It is easy to get into the Christmas spirit, put up our trees and lights, sing our carols, and not meditate or even remember that our celebration is because of the humiliation of the eternal Son of God, co-equal with the Father in essence and substance.
This article is to direct your hearts to spare a moment in your celebration to consider the great love of Jesus.
This article isn’t meant to dampen your Christmas spirit. No. It is to direct your hearts and minds to spare a moment in your celebration to consider the unfathomable humiliation, sacrifice, and great love of Jesus for us in coming down to earth to be incarnate and born on Christmas day.
Let me share two points for your meditation. They are about how Christmas marks the:
- Beginning of the Son of God’s humiliation
- The King of Glory stepping down from his throne.
1. The Second Person of the Trinity
Though not the absolute beginning of his humiliation, that’ll be at conception.
The Son didn’t have more or less deity than the Father or Spirit.
Yet, it is good for us to remember that the person who was born to us on Christmas is a trinitarian person, the Son of God, who at the same time with the Father and the Spirit, subsists distinctly as the entire and undivided intelligence, will, and consciousness of the one living and true God. The entire undivided essence is in Jesus without remainder. He did not have more or less deity than the Father or Spirit. Absolutely and without qualification, he is co-equal with the Father and has the same substance, power, and glory in precisely the same degree as the Father. He is exhaustively identical to the whole of the divine essence.
It is this same Jesus, not another who subsists as the divine essence, that was in the womb of the virgin Mary. There is nothing in the divine essence that is missing from all that he is or all that the Father is. It is he, the Son, who was incarnate in the virgin Mary and was born to us on Christmas day.
2. The King of Glory
In the absolute beginning, God made the highest heaven to be the dwelling place for him and his glory. Unlike the earth which God created in six days, he completed heaven in an instant and immediately filled it with glory and angelic hosts. It was in an instant populated with the hosts of heaven for worship around the throne of God having been placed in the immediate throne presence of the heaven temple to see the glory of the Father, Son, and Spirit.
When we speak of Christmas, we are speaking of the humiliation of the king of heaven. The heaven which by its very nature, is set ablaze by the glory of the Son of God. Isaiah in his vision of heaven narrates how the Seraphim, part of that heavenly host, encircle the throne of the Lord with ceaseless praise. They cry out “Holy, holy, holy” is the Lord God Almighty! And when John wrote his gospel account, he, inspired by the Spirit of Christ, commented that the one whom Isaiah saw on the throne, the one whose robe filled the heavenly temple, who Seraphs dared not look at and covered their eyes with a pair of wings and sang endless praise to is the same Jesus who was born on Christmas day (John 12:41).
Jesus was self-aware of his pre-incarnate glory even in the womb of Mary.
The one who was born on Christmas day was the one who declared in Isaiah 66:1, “Heaven is my throne and the earth my footstool.” He is the king the sons of Korah addressed their verse to in Psalm 45:1. It is he that it is said of, “Gird your sword on your thigh, O Mighty One, in your splendour and your majesty! And in your majesty ride on victoriously, for the cause of truth and meekness and righteousness” (Psalm 45:3-4). He is the one whose throne is forever and ever (Psalm 45:6).
He is the one Paul spoke about in Colossians 1:16 as the one by whom all things were created, and through whom all things were created, and for whom all things were created. And he was self-aware of his pre-incarnate splendour and glory even in the womb of Mary.
He Did What I Never Would
What humiliation. Angels bowed before him. Heaven and earth adored him. Yet he came down to earth from heaven, the very God and Lord of all. He left a throne, crown, resplendent splendour, riches, and glory for a stable, stall, and mortal flesh.
The truth is no one can comprehend this. I can’t. I have never been this humiliated before. And even if I was, it doesn’t compare. For his humiliation was voluntary and exceedingly great.
He left a throne and glory for a stable and mortal flesh.
I want to leave earth and go to heaven to see glory and splendour. I can’t comprehend why anyone would leave heaven to come to this filthy earth. Sure, I know people have left a good place for a less desirable place, but it’s usually because of some perceived benefits they lack like marriage or job opportunities. But Jesus Christ was altogether perfect and he himself gives to all people life and breath and all things. He isn’t served by human hands. He needs nothing. Yet the Son of God and King of Glory gave everything up, for you and me.
