Counting the cost
The costliness of the incarnation many times escapes our notice as we fixate on the cost of the passion and death of Christ on the cross. Yet for us to more fully grasp the depth of God’s love for us, we need to look before the cross and realize that the sacrifice of the Son of God was more than death; it was a humbling or humiliation for the Creator in order to redeem and save the creation. In his book Miracles, C. S. Lewis offers some helpful insights for understanding the unfathomable reality of Christ’s incarnation:
In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity.… But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole 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 almost 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 deathlike region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, back to colour 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 coloured now that they have come up into the light: down below, where it lay colourless in the dark, he lost his colour too.
In this descent and re-ascent everyone will recognise 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 deathlike, it must fall into the ground: thence the new life re-ascends. It is the pattern of all animal generation too. There is descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoon and ovum, and in the dark womb … the slow ascent to the perfect embryo, to the living, conscious baby, and finally to the adult. So it is also in our moral and emotional life. The first innocent and spontaneous desires have to submit to the deathlike process of control or total denial: but from that there is a re-ascent to fully formed character in which the strength of the original material all operates but in a new way. Death and Re-birth—go down to go up—it is a key principle. Through this bottleneck, this belittlement, the highroad nearly always lies.
The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the centre. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God. All the instances of it which I have mentioned turn out to be but transpositions of the Divine theme into a minor key. I am not now referring simply to the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. The total pattern, of which they are only the turning point, is the real Death and Re-birth: for certainly no seed ever fell from so fair a tree into so dark and cold a soil as would furnish more than a faint analogy to this huge descent and re-ascension in which God dredged the salt and oozy bottom of Creation.
Lewis’ explanation reminds me of 2 Corinthians 8:9: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you, through His poverty, might become rich.” We have nothing of any value to offer for our redemption from our rebellion and sin. There is not one of us that has righteousness as a character trait or even reputation before a holy and just God. Yet He deigns to come to and for us in this unfathomable means of incarnation. I imagine that when Adam and Eve first heard God utter Genesis 3:15, speaking to the serpent, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall crush your head, and you shall bruise His heel” that they clung to hope of vanquishing this deceiving foe that had set them on this path of sin. Hoping that their offspring would restore what they had given away by selfishness.
Yet, this promise of a Deliverer would not be fulfilled by Adam and Eve or even any of the line of husbands and wives that were to follow, but when God overshadowed a young virgin named Mary thousands of years later. This One who came was the God-Man, the son of God and the son of Man, Jesus Christ, Immanuel. He would be born of woman, taking on flesh but descending from His place in the Triune Godhead where He has existed eternally, all to save us. As I shared this morning, the cost of this descent, this humiliation, demonstrates the great love God has for you and me, sinners separated from Him. And it helps us more clearly see the purpose, power and absolute rightness of verses 9-11 of Philippians 2 “For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
There can be no other reaction or response to the praiseworthiness of the Lord Jesus Christ than what God has promised will occur. I suggest we practice this daily for He is worthy and greatly to be praised.
Pressing on…
Ron Tipton, Senior Pastor
