is what he meant when he told his audience on one occasion, John records it in chapter 10, nobody has taken my life away from me.

I lay it down on my own initiative. That's what he meant. So on the cross, Jesus will demonstrate this as God, though man, he, being God, will obey the will of the triune God. He will yield his spirit to the Father. John 19, 30. The old King James translates it, he gave up the ghost. He literally yields up his spirit. That verb to yield means he voluntarily gave it over. In other words, as Paul is effectively saying here, Jesus died at the very moment he decided to die. It was an act of obedience to the will of the Father as they had determined it all before the foundation of the world. It wasn't an accident.

It was the plan. In fact, Peter would later preach the stunning truth to the nation Israel. The man you killed was actually determined in advance by God to die in just that manner and in that moment. Acts 2, 23. You see what he's saying is from the perspective of mankind and all of the events surrounding the crucifixion, Jesus was murdered. But from the perspective of the triune God and the plan of redemption, he was not murdered. He was sacrificed. He was the Lamb of God who had come to take away the sin of the world. His last act of obedience in his life, his perfectly obedient life, was to yield up his spirit to his Father. Paul here adds one more freighted phrase. It wasn't just any kind of death.

I want to spend the majority of our time here. Notice the last part of verse 8. It was death on a cross. Paul wants us to pause.

This is the way he writes it. He became obedient unto death even as if to say, if you can believe it, if you can imagine it, death on a cross. Talk about giving up the right to be treated like God. Death on a cross was the ultimate insult. By man, it was the crowning act of humility by God. Paul would write that to the Gentile, dying on a cross is foolishness.

It's insanity. 1 Corinthians 1.23. Gods don't die, and if they die, they're not going to die that way. The Gentiles just couldn't quite get over it. I hope by the end of our study, you'll understand a little bit better why. But he also wrote in the same Corinthian text to the Jews that to them, the crucifixion of Jesus was a stumbling block.

Why? Because he'd go all the way back into the law, the Torah, Deuteronomy 21 and verse 23. It clearly says, anybody put to death by hanging on a tree, which encompassed crucifixion, they became a curse. They were cursed by God.

So to them, it was a stumbling block. Wait, if he were truly God's son, if he were really the Messiah, he wouldn't have been hung on a tree. He wouldn't have been killed by crucifixion if he were truly God in the flesh. The Messiah, he couldn't have become a curse.

The Jews were waiting for a Messiah who would liberate and rule and defeat the Roman army and the nation and Jesus died like that on a Roman cross. When I was in Israel a month or so ago, I was at the site of the place where they have discovered the ruins of King David's palace and the walls of his palace home are literally observable, excavated underneath the visitor's center of all places. A woman, an archaeologist, followed some clues from scripture and began to dig there, found it.

They discredited her because she used the Bible. Nonetheless, they found it. So they have built this foundation. The visitor's center sits on it and you can literally see through glass built into the floor down into the walls of David's palace.

There in that visitor's center is a gift shop with lots of books, with pictures, which I still enjoy to this day. So I'm rummaging my way around as I'm waiting on my group who at that point in time was wading through Hezekiah's tunnel underneath the city. There wasn't anybody else in the shop, just this Jewish woman, young woman behind the counter and I didn't think she had much to do so I struck up a conversation with her and talked about some recent discoveries and fascinated by it and I just cut to the chase.

I said, look, I want you to tell me something. I want you to give me what comes to your heart and your mind as the strongest argument you have against Jesus being the Messiah. I know you hear about that all the time. When you hear somebody say that Jesus is the Messiah, what comes to your mind and your heart?

What's your strongest argument against Him being that? And without batting an eye, she looked at me and she said, He died. He died. And she went on to add, and He didn't bring peace. I mean, what kind of Messiah is that? It is still to this day, 2,000 years later, the stumbling block. Paul, by the way, in the New Testament, follows up and fleshes out what I mentioned to her in Isaiah 53 about the fact that the Messiah came to suffer. He will one day come to rule.

I couldn't really get into it because other tourists from America came and ruined everything that I wanted to do. But Paul will write to the Galatians in Galatians 3, 13. Here's what was happening. That Jesus, He redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming the curse for us. And then he reaches back into Deuteronomy, for cursed is everyone who hangs upon a tree.

This is exactly why He did this. He was sacrificed on a cross. He gave up His right to be treated like God, and in all humility bore the curse of sin and the wrath of a holy God so that we would not be cursed forever.

But even to the world at large, especially back here, here's the early church singing about the crucifixion like we do today. It would be the crucifixion that separated Christianity from any and every other religion and make it repulsive. Mankind would much rather worship a God who kills people than a God who was killed by people. What kind of God is that? So it was unimaginable to His world.

Let me explain a little why. Crucifixion was invented by the Persians. They wanted to kill somebody that they had elevated so that that dying victim would not touch their goddess, Earth, whom they worshipped, much like many people today. The Carthaginians developed it further.

The Greeks popularized it. Alexander the Great crucified thousands. The Romans perfected its torture by designing it a little differently. Cicero, the Roman philosopher who died 50 years before the birth of Christ, wrote this, To bind a Roman citizen is a crime. To flog him is an abomination. To slay him is almost an act of murder. To crucify him is what? There is no fitting word that can possibly describe so horrible a deed. Josephus, the first century Jewish historian and an eyewitness of Titus, the Roman general, who came and surrounded and conquered Jerusalem, destroying in AD 70 the temple as Jesus had earlier predicted.

Not one stone will be left upon another. Josephus writes that the Jews who tried to escape from the city, that was surrounded by this Roman general, Titus and his troops, knew that it was too late to ask for mercy. So they were caught and whipped and tortured. And then they were crucified in front of the walls of Jerusalem. Titus, Josephus says, felt pity for them.

Some kind of pity. Since there were so many attempting to escape, nearly 500 a day were trying to slip away and out, Titus felt it was too great a risk to let them go or even put them under guard. Josephus writes, so he allowed his soldiers to have their way, hoping the gruesome sight of the countless crosses might move the citizens to surrender. So the soldiers, out of the rage and hatred they bore these people, nailed those they caught in different postures to crosses out of cruel mockery.

And their number was so great that there was not enough room for the crosses and not enough crosses for the bodies. Part of our misunderstanding of the degradation and horror and torture of this death is the fact that the church over the centuries has romanticized it and turned it into a tall Latinized cross. Jesus has a little trickle of blood and he's not totally naked and he's hanging symmetrically on this 10-foot tall cross.

The Roman cross was actually only about my height, six feet. The victim would be nailed to a portable cross beam. That was what Jesus was carrying and fell underneath. When they would reach the place of execution, if it were a normal place of execution, the vertical piece would be embedded in the hill.

It would be permanent. They would lie the victim down, nail his wrists, the upper part of his hand to that beam, then literally stand him up, raise his hands, and in the center of that portable beam was a hole cut that would slip over the vertical piece. And then they would raise the victim up onto a sedulum, a saddle, a peg. The Romans added that. They added that so that the victim could survive for days and some weeks.

They would be close enough to earth, they'd be right here, to talk to, to weep over, to beat, to spit on, to mock. Many died insane. Another thing that's lost that is unique in our Lord's own narrative and made it even more demeaning for the typical execution was that the victims were not buried. They were simply left on that cross to suffer and die and then be eaten by wild animals. Under Domitian, we have a fragment during the reign of this first Roman Caesar of a robber who was hung on a cross and then soon after torn to pieces by a bear. There were vultures known and even named after the places of crucifixion because they flew around ever ready to descend and dispose of the corpses.

In fact, a first century Roman poet by the name of Juvenal wrote, the vulture hurries from dead cattle and dogs and crosses to bring it to her offspring. Another first century account tells of a man who was crucified for the wild beasts and birds of prey. Now, if the Romans, during the days of our Lord, needed the cross for another victim and didn't have time to wait for the animals to basically dispose of it, or if the Jews wanted a Jewish victim to be taken down before Shabbat or Sabbath, which was the case of Jesus, the soldiers would break the legs of the victim, push him off the saddle. He would be unable to pull himself up, to exhale and would, in a matter of moments, unable to breathe, die. You remember from the account of our Lord in John 19, they broke the legs of the two men on either side of him, but not his.

He was already dead. This is the reason the Gentile, among others, the Gentile world considered worshiping a crucified God total folly. One early writer called it mania. That is, you who do are maniacal.

You're maniacs. In fact, one of them, Lucius Caecilius, a successful Roman banker who lived in the first century, during the days of Christ's crucifixion and the development of Christianity, he said this, they put forth sick delusions, a senseless and crazy superstition which leads to the destruction of all true religion. And that least among the monstrosities of their faith is the fact that they worship someone who has been crucified. They were repulsed by the idea of Christianity being founded by a criminal who died such a vile death. In fact, there's one critical issue also surrounding crucifixion that we have overlooked over the years, and that was this, that crucifixion was reserved primarily and mainly for the execution of slaves. They were often, in fact, they were always worried of slave uprisings. Slaves outnumbered citizens in the Roman Empire or came close to it. Slaves had no rights. They had no justice to defend themselves. They owned nothing. They were offered nothing in return for their servanthood. They were at the mercy and whim of their masters and the cross during this era, in fact, for several hundred years, came to be thought of, as one Roman author put it, the slave penalty, the slave punishment, it was called.

So there's no mistaking here. The early church is singing this. And they would have immediately connected Paul's reference as he quotes the lyrics or even composes it in verse 7 to Jesus taking on the form of a slave. And then later in verse 8, and he died on a cross.

Of course he did. Because that's how slaves who were executed most often died. The stanzas of this hymn then begin, not by taking us upward to see the glory of heaven and barely into the glory of the preexistence of Christ. What this hymn does in these early stanzas is, as one author said, take you down, down, down into the deepest, darkest hell hole in human history to see the horrific torture, the unspeakable abuse, the bloody execution of a slave on a cross.

And this hymn celebrates the death of this slave on this cross. He chose to become powerless. He chose that cross and he chose to die that way. He never stood up for his rights. He never demanded a fair trial.

He refused to defend himself. He didn't demand worship then. He doesn't demand it now. He will one day receive it from everyone.

But think about it. In our world today and for centuries, there has been this national birthday party. We call it Christmas. Can you imagine coming to a birthday party and giving gifts to everyone but the birthday boy? In fact, to take it one step further, can you imagine inviting everybody to the party but the birthday boy? If that were to happen today, the birthday boy would sue every one of us for violating his rights and emotional distress.

Think of all the lawsuits in our land. Just because someone didn't get what they believed, they deserved. Think of the glorious son of God who gave up his rights in order to be treated in a way he did not deserve. He gave up the right to live like God. He gave up the right to act like God. He gave up the right to look like God and he gave up the right to be treated like God.

Why? In a text, the apostle John explains it, but as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God. He gave up his rights to give you a right. He gave up everything he deserved to hold to give us something we do not deserve to have. Have you come to him, the sovereign who became a slave, so that through his suffering and his sacrifice, we can be saved forever. That was Stephen Davey and this is Wisdom for the Heart. Today's message is called, The Sovereign Became a Slave.

Can you imagine giving up what's rightfully yours for others? Thanks for listening today. Want to learn more about our ministry? Head over to wisdomonline.org. There you can dive into Stephen's complete Bible teaching library, which includes every broadcast and hundreds of sermons. If you ever miss a lesson, don't worry. You can catch up on our home page where we post each day's broadcast. Plus, Stephen's sermons are organized by Book of the Bible, making it easy to study any book you're interested in. Visit wisdomonline.org, then join us next time on Wisdom for the Heart. .