Milestones to Glory, Part 2

great and deep passage that we
have just begun to examine here in the past weeks. As we did
last week, we set the context pretty sufficiently, so I’m just
going to touch on a few things. The whole general context was
initiated back in chapter 1, verse 27, that Paul desired that
he would hear that they were standing firm in one spirit,
with one mind, striving together for the sake of the Gospel. Unity,
in essence, is what was introduced. Unity, in chapter 2, beginning
in verse 1, is what is enjoined upon the people. Let’s pick up
there. We’ll read it in full and then
we’ll come back. set the final context where Paul wrote to the
Philippians, if there is any encouragement in Christ, if there
is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the
Spirit, if any affection and compassion, Paul wasn’t doubting
their salvation. He’s saying that if those things
are there and they should be, if you are saved, then the rest
should be there as well. Make my joy complete by being
of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit,
intent on one purpose. Do nothing from selfishness and
empty conceit, but with humility of mind, let each of you regard
one another as more important than himself. Do not merely look
out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of
others. That is the immediate context
of the concerns that he now supports with this great illustration
beginning in verse five. In fact, great isn’t even enough
of a word for it. It is the perfect illustration.
There is no better, no greater illustration that Paul could
have ever seized upon than this illustration, this illustration
for the exhortation to unity. Look at verse five. Have this
attitude in yourselves, which was also in Christ Jesus, who,
although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality
with God a thing to be grasped. But he emptied himself, taking
the form of a bondservant and being made in the likeness of
men. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Therefore also God highly exalted him, and bestowed on him the
name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every
knee should bow of those who are in heaven and on earth and
under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus
Christ is Lord, for the glory of God the Father.” We began last week by acknowledging
that Perhaps Paul’s immediate purpose here wasn’t immediately
doctrinal. He was dealing with the one main
problem in the Philippian church, and that is disunity. And so
Paul augments and adds to this exhortation found in 1-4 of chapter
2. He augments that and undergirds
it with this example, if you will, or illustration to a humility
that we can’t even hope to attain to. It’s merely illustrative
of the need for humility in our own lives. Paul begins by saying,
have this attitude in yourselves. He’s talking about a mindset
And he does it over and over again as we’ve seen in the book
of Philippians and will continue to see. Paul is concerned about
our mindset because he says if we can adjust our mindsets and
tune it, if you will, to God’s deeds and actions, we’ll follow. Have this attitude or mindset
in yourselves which was also in Christ. And he immediately
begins his great illustration. What was Christ’s mindset? Look
again at verse 6. Have this attitude in yourselves,
which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the
form of God, and we spent no little time on that little phrase. This doesn’t mean that He just
had the form of God. He was God. He was fully God. And even that word existed pre-figures
and points to the pre-existent Christ who was already fully
and in the form of God. Scripture says it repeatedly
that He is God. 1 Corinthians 15, He is the image
of the invisible God. It was the Father’s good pleasure
for all the fullness to dwell in Him.” We don’t doubt by any
sense that Christ, by that little statement there, was in the form
of God. We don’t doubt in any sense that
He was not fully and completely God. It just says that He was
existing in a particular state. Although he existed in the form
of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped.
And again, we spent a lot of time here as well looking at
what was it that Christ was grasping at. And the bottom line there
was that he didn’t need to grasp hold of that. People didn’t like
the word that somebody made up, graspingly retain or graspingly
hold. I can’t take credit for it, so
I’ll surely not take the blame. But Jesus didn’t need to hold
on to that glory to the point of or to the detriment of, rather,
God’s creation. God had a redemptive mission
for Christ and Christ willingly released hold of those prerogatives
and privileges as we saw. He had a noble mindset. Which
brings us to point two, not only did Christ was Christ moved along
this path to glory and glorification, super-glorification, as you’ll
see, not only from this passage, but from Ephesians 1, that there
were these distinct steps along the way to Christ’s exaltation,
first of which was a noble mindset. Secondly, a selfless mitigation. A selfless mitigation. Look at verse five and we’ll
take it again with the running start at verse seven. Have this
attitude in yourselves, which was also in Christ Jesus, who,
although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality
with God a thing to be grasped, but he emptied himself. Now, that little phrase has caused
a great stir in the church, not not just for the last few years,
but for centuries. For centuries, theologians and
pastors and others have wrangled and wrestled over exactly what
that phrase means and what it implies and what are the implications
of all that is stated there. As I said, for centuries, it’s
that little clause has generated controversy. The question is
simple. Of what did Christ empty himself? The theory or the theological
term here, which corresponds to the Greek word here, kenosis,
it just refers to an emptying or the modern theory of this
theological term, the kenosis, Essentially is this, that it
consists in a real self emptying of Christ at his incarnation,
that he divested himself of certain particular things. One said it this way, it maintains
that it consisted in a real self-emptying at His incarnation by a total
or partial abandonment of His divine attributes and an abdication
of any divine prerogative that would be inconsistent with human
existence. You see, people had a difficult
time grasping that Christ was at the same time God and man. They could take him one way or
the other, and they would prefer him as such. And so liberal theology
seized upon this and developed a whole system of theology about
the kenosis, about what Christ emptied himself of. We’ll see
more about that in a moment. One proponent distinguishes,
I mean, get this, this is where This is where so many churches
go so far astray with regards to their Christology, their doctrine
of Christ. One proponent of this kenosis
material said that he distinguished between the absolute and the
essential attributes of God. Well, right there, you’ve got
a problem. Because if you say something is absolute, that means
that that’s not going away. But if there are essential attributes,
that means he’s telling us, he’s forecasting that there are attributes
of God that are non-essential. I told you to look for it, so
here it comes. The absolute and essential attributes of God are
these absolute power, holiness, truth, love. But his relative
attributes, which are not essential to the Godhead, are omnipotence,
omnipresence and omniscience. And there are several, several
different ways that people characterize this whole self emptying of Christ. One called it divine suicide. Jesus, as it were, committed
divine hairy carry so that he could come down and take on human
flesh. And there are several different
expressions of it that in in so doing, Christ was laying down
some of his divine attributes, as I said, omniscience, omnipotence,
some of the less important ones. I mean, I don’t I don’t even
know where they come up with it. Another one said that he did
this by parting with and giving up all attributes of the Godhead
in order to become man in the fullest sense of the word. And
see, that’s what I say. They couldn’t rationalize in
their skulls this idea that Christ was fully God and fully man. And so, in order to make it convenient
for themselves, they just got rid of the idea in its entirety.
Christ emptied himself of his godness so that he could come
down and take on humanness. It’s that simple. There’s some
problems with that, as you might suppose. As one said, it affects
and annuls the scriptural doctrine of the Trinity. As soon as Christ
emptied himself of his deity, you no longer have a Trinity.
It also affects the doctrine of the immutability of God. God,
if that’s what happened that day, whatever day it was in eternity
past where Christ divested Himself or even just prior to His birth,
all the way up through history until that very moment, there
was a Trinity. And yet the day that Christ divested
Himself of His deity, God changed. And if God changed, the world
came to an end. Thirdly, if that is the case,
then it imperils and destroys the true deity of the eternal
son. Christ never really was God.
If he could abdicate and delimit himself from that. Christ, without
divine attributes, is not truly God. And a God who has incapacitated
Himself to such an extent in order to become man, that He
has abandoned His divine manner of existence, is no real God
any longer. In other words, if He had it
and let go of it, He never really was God to begin with. Fourthly, Burckhoff states, If
that’s the case, then it makes the mediator of Christ impossible. Christ cannot possibly be our
mediator. We’ll come back to this thought
in a minute, but he goes on to say, if Christ lay down His divine
attributes, His self-humiliation loses its saving significance. In other words, Christ came down
to earth and if He divested Himself of His glory, His death on the
cross was absolutely worthless. If he was not very God and very
man, there is no true mediator between God and man. And if that’s the case, then
he’s neither the Christ of the Scriptures, nor is he the Christ
of the creeds of the church. Now, bear with me. Because as we go back to this
passage, we look at the passage and the Greek word behind there
is kenosis and the Greek word translated here as emptied is,
that’s a fairly accurate translation of that word. Some older translations,
you know, they’ve got it all kinds of different ways that
he made himself of none effect. You know, it’s all relatively
translated the same. What did Christ do? What did
he make himself of none effect? What did he empty himself of?
This is the word, as I said, that was adopted for that theological
controversy, but really the same idea is contained elsewhere in
Scripture. Listen, John 17.5, Jesus speaks
of the glory that Jesus had with the Father before the world was.
So in some sense, He does not, as He’s on the earth there praying
in John 17, He does not have the glory that He had when He
was with the Father. Second Corinthians has a similar
idea as we saw several weeks ago. Though he was rich, yet
for yourselves, for yourselves, pardon me, for your sakes, he
became poor. So there were riches that Christ
had in heaven. And I don’t take that to mean
silver and gold and monetary riches. There were eternal and
spiritual riches that were there in heaven with God that he does
not have here on earth by his own doing. Now, because of this,
just as there always is in every season of the church, there
have been witch hunts where people go looking under every rock and
overturning every phrase and looking for people who might
be holding or advancing this view of the kenosis, where Christ
emptied himself of his deity. And one of the most well-known
victims of that, as I would judge it, would be Charles Wesley.
Now, I want you to be patient with me because I probably have
at least a dozen phrases called out of contemporary Christian
songs that I almost cannot sing because they don’t encapsulate
biblical thought. In fact, in some cases, they
seem to run counter to it. I don’t know the men’s hearts
or the people’s hearts that wrote them. All I know is it doesn’t
seem to express a biblical idea. So I know where people are coming
from when they do that, and I’ve certainly done it myself. Let
me give you just a nickel’s worth of background on Charles Wesley,
and then I’ll tell you where I’m going with this. The Wesley
brothers, as you know, John and Charles Wesley, two of, I think,
12 children used by God to bring about a revival here in America. They were part of that whole
revival movement, part of the Great Awakening. John was the
more accomplished preacher of the two, but Charles Wesley wrote
sixty five hundred hymns. Unless you think that, you know,
he was just busy, you know, churning out these hymns and really they’re
not worth the paper they’re printed on. I mean, there’s some of the
greatest hymns that the church has in its possession. Love divine,
all loves excelling. Oh, for a thousand tongues to
sing. Calm thou long expected Jesus. Christ the Lord is risen
today. Rejoice, the Lord is King. Those
are some of our favorites. Let me tell you a little bit
more about Charles Wesley. And if you just be patient, it
pertains directly to this passage. I’m not just taking it. I’m not
having a senior moment here. I already had that. Charles Wesley
was a talented biblical scholar, was an exegete. As one said,
he was well schooled in the biblical texts and the original languages
he edited and corrected his brother John’s notes on the Old and New
Testaments. His study and application of
the Bible in his poems was not limited to the renderings of
the King James Version. But in essence, he would come
up with a new and fresh translation based on his own study. And we’ve
talked in our history, the written word of God, how difficult and
arduous a task that is to go into the new, fresh translation. Charles Wesley’s dexterity in
the Greek New Testament is often evidenced in his poetical treatment
of difficult Bible passages such as Philippians 2 7. The Greek
words say, literally, he emptied himself. And when referring to
the translation of Christ, assuming human form, the translators of
the King James, which was the standard of that was the main
translation used the standard in Wesley’s day. It avoided the
bold simplicity of the Pauline phrasing, translating the kenosis,
the emptying, with the words, he made himself of no reputation. But while the King James reading
avoids the apparently scandalous phrasing of the Greek words,
Wesley would have none of this type of evasion. So if you want
to criticize Wesley, that’s fine, but give him his due. He had
a high regard for God’s word. He had the courage to say this
is what it says. Charles Wesley’s bold and direct
translation of emptied pushed beyond the renditions of his
own day and returned to the plain meaning of the Greek New Testament
in a way that prefigured a lot of the more modern translations.
In other words, Charles Wesley was a forerunner in putting the
Bible into the language of the people of the day, which was
always its purpose. And so when he wrote his hymn,
And Can It Be?, which hymn we just sang, in the third verse,
he penned this phrase as woodenly and just as plainly
as he could for a purpose, because that’s what he believed Scripture
to say. And the verse goes like this.
This is how Wesley said it originally in the hymn. He left his father’s
throne above, so free, so infinite his grace. Now, you already know
that sounds familiar. We just sang it. But the rest
of it is how he wrote it. What we sang today is an edited
version, and we’ve edited choruses and other things. There’s nothing
sacred about the lyrics necessarily of hymns. But this is the one
that got him in trouble and vilified even to this day. He left his
father’s throne above so free, so infinite his grace, emptied
himself of all but love and bled for Adam’s helpless race. And
so you had people for centuries refused to sing the hymn or edited
the hymn. And so the accusation or the
insinuation at least is that Wesley was one of these kenosis
advancing people. That he believed that Christ
emptied himself of his deity in order to come down and take
on humanity. And there is absolutely no evidence
of that at all. This was a poetic way of him
saying what scripture says. I don’t believe that Wesley for
a minute literally believed that Christ emptied Himself of all,
A-L-L, everything. In fact, the proof is in some
of his other hymns. So I figured, let’s go through
all 6,500 real quick. Actually, one will do. One will
do. A little hymn that he wrote called,
Heart to Herald Angels Sing. And even as I begin to read the
lyrics, I know you’ll want to almost break out and sing it.
But listen to the lyrics and listen to his high view of Christ. Christ, by highest heaven adored,
Christ the everlasting Lord, laid in time, behold Him come,
offspring of a virgin’s womb. Veiled in flesh, the Godhead
see. Hail the incarnate Deity. Pleased with us in flesh to dwell,
Jesus our Emmanuel. Hail the heaven-born Prince of
Peace. Hail the Son of Righteousness.
Light and life to all He brings. Risen with healing in His wings. Mild He lays His glory by. Born that man no more may die.”
Charles Wesley didn’t hold to the kenosis in the sense that
Christ emptied Himself of His deity. I suppose I can go with those
that want to nitpick the hymn and change the words. That’s
fine, because it’s a great hymn. The point is simply this. Those words meant something.
And that’s all Charles Weston was saying. Those words meant
something. It didn’t say that he made himself
of no reputation. It didn’t say that he was made
of none effect. What does that mean? Christ, as we’ve already established,
laid aside was the glories the prerogatives of deity, certain
elements or prerogatives of deity, his entire life, if you will. And in that sense, I think Wesley
is well within his right to poetically use his poetic license there
to say that he emptied himself of all of that. One characterized it in these
terms, A.W. Pink said, so far was the son
from tenacious, insisting upon his personal rights as a member
of the blessed trinity that he voluntarily relinquished them.
He willingly set aside the magnificent distinctions of the creator to
appear in the form of a creature. He abdicated his position of
supremacy and entered one of servitude. You can say that Christ yielded
glory and is positioned there in heaven with glory without
suggesting in the least that he yielded his deity. John Puritan
said it just in the most powerful terms when he said it this way.
He said he emptied himself not of the nature of God. This is
impossible. He is essentially and everlastingly
God. But of the form, the glory, the
mode of manifestation, the glory in which He had been revealed
to angels in heaven, the glory in which at times in His pre-incarnate
state He, under all the economies of the revealer of God, has shown
Himself to man, At Sinai to Isaiah, when he saw the Lord sitting
upon the throne high and lifted up of this glory, he emptied
himself.” So when Christ came to earth, we saw flashes
and glimpses of that glory. There was a star at birth that
attested to the glory of Christ. There were the wind and the waves
that were stilled by the presence of Christ Himself on the waters. There were moments of that, but
it wasn’t like He came in a pillar of fire. He came in a birth basket. He came as a little child. He came as a man. Another clarified when he said,
when He came to earth, He divested Himself of His glory There were
occasional gleams, as one may recognize the sun, even though
it’s obscured by a cloud. But Christ came not in that majesty
which he possessed and by which the old world had been dazzled.
No troops of angels surrounded him. Nature didn’t do him homage
as God. The voice of the seven thunders
was silent and the wings of the wind were collapsed and motionless. The coals of fire were quenched.
Lebanon did not tremble. Jordan was driven. Jordan was
not driven back. It was a birth, not a theophany. A theophany was one of those
Old Testament revelations of God himself. And so what Jesus
laid aside, what he divested himself was of a particular way,
of a mode, if you will, of existence, a way of expressing himself or
revealing himself. He laid aside that form of God. And in so doing, he didn’t let
go, didn’t divest himself of his divine nature. The change
was a change of state, if you will, The form of a servant in
the form of God. His personality, his personhood
remained the same, the divine being in Christ was unchanged. You see, this whole kenosis thing,
I don’t mean to make little of it, it’s everything. You say
that Christ emptied himself of his divinity. Then you have no savior. Take
away, said one, from our faith the doctrine of the Lord’s true
divinity, and our hope of deliverance through his form is found baseless. We have no Savior. There could
be no atonement for our sins, no payment. The work on the cross
would be meaningless. There’s no adequate and substantial
power in the offering, the payment made there on the cross. And
so trusting in that Savior would be meaningless. And so Jesus
emptied Himself of His glory. And this He did. I mean, it says
it quite clearly with two little phrases that follow. Verse 7,
He emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondservant. This little phrase is is an explanation
of the previous one. He emptied himself by taking
the form of a bondservant. He exchanged the form of God
for that of a servant, as we’ve already seen. In essence, what
Christ did is come from the highest point to the lowest point. And he did this willingly. He
emptied himself. He divested himself. This isn’t
something that happened to him. It wasn’t seized from him. But he laid aside this form of
God, this splendor of expression of the divinity, the glory of
the Godhead, not the essence of it, not what was in the core
of his being. And he took on the form of a
bondservant. There it expresses essentially
the characteristics of a slave. that Christ came from the supreme
sovereign of the universe and took on for Him, not just the
attire, but the demeanor, the position of a slave. When Jesus did that, there’s no intended implication
there whatsoever that he ceased to be what he was before. He
took this on in addition to his deity. He took it on within his
being of deity. It assumed or literally imbibed
something that he was not before. But there was no change in his
divine nature. As one said, without forsaking
or in any way diminishing his perfect deity or his absolute
holiness in a way that is far beyond human comprehension. The
creator took on the form of the created, and that is that for
us, that is That’s what led so many to abandon this whole idea
and seize upon this idea of the self-emptying of Christ and His
deity. Stephen Sharnock got it. Stephen
Sharnock said, if you want to be a Christian, you’ve got to
be a Christian. You’ve got to be a Christian. You’ve got to
be a Christian. This incarnation of Christ, that
he is a God of unmixed blessedness, linked personally with a man
of perpetual sorrows. A life incapable to die, joined
to a body incapable to live without dying first. Infinite purity
and a reputed sinner. Eternal blessedness with a cursed
nature. Almightiness and weakness, omniscience
and ignorance, immutability and changeableness, incomprehensibleness
and comprehensibility, that which cannot be comprehended and that
which can be, that which is entirely independent and that which is
totally dependent. The Creator forming all things
and the creature made, met together in a personal union. That’s what
so many for centuries have been absolutely unable to reconcile. That Christ was both God and
man. And so, Jesus, it says willingly,
emptied himself and assumed the position of a bondservant. And
then this final clause in verse seven, which points out how this
form of a servant of a servant was assumed. Christ became a
servant in the fact that he became man. Look again at verse seven,
but he emptied himself, taking the form of a bondservant and
being made in the likeness of men. You say, why likeness? Why didn’t
he just say he was made a man? Why likeness? Because when it
says likeness, it speaks of the physical condition that Jesus
assumed in order to serve, in His likeness rather, He was a
man. As you can see, He would look
like any of us sitting in a pew. Or standing up here. But He was
more than a mere man. He was still fully God. And that part could not be readily
seen. Not easily. In His likeness,
He was a man and God. And so, he was more than just
a mere man. I remember years ago, laying upon
this quote by James Boyce, speaking of the incarnation of Christ.
And he said it well when he said, the essence of the incarnation
is that by it, God became man in order to achieve salvation
and establish the rule of God in his people. The means by which
that was accomplished historically was the virgin birth. The conception
of Christ without the benefit of a human father has always
staggered the unbelieving mind both within and outside the church. And it has always been denied.
Thereby reducing Jesus to the level of a mere man with a not
too well defined sense of spiritual sensibilities. But the incarnation
is much more than this. It is the invasion of God in
history through one who is uniquely both God and man. It is a supernatural
or miraculous event. And it is this character of the
event which the doctrine of the virgin birth both defines and
preserves. It was a miracle. Sometimes miracles are beyond
us, beyond us really laying grasp to. And sometimes we do struggle
to understand how Christ could be both fully God and fully man,
if that’s exactly what nature has meant Him to be. Most men have been blinded to
the significance of God’s ways in redemption. Why would God
send His own Son to take on human flesh and be born and to go through
all this indignity of just living, much less suffering and ultimately
being put to death on a cross. Why would God do that? Paul says
it quite frankly. It’s the foolishness of the cross.
Why on earth, the natural man says, would God do such a thing?
Such people cannot possibly allow the thought to enter into their
minds that this man whose life was
in so many ways similar to their own. Remember the cat calls?
Isn’t this Jesus, the carpenter’s son? He hungered. He thirsted. He
worked. He had a job. What kind of a
God has a job? He got tired. He got hungry. What kind of a God is that? He
went in and out among them. He lived among them. And then
as they looked at Him, He was really no different than them. But they didn’t know Him. If Christ had been the Son of
Joseph and Mary through natural means, He would have been a human person
and a sharer in Adam’s guilt and a sinner unable to save himself,
just like you and I, but he wasn’t. He was the Son of God through
miraculous means of the virgin birth. He had not only human characteristics,
but divine as well. One pastor said of Christ in
this regard that He emptied himself, taking the form of a bondservant
being made in the likeness of men. He chose this. He gave it preference. He humbled
himself in indescribable generosity. He looked at the things of others,
namely you and I. He descended with his splendor
eclipsed. He appeared not as a god in glory,
but as clothed in flesh, not in royal robes, but in the dress
of a village youth, not as deity in fire, but a man in tears,
not in a palace, but in a manger. Not with a thunderbolt in his
hand, but with a hatchet and a hammer of a Galilean carpenter. And in this way, he gave the
church an example. of that self-abnegation and kindness
with which the Apostle had been urging. I mean, last week it
was one thing to look and to realize that this whole thing
is an illustration of a point that Paul has already urged upon
us, that we be humble. And we were urged to be humble,
first of all, by the mindset of Christ. It was a noble mindset.
But now we see that it went so much further than just a mindset. Christ actually did something. Christ actually left the realm
of God and came down and took on the flesh that He created
and became a man. And it’s in that sense, Paul
says, humble yourselves towards one another. Let’s pray. Oh, Lord God, we see and we know
Christ more fully. But in a practical sense, we
do not yet know this humility. Lord, perhaps we can never know
it fully like Christ knew it. We can never humble ourselves
from the point of deity to humanity. But therein lies Paul’s point. The trip for us is far easier. Lord, the costs are so great
for a lack of humility and the breaches are so permanent and
so damaging in the church because of pride. Father, grant us the
grace to grasp just a little bit of this humility that Christ
modeled so fully and for our benefit, that if Christ had not
come and taken on human flesh, there would be no salvation and
no church to tear apart with our petty differences. Grant
us that humility. Be glorified in it, we pray in
Jesus name. Amen. Oh.