Jesus left eternal
glory and heaven’s worship to be our suffering Saviour.
To meditate/pray upon
John 17:5 "And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the
glory I had with you before the world began".
John 1:1 ‘In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’.
Philippians
2:5-11 ‘In your
relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who,
being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be
used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very
nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in
appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even
death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave
him the name that 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
acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’.
Jesus is the eternal Son of God. He has no beginning or end.
‘The obedience of the God-man
to the Father while on earth was not a new relationship occasioned by the
incarnation, but the continuation in time of the eternal relationship between
the Son and the Father in heaven… We see now what it meant for the Son of God
to empty Himself and become poor. It
meant a laying aside of glory; a voluntary restraint of power; an acceptance of
hardship, isolation, ill-treatment, malice, and misunderstanding; finally, a
death that involved such agony spiritual, even more than physical’. (J I Packer
Knowing God)
At Christmas we celebrate the incarnation (Jesus coming in a human body)
but this was not His beginning. The incarnation was a means of His going to the
cross, dying, as a man, in our place, for our sin. Jesus descended from the
glory of heaven, finished the work, and has now returned to heaven to be
forever glorified.
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