The Humility of Christ

I’m sitting here at work doing my little spreadsheets and listening to Timothy Brindle’s “Killing Sin” album and the song “The Humility of Christ” cues up. Because I’m working intensely (on a spreadsheet), I’m kind of half listening, but near the beginning of the song, it kind of grabbed me.

Timothy begins to describe the birth of Christ and two lines really hit me and made me start to think:

“Let me ask you if you seem confused with this/

God passed through His own creatures uterus/

I admit this is odd, but the Bible can persuade me/

An omnipotent God crying as a baby?!?!?”

Let’s take a moment to break this down for a second and put it all into perspective. Here we have one person from the Trinity, The Word become flesh, the ruler of the universe, the King of the Jews who rules both physically and spiritually… and yet he made himself so small… so fragile, so meek to become an infant little boy?!? It seems so opposite of the way Christians or humanity as a whole work today. It seems so many times we all struggle and wrestle with ourselves and each other to climb to the top of the pile. Yet, here we have the one who deserves the honor and praise so much that it’s required, but he puts himself at the bottom of the deck. He took off the power, the deity, the Holiness He had, and became one of us. Flesh like you and me, and was STILL God! It boggles the mind how… but more importantly WHY He would do something like that!

An illustration I like to use to demonstrate God’s patience is to contrast it with the patience we have. I’ll paint the picture of an artist or something and say things like “now say you had a picture you wanted to paint. You had it all planned out in your head… but as you begin to paint, it wasn’t turning out as well as you thought it would... what would you do?” Of course the answer is start all over right? Why did God go through all the trouble? Was it because He loved us so much? I don’t think that’s the whole reason, but certainly part of it. Was it because of His limitless patience? I think it played a part… but not a majority of it. Well what do the scriptures say about it? What reason does the Bible give that God would go through all of that rather than just wipe the slate clean and start over. The simple answer is, God wanted the glory! OH HOW HE DESERVES IT!

The simple fact is, there’s nothing about anyone on Earth that could make God have a change of heart! Plainly put, He planned and ordained everything from the beginning. I like the illustration I used in the previous paragraph, but there’s one glaring obvious flaw people don’t pick up on all of the time. It assumes that the fall of man caught God off guard. It assumes that God didn’t have any clue what would happen once he started this “people project”. That of course is wrong, but I do it like that so that I can bring up another point. That point being the HUGE difference between God and man.

How limited our intelligence, foresight, potential for planning ahead… it’s all predicated on other circumstances we don’t control. We can’t create or manipulate events all the way through. For all of our planning, for all of our thinking, there are still uncertainties. Companies can plan to build buildings 5 or 6 years into the future, but when the time comes and those 5 or 6 years have passed, every company will stop to examine its condition at the time to decide if beginning that building is something they can afford to do. I was in a conversation with a co-worker where this was exactly the case. A company had began to build some office buildings in our area a few years ago with the idea that they’d be able to fill them up with occupants, however during the building process, turns in the market means that now, people and businesses aren’t willing to spend as much, so the building is finished and barely occupied now.

It isn’t so with God. He knows every second that passes. He’s seen it all already, and we’re all in His stage play. He’s planned everything in such a way that He would be magnified by those who love Him throughout history. He hardened Pharaohs heart so that the Israelites would witness His might with the splitting of the Red Sea and the destruction of Pharaoh and his army. He has allowed sin to exist so that we would be able to experience His grace and kindness. Would we know how GOOD our God is without evil to contrast His goodness? He only allows it for a time, and those who will open their eyes to witness His splendor will be kept for eternity having borne a testimony to God’s glory and being able to worship Him rightly because of it. With that in perspective, let’s take another look at the marvelous work He has done by coming to us in such a humble fashion.

A holy and matchless God, who formed the universe with a few words, made himself into the likeness of His own small creation and saved them from His own wrath. Someone so High and Mighty, deserving of all the horns of the Earth announcing his entry, chose to come to us in the most humble conditions, in the most humble place, in the most humble way. Why? So we could look back into history and witness this even in our Bibles and see that His coming is two-fold. The first part was to free the slaves from the bondage of sin and the second, to gather those who He chose to save. Praise our God!