Wednesday, January 23, 2013

God Stooped Down


In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth by the Word of His Power. He spoke and things came into being. By the pronouncement of some nouns and verbs, without the lifting of a finger, the waters teemed with sea-life and the ground sprouted vegetation and animals slowly began creeping along the ground. A brilliant system when you think about it! What else would you expect from THE God who alone rules and reigns over all things? 

But on the sixth day, there was a change of method. No more speaking and it was done.  No more creating things without a drop of sweat from his holy brow. God stooped down. He stooped down and created a little mud-man. God stooped down and got His hands dirty. Compelled by no outside stimuli or lack in Himself, He stooped down to deal with Man in a way that was unique from all of the rest of the creation. The breath of His Spirit blew roundabout and inside the Man and he lived; this was His masterpiece. This Man that God made would be crowned with glory and honor and be set over all of the rest of the created order. He would be the image of God physically manifest in the universe to live in perfect communion with God, to perfectly receive and display absolute Trinitarian love. But as a sign of God’s unique relationship with this Man, God stooped down.  

And Man grew to resent God. The Serpent deceived Man and so, in pride, the Man coveted against God; he leapt up in a vain attempt to usurp God’s role and by so doing he fell...hard. Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one Man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all Men because all sinned --

Fast forward several thousand years.

In a small room, in the middle of the pre-celebration festivities for the Passover, Jesus was eating with His disciples. Then, in amazing humility, He rose up from the table, and He stooped down. He laid aside His outer garments, much the same way as when He left the glory and privilege that He had with God before. He tied a towel around His waist, the mark of a servant, pointing us back to His birth when Divinity wrapped Himself in servant-like flesh. And then He proceeded to wash the disciple nasty feet. He got His hands dirty, beads of sweat forming on His holy brow. In this act of extraordinary humility, Jesus showed us the kind of death He was to die. With greatest grace, in leaving the manifest presence of God to stoop down into human flesh, God the Father crowned Him with glory and honor because of His suffering and death. 

God’s unique and redemptive purpose for Man, you and me, demanded that justice be satisfied by sending His Son to take our curse upon Himself. Jesus stooped down and bore our sin in His body on the tree. He is now risen from the dead. Therefore God has highly exalted Him to the highest place and has 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. Repent and Believe, the Kingdom of God is at hand.

Genesis 1-3, John 1:14, Galatians 4:4, Hebrews 2:5-9, Romans 5:12, John 13, Philippians 2:1-11, Romans 8:4, Mark 1:15

*In case you missed it: in the Garden, in the very act of creating Man, before the Fall, God showed the lengths He would have to go to redeem us.

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