Star Wars is huge at our house. When I was about Damon's age my parents took me to see Return of the Jedi. I've been fan ever since. I still have a bunch of the vintage toys and I still love the movies.
My boys are crazy about it too. They watch one of the movies (at least) about once a week. Brandy and I can't throw soda bottles out because every time we do, they get 'rescued' from the trash and reincarnated as lightsabers. They run, screaming, through the house, arguing about which one of them is Darth Vader. Excuse me. "Dark Mader" (Damon can't pronounce it right yet). The epic soda bottle lightsaber battles that take place in my house make the duels in the movies look tame by comparison.
Recently, they've started holding up there hands and yelling "Force Lightning!" while pretending to shock everyone in the house.
Unfortunately, however, the Force is not with us. Now matter how many attempts are made, thrown soda bottle lightsabers do not telekinetically return to hand. Someone will throw one, it'll hit the intended recipient (or not), fall to the ground, and that is where it will stay until someone goes to reclaim it.
Momentarily Jarring Subject Change:
This semester, we've been wrestling with Philippians 2:5-11 in my Greek Exegesis class. Lets take a look at the text real quick.
5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus,
6who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,
7but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.
8Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
9For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name,
10so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
A person could give half a dozen sermons on that text because there are so many critical and extremely interesting topics there. The one that I haven't been able to get out of my head, however, is the purpose of the Incarnation.
Why did Christ, who was (is, always has been and always will be) in the form of God come down here? Why did he take on human form? Why was all this humility necessary? Couldn't God just redeem us, if that's what He wanted to do, without having to put a part of His Triune being through all that?
And what about that exaltation Christ received from the Father? If Christ is God and it doesn't get any higher than God, what was he exalted to?
Lets start with that question of why he ever came down here to begin with. Take a glance at Genesis 3:4-6.
4The serpent said to the woman, "You surely will not die!
5"For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
6When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.
This should look a little familiar to you. Not just because many of you have read it a hundred times, but because we just got done reading its opposite. Here we have Humanity, created for a relationship with God. As created beings, we are subordinate to our Creator. But that wasn't good enough for us, was it? No, through pride we refused to humble ourselves and sought out equality with God. And look what it got us.
But Christ, on the other hand, had equality with God. And he humbled himself.
We were low, reaching up into the tree to steal something, to grasp at something that didn't belong to us and it caused us to fall. Christ was as high as it gets and he set aside the privileges and rights that were his due. We were low, reaching up to take something that didn't belong to us. He was high and stepped down to give us something we didn't deserve.
Just like my kids' fake lightsabers at home, we'd fallen. When something falls, you can leave it where it lands. But if that isn't where you want it, well, then someone is going to have to go down and pick it up again. Its a simplistic illustration, I know, but there it is. We fell, so Christ came down after us.
C.S. Lewis, in his book Miracles, gives another illustration for the Incarnation. Not surprisingly, his is a whole lot better than mine:
"In the Christian story, God descends to re-ascend. He comes down, down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity, down to the very roots and seed bed of the humanity which He Himself created. But He goes down to come up again and bring ruined sinners up with Him. ...One has the picture of a strong man, stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden, he must stoop in order to lift. He must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders."
Now, its a wonder to me why he didn't just leave us there. I mean, it really isn't as though we deserved any better. Christ's mercy and compassion, however, are well beyond my comprehension and he did it. He came down into this mess we made to lift us back out of it again.
Don't lose sight of the mirroring in those Scriptures we looked at a bit ago. In coming down after us, Christ did exactly the opposite of what Adam and Eve did because that was the point from the start. The Incarnation, the redemption drama, took place to begin the process of undoing the Fall.
No, that's not quite right either, is it? That isn't all of it. If Christ were simply undoing the Fall then we would be looking forward to returning to the Garden of Eden, wouldn't we? No, somehow, despite our unworthiness, we actually get to look forward to something even better. We are looking forward to Heaven.
I was asking questions earlier about that exaltation Christ received from the Father. Lets direct our attention there for a bit.
How does God exalt God? How does God further elevate something that is already as high as it gets? The question I'm trying to ask here is, "If Christ was already God, how was he exalted higher than that?"
Obviously, he wasn't. I mean, that doesn't compute. If that were even possible to begin with, it would create inequality within the Trinity. If Christ was equal with the Father to start with and the Father made him higher than He was... Yeah, that doesn't work. Is this a paradox in the Scripture?
No, it isn't. Because we've overlooked something.
In his humility, Christ became a man. He came down to our level to undo what we'd done. Now, that "becoming a man" wasn't like putting on a new shirt. Christ changed himself. He was fully God, but became also fully man.
Now, someone is going to accuse me of heresy here because we have this idea that God can't change. But what is omnipotence? Being all powerful means God can do whatever God decides He wants to do. Saying God cannot change is saying that God is not omnipotent. Christ did change. He took on human form. He took on a new aspect.
It was that new aspect of Christ that was exalted. The Father elevated Christ's human flesh, Christ's new elements, into the Trinity. Right now, Christ is sitting at the right hand of the Father and he's still fully God and fully man.
And that is why we have something even better than the Garden of Eden to look forward to. Christ opened a door for us. He redeemed humanity and established a new prototype of sanctified flesh. When you read about the new bodies we'll be given in Heaven, I think this is what makes that possible.
There is some amazing poetry in how God works.
I'm going to shut this down now and open this up for some discussion. I would really like to see a dialogue develop here and get some ideas exchanging.
Also, I hope if you have to bend down to pick up a dropped trinket or a child's mess this week that it makes you remember the Incarnation, if only for a quick minute.
