Compared with all the other activities that scream for our distraction at this time of year, the incarnation of God, in Christ, normally receives little attention. Through meditation on the incarnation today we want to gain a deeper understanding of its impact on our life. As we will see, the incarnation is the source of hope for our salvation. In the fast-paced, instant gratification society of today, meditation, especially on Scripture, is a lost art. We just do not think deeply about anything. The biblical concept of meditation involves a striving to understand what God is saying to us. It carries the idea of being consumed by something to the exclusion of all else. David said in Psalm 1:1-2 blessed is the man who meditates on God’s law, day and night.

Thomas Watson, a 17th century Puritan minister, wrote in Heaven Taken by Storm: “That Christ should clothe Himself with our flesh, a piece of earth which we tread upon, oh infinite humility! Christ taking our flesh was one of the lowest steps of His humiliation, He humbled Himself more in lying in a virgin’s womb than in hanging on the cross. It was not so much for a man to die, but for God to become man was the wonder of humility. ‘He was made in the likeness of men.’” We don’t contemplate the incarnation enough nor do we understand the depth of what God has done for us in the incarnation. Yet, we have a season to celebrate the incarnation of Christ.

The way in which we celebrate the Christmas season is antithetical to the truth we celebrate. In contrast to the incarnation of Christ and His meager birth, when we look at this holiday season, we see self-indulgence and excess. We have self-sacrifice lying in the shadow of selfishness that often surrounds our gift exchanges. In contrast to the quiet serenity of Bethlehem is the hustle-bustle of shopping malls and the traffic jams, which make us angry and raise our blood pressure. We have cheap plastic toys that contrast with the eternal gift of the sacrificial Lamb. We need to remove ourselves from the ever-present commercialization around us and take time to see what God has done for us, then give Him the honor and glory He deserves.

Not just at Christmas, but we need to remind ourselves of the words to the chorus of O Come, All Ye Faithful: “O come, let us adore Him.” We need to consider what makes God so adorable, so awe inspiring, so wonderful that we should adore Him. Simeon showed his adoration when he took the infant Jesus in his arms and proclaimed that he had now seen the Lord’s Christ. The Magi, who had been contemplating the birth of the Messiah ever since Nebuchadnezzar placed Daniel over them, showed their adoration of Jesus by traveling over eight hundred miles to Jerusalem to worship Jesus.

All that surrounds the Christmas season can be summed up in one word: obedience. It is the obedience of Christ that captures our awe and wonder. Christ’s obedience is magnified in the incarnation which happened in time and space, but the obedience happened outside of time and space in the eternal Trinitarian Godhead, when God the Son submitted to God the Father’s plan so that we might be saved. We celebrate what we know and understand of the wonderful works of Christ. Theologically, the works of Christ are His obedience to the Father in everything. The pinnacle of Christ’s obedience is in His incarnation.

The incarnation is the central miracle for all of Christianity. Without the incarnation we have no salvation; it is central to our faith. This is why we understand Thomas Watson as saying that when we look at the birth of Christ it is almost a greater miracle than His death. The deity of Christ is constantly being challenged because of His virgin birth. Truly the incarnation of Christ is our hope of salvation.

The Scripture being examined today is Philippians 2:6-11. Scholars believe that these verses were sung as a hymn by the ancient church as they celebrated the incarnation. We will consider a theological concept from each of these verses and develop an idea that we can meditate on during this Christmas season. Within the letter to the Philippians, a very unsuspecting book written to a church having two women in conflict, we have the true Christmas story. If we take the incarnation away, we have no reconciliation with God. Philippians 2:6-11 is a text that we should memorize and meditate on. Commenting on these verses, F. B. Myer said, “It is almost unapproachable in its unexampled majesty.” We will consider five points as we explore this passage.

I. Meditation on the Humility of God (VV. 6-7)

The humility of God set in motion the hope that we have in Christ. Prior to the incarnation, Jesus sat in a position of unrestricted power. In this verse we find three words describing Jesus: who, form, and equality.

• Who

Before anything existed was Jesus. The proper understanding of this verse is that, before anything existed in creation, Jesus IS. God told Moses in Exodus 3:14 to tell the Israelites “I AM” has sent you. Jesus, as a member of the Trinity, is the I AM, referring to the all-powerful, eternal, self-existing God. Jesus declares this in John 8:58 when he said, “before Abraham was, I AM!” John affirms this in John 1 where he declared that Jesus is God, that He created all things, and that He is the source of life and light.

• Form

Jesus was in the form of God. The Greek word Paul used here, morfee’, implying inner nature, not something similar to as we tend to think of form. Jesus, in His inner nature is God, whereas in verse 7 when Paul said Jesus was “born in the likeness of men”, he used the word, homoioma, meaning similar to. Jesus has always existed as God. Colossians 2:9 states that, in Jesus, all the fulness of the Godhead dwells in bodily form.

• Equality

Jesus is equal with God because Jesus is God, co-equal with the Father and the Holy Spirit. First Timothy 3:16 refers to Christ’s incarnation as a great mystery; this is the bedrock of our faith and is the reason that our faith is attacked so frequently. The fact that our Savior is God separates Christianity from every other religion or cult. Jesus temporarily laid aside His privilege as God and took on flesh. When Paul said that Jesus “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,” he meant that Jesus did not have to strive to hold on His deity, it remained His inner nature. Yet, He voluntarily moved from a position of power to a position of weakness. Jesus could have retaken the position of power at any moment, for He said in Matthew 26:53 that He could call legions of angels to rescue Him from being arrested. Jesus exemplified what humility means: a setting aside a position and all the benefits thereof for the sake of love. Jesus remained in His humble position, fulfilling the will of the Father, in calling His elect unto salvation.

We enjoy positions of authority, we grasp them and hold onto them. This is the opposite of what Christ did. He humbled Himself to do what God, outside the flesh, could not do – die for us and bring to us salvation. Referring back to Watson’s quote, the self-existing God humbled Himself, not just in taking on the appearance of man, but He stayed in the form of God and, yet, took on the most humble, contrite state, as an embryo, totally dependent on another person for survival. As Jesus came into the womb, we have deity meeting humanity in the most fragile state, so that we can be saved from sin.

Jesus’ act of humility points to the dignity of humanity. Dignity is found, first, in man’s creation. God simply spoke into existence everything else in creation but man He formed out of the dust of the earth and breathed life into him; no other creature was formed this way. Our dignity is also seen in our design – made in the image of God (Imago Deo), Genesis 1:27. The purpose in man being designed in the image of God is to reflect His glory; this is what it means to be human. Of all other living creatures, only man has both a physical and a spiritual component. Imago Deo refers specifically to our spiritual component.

We are made in the image of God mentally, morally, and socially: mentally in that we are rational and volitional, morally in that we reflect God’s holiness, and socially in that we are created for worship and fellowship. Our image-bearing grants us two main purposes: 1) to have dominion over, or nurture God’s creation, and 2) for communion and fellowship with God. Man is esteemed above all other created beings, and man’s dignity is further displayed in God taking on humanity in the incarnation. Saint Augustine said, “God has proved through the incarnation how high a place human nature holds amongst creatures in as much as He appeared to man as True Man.” God bound Himself to the flesh of man. While humanity is not divine, we can be joined to the divine.

II. Meditations on Shared Deification (V. 8)

By God dying on the cross willingly, he granted to us the opportunity to be saved. In salvation, through the power of the Holy Spirit, God combines the natural and supernatural, then infuses this into us. The sharing of this divine nature is called theosis, meaning God-infused –  the changing of our nature. Since our nature is changed, our character also changes. Second Corinthians 3:18 says, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” Thus, we live out the character of God in our daily walk through life. The infusion is experienced in three main ways: 

• Deification

This aspect of shared deification is seen most clearly in 2 Peter 1:4, “…he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.” Christians, by the great promise of salvation, sanctification, and adoption through faith become participants in the divine nature of God. This means that we are enveloped into the love of the Trinitarian Godhead. Perichoresis describes the relationship between the three members of the Trinity, and Christians become enveloped into this relationship.

The intimacy within the Trinity is shown in three ways in Scripture: i) The joining of God and man in Jesus, ii) The interpersonal relationship within the Trinity, and iii) The believer’s relationship to the Trinity. We see this very clearly in John 17, Jesus’ high priestly prayer, where the Father and Son are interacting. In the first four verses, Jesus gives us the reason He was incarnate: for the Father and Son to glorify each other. John 16:14 states that the Holy Spirit also glorifies the Son. The love relationship within the Trinity is on display for us to see and meditate on, and God brings us into this relationship through faith in Christ. We see this love briefly when Jesus unveiled a small portion of His glory at His transfiguration. We can experience the love of the Trinity to a limited extent now, but to a far greater extent in eternity. Standing before the throne of God, we will be compelled to worship, giving Him praise and honor forever.

We should be seeking to give glory to other believers as we see the glory in them. In other words, we see Jesus in them and we should recognize that they have the same love relationship with the Trinity. We share the same spirit, and we should be glorifying that spirit so that the Father is glorified by our relationship. This is why there are so many warnings in Scripture regarding our relationships with one another. Charles Spurgeon commented: “Your own spiritual beauty may be very much measured by what you see in other people. When you complain that love is dead in the church, it must be dead in your heart, or you would not say so. As you think of others, that you are. Out of your own mouth shall you be condemned.” Because of the incarnation, we should look for the glory in others, not their sin and guilt.

• Transformation

Because we have been infused with the divine, we have a changed nature. We experience this changed nature through our sanctification. Paul speaks of the power of God in 1 Corinthians 1:18, and it is only this miraculous power that can overcome sin. We should celebrate this in the process of our sanctification where God is working with Himself to bring about His character, so that we properly represent Him in the world. Believers will reflect the character of God. The purpose of our sanctification is to bring glory to God. We experience sanctification through the renewing of our mind, when we present our body as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1-2). Jesus presented His body in the incarnation to be a sacrifice, and He calls us to also present our bodies as a sacrifice, holy and acceptable, which is our spiritual worship. Jesus exemplified this in His perfect obedience. As we renew our minds through the truth of Scripture, God’s character is formed within us, and we become vessels that put God on display to the world. Christians are not motivated to seek godliness by laws or fear, but by the love of God in the incarnation, and by His dwelling within us. 

III. Meditations on Christ’s Obedience (v. 9)

Through Christ’s obedience and willing sacrifice, God grants forgiveness to us, and exalts Christ to a high and lofty position, superior to the angels (Hebrews 1:4). Christ is exalted as the God-man. In verse five, Paul told us to have the mind of Christ Jesus. Christ is the Greek word for Messiah, the Anointed One, His divine name, and Jesus is His earthly name. In verse eleven he says that Jesus is Lord. Paul is intentional in the use of two names for Jesus. Paul tells us that someday every tongue will confess that Jesus is the Christ.

God, the Father, exalts God, the Son, because He fulfilled what He came to do – to live an obedient life, so that eternal life can be granted to us through justification. In John 17, Jesus said that He received the sheep that the Father gave to Him. Jesus is the voice that goes out, people respond to the gospel call as God prompts them, then Jesus returns them back to the Father as an act of worship. One day there will be an ongoing glorious cosmic worship service as Jesus presents the church to the Father, and we get to participate in this. Now, Jesus continues to intercede for the sheep before the Father.

The purpose of the incarnation was to free man from sin. God knew that He had to be born, so that He could die and free us from that bondage. Romans 6:6 says, “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.” Because of Adam’s primal sin, we are infused with sin, but Christ’s obedience of being born of a virgin and dying on a cross to be raised again brought God’s righteousness to us (Romans 5:19). Saint Augustine said, “The incarnation was done in such a way that the devil should be overcome by the justice of the Man, Jesus Christ.” So, God overcame evil with justice in the divine rescue of those who place their faith in Christ. It is by our faith that we are rescued, reconciled, made righteous, and justified, but not by our will. When you understand this one aspect of the incarnation, it is foolish to think that we could do anything to secure God’s favor. Faith is not the basis of our salvation – it is the means; the basis is Christ’s obedience. 

IV. Our Source of Hope (vv. 10-11)

Because of Christ’s obedience, all of creation is called to worship Him. This includes demons, lost people of the world, angels, principalities, authorities in the heavenly places, and the redeemed, past, present, and future. Verse 11 states that “every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Jesus deserves this worship because He is the Christ, the Messiah. He came to the womb of a woman, and there took on flesh so that He could live the life that we could not and die the death that God could not die outside of taking on flesh. The incarnation is our source of hope, and it paved the way for our reconciliation. Augustine said, “Nothing was so necessary for raising our hope as to show us how deeply God loved us, and what could afford us a stronger proof of this than that the Son of God should become a partner with us in human nature.” The incarnation truly is our source of hope.

At this Christmas season, as we meditate on the incarnation, let us adore the One who gave up everything, so that we might have everything. You can adore Jesus in one of two ways: i) confessing faith in Him, or ii) worship Him as the One who made salvation possible.

Selah:

1. What are your thoughts regarding the Eternal God becoming a man? Meditate on this.

2. How would you explain to an unbeliever how much God loves you?

3. How do you understand what Peter meant when he said that we may become partakers of the divine nature?

4. How should you show your adoration of Christ for His obedience to the Father?