The High Cost of a Free Gift: The Humiliation of Jesus

By Kermit Taylor

When we think about our salvation in most cases, we will focus on God's gracious and undeserved goodness toward us. Though salvation flows from the grace of God, thereby making it free to all who put their trust in Jesus, free does not mean that our salvation is cheap or without great cost to God Himself. This book, The High Cost of a Free Gift, takes a very Christocentric looked at the gracious provision of salvation. This book focuses on all that it cost our Savior in order that He might be our perfect and eternal sacrifice for sin. By looking at the Christology of our salvation, this book encourages a greater appreciation for all that the Son of God endured in order that we might be saved. From His preincarnate glory to His descent into the grave, our Savior paid a high price in order that we might receive the free gift of salvation. This book will trace the downward stage in the works of Jesus Christ from His glory to the grave referred to as His humiliation. We will take a deeper look at the following topics: - "Jesus's Glorious Preincarnate Existence" - "The Meaning and Necessity of His Humiliation" - "The Virgin Birth and Incarnation of Jesus" - "Kenosis: The Self-Emptying of Jesus" - "His Temptations and Rejections" - "His Illegal Trials" - His Sacrificial Atoning Death" - "His Burial and Descent to Hades" - "The Implications of His Humiliation" Ultimately, from this reading, we learn that the Son of God's love for man was so deep that He willingly laid aside His glory in order to endure a level of humiliation that was so great that only God wrapped in humanity could endure it. Our greater appreciation for the high cost that Jesus paid to save us should cause us, as believers, to appreciate, admire, and adore Him all the more and greatly value the free gift to which He paid such a high cost.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098042516

Book preview

It is my pleasure to dedicate this book to the many servants of God who sowed the seed of the Word into my life.

From the many Sunday school teachers that I was blessed to sit under through the years to my three preacher friends who invited me into their Bible study and taught me what it really means to study the Word of God—Clifton, Bill, and Danny.

To my pastor, Lloyd Joiner Jr., whom God used to preach life into my dead spirit.

To my encouraging friends and loved ones, especially my wife and family, who learned that, if I was in my study with the door closed and television off, to approach thoughtfully.

And lastly, I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my favorite United Theological Seminary and Bible College instructor, Pastor Ennis Sullivan, who never ceased to encourage me to write.

Introduction

As Christians, we often speak about the amazingness of God’s grace and the freeness of His salvation to us. From our viewpoint as believers, all the Bible declares is that we need to do for salvation is to " call on the name of the Lord " in faith (Rom. 10:13; italics added). ¹ But we must understand that even though God has given us salvation freely through His grace (God’s undeserved blessings), grace is not cheap, for grace has been made possible only through the offering of "the precious blood…the blood of Christ" (1 Pet. 1:18–19; italics added), the most costly and expensive offering that ever was or ever could be. We must appreciate that in order that we might be saved, Jesus, the Son of God, was humbled from His exalted state in glory; and He entered into time and creation itself so that He could share our human experience. By Him being identified with humanity, His humiliation (the degrading of Himself) qualified Him to be our perfect sacrifice for sin. ² In theology, the term for Jesus’s descent from glory into the human experience is called His humiliation. Thomas Oden, the father of the paleo-orthodox theological movement, says that the humiliation of Jesus does not mean that God

has been finally degraded, demeaned, or diminished but rather that God the Son enters our human condition by self-humbling and "becoming obedient to the point of death" (Philippians 2:6–9) and burial.³

In this book, we will trace Jesus’s descent from His preincarnate glorious existence in the presence of God the Father and the holy angels, then ultimately to Calvary, and then to the grave. The steps that we will look at in the humiliation of Jesus will be His incarnation (the putting on of human flesh); His self-emptying of his preincarnate glory (kenosis); His theanthropic experience as the God-man Mediator; and ultimately His rejection, crucifixion, and His descent into the grave. The purpose of studying the indignity that Jesus endured on our behalf is that we might develop a greater love and appreciation for the salvation that He has freely made available to us by grace. To this cause, when we consider the high costs that our Savior paid in order to redeem His people from the darkness of sin, we come to recognize how highly valued and loved we are as children of God. It is a foregone conclusion that any person or object must be highly valued or highly loved when a great price is paid to possess that person or object. Knowing that we are deeply loved and highly valued, our desire should be to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God (Col. 1:10). Because of this, our goal in this writing is to encourage all readers who are saved and would be saved to fully appreciate the fact that the grace of salvation that is freely offered to us by God is not cheap and to deeply understand The High Costs of a Free Gift.

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¹. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical passages referenced are in the New American Standard Bible (La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995).

². Thomas Oden, The Word of Life: Systematic Theology Volume Two (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 1998), 20.

³. Ibid.

Chapter 1

Jesus’s Glorious Preincarnate Existence

As Christians, we are very accustomed to visualizing Jesus walking the dusty roads of Galilee, healing the sick, feeding the multitudes, and proclaiming the kingdom of God is at hand. It may therefore be a challenge for some of us to recognize that our Savior’s existence is not confined to His thirty-three years of life that the Gospels reveal to us as He walked the earth; the Son of God always was. In this chapter, I will use the term preincarnate , which literally means before putting on flesh. As this term applies to Jesus, it refers to the period in eternity prior to Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. My goal in this chapter is to give you a sense of Jesus’s glory that He shared with the Father prior to creation, prior to time itself. By appreciating the lofty height that was indeed the divine right of the Son of God before He added humanity to His divinity, we gain a better admiration for the depths of His humiliation. Our Savior, the eternal Son of the true and living God, for our sake left His place of honor and worship in order to take on humanity that He might pay the high cost of our free gift of salvation.

What Jesus gave up in coming to earth was immense. No mere words or the deepest thoughts ever measure the distance between the glory of God’s throne (located in what the ancients called the third heaven) and the modesty of an earthly Bethlehem manger. This was the enormous distance from which our Savior, Jesus, descended—from a place of honor and praise down to a habitat filled with rejection and death. This represents the great humiliation or dishonor that our Savior endured so that man could be redeemed from the curse of sin. The Triune God is the only eternal being, the only One existing before the creation of the universe or anything that existed in it. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit existed even before time began. Because God created time only as a temporary context for His creation, it is clear that time could not begin until God had created. For the countless ages prior to God’s act of creation in eternity past, the divine Son of God, the second person of the Godhead, dwelt in the glorious presence of His Father, being in Himself co-glorious—equal in power and enjoying all the full honor of deity and the glory of being God.

From the point in time when God created the angelic host until the point that Lucifer rebelled and turned a third of the angels against the perfect will of the Almighty, the Son of God enjoyed glorious, uninterrupted, and harmonious sound of the praise, Holy Holy Holy. This was the Son of God’s divine and eternal right as God until the time would come that He would take on human flesh and make His downward journey to redeem man from the penalty of sin. We must understand that when the Son of God was born within the confines of that which He Himself made with the Father and the Spirit—time and creation, in a lowly manger in Bethlehem—this was not the beginnings of His existence but just the beginning of Him also becoming the God-man. This downward journey from glorious praises from the heavenly host in glory to humble servanthood, rejection by men, and ultimately death is called by theologians the humiliation of Jesus.

We see the proof of the reality of Jesus’s glorious preincarnate existence in heaven (Jesus’s existence before putting on human flesh) testified by the words of Jesus Himself. In John 17:5 Jesus says of the Father, Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was. This statement makes it clear that prior to the beginning of creation (and so) well before Jesus’s incarnation, in the timeless past of eternity, the Son of God’s true existence was glorious and filled with honor, majesty, and praise. The Greek word for glory, doxa, is normally thought of in terms