JESUS CHRIST-HUMILITY
There is an
infinite distance between God and His creatures, and it is an act of sheer
grace for Him to take notice of earthly things. Christ, as God, is completely
self-sufficient in His own eternal blessedness. How great, then, is the glory
of His self-humiliation in taking our nature that He might bring us to God!
Such humiliation was not forced on Him; He freely chose to do it.
John Owen
Meditation on the Glory of Christ, 1684, ch. 4.
Emmanuel. God with us. He who resided in Heaven, co-equal and
co-eternal with the Father and the Spirit, willingly descended into our world.
He breathed our air, felt our pain, knew our sorrows, and died for our sins. He
didn't come to frighten us, but to show us the way to warmth and safety.
Does God ask
us to do what is beneath us? This question will never trouble us again if we
consider the Lord of heaven taking a towel and washing feet.
Elizabeth Elliot
The heart of
the Adamic temptation was to grasp for equality with God (Gen. 3:5). Adam
attempted to seize equality with God; Christ did not. By contrast Christ chose
the way of self-emptying rather than self-aggrandizement.
George Eldon Ladd
A Theology of the New Testament, Eerdmans,
1993, p. 461.
Man was added
to Him, God not lost to Him; He emptied Himself not by losing what He was, but
by taking to Him what He was not.
Augustine
Christ is the
humility of God embodied in human nature; the Eternal Love humbling itself,
clothing itself in the garb of meekness and gentleness, to win and serve and
save us.
It is by far
the most amazing miracle in the whole Bible-far more amazing than the
resurrection and more amazing than the creation of the universe. The fact that
the infinite, omnipotent, eternal Son of God could become man and join Himself
to a human nature forever, so that infinite God became one person with infinite
man, will remain for eternity the most profound miracle and the most profound
mystery in all the universe.
Wayne Grudem
Systematic Theology, Zondervan, 1994, p. 563.
[He] is not
proud... He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything
else to Him.
C.S. Lewis
Because we children of Adam want to become great, He
became small. Because we will not stoop, He humbled
Himself. Because we want to rule, He came to serve.
Oswald Sanders
Spiritual Leadership, Moody Publishers, 1967, p. 15.
He is the
King of kings, the radiance of His glory, the Lord of the spaceless,
fabulous, infinite universe, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, unspeakable
holy, dwelling in light, unapproachable, changeless…and yet He condescended to
be enclosed in lowly human flesh, to be born a despised Judean, in a filthy
stable, in the womb of a simple Israeli woman and without fanfare or pomp.
Author Unknown