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Introduction
· Grace to you and peace through God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!
I bring greetings from Immanuel Baptist Church in Highland.
Several of our staff are here today, some of whom are graduates of Gateway Seminary.
So your work here is blessing many churches, including ours.
I also want to say a special thank you to Dr. Groza, who has been serving as interim pastor of my previous church, Crossview Bible Church, as they continue the pastoral search process.
What a blessing it has been to see his leadership there and our people growing in the faith.
I understand that you’ve been doing a series on Difficult Passages, and I’ve been asked to speak this morning on Philippians 2, sometimes called the “kenosis” passage.
· About a two hour drive south of here is a little town called Julian in the mountains east of San Diego.
It’s a great little day trip and you’ll be hard pressed to ever find a better slice of pie.
But it’s also rich California history.
Back in 1869, a man named Fred Coleman was horseback riding through that area, when he saw the sun reflecting off some rocks in the creek.
Upon a closer look, he discovered there was gold in the area, and soon, there was a mad rush.
Before long, several mining claims were filed, and another California gold rush had begun.
To this day, you can go underground and tour one of the gold mines called the Eagle Mine and see some of the original equipment that was used in the area.
· The passage before us this morning is a gold mine of Christian theology.
It is full of treasure, but contains an intricate network of tunnels, shafts, and potential pitfalls.
A maze that could leave someone’s head spinning.
Much more than we will have time to go into this morning.
But hopefully we can hit some of the highlights and enjoy fixing our eyes on Christ together this morning.
· Read Philippians 2:1-11
· Three lessons about the person and work of Christ: His Deity, His Humanity, and His Humility.
His Deity (v. 6)
· This section begins with a look at who Christ was since eternity past.
· “Though he was in the form of God” – This may appear to be something less than God.
He was not God – he was only the “form” or in some way “resembled” God.
But Paul is not diminishing his divine nature here.
He is actually emphasizing it.
The word “form” (Gk μορφή) sometimes refers to one’s shape or outward appearance, but it also can speak of their inner character or essential attributes (AS).
Had Paul used the word σχῆμα, he could have left the door open for Jesus being only the appearance of God, as though he were some sort of earthly depiction of God.
But μορφή tells us that deity is his very nature and substance, and that this condition existed from eternity past.
· The prophet Micah testifiedto this hundreds of years earlier in Micah 5:2, that the one who would rule Israel was from of old, from ancient days.
· Colossians, another letter that Paul wrote around the same time, speaks of Jesus as “the image of the invisible God” and that in him “the fulness of deity was pleased to dwell in bodily form” (Col.
1:9)
· Jesus refers to his eternal glory in John 17:5 And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.
· The Son of God existed with the Father and Spirit from eternity past.
· What was he doing, you may ask?
He was radiating beauty and ruling with wisdom.
He was engulfed in glory and enjoying all the privileges of deity.
He lacked nothing.
He was the eternal, omnipotent, self-sufficient, second person of the Trinity, delighting in constant fellowship with Father and Spirit.
And this relationship went on, with no beginning, no deficiency, and no interruption.
· To put it simply, “He was in the form of God”.
But then, in order to save us from sin, God did something shocking.
He took on human flesh.
The Creator became like his creation.
This leads to our second point, “his humanity.”
His Humanity (v.
7)
· His Mindset.
“He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.”
In other words, he did not cling to or insist on retaining equal standing with the Father.
He could have done so.
It would have been the reasonable and fair thing to do.
And yet he willingly chose not to.
There is a strong adversative (Gk ἀλλά) at the beginning of verse 7 as the story shifts to what Jesus diddo.
· “Made himself nothing” (v. 7).
Just let that sink in for a moment.
God, through Jesus Christ, made himself nothing.
My ESV (2004) says “made himself nothing.”
Later the ESV editors updated it to: “emptied himself.”
KJV “He made himself of no reputation.”
Gk. κενόω.
Which of course is why we sometimes refer to this as the “kenosis” passage.
· But what exactly did Jesus “empty himself” of when he became man?
Did he exchange his deity for humanity?
God and man are two very different beings and would seem to be mutually exclusive.
God is infinite, while man is finite.
God is eternal, while man is mortal.
God is Creator, while man is the creation.
It might seem logical, but the text doesn’t say he “emptied” himself of the form of God.
· The very next phrase tells us how he emptied himself “by taking the form of a servant.”
In other words, his subtraction was actually an addition.
His emptying was by voluntarily limiting himself.
Some of put it this way: he gave up the independent exercise of his divine attributes.
Augustine said, “He concealed his divine radiance.”
· A couple weeks ago my daughter came home from church saying she had learned about Ehud.
Ehud was a judge used by God to deliver Israel from the Moabites.
He went before the wicked king Eglon and assassinated him.
And of course, if you remember the story, Ehud was left-handed.
He had strapped his sword to his right thigh under his clothes, where it couldn’t be seen, and where the guards would not normally look.
And so the teacher that day talked about right handed people versus left handed people.
Some of the kids weren’t sure which hand was their dominant one, and so the teacher had them run a short race to see which foot they started with.
At lunch the next day, my daughter was eating with the spoon in her left hand, and said, “I’m going to try doing everything with my left hand today, except my school work.”
There was a voluntary laying aside of an ability and right.
· Hebrews 2:9 …for a little while [he] was made lower than the angels….
· 2 Corinthians 8:9 … though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.
· John 1:14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
· So it is clear Jesus did not empty himself of deity in order to become human.
He did not stop being God in order to become a man.
He now has two natures.
What then is the relationship between these two natures?
A number of early church leaders grappled with these issues, sometimes moving into speculation and sometimes outright heresy.
· Apollinarius – referred to Christ as a “flesh-bearing God,” and suggested that Jesus took on a human body, but not a human soul.
· Nestorius – church leader speculated that Jesus was made up of two different persons that worked together with each other – one divine person, and the other human person.
A split-personality, so to speak.
· Eutychus – this monk affirmed Jesus was a single person, but denied the dual natures of Christ.
Jesus remained neither God, nor man, but became a third kind of being with a new nature – a “God-Man.”
He oddly even went on to suggest that both the divine and the human nature of Jesus existed before the incarnation.
· All of these would have serious implications for the atonement, as Jesus needed to be both fully God and fully man in order to be our sin-bearer and our substitute, yet capable of bearing the sins of the world.
· To resolve the matter, the early churches gathered in the city of Chalcedon in AD 451.
In it, they carefully thought through the wording and concluded the best way to express the person of Christ as “one person, two natures.”
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