Now, if you go to sleep, I know
it's my fault.
What I should like to do in these
four sessions I shall have with you is
look at our Lord Jesus Christ.
First of all, examine who He is as
far as Scripture can tell us, and we
can understand Him.
And then examine Him in His interaction with
people, the kind of person He is, whom
we have come to know, and hope that
we shall see this as our relationship and
the kind of relationship He has with us,
and the kind of relationship we ought to
have with one another as Christians.
Let's turn to Paul's letter to the Philippians,
chapter 2.
And Paul did not write this for a
doctrinal discussion, but it is a key passage
in any discussion of a person of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
And I don't believe it in its doctrinal
position.
I would like to use it, or have
us see it, the way Paul was using
it when he wrote to the Philippians.
Look in chapter 2, verse 1.
I'm using a revised translation, so it will
be a little bit different from your PD.
So, if there is any encouragement in Christ,
any incentive of love, any participation in the
Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy
by being of the same mind, having the
same love, being in full accord and of
one mind.
Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in
humility count others better than yourselves.
Let each of you look not only to
his own interests, but also to the interests
of others.
Have this mind among yourselves which you have
in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in
the form of God, did not count equality
with God a thing to be grasped, but
emptied himself, taking the form of a servant,
being born in the likeness of men, and
being found in human form, he humbled himself
and became obedient unto death, even death on
a cross.
Therefore God has highly exalted him, and bestowed
on him the name which is above every
name, that at the name of Jesus every
knee should bow in heaven and on earth
and under the earth, and every tongue confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord, for the glory
of God the Father.
Who is Jesus Christ?
It was a great question that plagued the
church in the first four centuries of its
history, and whether we realize it or not,
we are deeply indebted to certain men who
wrestled with this problem.
If we can repeat what Scripture says, that's
not the point.
What does Scripture mean in what it says?
And there's one man I want to meet
when I get to heaven and have a
long talk with him, and it's a young
man, at least he was young at this
particular church council.
A young man by the name of Athanasius,
a young theologian, who stood against what was
almost an overwhelming tide to insist on the
full deity of Jesus Christ.
Humanly speaking, if it had not been for
that man, the Christian church as we know
it would have been swept with a denial
of the deity of Jesus Christ.
There have always been the tendencies to swing
to one extreme or the other, so to
stress the humanity of Jesus Christ as the
liberals have done, that you lose his deity.
There has been the other danger, so to
stress the deity of Jesus Christ that you
lose his humanity.
Scripture brings the two together, and I don't
know any passage in the Word of God
that does it as beautifully as Philippians 2.
And I would like to examine that, and
then I hope to be able to see
why Paul was right in it.
We shall have to begin with verse 6,
and look at some expressions Paul uses to
try to get their meaning.
And we'll just go down through these verses
and pick up some of these important expressions.
First of all, in verse 6, we shall
have to describe or talk about the word
form.
Though he was in the form of God,
or as the English translation has it, who
being in the form of God.
What is the form of God?
Scripture seems quite clear, indeed, that God does
not have a physical form.
God is spirit being.
What, then, does Scripture mean by form?
We shall have to get away from our
idea of our English word form, which contains
the thought that there are external, physical characteristics
through which we see and comprehend this thing
we are talking about.
That's not the meaning here.
C.
B.
Warfield, that great Princeton theologian of a century
ago, summed up the meaning of the word
form that Paul used this way.
The form of any thing is the sum
of those characterizing qualities that make a thing
the precise thing that it is.
It is the sum of those characterizing qualities
that make a thing the precise thing that
it is, and not something else.
If we were to talk about the form
of God, as Paul is using the expression
here, it is the sum of those characteristics
that make God to be God and not
angel or man.
And when Paul said our Lord Jesus was
in the form of God, he has given
us as clear an expression of the full
deity of Jesus Christ as he writes.
Everything essential to being God, Jesus Christ was.
What does Paul mean by being in the
form of God?
He has used a word here that's more
than existing.
It is the idea of personal existence.
And Paul seems to be saying the form
of God is not something impersonal.
There is no deity in the abstract.
There are only divine persons, one of whom
is the one we know as Jesus Christ.
Now, what sometimes those who deny the deity
of Jesus Christ are facing is what seems
to be a mathematical contradiction.
If you say that the Father is God
and the Son is God and the Holy
Spirit is God, as the Orthodox confess, then
one God plus one God plus one God
equals three Gods.
And you're a polytheist, you're a worshipper of
more than one God.
Any second-grade child knows that one plus
one plus one equals three.
But we are talking about three and one
in different categories.
When we say Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
we grant that one plus one plus one
equals three.
There are three persons.
When we say one, we are talking about
the being of God and not the persons
of God.
And so we are talking about two different
categories.
We are saying that one God exists in
three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and
in this personal existence of the Son there
is all the deity, Paul is saying, that
there is in the Father and in the
Holy Spirit simultaneously.
And by deity, we are talking about the
eternal personal existence of the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient
being designated God.
There was a time, according to biblical revelation,
when all created matter was not.
He called into existence, by the word of
his power, everything created, everything material.
There was never a time when God was
not.
There was never a time when Jesus Christ
was not.
Full being, subsisting, personal, in the form of
God, in full deity.
Then there's another expression Paul uses here, did
not count equality with God.
Equality with God is a state of existence,
a condition of existence, in keeping with the
form of God.
Who, being fully God, lives in a condition
that goes along with being God.
Equality with God is a state of living,
a state of existence.
Now, the way Paul has constructed this statement,
he says, in the form of God.
The very way he has constructed this statement,
existing in the form of God is true
while all the other actions of Philippians chapter
2 go on.
When he emptied himself, he was still in
the form of God.
When he humbled himself, he was still in
the form of God.
When he subjected himself to death, the death
of the cross, he was still in the
form of God.
This is something that never changes.
You have a parallel construction that I want
to use in a moment, in 2 Corinthians
chapter 8, where Paul says, He knoweth the
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though
he was rich.
It's the same kind of construction.
Who, being rich, for our sakes became poor,
that we through his poverty might be rich.
What he's saying is, being rich is a
condition that was true while all the other
actions went on.
When he became poor, he was still rich,
in the way Paul is using the term
rich.
And that's what he's saying here.
While all these other actions occurred, he was
still existing in the form of God.
What then did he do?
This translation has, he emptied himself.
And that is probably the greatest passage of
controversy about the person of our Lord Jesus
Christ.
Our tendency is immediately to ask, and this
is a proper translation of it, emptied himself.
Our tendency immediately is to ask, emptied himself
of what?
And I think right there is where we
make the mistake.
This particular verb, to empty, is never used
literally in the New Testament.
It is always used metaphorically, never literally.
So, you can't ask of what?
Do you empty a thing?
Now, if it were used literally, I could
say, I will take the glass and empty
it.
I mean, I pour out what is already
in it.
But not so if I use it metaphorically.
Paul uses metaphorically that he refused the words
of man's wisdom in preaching the gospel, let
the cross of Christ be made of none
effect.
Let the cross of Christ be emptied.
Emptied of what?
Well, you don't ask that question when you're
using this word metaphorically.
Just annul the cross, the meaning of it,
to make it of none effect.
When Paul says our Lord Jesus emptied himself,
you can't jump beyond the himself to ask
of what.
It was himself he emptied.
Not of anything, but himself.
The whole point Paul is getting at is,
we, in our relationship with each other, are
to follow his example.
What are we to do?
Empty ourselves of anything?
No.
We are to become servants of our fellow
Christians.
And Paul is saying that's precisely what the
Lord Jesus did.
He emptied himself.
He took the loaf of it.
How did he empty himself?
He goes on to describe how he emptied
himself.
By taking.
Now, if you were to use this word
literally, emptied himself, you don't empty something by
adding to it.
But that's precisely what Paul said he did.
He emptied himself taking the form of a
servant.
That was the emptying.
And the form of a servant was just
as real as the form of God.
And our Lord Jesus, the eternal form of
God, emptied himself by taking on human nature.
He goes on to explain what he means
by the form of a servant.
That is, human nature.
Becoming a man.
So, in the great act of incarnation, our
Lord voluntarily took human nature to himself.
And what we have to say of our
Lord Jesus Christ, without pretending to understand it,
is in the one person of Jesus Christ
there are two natures, divine and human.
I'm using the term divine as a substitute
for deity.
It's a common term in the discussion.
In that one person of Jesus of Nazareth,
there are at the same time, without any
change of nature, there is the divine nature
and the human nature.
And when the divine person, the Son of
God, took the human nature, that was emptying
himself, he left the condition of being on
an equality with God to take the condition
of humility and servanthood, of human equality, of
human life.
What I understand the Scriptures to teach is
something like this.
Our Lord deliberately chose to become man, genuinely
man, without, of course, giving up any deity.
That would be impossible by very definition of
deity.
Once you predicate immutability of deity, the deity
cannot change, I the Lord change not, then
it's impossible to give up any deity and
still be God.
In fact, the idea of giving up deity
would be impossible to discuss.
So, without surrendering any deity or any of
the attributes of deity, he took on human
existence, human nature.
So, while he was here on earth, he
had all the attributes of deity and all
the attributes of genuine man.
Now, what I understand is this, that our
Lord became poor all the while he was
rich.
That is, he had all the attributes of
deity, but deliberately refused their exercise in his
own interest.
In other words, he took a genuine human
existence, a genuine human life.
He lived the way we have to live
apart from sin.
He lived in voluntary self-limitation, that is,
limited himself to human existence, lived as we
must live.
Lived a life of dependence upon the Father
and the Holy Spirit.
The words that I speak, he said, are
not mine, but his incentives.
The works that I do, the Father does,
and I don't do.
And he did not enter his public ministry
in the baptism of the Spirit of God.
Dependence.
The writer of the Hebrews put into the
mouth of the Lord Jesus those words, I
will put my trust in him, that is,
I will put my trust in God.
And he would not, in order to ease
his own life here, call into play the
attributes of his deity.
Now, let me go back to that 2
Corinthians 8-9.
You know the grace of our Lord Jesus
Christ, and try to illustrate it.
Who being rich became poor.
The same idea as I understand it in
Philippians 2.
Let's take a very wealthy man who wants
to go down into a poverty-stricken area
and share the life of the poor.
And so he leaves his mansion, and his
servants, and his wealth, and his abundance of
food, and he leaves his chauffeur, and his
limousine, and his fine clothes, and he puts
on the clothes of the people of the
area to which he is coming.
And he comes into this poverty-stricken area,
and he finds a little basement, one-room
apartment.
Damp, dirty, cold, cheerless, the way other people
in this area have to live.
And he lives in that apartment.
And like other people, he goes up to
the employment agency and tries to find a
job.
And like other people in that area, he
can't find a job.
And he's sitting in this apartment building, in
this basement apartment, cold and hungry, and he
thinks of the mansion he has left, and
its abundance of food.
And he refuses to send back to his
servants to bring him some food to relieve
his own hunger.
He has determined to share to the full
the experience of those whom he has come
to serve.
Now, he will send back for some money
and things in order to give to others,
but he refuses to do it for himself.
When Satan says, turn these stones into bread
to satisfy his own hunger, he refused, but
he could take a loaf of bread, a
few loaves of bread and fish, and multiply
them for a hungry mother.
But he was determined to share our life,
to live as we live, all the while
being in the form of God.
The writer of the Hebrews tells us he
did this, that he might be a merciful
and faithful high priest.
And when I come to the Lord Jesus
Christ, I'm not coming to one who hadn't
experienced what I experienced in the past.
He experienced temptation, of course, but the source
was external, not internal, as so many of
my temptations are.
But he experienced what I experienced.
He lived by faith as I live by
faith.
He had to trust in God as I
have to trust in God.
He didn't know what hunger and sorrow and
thirst and heartache and weariness were, as I
have to know them.
He deliberately restricted himself to this kind of
life.
Now, what does this do?
Well, this is what I'd like to look
at in the gospel as our Lord interacts
with different people.
He didn't overwhelm them with a blaze of
glory.
He lived as they lived.
And when they saw him at first glance,
when first meeting him, there wasn't anything unusual
about him.
It's only as they listened to him talk,
as they watched him work, that they came
to discover there's something unique about this individual.
And the only way, ultimately, they could explain
his uniqueness is to say he's the only
begotten of the Father.
What did this do to them?
Well, one of the incidents that thrills me,
really, and I know why, in no way,
and know why I intend to be disrespectful
of our Lord, but one of the things
that thrills me is when our Lord was
in the upper room, you know, Passover and
instituting the Lord's Son.
These men had lived with him for three
and a half years and had gotten to
know him pretty well.
And do you remember what they were doing
at that Passover and while he was instituting
the doctrine?
Do you know what they were doing?
Well, the Gospels tell us they were arguing
which of them was the greatest.
Now, let me admit, they had no business
doing that, but they did it anyhow.
Now, the thing that thrills me, as I've
shared with some of you before, I suppose
our kids are pretty normal.
It's normal they can be heading up to
the parents.
When we are off to someone else's home
for dinner, they're usually on their good behavior.
In fact, this has been a point of
contention at home.
Look, don't use your fork that way.
Use your napkin this way, you know.
You want to act like this when we
go out to someone else's home?
And they respond, we don't act like that
when we're in someone else's home.
And they don't.
They've got all their manners on in someone
else's home.
And when we're sitting at someone else's dinner
table, they not only have their manners on
in regard to forks and knives and food
and napkins, but in regard to each other.
My wife and I sometimes look at each
other in someone else's home and we say,
are these our kids?
Boy, they're polite to each other.
But when we get home, you know, and
we're around the supper table, things have been
all jarred up that afternoon at school.
You know what happens at the supper table?
Wham, wham, wham it goes, you know.
And I'm not saying we tolerate this or
we allow it to go on, but it
occurs.
They fight.
Why do they argue here and not there?
Their response is, we're at home here.
Those disciples were so at home with Jesus
Christ, they'd go ahead and argue with him
right there at the dinner table.
I like the way he corrected it.
Not you bunch of unspiritual, good-for-nothing
disciples.
No, he just very quietly got up and
took some water in the towel and went
around and watched everybody.
They were arguing about who was going to
be the greatest and he took the place
of the servant.
And that settled the argument.
You see, because he did not come down
overwhelming us with a blaze of glory but
lived as we live, it's possible to get
close to him.
And they got so close.
And they were right at home with him.
And they could be open with him.
They could blurt out what they were thinking.
And when you begin to experience the fellowship
with the Lord Jesus like that, and you
begin to experience that with each other, that
kind of closeness, that kind of openness, that
kind of relaxation in each other's presence, life
takes on a whole new meaning.
And this is what Paul is saying to
him.
Look, our Lord got down like that.
You do the same thing with each other.
Now, you can't put this on, mind you.
You can't put this on.
You can't do it.
I thought many a time, if I tried
to do what the Lord did, take the
basin and the water and the towel and
wash the disciples' feet, I think Peter would
have kicked me.
Because he would have known it wasn't genuine.
I was putting on.
I was pretending.
I was saying, this is what a person
ought to do and I'm doing it for
the wrong motivation.
But this is the kind of relationship where
you can't pretend.
And what our Lord did was genuine.
He has genuinely become a servant.
And what he did in washing their feet
was the natural expression of the decision he
had made to become man in the fullness
of it.
Now, Paul is saying, look, you have the
same mind, it'll lead to the same action.
You do what he did.
And if he...