"Jesus Christ is Lord" (Philippians 2:5–11)
In Philippians 2:1–11, we come to one of the most important passages in the entire New Testament. The Christ hymn that takes up the second half of this passage has, for good reason, demanded an incredible amount of attention within this book. In only a few verses, Paul’s writing takes us from the incomprehensible depths of eternity when the Son existed in the form of God to the point where he willingly takes on the form of a servant through his incarnation, and then down to the depths of his death on the cross, only to soar back up into the cosmos with Jesus exalted as Lord over all creation. What a magnificent Savior we worship!
But, despite our inclinations to examine the Christ hymn on its own, we must come to grips with the context in which Paul includes it in his letter to the Philippians. This is not a pure doxology, where Paul bursts into praise of the exalted, glorious, suffering servant. Instead, Paul gives us this written portrait of Christ’s humility as the picture of humility to which we ought to be conformed. Paul has written of his own rejoicing in the midst of suffering (Phil. 1:12–18), and of the confidence he has on the basis of his suffering (Phil. 1:19–30), and now he reveals the secret of how to rejoice and take confidence in suffering: humility. Through humility, we discover that unity, likemindedness, and even Christ-likeness all become possible.
If you have a copy of the Scriptures this morning, please open it to Philippians two. We will read all of 2:1-11. although we will be focusing specifically on verses five through 11 this morning. We looked at the first four verses of this passage last week, and all of this section versus one through eleven intricately holds together. This is written to be one passage. We have to read this together, we can't split this up, but there was too much to preach in one morning, so we split it up and this is part two of that sermon. Hear now, the word of the Lord from Philippians 2:1-11.
1So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, 2 complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. 5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Philippians 2:1-11
This is the word of the Lord. As I mentioned in my prayer and we talked about last week, and maybe you were even here on Friday. This past week, we laid a great saint in the church to rest. Peter Gwilt was a remarkable man. I only got to meet him a couple of months ago, which was deep in suffering through the Alzheimer's disease that he had. He was a remarkable man, a brilliant man. He was a man who had a Ph.D. in biopharmaceutical and pharmacokinetics, which, as I said on Friday are words that I could barely spell and had to look up what they were, but he was an expert in these fields and he was from England. He was an English gentleman. He was a really remarkable man from everyone who shares much about him.
In his last days, he was entrusted with a deep kind of suffering. We talked a little bit about this on Friday. As I'm reflecting on the life of Peter, as I'm studying this particular passage in Philippians, I think it is so providentially ordered that we would have this text to study this week. Late in his life, as Alzheimer's had begun to have begun to set in to limit his abilities, it attacks the brain and not only affects the mind, but also your motor skills. As Alzheimer's had begun to set in and there were limited things that Peter could do, he was a man who had throughout his life devoted himself to serving the Lord. His life's ambition was to hear from his master, "Well done, good and faithful servant." That was the text we looked at on Friday.
So that when he came here to Harvest, there were limited things he could do. Unlike earlier in his life, when he led Bible studies with international students introducing the gospel of Jesus to people who had never before heard the gospel and seeing them come to Christ. He nevertheless wanted to serve in some way. So he gave himself to doing dishes at our Wednesday night meal where we fed people from the community, homeless people, people with substance abuse addictions, all kinds of people who came to get a meal on Wednesday night. He served by washing dishes. This is a brilliant man. A man on top of his career of his profession and yet there was nothing beneath him. A man of deep humility, because he knew, even at that stage that he was simply following in the footsteps of his master.
Now, in the world's eyes, that is a tragedy period. That is a fall from a high point, period. That is unrecoverable, irredeemable life situations that we can do nothing but pity. Yet God in his gospel gives us something different. The economy of God does not say that your power and significance and worth and esteem and value in this world is determined by your personal productivity, by your place in this world, by your status. Instead, it's determined by your relationship to Christ, who sets before us a pattern of humility.
The passage we're looking at today, again, is a longer passage than we're going to look at specifically today. We looked at last week how suffering, that we seek to avoid suffering that we want nothing to do with, quite frankly, but suffering God uses in our lives to bring about unity in the body of Christ. Not through bland homogeneity, not through absolute sameness. Everywhere the scriptures speak about the church, we read that the church is supposed to be of a diversity of peoples, different people from different backgrounds with different gifts, different races, different cultures, different languages sometimes. That we are united, not because we are absolutely identical, but through humility. Suffering has a way to lead us into humility before the Lord in a way that power and riches and fame cannot.
So we come to verse five, where Paul says after urging us in verse three and four to do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility, to count others more significant than yourselves so that each of us looks not only to our own interests, but to the interests of others. Then come to verse five and this is the hinge verse of this passage, where Paul says, "Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus." In other words, the ultimate example that we are trying to imitate, not that we can imitate everything about Jesus. He was the Son of God, we are not. He was very God of very God from eternity past, we are not. He came on a different mission than ours. He came to redeem the world in a way that we can't replicate or imitate.
Our humility, John Calvin writes in his commentary, our humility is not the same as Christ, because Christ came from a high point of infinite glory to a place of the lowest condescension. Whereas for us, humility simply consists of not raising ourselves above where we should be. We actually have an easier job in that way than Jesus Christ. Paul says, have the mind of Christ, the humility of Christ.
We're going to look at the humility of Christ in this passage. First, we're going to look at what Paul says about the humility of Christ, both Jesus in the form of God and in the form of a servant, as he talks about in the first part of this passage. The next thing we are going to see is what Paul teaches us about humility. Where humility fits in the economy of God versus the economy of this world. That will be the second thing we look at. And finally, because this Christ Hymn, as it's called, this Christ Hymn is one of the most majestic descriptions of the glory of our Lord and Savior, we're going to look at how this leads us specifically to worship our resurrected Lord. As we did through all of our songs and readings this morning already, but we'll continue to do that through the study of his word.
1. Why We Should Seek Humility and How It Comports with Christ
2, Where Humility Leads Us in the Economy with God
3. How We Should Therefore Worship Christ
Why We Should Seek Humility and How It Comports with Christ
So humility. Paul, in verses six, seven and eight that there are really two ways in which Jesus the Christ, the Eternal Son of the Father, humbles himself. One is in the form of God and that contrasts with what Paul says in verse seven about the fact that Jesus then took the form of a servant. We see Jesus as humility in the form of God and in the form of a servant. So let's look at this and break this down a little bit.
In verse six. Christ, Jesus is the one that, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God, a thing to be grasped. Christ from eternity past, as the eternal Son of the Father, very God of very God, light of light, God of God. He was in the form of God. He was by nature God. As Christians, we confess that there is one God, but that this one God exists eternally as three persons Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We don't worship three Gods, but also as we speak of the three persons of the trinity, it isn't the case where they can be ignored or though that God has somehow just put on different masks appearing in different forms at different times, earlier as the Father, then as the Son and now is the Spirit. These are three distinct persons in the trinity. One God, three persons.
This is a complicated doctrine. This is the mystery at the heart of faith. We will spend eternity contemplating this reality. We're not going to sum it up and exhaust the glorious truths of the trinity this morning. I'm sorry to say we need a lot more time, and probably some of you need to get to lunch. As trinity, the Father, Son and Spirit Are all fully God, that's critical. If you lose that, you lose everything, the Father, Son and Spirit are all God. That means they share the singular, unified nature of God. So there's nature, and then there's persons. That's kind of how we distinguish one nature, one God, God in essence, in the three persons of God.
Now there's a lot more to this, but generally when you're talking about the nature of God, you're talking about his attributes.
So we say that God is infinitely authoritative, he holds all authority. There is no one before whom God bows, which means we say that the Father is infinitely authoritative, the Son is infinitely authoritative, and the Spirit is infinitely authoritative. Not three authoritative persons or Gods, but one God who is infinitely authoritative, whose authority is shared by the Father, Son and the Spirit. We say that God is infinitely glorious, that he is weighty. The idea of glory is the idea of something that's heavy. If you lived in the 80s and you said, oh man, that's heavy. That means it's weighty. It's significant. That's the idea behind the word glory. God is glorious, infinitely glorious. No one, nothing in all of creation is more glorious than God. That means the Father is glorious, the Son is glorious, and the Spirit is glorious.
God is eternal, Father, Son, Spirit is eternal. There was never a time when the Son or the Spirit did not exist, all of the three persons are eternal. God is uncreated Father, Son, Holy Spirit, are uncreated. God is incomprehensible, same for the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. God is Almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Yet not three almighties’ yet not three incomprehensible, yet not three uncreateds, but one. Three persons, one God, that's critical.
What Paul says here is that Christ, from all eternity past existed in the form of God. But Christ did not consider or count equality with God, a thing to be grasped. Now we just said that Christ existed in the form of God. So Paul is not saying here that Christ didn't count equality with God, a thing to be grasped in the sense that Jesus was somehow looking up at the at the form of God and wanted something that was not his and was trying to grasp at it. That's not what Paul is teaching here. That's a heresy that is actually the position of Satan. Satan was a glorious, not as glorious God. A not eternal but was created at some point being, who grasped at something that was not his, namely the glory and the weight and the significance and the almighty power of God and because of that, he fell from heaven and angel fallen for all of eternity. Christ, even though he was equal with God, even though he existed in the form of God, didn't count this equality With God, a thing to be grasped. That means he didn't cling to it. He wasn't willing to exploit it for his personal gain.
When I was a boy, one of my favorite books to read was the classic by Wilson Rawls, where the Red Fern grows. I read it many times through my childhood. It's the story of a boy named Billy who saved up everything he could to buy two hunting dogs Old Dan and Little Ann. And he wanted to get these dogs so that he could hunt raccoons in the Ozarks. Well, to begin training these little hound puppies to track raccoons, he had to get an actual raccoon pelt to teach them how to follow the scent. So what he did with his father, his father helped him with this, was to bore a hole in a log just big enough for a raccoon to reach his little paw in. On the inside of that hole he put a bright, shiny object that would catch the eye of a raccoon. This raccoon, they eventually they caught one, reached in and grasped onto this bright, shiny thing.
Now here's the thing, all the raccoon had to do was let go of that bright, shiny thing, and he would have been able to slip his paw out and free himself and save his life. Yet because that raccoon was not willing to let go of the grasp, he had found something. He wanted it. He insisted upon keeping it. It killed him. The raccoon died. I'm sorry to say if that makes you sad, but the raccoon died and was used as a training tool for Old Dan and Little Ann, and they became glorious hunting dogs for Billy and the Ozarks in this story.
Jesus was not like that. Jesus possessed rightfully by nature, the form and the nature of God from all eternity pasts. This wasn't a bright, shiny object he happened upon at some point. But Jesus also was willing to let the glory and splendor and rights and privileges that were his as God, he was willing to let it go. Even for Jesus, it wasn't that letting go would allow him to slip out of a trap and save his life. Jesus let go his rights and privileges not to save his life, but to lay down his life for us. That's the humility of God.
What's really interesting about this verse is that the ESV actually adds a word here that I think actually unfortunately changes the meaning of this if we're reading it in English. The word, though, does not appear, "who though he was in the form of God". Literally, this is in the Greek, "who being in the form of God". In other words, it's the idea who because he was in the form of God, he was willing to let go of it.
Here's what this means to have the mind of Christ. It's to have privileges, and all of you have some privileges, although as long as you have breath, you have abilities. You have a background that is unique so that you can reach people for Christ in a way that I can't, that Tower or another pastor can't. None of our elders can. No one else in this room can. Because of your background, your experiences, the languages you speak, whatever it is, you have an ability to reach people for Christ that no one else can. Do you use those abilities and resources and privileges for yourself? Will you exploit them and cling to them for your own good, or are you willing to let them go for the good of others?
It wasn't only in his godhead, in the form of God, that the Son was humble. We read in verse seven, "the eternal Son made himself nothing", or if you have another translation or even a later edition of the ESV, this this reads, "but he emptied himself". That's literally what it said that he emptied himself. The reason earlier versions of early editions of the ESV, which is the version I'm reading out of today, it's the pew Bible that you have in front of you or even other translations use or this phrase made himself nothing, it's because it interprets what we mean by emptied.
Jesus didn't empty himself of his divine nature. He didn't divest himself of his divine nature. He didn't set aside the divine nature in order to instead become human. Jesus was fully God, and yet he became fully human for us. Not 50 percent of one and 50 percent of the other, but 100 percent God, 100 percent human. And this he took on, we know this, he's not saying more than this because the rest of the sentence defines what it means to empty himself or to make himself nothing. "He emptied himself" or "made himself nothing by taking the form of a servant."
From here, Paul essentially narrates a dark descent into a pit. Did you ever have a staircase that you were afraid to go down as a child? Or maybe you still won't go down at night because it's just dark and dingy and you're afraid to go down there? This is the descent that Jesus himself walked. Every phrase narrates a new step down to the pit that Jesus went into willingly for us. He made himself nothing taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. He took on human nature and being found in human former, that's a different word from the form of God form of a servant used earlier, so maybe being found in human fashion just to distinguish that word in English. He humbled himself, how much more does he need to do? He humbled himself by becoming obedient. Well, how obedient? To the point of death. What kind of a death? Death on a cross.
To die on a cross was the worst, most shameful death that you could possibly live as a Jew. You knew what Deuteronomy said, which was that anyone who is hanged on a tree is cursed by God. That was not just for anyone. That was for the worst criminals. Same thing for Romans, to die on a cross was the most shameful, horrific death possible legally. If you are a Roman citizen, and the Philippians were Roman colony, they were reclassified as a Roman colony, you did not qualify as being subject for crucifixion. If you had to die by the death penalty, they would simply behead you, which as you know, you still end up dead, but you don't end up dead after hours of torture that the cross would entail. That was what we might call cruel and unusual punishment and constitutionally impermissible for Roman citizens. It was that bad. Yet Jesus submitted to that, to go to the deepest pit he possibly could.
The Psalmist says, "Do not let me be put to shame. Do not let me die." Yet Jesus descended even there. That's the humility of our Lord. Again, we're simply not supposed to rise above where we were. Jesus Christ, who had everything from eternity past, gave up all of it to descend into the pit. Glorious condescension.
"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus." Paul was saying, what do you have? Are you clinging to it? Do you refuse to let it go for the good of others? Or is your money, your possessions, your education, your status, your relationships? Are those used by you for the sake of serving others? "Have this mind among yourselves which is yours in Christ." God calls us to humility, giving us the example of Jesus.
Where Humility Leads Us in the Economy with God
The next question, as I said earlier, that we need to address is then what role does humility take in the economy of God? Where does this play, what can we expect from humility? Well, in verse nine, Paul says, therefore, now we've made much of the conjunctions, and we still need to here. Conjunction Junction, what's your function? This, therefore, is what's classified as an inferential conjunction for your grammar nerds out there. What that simply means is that Paul is making a logical conclusion. He's saying, based off of what I've told you, here's what you need to know. Here's the result. Here's a logical conclusion I'm coming to. One person suggested we translate this as that is why God has highly exalted him. The reason for that is because of this humiliation that he willingly endured. Therefore, that is why God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.
Now in the Bible, there are lots of name changes. God renames Abram to Abraham; God renames Jacob to Israel. Even the author of this letter formally went by the name Saul, but when he came to Christ he was renamed as Paul. We don't have the same kind of name change in Jesus. That's not what's in view here. But it's the concept behind why all of those people had their name changed because Biblically, your name is more than what people call you. It's more than what you are supposed to sign when you enter into contracts. Your name speaks to a deep part of your identity, and your nature, and your character.
The name of Jesus, Paul is saying, was bestowed upon, redefined as being the name which is above every other name. A human being was given the name above every other name. The idea here is that Jesus, the name Jesus, was reclassified as Lord. That's what we read here at the very end of it, and "every tongue confess", in verse 11 "that Jesus Christ is Lord. So every knee will bow in heaven on Earth and under the Earth at the name of Jesus. And every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God, the Father."
Now, throughout history, human beings have tried to assert themselves, to aggrandize themselves as being Lord. Pharaoh did it during the days when the children of Israel were in captivity in bondage and God crushed Pharaoh because of Pharaoh's pride and arrogance. Caesar during this time tried to redefine himself as Lord. As a Roman citizen, part of your responsibility was to confess that Caesar was Lord. In fact, the Roman senate had reclassified Caesar as a god, and you were to worship him and offer sacrifices to him as a god. The early church faced the dilemma. Will we reject that and ay Caesar is not Lord, Jesus Christ is Lord. Or will we face some of the worst possible torture and humiliation for the sake of the name of our Lord?
Jesus here, understand not only did Jesus go from the highest place to the lowest place, but from the lowest place, not only death by the cross, but also in death itself in Hades, in the grave, in Sheol, got from there from that pit. God raised the crucified Jesus up so that a man, a crucified human being, is reigning at the right hand of the Father, still bearing the marks of the nails on his hands and on his feet, still bearing the hole in his side with a spear pierced him on the cross. We are to worship a human being, not any human being, not anyone running for president today, not anyone who claimed to be Lord in the past. We are to worship or worship the crucified suffering servant. In the form of God he is to be worshipped and as the servant, the exalted suffering servant he is to be worshipped. In this God the Father is glorified.
Someone suggested to me watching a movie called The Big Short, which I don't necessarily recommend because it has lots of content. The story is historical, which is really interesting. It's about the collapse of the housing market in 2008 and the devastation that that wreaked on the worldwide economy. What's fascinating about that story is the way in which there was something that was sure in those days. If you were going to get rich, if you were going to enter into finance and really make a whole lot, you are hedging all your bets on the solid sure footing of the housing market. I mean, what's duller and more boring than that? Who doesn't pay their mortgage people kept asking themselves. Yet it was all a farce, it was all a lie. The world economy was built in so many ways, bets on top of bets, on top of bets, so that money was free flowing here and there and everywhere, based on the solidity of the housing market. Except for a few people who crunched the numbers, did the math recognize that this was all a bubble, that this was all going to crash and they bet hard against the housing market. The only people who walked away from the 2008 crash were those people, and they made millions on shorting the market, betting against the market.
Well, in the world's economy, there's a clear path to the top. It's step on who you have to step on, destroy who you have to destroy. Do what you have to do for the sake of exalting yourself. The only one who is going to get you to the top is you. So take advantage of what you have, grasp to whatever rights, privileges and opportunities you are given and exploit them for your own personal gain. That's the world's economy.
God's economy says something very different. It says the way to the top is not by pursuing it directly, it's by following in the footsteps of Jesus in humility. How can a man suffering from Alzheimer's washing dishes show you a glimpse of the glory of God as his life has been transformed by the Gospel? It's because we see there that in humiliation, in humility, as we suffer for the sake of our Lord, we do that with the knowledge that God himself will lift us up. We read it earlier today in our worship from James 4:10, "Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord and he will lift you up." Well, just as God urges us to humble ourselves in this passage, "have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus." He's telling us the outcome of that. If you humble yourselves for Christ, you will be lifted up with Christ on the last day. Short the world's economy. It's going to crumble; it's going to fall away. The only thing that will last is a crucified, shamed human being who reigns over all the cosmos and the Earth. Worship him.
How We Should Therefore Worship Christ
So finally, that leads us to worship. This passage teaches us three ways in which we must worship the Lord, and I'll work through these fairly quickly. The first is that we ought to worship Christ because he existed before all time and now and forever more in the form of God. Because Jesus Christ is God. Not 50 percent God, not 50 percent human, but 100 percent fully God.
Now I have to tell you, I am not a heresy hunter, but there is a doctrine that is creeping into the church that is not pure. That is not what the church is confessed throughout the throughout the history of the church. There are people with whom lots of people in our circles would probably read a lot of their books who are confessing something false about the trinity.
I'll tell you their names, not because I glory in this, but because it's important to know the truth. Bruce Ware is a systematic theology professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky and Wayne Grudem, you may have his systematic theology on your shelf, I do on mine. What they are confessing about God, the Son is not true. It's critical that we get this right. We need pure doctrine. We need to confess the trinity as he is.
A few weeks ago, we talked about the circles of what's important in the church, and at the center of that is our confession about Jesus. If we miss this, we miss the gospel. If we lose this, we lose the gospel. What they are saying is they confess on one side; I want to acknowledge that they do confess on one side that the Son and the Father are fully God both and the Spirit with them. What they say that not in nature, but they try to make an argument that from the personhood that the Son is eternally subordinate to the Father. Let me read you what Bruce Weber writes. He writes, "God, the Father receives the ultimate and supreme glory. For the Father sent the Son to accomplish redemption in his humiliation, and the Father exalted the Son to his place over all creation. In all these things, the Father alone stands supreme overall, including supreme over his very son. All praise of the Son ultimately and rightly redounds to the glory of the Father. It is the Father then who is supreme in the Godhead in the triune relationships of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and supreme over all of the very creation over which the Son reigns as its lord."
The problem is, if you say that God the Father is more glorious in the Son, you can't make that argument on personhood. Remember, the attributes of God are his nature. If you say that the Father is more glorious in the Son, you were saying that the Son is not ultimately glorious and you are undercutting the divine nature of the Son and making him something different than the Father. You cannot do that.
Wayne Grudem writes this, "Therefore, the consistent testimony of scriptures at the Father by virtue of being Father, eternally has authority to plan, initiate and command and send authority that the Son and Holy Spirit do not have." In other words, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not authoritative in the way that the Father is. Again, that's a nature argument. I don't care how you define that, according to a person, that's a nature argument and that undercuts the very trinitarian doctrine that the church has confessed throughout our history. You cannot do that. God exists as three persons Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it is their nature that they share that is ultimately authoritative, ultimately glorious, and you can't say that one the Father or the Son is glorious to the exclusion of any of the other persons of the trinity.
Even on this last phrase in verse 11 of Philippians two, that all of this happens to the glory of God, the Father, that's not talking about a ricocheted thing where the glory bounces off Jesus and lands on the Father. It's saying what the scriptures teach, which is that the Father is glorified by putting forth his Son because his Son is the image of the Father. It's actually this passage that gives us a framework, perhaps better than any place else in the Bible, for understanding there's a difference between the form of God texts that Jesus affirms and that the scriptures teach of the Son and the form of a servant texts that the scriptures teach.
So on the one hand, we have texts where Jesus is saying, where we read in John 5:18, "This is why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God." And then Jesus says, "for this reason, the Father loves me because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again this charge I ever received from my Father." Then in John, 10:30, "I and the Father of one." Those are the form of God texts. Jesus is fully God, fully worthy of authority and supremacy and glory with the Father and the Spirit before all time and now and forever.
In the form of a servant when Jesus was humiliated, he says, "Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord," that' John, 5:19. In John 5:30 he says, "I can do nothing on my own." Then he also says, in John, 14:28, "The Father is greater than I." Well, in the form of a servant, yes, the incarnate Son is inferior to the Father. In fact, he's inferior to himself in the form of God. Because he humbled himself, willingly taking the form of a servant through his incarnation.
We worship Jesus because he is fully and absolutely God. The Athanasius Creed, which is one of the three ecumenical creeds, the creeds that all Christians everywhere have always confessed. We read this these lines. "So there is one Father, not three Fathers, one Son, not three Sons, one Holy Spirit, not three Holy Spirits. And in this trinity, none as before or after none is greater or less than another. But the whole three persons are eternal and co-equal." You cannot put different tiers and keep the doctrine, anyway continuing. "So that in all things, as before said the unity and trinity and the trinity and unity is to be worshipped. He, therefore, that will be saved must thus think of the trinity."
The church has always put this at the heart of our first tier doctrines. This is so critical. Now if you're a theology person and you want to ask more questions about this, maybe you've studied some of these other writings. I would love to talk with you about them. I don't have time to lay out all that's going on here, but I would love to talk with you more about this because this gets at the heart of the gospel, at the heart of the trinity. What the church has always confessed about who God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We worship Jesus because he is God.
Second, we worship Jesus because he is an exalted human and exalted suffering servant. He's given the name above every other name he is ruling as the crucified incarnate Lord at the right hand of his Father. He is on a mission that didn't finish at the resurrection of Jesus, but really began because now is the point where he reigns until he puts all his enemies under his feet. Therefore, we are called to do something we have never been called in human history to do, which is to worship a human being, because this human is the incarnate God who has been given the name above every other names. Worship Jesus not only in his godhead, but in his servanthood, his exalted servanthood.
Finally, we worship Jesus because all this he did for us. It's actually interesting in versus six or eleven, we don't show up at all. We don't appear anywhere. We don't actually receive a direct application to us in reading this. We read here the story of what God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, planned before all time, executed in the Son and is applying by his Spirit to this very day for us and for our salvation. This is the gospel that if you would be saved, turned from your sins, look to Jesus Christ who was cursed for you, who is ashamed for you in his humiliation, was crucified for you, and worship him as he is the exalted Lord. Through whose humiliation, all of us who humble ourselves and bow the knee and confess with our tongues today will be also exalted with him.
This is the word of the Lord. Humiliation in God's economy is at the heart of the gospel. It's in the heart of how you and I are exalted at the heart of how you and I come to know God through Jesus Christ's own humiliation and as he conforms us to the image of his son. And we have a great cloud of witnesses gathering around us. That passage in Hebrews 12 doesn't talk about eternal grandstands where people are watching and cheering us on. It's actually the idea of people who have gone before us bearing witness of the goodness of following Jesus into his humiliation. Whether that's a brilliant scholar of medicine who was willing to wash dishes or whether that's any of the other saints who have gone before us, who've entered into their eternal rest and eternal victory in Christ. You and I have patterns that ultimately, we see in the pattern of God the Son, Jesus Christ, who is Lord. Let us therefore have this mind in ourselves, which is ours in Christ Jesus.
Pray with me. Heavenly Father, I pray that you would be glorified in your Son. That as your Son stands, as your perfect image, your perfect representation, that he became visible in this world so that we might see you who is invisible. Father, I pray that you would send your Spirit. I pray that you would send your Spirit to give us eyes to see the glory of the crucified savior, our Lord Jesus Christ, that you would lift us up with him by your Spirit through the preaching of your word and as we gather at your table to feast with the spiritual presence of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. We pray this now and your Son's name. Amen.