Philippians 2:5–11

0:00 I think one of the greatest joys of this Christmas season is just the amazing coming together of so many unexpected things. You ever notice that? Christmas season is always, in one way or another, about the unexpected. You're constantly running into things that surprise you. That's the whole point, isn't it, of wrapping the gifts that we give to one another. It's the whole point of getting those gifts in the first place. It's to give someone something as an act of kindness that they get to open up and be surprised about.

0:36 You know, there have been times in the past when my mother has had me go out and buy my own Christmas gift because she didn't know where to get it, and she'll put it under the tree and wrap it up, and I'll open it up on Christmas Day, and, oh, there's the thing that I bought at the store. It's not near as exciting, is it, as when you don't know what's coming, and it's something that you like and that pleases you and that surprises you. And I notice the same thing when I'm driving around neighborhoods in Louisville. What I've noticed is that some people are very traditional in the way they do their Christmas decorations on their house.

1:07 It's sort of the same thing every single year. That's how my house is. We have a nativity scene that we put out, and we shine some light on it. And it's become just a kind of famous tradition in our neighborhood. Oh, there's the Gilbert's nativity scene that they put out. Other people, though, surprise you. You'll turn a corner, and there's a whole new gigantic 20-foot Santa Claus sitting on the deck. Or they've changed the color of the lights. Or they've put out candy canes this year. It's surprising and it's delightful when that happens. I think the same sort of delight, I think the same sort of surprise really runs through the entire story of the Bible.

1:43 Last week, if you remember, we looked at three prophecies of the coming of the king, the Messiah, that had been promised back in Genesis 3.15. And in all of those, there's this element of surprise. Maybe the most striking one is that of Balaam because he's actually being paid by King Balak to curse the Israelites. And yet what comes out of his mouth is surprisingly and delightfully, at least for us and the Israelites, not so much for Balak and Balaam. But surprisingly to us is blessing of the nation of Israel.

2:15 And this promise of a star rising out of Israel, a scepter out of Jacob, it's surprising. There are lots of times in the Bible when we're surprised by God's work. When you think about it, Genesis 1, 1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And God said, let there be light. And boom, there was light. I mean, how surprising would that have been? Let there be light. And phew, it's the first thing that's ever happened in history. Time and space and all the rest of it come into existence right there. Because nothing had existed to that point except God filling up eternity.

2:52 It's surprising. It's surprising when God hears the cries of his people in Egypt during the Exodus, remember? And he acts in order to save them. It's surprising when they're standing on the edge of the Red Sea, about to be crushed by the Egyptian army. And Moses stretches out his rod over the sea, and the sea opens up so that they can walk through. It's surprising. Well, this week, today, we're going to look at another surprising act of God. But it's an action of God that really is, I think, different in kind from all of those other surprises.

3:29 It's something that in a certain way is just different, and it hits us different when we think about it. And that is the act of the incarnation itself. We're going to go to one particular passage of Scripture today, and we're going to look at the incarnation of the eternal Son of God. That's fancy theological language, but what it means is that we're going to be looking at the Son of God, the second person of the eternal trinity becoming human we're going to delve into it in some detail we're going to talk about the theological meaning of it we're going to sort of tease out some of the implications uh and it's it's going to be theological because the christmas season believe it or not is one of the most theological times in the entire calendar of the christian church this is when our hymns become the most theological right hail the incarnate deity how do you how do you get any more theological than that. So we're going to delve into all of that, and hopefully we're going to learn about the incarnation of the Son of God. But before we go there, before we even go to the passage of Scripture that we're going to study, I said just a minute ago that the incarnation is an act of God

4:32 that is different from all those other acts. How is that? Why is the incarnation different? Well, I think it's different in a couple of different ways. I mean, for one, the incarnation, at least at first glance, the first time you look at it, it doesn't come with the sort of power and explosive force that creation came or that the exodus came or that the falling of the walls of Jericho came. It doesn't seem at first glance like an explosive thing. It seems like a quiet thing, a silent night, holy night kind of thing, the lowing of the cattle kind of thing, no crying he makes kind of thing. That's what it seems like it does. I mean, you don't get this enormous display of power on Christmas night, do you?

5:21 And in the creation, you've got this explosion of light in the universe. You've got the forming of the sun. You've got the bringing forth of life on the barren earth. In the exodus, you get God's divine words against the gods of Egypt and this crushing of the gods of Egypt one by one by one. You've got the screams that ring through the night on the night of the Passover when the firstborn of all Egypt die under God's judgment. At the Red Sea, you get the roar of the waters as they pull back and the shouts of joy of the people as they walk through it.

5:53 At Jericho, you get the trumpets and the shouts and the sounds of the rocks falling in on one another. Not here, though. Not at the Incarnation. What you get at the Incarnation is just the second person of the Godhead wrapped in a single embryonic cell in his mother's womb. It's quiet. But you know, if the incarnation, the Son of God becoming human, if it doesn't come with the sort of assertion of glory and the explosion of power that these other acts of God do, I think the incarnation is also unique because there is in it a level of intimacy that's not present in the other ones.

6:40 And it's not to say that there's no intimacy in the creation or the exodus or the fall of Jericho. I mean, there is. The reason God does those things in the first place is because he loves his people and he's acting for the good of his people. There's a certain intimacy in that. God breathes the breath of life into Adam's lungs. He walks with him in the cool of the day in the Garden of Eden. He heard the cries of his people in Egypt. And as the book says, he heard and he knew. There's an intimacy in that. There's a love for God's people. In fact, love has always been one of the main drivers of God's actions, One of the main motivators of his actions.

7:18 But there's also something special about the incarnation. There's something especially intimate about the incarnation. Because see, in Genesis and Exodus and Joshua and all those Old Testament books where you have these huge displays of power, God is still doing those actions kind of from a distance, isn't he? And when he crushes the gods of Egypt, he doesn't show up like with the sword in his own hand. He just hurls plagues at them from the heavens. When the walls of Jericho fall, the same thing happens.

7:49 He just does it from the heavens. He rescues his people, but he never touches them. He's never among them. Even the pillar of cloud and the tower of fire are always a few steps ahead of them leading the way. But the incarnation of the Son of God, his enfleshment, which is what that word incarnation means. That's something entirely different. Because all of a sudden, there is no more distance between God and humans.

8:25 The separation between heaven and earth is completely erased. And God becomes one of us. He touches us. And we touch him. So I think for all the actions of God, for all their explosive power, for all their brilliant glory, the incarnation may be the tenderest of them, the most intimate of them. The one in which what's on display is not so much anymore the glory and the power of God, but his love.

9:02 The kind of love that says, I'm with you. All the way, no matter what, I'm with you, and I'll never leave you or forsake you. So that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to consider the incarnation of Christ, this most intimate of God's acts. We're going to talk about some of the technical aspects of it. We're going to think about its implications, and we're going to do it by looking at one New Testament passage in particular. Philippians chapter 2, starting in verse 5. So let me invite you to take a Bible.

9:33 Turn over to Philippians. It's a letter that Paul wrote to the church in the city of Philippi. And he uses this reflection on the incarnation of Jesus as a way to make a point to the Christians in Philippi. So turn over there. If you're using a pew Bible, you can find this text on page 980. So right there at the beginning of the book of Philippians. And it kind of spills over onto 981. But I'm going to begin reading in Philippians chapter 2, verse 5. Paul writes here, Now, thinking about the Incarnation, we could have gone to a whole lot of places in the New Testament to think about this.

10:46 The theology of the Incarnation is sort of scattered all over the New Testament. I mean, all four Gospels, in their own way, begin just by marveling at the fact that God has become man. Every single one of them. And we could have gone to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John to talk about this topic. But this hymn here in Philippians 2 opens up not just the marvel of the incarnation, but the meaning of it in such a deep and beautiful way that I think of all the places we could have gone in the New Testament, this one is going to be best for us to actually dive into the mechanics and the meaning of the incarnation.

11:24 Just to give you a little bit of background on it, It actually comes in the middle of a letter in which Paul is exhorting this local church in Philippi to be unified. That's the main point of the whole letter of Philippians. I've preached it here as an entire letter before. So some of what I'm going to say anyway is what we talked about back in that series some years ago. But what Paul is doing in this particular section in chapter 2 that I just read is that he's actually using the incarnation to make a point about unity.

11:55 He calls the church to unity and to humility by pointing to the humility of Jesus Christ. That's how he does it. You can see that in verse 5 there. The main point of all these verses is this. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus. And then he describes Christ Jesus. He describes Christ's humility. He describes his emptying. He describes everything that happened in the incarnation and says, the way Jesus did that, you see the way Jesus did that? You ought to have that same mind in yourselves.

12:28 Okay, now, if this were a normal sort of expositional sermon, my job as the preacher would be to identify that main point, have this mind among yourselves that was in Christ Jesus, and then preach that point to you. So this whole sermon would be about you being humble and you being unified, if this were a normal expositional sermon. In fact, I've preached that expositional sermon. Some of you have heard it, right? I've done that one a couple of different times in a couple of different places and you've probably heard that.

13:00 That's what it means to preach expositionally. Not just to go to your favorite idea in a text, not just to go to this phrase that you find impressive or this phrase that you find glorious. It's not the point. The point is to find the main point that Paul is writing about or whoever and then preach that to the congregation. I'm not gonna do that this morning. You can go back and find the sermon in Philippians. We're gonna do something slightly different. What we're gonna do is dive deep into what Paul uses to call the church to unity and humility. That's what we're going to do. So I can tell you right now, because of what we're going to talk about, you therefore ought to be humble and you ought to be unified, but we're going to spend pretty much all the time diving into the thing Paul uses to make the argument.

13:41 So, you know, not technically a good expositional sermon here, but I do want you to know that I know what one is, and I'm doing this on purpose. So that's why I'm making such a big deal out of that. So the point of this, the point of this whole sort of section here is for Paul to say to the Philippians, look at the Son of God's humility. Look how he steps down from the throne of heaven to become a man. You need to have this same mind in yourselves. But in the process, he delves deep down into the mystery of the incarnation. And so we're going to go with him and look at those details.

14:14 Two major points of this sermon. Number one, we're going to look at the wonder of the incarnation. So we're going to spend a good amount of time just talking about the theology of the incarnation. How does it work? What does it mean? What are some ways we can go wrong in thinking about Jesus? In my own experience, one of the uses of these kind of systematic teachings, like looking at a particular systematic topic from a set of scriptures, is that it works as a sort of mind sweeper for error in your own thinking, right? So, you know, I've had this happen to me in seminary classes and sermons.

14:47 you just, you sort of, you know, you have these little hidden errors in your mind, theological errors, and you don't even know they're there. It's not like you've thought it through and embraced an error. It's just that you're thinking about something in the wrong way, and then a sermon like this comes along, acts like a mind sweeper, and boom, oh wow, I was thinking like an Apollinarian, and I didn't even know it, right? You'll understand what that means in a little bit, a little bit later. But that's how this is going to work, I hope, for many of us. The wonder of the incarnation, That's where we're going to look at the theology of it. Second, we're going to turn and talk about the meaning of the incarnation.

15:20 So why is it important to us? What does it do when we think about the incarnation? So that's going to be application. So two points, wonder and meaning, theology and application. I hope what you'll do this morning, having listened to this sermon, is come away understanding more. Yeah, I want you to understand more the theology of the incarnation so that you can rejoice in it and marvel at what God has done in sending his son Jesus to become a man so that we would not be lost. Okay, so point number one.

15:51 First thing I want to do is look at what Paul wrote here and talk about the wonder of the incarnation. All right, so first four verses of chapter 2, we didn't even read them, but if you'd let your mind and eye kind of roll over those verses, you can see what Paul's doing. He's exhorting this church to unity. He's exhorting them to being the same mind, acting in humility for the good of others. And the main way he uses to do that is with what we think is this great Christological hymn that begins in verse 5. We're not sure exactly where that hymn came from.

16:25 It doesn't show up really anywhere else. It's not like it's quotations from the Old Testament or from the Gospels. Nothing like that shows up. So it may be that Paul wrote this hymn himself. That's a definite possibility, and a lot of scholars think that. It's another possibility that this was just a common hymn that people sang about Jesus, and so Paul is quoting it in his letter in order to make this point. Either way, though, I don't know. I don't have a particular opinion on it. I'd love to ask Paul when I see him in heaven, but I don't know. Either way, though, it is one of the most important passages in the Bible for teaching us who Jesus really was.

17:03 Not just in the way he acted. There's a lot of stuff in the Gospels and everywhere else that will teach you who Jesus was in the sense that, you know, here's his character, here's his personality, here's what he does. This, though, is going deeper. It's telling you who Jesus was at the natural level, at the level of nature or essence. Who was Jesus? Who is Jesus? It unfolds for us in a way that doesn't show up, I think, anywhere else in the New Testament.

17:33 The mind-blowing significance of his becoming human. So let's look through it. We're going to look at the progression of this hymn. So verse 5 there, sort of the main point. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus. And then verse 6 starts telling you what that mind is. Look at that, verse 6. Jesus Christ, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. And what that's talking about is the Son of God, the eternal Son of God, second person of the Trinity, existed in triunity with the Father and the Spirit from all eternity.

18:12 It's talking about Jesus, the Son of God, before he was Jesus, right? He was the Son of God. He only got the name Jesus when he was born, right? You shall call his name Jesus. It's not his name is Jesus. It's you shall call his name Jesus. So he gets the name Jesus after he's born. He's the eternal Son of God prior. And verse 6 is talking about the situation when the Son of God was not yet incarnate. And it says that though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.

18:44 Now what does that mean? Well, let's talk about that first phrase. He was in the form of God. Now some people will read that phrase there. He was in the form of God. And they'll think, whoa, Paul, wait a second. I thought he was God. I didn't think he was just in the form of God, right? Because to me and to you, the word form there sounds like it's trying to put some distance in between God and the Son of God, right? It sounds like it's just saying, well, the Son of God was something. He was sort of in the form of God, maybe outward appearance, but he wasn't God, God.

19:15 Well, that is exactly what that word is not trying to do. The word form there, the Greek word underneath it is morphe, and it means just the stuff of, right? It's not trying to put distance between God the Father and God the Son. It's trying to tie them together. If you're looking at a new international version, it just gets rid of the word form entirely. And it translates that word morphe as something more like nature. I think the words that the NIV uses is something like, who was in very nature God.

19:49 Right? That's what that means. We can know that, not just from the Greek word itself. You can look at, you know, all the sources. You can look at the way the word morphe is used. It means in very nature. It's not trying to put distance. You can also see that that's its meaning, though, in the next phrase. Where it says, though he was in very nature God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. Now, there's a strange little translation thing there.

20:23 Because the ESV leaves out one tiny little word that turns out to be very important. It leaves out the word the or that. And I'll show you where it is. Who, though he was in the form of God, did not count that equality with God a thing to be grasped. So do you see how it's throwing equality with God into parallel with the form of God or in very nature God?

20:55 He was in very nature God, though he was, he did not count that equality with God a thing to be grasped. So you shouldn't read verse 6 and think, well, he's not quite God, right? He's in the form of God, but he's not quite God. And equality with God is something that the Son of God could have aspired to had he wanted to, but he decided that getting there to equality, not just form, was not something to be done. That is not how you should read that verse. The way you should read that verse is, though he was in very nature God, he did not count that equality with God something to be grasped or held on to.

21:35 That's what the verse means. Now let's, we'll talk in just a minute a bit about exactly how Jesus gave up that equality of status in order to become human. But first we need to take a few minutes just to talk about some basic Christian theology. Because we're talking about God the Son being in very nature. So we're already talking about two persons, right? God the Father, God the Son. And they're in very nature the same thing somehow.

22:05 And then you've got hanging out in the wings over here. It's not mentioned here, but later on he is in other places, the Holy Spirit. So now you've got three different persons, all of the same nature. How does that work? Where does that come from? How do we get our minds around the idea of three persons that are all the same nature? Well, that's the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. So let me unfold that for you just a little bit. Scripture teaches that God is not like us. Fundamentally, at the nature level, at the essence level, God is not like us.

22:41 I mean, yes, we're made in his image. Yes, there are therefore some similarities that we as human beings have with God and his character and some of his attributes. But in the most important respects, God is fundamentally different from us. Now, some of those ways are really easy to get your head around. We are finite, right? We have a beginning. And if God didn't sustain us for eternity future, we would have an ending, right? He's going to sustain us, all of us, whether we believe in him or not, either in heaven or hell. But if he didn't do that, we'd have a beginning and we would have an end. God, on the other hand, is infinite.

23:13 He extends in every direction without end, right? God is infinite. We are finite. He is eternal. We are temporal. We are dependent creatures. He is the self-existent creator. He doesn't need anything from anybody. We do. But he's also different from us in his very nature. In the way he exists in himself as three persons in one nature. That's different from us.

23:44 We can't get our heads around what it would mean to have one nature and yet multiple persons. It doesn't make sense to have one being with three persons. It just doesn't compute to our minds. And the reason it doesn't compute to our minds is because at the most fundamental level, each and every one of us in this room is one being and one person that's who we are one being and one person so for for me for you to be with another person necessarily means that you also have to be with another being because you you're not going to have two persons in yourself or three you're just not you are one person and one being and everyone else is too right God is not like that. Scripture teaches that God is one being who exists in three persons, which is utterly mind-blowing to us because it's just not how we exist. But God does exist like this from all eternity. One God existing eternally in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And

24:46 Christians call this reality the Trinity, which is really two different sort of word parts stuck together. Tri, which gets you the three persons, right? And then unity, which gets you the one God. Tri-unity, trinity, right? That's where the word comes from. I want to take a few minutes and show you where this comes from, because I think at first glance what happens when we start thinking about the trinity is that even Christians will just kind of check out. It's just like, you know, where this comes from is probably just 2,000 years of Christians doing theology and philosophy, and I'm never going to get it.

25:22 I'm never going to understand it. And so that's just that. Well, it's true we have spent 2,000 years doing philosophy and theology on it. But where the idea of the Trinity came from and the reason Christians feel bound to believe that thing, which doesn't make sense to us at first glance, the reason that happened is because we saw it in Scripture. And I want to show you how that is. It's way simpler than you would expect. The doctrine of the Trinity didn't grow up from philosophical premises about the nature of reality or knowledge of personhood or Aristotelian, this or that.

25:56 It's not where it came from. It just grew up because Christians read their Bibles. And what they noticed was that the Bible teaches very, very clearly three fundamental truths. You ready? I'm going to give them to you. They're not long, so you should write them down. Christians noticed three fundamental, inescapable truths in the Bible. Number one, there is one and only one God.

26:28 That's the first thing. And you can find that in all kinds of proof texts all over the Bible. When you think about the Shema of Israel, the basic confession of faith of the Jewish nation is here, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. Over and over again, in Isaiah, God declares that he is the one and only God, right? It's just everywhere in the Bible, it's exceedingly simple to prove. There is one and only one God. Here's the second one.

27:00 God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit are all said to be God. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit are all said to be God. You get that, right? And what you'd have to do to prove that statement is just find somewhere in the Bible where God the Father is called God. That one's very easy. Where God the Son is called God. I mean, Paul does it right here. You've got before Abraham was, I am.

27:32 You have Paul saying it in Romans chapter 9. Over and over again, the Son of God is Jesus, is said to be God. So we've got Father, we've got Son, and then in Acts 5, the Holy Spirit is said to be God. So all three of those are said to be God. Father, Son, Holy Spirit are all God. Okay, now stop and think. Stop and think. If those were the only two propositions I gave you, what would you wind up with? What would you wind up with? You'd wind up with an ancient Christian heresy called modalism, which says that there is one God, But that God just reveals himself to us in different modes, which is where the word modalism comes from.

28:15 Now, what's a mode? Well, a mode is, I mean, you know what a mode is. You can put your phone in night mode, right? Or you can stick it in airplane mode. It's a way of presenting itself, right? That's what it is. So when God puts himself in sun mode, it's like, now I'm the sun, right? And then he can switch and he can be in Holy Spirit mode if he wants to do that. Or father mode, right? It's just whichever one he wants to be, he can be it by flipping a switch in himself. But it's just one God and one person, and he just has different modes that he reveals himself, you know, as.

28:47 Different masks that he wears at different times. That's an ancient heresy called modalism. But if those were the only two propositions you had, there's one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or all God, it makes perfect sense. So why didn't Christianity wind up being modalist in that way? Well, it's because Christians read their Bible some more, and they saw this third proposition. You ready for it? Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all distinct persons. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all distinct persons.

29:21 They're not just modes of one God. That's not what they are. It's not just one God that's wearing a different mask at different times. You actually have Father, Son, and Spirit that are distinct persons. Now, how do you prove that? How do you prove that they're distinct persons? Well, the way you do it is that you find places in Scripture that show the Father interacting somehow in a personal way with the Son. And the Son interacting with the Spirit and the Father interacting with the Spirit. And once you find all of those relationships, you can say that that Proposition 3 is true.

29:55 Okay, think about it. Can you think of any places in the Scripture where the Father interacts with the Son and the Son with the Father? Yeah, sure you can. The Son prays to the Father. The father speaks to the son, right? So you don't just have somebody wearing a mask, right? And the old analogy that I am all at once a father, a son, and an uncle. It doesn't work. That's modalism. Because Father Greg doesn't ever have a conversation with son Greg, right?

30:26 Nor does Uncle Greg have a conversation with Father Greg. That's modalism. It doesn't work. And yet the father listens to the son. The father responds to the son. The son prays to the father. They interact as distinct persons. Okay, son and spirit. What about that one? Well, the son sends the spirit. The spirit glorifies the son. What about the father and the spirit? Well, same thing. The father is said also to send the spirit. And the spirit obeys and glorifies the father. So you see how that's working?

30:57 Those interactions between the different persons are creating this proposition that they're all distinct persons. Okay, now let's back up. Let's back up. If you took notes, what if all you had, what if all you had in Christian history were propositions two and three? Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct persons, but you don't have number one. There's nothing in the Bible, let's say, that said there's one and only one God. What would you have if you only had two and three? You have polytheism, right?

31:29 You've got a Father God, a Son God, and a Spirit God. I got all three of them, but that's messed up when you throw in Proposition 1. But there's only one God, so that can't be right. No, people tried it. Okay, what if you had, there's one God, Proposition 1, and three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all distinct, but you didn't have two. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all God. What if two wasn't there in the Bible? What would you have then? Well, then you'd have a situation where probably you're pretty quick to say, it's the Father who's God, right?

32:00 The Son and the Spirit are something not God. They're something less than God. And the church tried that early on. Our heretics from the church tried that. That's what Arianism was, right? What they said is there is one God. We know that. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all distinct. So what that means is that the Son is something less than God. The Son is a created being that's less than God. They tried it, and the church declared that heretical because they saw Proposition 2 in there, right? So you see how this works? It's not a hugely difficult philosophical thing.

32:31 You read your Bible, you wind up with these three propositions, all of which are proved in Scripture, and then you start knocking out heresies, right? Modalism goes down because of Proposition 3. Tritheism goes down because of Proposition 1. Arianism goes down because of Proposition 2. And that's the kind of work that the church was doing. And so what they wound up with were these three propositions that didn't make entire sense to them and yet were all taught in the Scriptures. And they said, we submit to the Word of God, therefore Trinity. That's what they did, and that's how Christians operate. Look, not everything that is true of the triune, eternal creator of the universe is going to fit inside your tiny little pinhead.

33:15 It's just not. And when you come to the God of the Bible, you've just got to start with the understanding and with the presupposition that God is bigger than you, and there's stuff in his gigantic head that is not going to fit in yours. Now, maybe it will when we all get to heaven and God decides to teach us more and more about himself. Maybe it'll start to fit and it'll all start to make sense. But why would you start with the presupposition that just because something Christians teach won't fit in your head, that therefore it cannot possibly be true?

33:51 Why would you start with that? You shouldn't. You just start with a more humble posture and say, listen, I expect, I expect the triune eternal God of the universe to have some things in his mind that do not fit into mine. And I expect there to be sparks of those realities that show up in scripture sometimes that I don't understand. And yet I'm going to submit to the Bible because I know it's true. All right. Well, Paul goes on. Let's keep, let's just, let's keep working through this. He goes on in 6 and then in verses 7 and 8 to say what the eternal Son of God did.

34:29 He who is in the very form of God, in the very nature of God. What did he do with that? Well, he did not count that equality with God a thing to be grasped. Or in other words, a thing to be held on to at all costs. Instead, what did he do? Verse 7, he made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. So what that's saying is that the Son, the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, as part of the triune Godhead's plan of redemption from all of eternity, that phrase there, made himself nothing, is actually emptied himself.

35:12 That's what that phrase is. He emptied himself and became a servant, and he was born as a human being. So a couple of different and important things to notice here. First, that phrase, made himself nothing, which is actually he emptied himself. It's an interesting phrase because we read that, and what we think immediately, because we're not reading carefully enough, but what we think immediately is that emptying himself means that the Son of God gave up something in the nature of his godhood, that he poured something out, that he lost something of his godhead.

35:45 He ceased to be fully God. That's how we read it because we don't read it very carefully. But look at the next phrase. The emptying doesn't happen by the Son of God losing something. Do you see that? He doesn't lose anything. In fact, he made himself nothing. He emptied himself precisely by taking on something else. He didn't lose anything. He didn't pour anything out and cease to be fully God.

36:16 He emptied himself by taking something on. And what was that? Something. He took on the very nature of a servant. Which means, this is the next phrase, that he was born in the likeness of men. You see that? When the Bible says, when Paul says that Christ emptied himself, that the Son of God emptied himself, he doesn't mean that he gave up his omniscience or he gave up his omnipotence or he gave up this. No, nothing. He didn't give up anything. It's not what Paul says.

36:46 He says he emptied himself by taking on human nature. It's not that he stops being God. It's that he starts being human. Now, again, same word there, taking on the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. It's not saying that he was just kind of a man. It's not saying that he was just outwardly a servant or something like that. It's the same words from up above. It's in very nature. He was a servant in very nature. He was a human.

37:17 In other words, to put it the way Christians have often put it, the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, light from light, very God from very God, became human in every way. This is a mind-blowing reality, but the Bible affirms it over and over again. Jesus Christ is 100% God, and he is 100% human. Okay, so let's unpack that just a little bit. What does that mean? Let's just kind of prove it for a second. The Bible talks a lot about Jesus being God.

37:48 Every time we come across it in a gospel, in the gospel of John, I'm telling you about these places where Jesus is affirmed as God. So you've got it here in Philippians 2. You've got it at the beginning of John, right? Where John says, in the beginning was the Word, the Logos, and the Logos was with God. But the Logos was God. And then the Logos became flesh, and that's how you know the Logos is Jesus, right? So John says it. John says it a couple other times. John chapter 8 is the moment when Jesus says, before Abraham was, I am. And they all want to stone him because they understand that he's claiming to be God by using the great I am name of the Old Testament God.

38:25 There's the calming of the storm. See, nobody calms the storm except God. There are also straight up statements of it. You remember Thomas at the end of the book of John? What does he call him? My Lord and my God. So the Bible affirms over and over again that Jesus is God. But he is also awesomely and very plainly human. And there's all kinds of evidence in the New Testament for that too. So he grew in wisdom and stature, Luke tells us. He was 30 years old.

38:57 I mean, think about that. The eternal son of God was 30 years old when he began his ministry. He grew weary. He slept. He got thirsty and hungry. He ate and drank. He was sad and he wept. He was happy and he rejoiced. He even, believe it or not, made jokes. And also, if you think about it, after his resurrection, he didn't cease to be human after the resurrection. After the resurrection, he could do things that he couldn't do before, like just appear in places or walk through walls or, you know, something. But he also ate fish.

39:29 He showed his hands and his feet and his side to Thomas. I mean, you ever wonder why Jesus in the ascension didn't just disappear like he had many other times? There are times in the post-resurrection narratives where Jesus just appears in places. Oh, he was among them, right? Peace be with you. We talked about that at the end of John. For the ascension, when he goes to reign at his father's right hand, why does the Bible make such a big deal? And why did God plan it so that the disciples would literally watch his feet levitate off the ground and go up into the sky and leave their necks craning back?

40:05 Why do it like that rather than just having him disappear? Because God wanted them to know that he's human. He doesn't cease to be human. They watch him go up into heaven. Which is just an incredible thing to think about. That the person who reigns on the throne of the universe in heaven right now is a human. With a human body. That if you could get there, you could touch it. You could shake his hand. You could hug his neck. It's an incredible thought that the God of the universe is a person, a human, like us, and he always will be.

40:42 And there's some really, you know, strange things that people get in their minds. It's like, you know, when Jesus got back to heaven after having done his work as a human, he just, you know, walked up to his father. He's like, whoa, that was hard work. And he sloughed off the skin suit, and he became his glorious non-human self again and sat down at the throne of God. And when he gets ready to come back, he's going to walk over, pick up the skin suit again, put it on, you know, now I'm human again, and come back and get us. and then maybe take it off again. It's not like that, though. It doesn't work like that. When Jesus became human, he became human forever. He identified himself with us forever.

41:14 He's never going to incarnate again as something else. He is a person, which is critical for all kinds of theological things in the Bible. It's critical that he be a human in order to be able to represent us before God. It's critical that he be a human so that he can stand as a sacrifice for us before God. It's critical that the Bible says there was always supposed to be in Adam until he messed it up. And now there always will be in Jesus a human to rule over the cosmos.

41:47 It's important that he be a human so that he can be an example to us. So that he can sympathize with us in all of our weaknesses. It's not just neither here nor there, as if it doesn't matter. It matters that Jesus is human. So he's got this divine nature, right? He's 100% God, and he's human. He's 100% human. He's got a human nature, and that's very different from us because you and I don't have a divine nature and a human nature. We talk like that colloquially sometimes, right?

42:18 But it's not true. We are human. We are 100% human, and we are 0% God. You don't have two natures. Jesus has two natures, divine and human. You're 100% human. But the next question is, okay, how do the divine nature and the human nature in Jesus, how do they fit together? How do they work? Because in Jesus, you don't have this, like, two-headed creature, right? You don't have, you know, the divine head of Jesus here and the human head of Jesus here, and they can sort of talk to each other.

42:50 That's not how it works. It would have been easier theologically had that been the case, but it's not the case. So early on, there were lots of attempts to try to figure this out. How do the divine and the human natures work together, and yet there's just one Jesus, right? There's one person in two natures. How does that work? And Christians had to work on it. They had to look at Scripture. They had to, you know, marshal all the evidence, just like we did with the Trinity. And they got it wrong sometimes. For a lot of years, a lot of Christians got it wrong. Let me give you three ways they got it wrong.

43:21 Because this, I guess, is where this mind sweeper thing might work in your head. And you're going to realize, oh my gosh, I'm a Eutychian, right? This might happen to you. It has happened to me before. So I'm going to give you three ancient heresies to show you how not to think about Jesus and his divine and human nature. But I have given them new, more interesting names. Some of you have heard these before. That's okay. So the first one I want to talk to you about is called Apollinarianism.

43:52 I'm not even going to explain where that comes from, but it's a guy. I like to call this, however, the, oh, I love your coat heresy. Oh, I love your coat heresy. Which is what we were talking about a minute ago. It's the idea that the divine nature just put on a human body like a coat. So that you had a divine soul, a divine inward Jesus, and then you just had what looked like a human on the outside. Just a body, right? And the church looked at that and said, no, no, no, no, no, that doesn't work because what that leaves you with is really not a human at all.

44:27 You just have a body, and humans are more than their bodies, right? And it's also just kind of gross. So that's why, if you have ever used the phrase, God with skin, I'm sorry, friend, you are a heretic. And we're not going to burn you, you just need to change your opinion. He is not God with skin. He is God made man. So the, ooh, I love your coat view is not right. Here's a second one. It's called Nestorianism.

44:58 Also not going to tell you where that comes from, but it's a guy. Two cats in a sack view. Two cats in a sack. It's the idea that Jesus was really not just one person with two natures, but he was two natures, but also two persons. so there's a divine person and there's a human person in one body so two cats in a sack right does that make sense divine person human person in one body in one sack the church looked at that and said no no no we don't we don't ever see Jesus looking like two different people stuck in a sack we never see them you know with we never see him with two independent personalities we never see him conversing with himself or disagreeing with himself. He doesn't say we when he's talking about himself. He says I, which is not interestingly the case when he's talking about his father.

45:54 John 14, 23, for instance, when he's talking about his father, he says we, we, because there are two. There are two persons in one nature. But when he's talking about himself, he doesn't refer to two persons. It's always I. It's always one. Talking in wholeness and unity. Here's another one. Eutychianism or monophysitism, the shaken, not stirred view. Shaken, not stirred is the idea that the two natures of Christ, the divine and the human, are sort of mixed together into a new thing all together.

46:32 And the way Eutychians would talk about it is that it's like a drop of ink in the ocean. The human nature is dropped into the divine, eternal nature, and it's mixed in and it's swallowed up. The church looked at that and said, no, no, no, that doesn't get it. It doesn't work because if you mix the human nature and the divine nature together, they're confused, they're mixed up, and really you don't have one or the other anymore.

47:04 You have something entirely different. So the church said, no, no, no, you don't have man there, and you don't have God there. You have something utterly different. So none of those heresies worked. The churches looked at it, they looked at the Bible, and they said, no, that doesn't work, that doesn't work, that doesn't work. So Christians came together, they read their Bible some more, and they wrote down what they learned. They spoke about Jesus and his two natures in many different places, but one of the most important is what's called the definition of Chalcedon. Chalcedon is a city, this is a statement that a bunch of Christians wrote in Chalcedon in the year 451, so 1,500 or so years ago.

47:41 Here's what they wrote about this thing. They said, we, following the Holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Perfect in Godhead, perfect in manhood. Truly God and truly man. Of a rational soul and body. So no skin suit, right? Not just the body, but a rational soul and body. Of one nature with the Father according to the Godhead. There's his divine nature.

48:12 And of one nature with us according to the manhood. In all things like unto us except without sin. This Christ is to be acknowledged in two natures. Divine and human. And then listen to what they say. Inconfusedly. So not confused like, you know, the shaken not stirred view said. So inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably. The distinction of the nature is being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved and concurring in one person.

48:46 So not the two cats in a sack. One person. Not parted, not divided into two persons. We're not talking about cats in a sack here. But one in the same Son, the only begotten God, the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the prophets from the beginning have declared concerning him, and the Lord Jesus himself has taught us in the Creed of the Holy Fathers has been handed down to us. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? no not blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah because even if you have taken these things for granted your entire life understanding this stuff or the fact that this stuff is real anyway is critical for you being saved it's critical for you being saved even if you don't understand it even if you even if your your mind is glazing over right now it's critical for you being saved, that these things be true. Why? Well, because if Jesus is something less than 100% God, if he's only 90% God or 0% God, if he's something less than fully God, you can't be saved

49:47 because that less than God Jesus is not powerful enough and deep enough and eternal enough to exhaust your sins. It's also critical that he be 100% man. Why? Because nobody but a human can And stand as a representative for humans. Not permanently. Cows, bulls, goats. They did it for a little while. But very temporary, right? Jesus has got to be 100% God to exhaust your sins. And 100% man to stand in your place. It's critical for your salvation.

50:22 That's the wonder of the incarnation. We serve a Jesus. We follow a Jesus. Who is true God from true God, light from light, and yet one of us. Okay, so beyond that, what does it mean? Like, well, what are some ways that this doctrine of the incarnation works in our lives? That's point number two, the meaning of the incarnation. So now you're armed up with a little bit of theology, right?

50:53 Got a little spark of understanding of what exactly happened when God became man. You know three heresies that you don't want to fall into. And we've worked very quickly through the definition of Chalcedon and seen how that answered those heresies. You've got a little spark of understanding of what happened when God became man. So with that, we're in a better position to think about the implications of it. So not just what happened and how, but why God became man and what that means for us. So I want to talk about three of those implications. First, the incarnation of the Son of God points us to our utter helplessness before God.

51:31 It points us to our utter helplessness before God. It points us to our need for God to rescue us from ourselves. The fact that God became man points us to the fact that we need God to rescue us from ourselves. See, most of the time we live in this comforting, warm lie that we are quite capable, thank you, of solving our own problems. We're confronted with a problem, whether it's a big one or whether it's a little one, and our minds immediately move to solutions to that problem.

52:05 I can fix this. I don't know what cartoons your kids watch these days, those who have little kids, But my kids used to watch Bob the Builder, and the whole thing of Bob the Builder was his slogan, Can we build it? Yes, we can. Well, that's, we were just pumping humanism into our kids. That's us. Can we fix it? Yes, we can. We think that's true of ourselves, morally speaking. That's why the best-selling books in the country, year after year after year, are about self-care and self-betterment and self-help.

52:41 It's also true societally. We think it's true that we can fix it societally. Now, that comes in waves, right? And it's usually timed with an election year, which means we're about to get a whole big dose of it in 2024. Because everybody and their dog is going to be yelling at you that if you vote for this candidate or this candidate, that candidate four years from now will solve all the problems in the country. Well, friend, let me just pull back the cover for you. Whoever is elected president of the United States in 2024, he or she is not going to solve all the country's problems.

53:17 Because the country is made up of sinful human beings. Can progress be made? Of course. Can evil be pushed back? Of course. But don't let yourself be dragged into some utopian fantasy that this man or this woman or that man or that woman is going to be able to solve all the country's problems. They won't. You do what you can. You vote the way you can, but don't let your mind get swept away by political utopianism. I mean, history, too, teaches us that it's not just outside forces that are keeping us from achieving our true potential as a human race.

53:52 Sometimes we think that, too. Oh, if this problem were just out of the way, or if that group of people were just out of the way, if they would just leave us alone, if we could just get rid of this outside force, then humanity would reach its potential. But that's not the problem with humanity. The problem of humanity is not external. It's not that we're pressed on by the outside and therefore the human race is a wreck. No, the problem comes from within us. It's our rebellion against God. It's the choices that we make that we want to make.

54:27 That's our problem. The sin that lives inside us. And so the incarnation of the Son of God, the in-breaking of God into the world, rank on rank, the hosts of heaven leading the way for the Son of God to become flesh. That points us to the fact that we need help. We need something more to make ourselves better. We need something more than our own minds and our own desires to help ourselves.

54:59 We need something to interrupt the course of human history and change it dramatically. And that's what the incarnation does. It arrests the course of history. It's like a dagger in the fabric of history. When everything's flowing just fine from one perspective and in a disastrous direction from another, the incarnation comes and says, stop. It breaks the flow. It changes the course. God becomes man to save us. from our own sin. If you're going to understand the gospel of Jesus Christ, you've got to come to grips with just how much that interruption was needed in the course of history. And even more, you've got to come to grips with just how much that kind of interruption is necessary for you personally. Because without Jesus Christ, because of your sins, you are on a road to hell and you need somebody to interrupt that.

55:55 That's what Jesus does. Jesus steps into a person's life as they're on the road to hell, and he says, stop. We're changing course. Some of you need that to happen desperately today. You need this Christmas, you need December 17th, 2023, to be the day when the dagger of the incarnation stuck into your life and said, stop the flow. Let that be today. Put your faith in Jesus. It's not hard. You don't have to go through some ritual. All you've got to do is say, yeah, I believe this. I believe.

56:28 I believe that Jesus is who He says He is. I believe that He saves sinners from their sin by dying in their place. I believe this stuff. And then you turn to the person sitting next to you and you say, I think I'm a Christian now. That's what you do. And then you launch into a whole life of being a Christian. But man, the gateway is so easy. You believe. And you repent of your sins and trust Him as Lord. Here's the second thing. It not only shows us our helplessness and our need to be interrupted, but the incarnation gives us hope when God seems hidden in silence.

57:01 The incarnation gives us hope when God seems hidden in silence. Do you realize that on the night when Jesus was born, the cries of that little baby, I don't think the old carol was right. I don't think he didn't cry. I think he probably did. He was a human. He was a baby, right? He cried. And the cries of that little baby broke 400 years of silence from God. On the night that Jesus was born, it had been 400 years in which no prophet had spoken, no miracles had happened.

57:37 God seemed absent. He seemed hidden. He seemed quiet. He seemed silent. You know, there's a long, long tradition of Christians noticing that over the course of life, it often feels and seems like that, doesn't it? There are times in life when the heavens seem like they're brass, as if prayers bounce right off, as if God doesn't hear, as if he is just gone. Deus Absconditus, Christians have called that.

58:11 Deus Absconditus, God hidden. when you're going through a time like that in life it's easy to get discouraged but the incarnation of Jesus reminds us that God will not always hide his face in his own time in the fullness of time he's going to break that silence he'll come out of hiding and he'll come to us that's what the incarnation reminds us of remember that and hope in it if you're going through a time of the silence or the darkness or the hiddenness of God remember that It will not always be so.

58:49 I mean, you know how many times in the Bible God has said to hide his face from his people? Dozens and dozens of times. I mean, I could give you a ton of them. Psalm 13, Psalm 27, Psalm 44, Psalm 51. I could keep going and going and going. But in those verses, what he says is, the Lord has hidden his face from us. Oh, Lord, please do not hide your face from us. Lord, don't hide your face from us. Over and over again. But you remember how the New Testament ends? They will see his face. That's the promise that the incarnation makes.

59:22 That we will see his face if we are believers in him. Here's the last thing. The incarnation points to God's ultimate and final triumph. The incarnation points to God's ultimate and final triumph. It is extremely hard to look at the headlines of today, to look at your Twitter feed, to look at your Facebook feed, to not conclude that the world is a wreck right now. There are wars and rumors of wars. There are disasters. There's inept leadership at every level of government.

59:55 Sometimes it seems even as if the whole civilization is about to come unraveled. I hear the ads on the radio that you need to get your freeze-dried food because of what is coming. So many people have a sense of foreboding right now that things are just not right. People are dying. People are being oppressed. People are being killed in the womb. People are utterly deceived about what it means to be a man and a woman. Satan is running rampant in the world.

1:00:30 What do we say to that? What is there to say to all of that? And people say a lot. All you've got to do is look at the Internet, and people are talking constantly. Human race is creating more words than we've ever created in our existence. We say a lot. But in the face of a wrecked world, in the face of what we see in the world right now, how many of those words actually have any power to make any difference?

1:01:04 None of them. None of them, because that's just it. There is no human word to answer all that. But there is a divine word to answer it all. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, and the word dwelt among us. That's where Paul ends as well. Look at verses 9 through 11.

1:01:37 Therefore, God has taken this eternal incarnate Son of God and exalted him. And bestowed on him the name that is above every name. So 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 to the glory of God the Father. There it is. There's the final unity. Every knee, every mouth, every tongue confessing Jesus is Lord.

1:02:12 And friend, if you're here and you're not a Christian, this is the very last thing. If you're here and you're not a Christian, you realize, don't you, that one day your knee will bow. And your tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. The only question, the only question is when is that going to happen? Is it going to happen now? And then carry on for eternity in the glories of the new heavens and new earth? Or will your tongue not confess it until it does so from the fires of hell?

1:02:48 You will confess him as Lord. There's no doubt about it. Friends, let it be now. And then join us in eternity. Let's pray. Our Lord, we praise you and honor you and thank you that you are the incarnate son of God, the second person of the eternal trinity made man. Lord, we honor you and we praise you as the one who is 100% God and 100% man and who therefore saved your people from their sins.

1:03:21 Oh, our God, we pray that if there's anybody here this morning who doesn't know that and believe it, we pray that they would even by the time we finish today. We pray, Lord, that they would see your beauty. We pray that they would see the beauty and the genius of the incarnation and that they would put their faith in you. And we pray all of that in your name and always to your honor and glory. Amen.