The Special of the Day… From the Orange Moon Cafe…
"The Mystery (and the Misery)"
"To have existed from everlasting as the infinite God, the second Person of the Trinity, would constitute becoming human as the severest limitation known ever known by any conscious being."
We rightly focus on the sorrow, suffering, forsakenness, and death of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary. Indeed, it makes possible our salvation.
"For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit" (I Peter 3:18).
We can never begin to understand or give enough thanks for what the Lord Jesus experienced in sacrificing Himself to the wrath of God and man for our sins. Eternity will not fully reveal the extremity of His travail, perhaps one reason God allowed the prints of nails and a spear to remain upon His resurrected body (John 20:27). However, we also do well to consider the entirety of our Savior's self-sacrificial life, including the very fact of His becoming human for us.
"Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness. God was manifest in the flesh" (I Timothy 3:16).
The Apostle Paul acknowledges the profound enigma of the incarnation. How does God become man, and how can a man be God? For our present consideration, what would such a being experience in heart, mind, and body throughout a human lifetime? (and even eternity as the Savior, for our sakes, will forever abide as the God who became man, and the man who remains God - I Timothy 2:5). Surely, neither human or angel can begin to comprehend the mystery that must surely have elicited misery in ways not only confined to Calvary. To have existed "from everlasting" as the infinite God, the second Person of the Trinity, would constitute becoming human as the severest limitation known ever known by any conscious being (Psalm 90:2; Hebrews 1:8).
Consider…
Before His birth, the Lord was confined to the womb of a human woman (Luke 1:31).
As a baby and child, He could not care for Himself, requiring the efforts of human parents to nurture, provide for, and protect Him (Matthew 2:12-23).
He suffered the possibility of temptation, which as God He could not have experienced (Matthew 4:1; James 1:13).
In the wilderness temptation, after so great a trial and temptation, He required angels to come and minister to Him for the ongoing of His earthly life (Matthew 4:11).
His knowledge, heretofore vast beyond our comprehension, became limited (Mark 13:32).
He hungered, a challenge unknown in the from everlasting eternity before becoming human (Mark 11:12).
He became weary, an impossibility before His incarnation (John 4:6; Isaiah 40:28).
He endured human agony so profound that it resulted in its extreme physical manifestation, the bloody sweat of a condition known as hematohidrosis (Luke 22:44).
The list of limitation could go on, and if God opened our understanding, a further chronicle of that which we cannot know would loom before us. Such information would surely become inspiration deep within our spirits, the great yearning to love our Lord far more than ever we have. Paul knew this, and penned his sublime doxology of the Divine becoming human: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men" (Philippians 2:5-7). Yes, as we rightly remember and fall before our Lord in the light of the cross, we also ponder and fall yet again in the light of a life and an eternity wherein the God who became man without relinquishing His divinity will forever remain, for our sake, as one of us. Great indeed is the mystery, and great indeed must have been the miseries of which we are aware, and so many we will never know.
God in man, God as man,
this is our blessed Christ.
The holy One, the humble One
who for us sacrificed
the glory of His Heaven,
and then His very life.
God in man, God as man,
how can such wonder be?
Forever won't be long enough,
our hearts to fully see,
that Christ became a man
to live and die for you and me.
God in man, God as man,
this is our blessed Christ,
this was and is the wonder
of His holy sacrifice.
God in man, God as man,
this is our blessed Christ.
"Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil."
(Hebrews 2:14)
Weekly Memory Verse
Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom He hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy,"
(Psalm 107:2)
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