Our God did the unthinkable: He accepted limitation and pain and suffering just by taking on human flesh! One of the three persons of the infinite Godhead stuffed Himself into a finite human body, and not only that, but He chose to start as a human embryo… to go the whole distance of human experience and suffer total human helplessness and limitation, and, eventually, to endure the worst physical and spiritual torture ever inflicted. As we look more closely at what is called the “Incarnation,” Jesus taking on human flesh, and what God accomplishes through it, we see that one of the defining features of the Son is complete and constant surrender to the will of the Father. We also see that surrender is something that everyone can do, irregardless of circumstance and life station.
In Bible Study this week, one of my friends was commenting on how Jesus, as he dealt in person with everyone, knew everything about everyone everywhere. My friend expressed what seems like common sense, that Jesus always knew exactly what to say and do from His omniscient vantage point. This idea could lead us to think that everything was easy for Jesus, because, after all, He is God. I wonder, if we allow ourselves to think along these lines, if we may begin to downplay the unceasing surrender of the Son? And if we believe that surrender was somehow easier for the Son because He held onto traits like Immortality, Omniscience, and Omnipotence, then we might consider the kind of surrender He demonstrated and the spiritual assets He held as something impossible for us to live out, and assume that miracles are completely out of the question for us. Looking for other treasure, we might completely miss the abundance that Jesus sought and bought in relationship with the Father, and ignore the source of power that Jesus Himself relied upon, the Holy Spirit…
We generally try to make choices to avoid pain and suffering. The thought of sustaining a bodily injury, like the loss of a leg, or one of our senses, like hearing, or eyesight, is scary. Even our sense of taste informs our existence in so many important (and wonderful) ways, it is difficult to imagine life without it. As we consider the condescension of the Son into a body of flesh, it is good to recall the glory from which He came, and compare it to our own starting point, a healthy human body.
To think that He who can see all things… in fact, the One in which all things hold together—
[“For by Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” Col. 1:16-17. NIV 1984.]
–would accept the limitation of the poor eyesight afforded by two human eyeballs… is amazing. His infinite vision was not only limited by the physical apparatus of the eyeball, (the human eyeball isn’t able to discern detail even as well as the eyeball of a hawk), but those comparatively weak eyeballs are set to rotate within a head that has to turn in order to interpret even part of the surrounding environment. Objects that are nearby obscure the awareness of other objects (near or far) that are behind them.
Human eyes don’t see well in dark places, either. To go from seeing everything at once, as Jesus did, (and now does again), to seeing only a small patch of surroundings, is like you and me making sense of our surroundings looking only through a straw. The constraint of physical human vision Jesus accepted was almost infinite, compared to seeing everything.
Jesus, who could hear every thought and word of every brain and voice, accepted the limitation of the audio range and distortion of the sound waves that the human ear can take in. Imagine if you were given special earplugs that filtered out all noise beyond a range of 36 inches from the ear. You would suffer greatly from the loss of distant hearing. Jesus gave it up willingly, and the reduction of divine hearing to the constraint of human earshot was almost infinite.
Jesus, the Living Word…
[“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.” Hebrews 1:3. NIV 1984. Italics mine.] The New King James Version has it, “and upholding all things by the word of His power.”
…chose not only to limit His voice to a vocal range that could be produced by a human throat, but also to throttle His communication with mankind for years within the cries and coos of an infant and the babbling, garbled speech of a toddler.
How can we understand the condescension of Jesus’s spoken language in order to relate to mankind? Perhaps if we were to limit our spoken communication through the sound apparatus of a cricket, we might begin to understand what that is like. It makes a nice comforting sound on a lazy summer evening, but doesn’t come close to capturing the range of emotions and expression that we might want to communicate. (However, if we are sent to crickets, we will be understood better than if we go into the grass speaking dog language).
By the Father’s will, the Son accepted a nervous system like yours and mine, capable of feeling intense pain, knowing that very fabric of nerves would some day be assailed in every way, and deliver an excruciating combination of signals to His brain that His tissues were being tortured and marred beyond a physical body’s healing capabilities. Every human sense was going to be attacked viciously and unmercifully so that a death sentence would be realized in every molecule of His flesh.
This part of Jesus’s suffering we understand, at least in concept, and a few of us have experienced the pain of brutality and torture, but none of us has been attacked by the sin of the entire human race through all human history—past, present, and future. Some of us have been subjected to the violence and sin of a hate-filled mob, but in the case of our Savior, He was brutalized at the same time by the will of the Father, receiving within Himself the complete spiritual penalty for the collective rebellious rot of human rejection and selfishness.
The Father was unmerciful to His own Son so that He can extend completed mercy to mankind!!!
What a stench humanity has made itself in the nostrils of God! When the Father poured the whole stinking cup of sin onto the the sacrificial lamb, it covered the lamb in such an offensive display that the Father had to turn away in repulsion. If the Father ever turned to vomit, it was surely at this time!
In Galatians 5:11, we are told of the “offense of the cross.” In Galatians 3:13, we see that the Savior was actually made a curse… “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.'” NIV 1984.
The moment this happened, the Father did what He had never done before, and would never repeat again… He broke off fellowship with the Son. We know because of the puzzling, anguished question Jesus launched into the air with a few of His last labored breaths under the full crushing weight of humanity’s sin, and just moments from the death of the body that was broken for us:
“About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”—which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matthew 27:46. NIV 1984.
THIS is the ultimate expression of the full cost that was paid for the penalty of sin which we have each incurred. The physical punishment of the body through torture and crucifixion serves as a shocking and astounding symbol for us because the wounds and physical pain can be understood and measured in human terms, but it does not come close to expressing the true spiritual cost and pain that was endured for us. Jesus gave up fellowship with the Father for a time in order to guarantee fellowship in eternity for those who will accept it.
There is a part of the Apostle’s Creed which says, “He” (Christ) “descended into hell.” The case could be made that the moment most apropos to this phrase is when the Father forsook the fellowship of the Son. (The most defining feature of the Hell that will be prepared for the devil and all those who reject Christ is that God will not be there. Separation from God and others will be the most torturous aspect of eternity future in Hell. A place from which God will withdraw completely is incomprehensible, since God is omnipresent. Perhaps God will not limit Himself or His extents, but rather remove in the hellbound soul any ability to sense or appreciate His presence? I do not pretend to know).
I can’t pretend to know how the Father and the Spirit withdrew from the Son, but I suppose it was a continuation of human limitation within the Son beyond physical death where the Father allowed Jesus to experience the abandonment that we all deserve. Jesus tasted the second death so that many of us would not have to.
Hebrews 2:9, “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” NIV 1984.
And so the storm cloud or eclipse that obscured the sun on that day at the cross, which darkened the earth at the time, was only a hint of what was going on in the Godhead. To Be Continued in What Did Jesus Do? “WDJD”- PART 2.