Pleasing Meditations

For Adoration of Christ April 2024, I want to think about four major things the Apostles’ Creed confesses to be true about the Lord Jesus Christ. This ancient Creed, common to all Christian denominations, gives us glorious doctrine intended to fuel our worship. May Christ be exalted!

The only begotten, much beloved Son of the Father, our Lord Jesus Christ, bowed low in His “estate of humiliation,” to use the words of the Westminster Catechisms (WLC 46-50, WSC 27).

For us and for our salvation, the eternal Son did not grasp greedily on His divinity, but instead He humbled Himself, taking on the form of a servant, taking to Himself the likeness of humanity, and being incarnate in a limited, frail human body (Philippians 2:7-8).

He humbled himself, being obedient to His God and Father, all the way unto the point of death, even death on a cross — even being bound in the cords of death and subject to the disgrace of the grave, if only for a short time (Philippians 2:8, Acts 2:22-32).

Contrary to our imaginations sometimes, and contrary to the singing crowds on Palm Sunday, Christ’s earthy ministry was not of exaltation and glory. Instead, from the moment Gabriel announced His sacred conception all the way through Holy Saturday where His disensouled body laid in the tomb, our Lord was humbling Himself lower and lower. That is Paul’s logic in quoting Psalm 68 in Ephesians 4:7-10: we can only proclaim that He has ascended on high if first He has descended to the lowest, deepest place of humility possible.

Only a Humiliated Christ can be our Exalted Christ. First comes humiliation, then exaltation. First comes suffering, and then glory.

In the Creed, we confess a Humiliated Christ.

He “was conceived by the Holy Spirit.” People usually call conception and birth a “miracle.” However, for all humans (save One) both events are entirely natural — wonderful, yes, marvelous, yes, but natural. When a man and a woman create a child, God’s well-ordered universe is proclaiming the praise of its maker. But Jesus Christ was not naturally conceived. His conception was truly, completely miraculous. When the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary, the incarnation of Christ began (Luke 1:35). In that miraculous moment, the eternally begotten Son stooped down to take to Himself human nature and human form. Jesus did not just appear one day, conjured out of thin air, descended from heaven at age 30; He was conceived — miraculously so, but conceived nonetheless. God became man in this miraculous conception. The incarnation of Christ began, not in strength or glory, but in the weak, defenselessness of a fetus.

And He was “born of the Virgin Mary.” Mary was a godly young woman (Luke 1:38), and a godly wife to Joseph (Matthew 1:25), and a godly mother to Jesus’ half-brothers and half-sisters (Matthew 13:55-56). But the birth of Jesus was still humiliation. It was continued condescension for the Son of God. Even had He been born at the inn, even had He not be laid in a manger, birth is still a messy, bloody, painful process. I do not mean in the least to demean the beauty of motherhood or the wonder of child birth, but the act of birth itself is not a dignified time for mother or for child. It is a time of vulnerability and nakedness. Yet, as most English-speaking Christians sing in December, “He abhors not the Virgin’s womb.” (TPH #319). He is not ashamed of His gestation, He does not shun His human mother, He is not too proud to be born. As Timothy Brindle put it “God passed through His own creature’s uterus.” It is a shocking thing to consider so starkly. Yet, Christ was humbly willing to be humiliated.

And when we think of His mother, we surely remember His nativity and His subsequent humble life, raised by an ordinary worker and his wife. As Paul says, “you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9) Again, as a Christmas hymn says, He “who wast rich beyond all splendour, all for love’s sake becamest poor” (TPH #324). A life of humility for you and me.

The Creed passes over His life and public ministry. Jesus had a humble upbringing, and a humble ministry, for “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20).

Instead of considering any other intermediating historical details, the Creed goes directly to the other crucial human figure in Jesus’ life. The Virgin Mary is crucial in the incarnation, the beginning of His Estate of Humiliation. And it is Pontius Pilate, Roman Governor of Judea, who is crucial in His execution, bringing His Estate of Humiliation to its planned and purposed end (Acts 4:27-28).

It was Pilate who ordered Christ crucified. Jesus was betrayed by His own people, rejected by religious leaders who should have recognized that He is the Christ. Pilate may have tried to wash his hands (Matthew 27:24), but he signed the death warrant (Matthew 27:26).

Jesus was beaten, mocked, and scourged. He was marched out of the city and stripped bare. He was publicly crucified, counted among criminals. He was denied dignity at every point. He did not die like an epic hero, but died in human weakness, humiliated to the end.

He died a cursed death (Galatians 3:13, Deuteronomy 21:23), suffering “the pangs of Sheol” as He hung there (Psalm 116:3), but most importantly — for the sake of our salvation — He was forsaken by our God (Matthew 27:46, Psalm 22:1), enduring the wrath of God we deserve as sinners, bearing our sins in His own body on that accursed tree (1 Peter 2:24). Though his bodily pain must have been immense, the psychological suffering as sin-bearer was infinitely worse still. As we sing in the hymn “Stricken, Smitten, Afflicted,” “the deepest stroke that pierced Him was the stroke that Justice gave” (TPH #342). To be our propitiation, He was wounded physically and psychologically, humiliated in both body and soul.

And so humbled was our Lord Jesus Christ that His body rested in the grave. Jesus endured hellish agony on the cross in our place (Psalm 18:6). But His death was not the end of His humiliation. His soul, ripped from His body in death, immediately went to be with His Father in paradise. But He was buried in a borrowed tomb, and thus He descended to Hades (Acts 2:31).

His body was under the veil of the earth (Isaiah 25:7-8); His body was bound in the cords of death (Psalm 18:4-5); He was sown in disgrace and put in the place of corruption (1 Corinthians 15:42-44). Humiliating descent to Sheol … Hades … Hell, as we translate in English.

Holy Saturday was a day of humiliation, because the resurrection had not yet come. That last Sabbath Saturday before Easter, the body of Jesus rested in the grave, the soul of Jesus rested in His Father’s hands (Luke 23:43, Luke 23:46, Psalm 31:5), and there was not yet victory to claim. It was a day of humiliation, just as Good Friday before.

Behold how low He went! That’s our Jesus. Humble and humiliated. From a fetus in the Virgin’s womb to a corpse in a rich man’s tomb, this is our humiliated Christ. This is “the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

I’ll say it again: only a Humiliated Christ can be our Exalted Christ. First comes humiliation, then exaltation. First comes suffering, and then glory. And our once-humiliated, sacrificially-suffering Christ is sympathetic to us amidst our humiliations and suffering in this present, passing, evil age (Hebrews 4:14-16, Romans 8:17, 1 Peter 4:12-16).

Beloved, do you see how lovely our humble Jesus is?

Let us then adore Christ!

A Psalm for the Adoration of the Humilated Christ: