Even though the God-man is a unit in whom God and man meet in a harmonious union of natures yet the root of His wonderful personality is God. Through all eternity He was God. At one moment of time He became Man. "The Son of God came from the eternities. The Son of Man began His being." "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God." The Deity of Christ Jesus is basic and primary. "The Word was made flesh" and there was "born this day in the city of David a Saviour - a Babe wrapped in swaddling clothes." The humanity of Christ Jesus is assumed and therefore secondary though essential. In the union of God and man God is the dominant factor. "The incarnation is the humanizing of deity and not the deification of humanity." The God-man is "God ... manifest in the flesh" (1 Timothy 3:16).
In the following Scriptural classic we have a very clear and beautiful revelation of the person of the God-man and the process by which He became such and the purpose.
Phil. 2:5-8, "Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the Cross."
He was the Eternal Son, "existing in the form of God" and "on an equality with God." But in the presence of Eden's tragedy and man's need of redemption He counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped but by a sublime act of self- emptying He qualified to be the world's Saviour. While not divesting Himself of His essential nature as God, He became the Incarnate Son, "taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men," and submitted to the temporary non-manifestation of His divine prerogatives.
"He emptied Himself." He did this by permitting the essential glory and majesty of His divine person to be covered and hidden for a while by the flesh, by voluntarily putting His several attributes, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, under temporary limitations; and by placing Himself under the sovereign will of the Heavenly Father and under the control of the Holy Spirit.
"The emptying indicates the setting aside of one form of manifestation, in which all the facts of equality with God were evidently revealed, for another form of manifestation, in which the fact of equality with God must for a time be hidden, by the necessary submissiveness of the human to the divine. The Word passed from government to obedience, from independent cooperation in the equality of Deity to dependent submission to the will of God." ("The Grace of the Christ" - G. Campbell Morgan)
"He humbled Himself." God took man's form, the Lord of glory stooped to an actual union with human nature. In His humiliation He endured every conceivable suffering, the culmination of which was His cruel death on the Cross as a condemned criminal.
His voluntary self-humbling and self-emptying was for a purpose. "He became obedient unto death, yea, the death of the Cross" that through His divine-human mediatorship He might become mankind's all-sufficient Saviour.
~Ruth Paxson~
(the end)
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