The “V” Is for Victory: From Incarnation to Exaltation
Our Lord’s great redemptive complex is calculated to save sinners and incrementally abolish the power of sin’s curse in all of the Father’s “very good” creation.
“He [Jesus Christ] humbled Himself … Therefore God also has highly exalted Him .…”
Philippians 2:8, 9
Dear friends and supporters:
Philippians 2:6-11 is one of the most memorable passages in the Bible. It’s probably a fragment of an early Christian hymn or poem. In discussing the necessity of humility in the church, on not insisting on one’s own rights, the apostle Paul highlights the great V of man’s salvation in our Lord’s example. On the downward diagonal axis of the letter, our Lord in great humility comes down from heaven to earth, dies an ignominious death, and goes down into the ground in burial. This is the nadir of the axis. Then comes the upward swing of the second diagonal of the V. Christ rises up from the grave and then ascends up into heaven to assume his exalted throne at his Father’s right hand.
Advent To Humiliation To Victory
Every Advent, we think especially of our Lord’s downward movement at his Bethlehem incarnation. It’s a pivotal point in history. There could have been no salvation without it. But our Lord’s work did not end with his incarnation. It was barely getting started. He then died for our sins and was buried, and he rose again victoriously the third day, and several weeks later he ascended to his Father’s right hand of cosmic rule. Both axes of the letter are necessary to comprise the V, and the V is for victory.
Incarnation
Paul writes that though Jesus was fully God, he did not look on his deity as something that would prevent him from fulfilling his Father’s redemptive plan. That’s the meaning of “did not consider it robbery to be equal with God” or “did not consider equality with God something to be grasped” (v. 6). He wasn’t so insistent on holding to his identity as God that he would refuse to undertake the humbling state of humanity to die for man’s sins. Paul writes that he “emptied himself.” The biblical-theological term for this is kenosis, a self-emptying. What does this mean? It’s been hotly and wildly disputed. I’ve seen no better explanation than Peter Forsyth’s.1 He points out that in the incarnation Jesus “concentrated” his divine attributes. Like water from a tightened hose, his divine attributes became constricted, but more forceful. He did not surrender them. He was always 100% God, but he did not exercise his attributes as he had before the incarnation. He was limited as all other humans are, though without sin. He grew weary and got sick. He could suffer physical and emotional and spiritual pain. As a child he lacked the knowledge he had as an adult (like all of us). He was never disobedient, but he had to learn obedience (Heb. 5:8). To redeem humanity he had to become fully human. He added humanity to his deity. He did this mainly so he could die for the sins of the world — yours and mine. By being willingly contracted, his deity gained concentrated force in the incarnation.
Death and Burial
More humiliating than the incarnation for the sovereign Son of God was his horrific death. Death by crucifixion was the most agonizing, humiliating execution of the Roman Empire. The Jews themselves knew those hanged on a tree are under a curse (Gal. 3:13). It portrayed the crucified as the most criminal of all humans worthy of the grossest inhumanity and indignity. Worse still was the atoning sacrifice itself on the cross. The impeccably righteous One was treated as a sinner, suffering the penalty for man’s sin, so that his righteousness could be imputed to our account (2 Cor. 5:21). Paul’s point is that if our Lord could endure such humiliation for us sinners, can’t we endure a little humility for one another in the church? His death and subsequent burial are the nadir of the Lord’s humiliation. His burial proves that he was executed as a common criminal left for dead by the seemingly all-powerful Roman Empire. It appeared as though Satan and his minions had the last laugh.
Resurrection
But appearances are often deceiving. On the third day our Lord arose triumphantly from the grave, “having [been] loosed [from] the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it” (Acts 2:24). Death could impose a righteous claim on one treated as a sinner, but death cannot permanently hold a righteous man. Jesus was an impeccably righteous man; therefore, he could never remain dead.
This miraculous, spectacular rising from the dead is the initial upward swing of the victorious V. Christ is still incarnate, fully human in the resurrection, but his resurrection body is a different kind of body from his incarnate, pre-resurrection body. He was sown in weakness, but raised in power (1 Cor. 15:42). This resurrection body can no longer suffer pain, weakness, sorrow, or death. It can travel at great speeds and move through closed doors. We might say it is a spiritually turbocharged body. We too in the resurrection will have a body like our Lord’s present body. He was the first fruit of the great resurrection harvest (1 Cor. 15:20-23). His time of humiliation is over. Now is the time of glory.2
Ascension and Reign
A few weeks later he commissioned his disciples to evangelize, baptize, and catechize the world (Mt. 28:18-20). Then he ascended out of their sight into heaven, where he took his place of rulership next to his Father. He rose up from the grave and ascended up to his throne. This is the victorious upward final apex of the V. In that first post-resurrection Pentecost, Peter unites these events as one upward exaltation:
Therefore, [David] being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne, he, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption. This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses. Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God ….(Acts 2:30-33, emphases supplied)
Christ rose from the grave not only to defeat Satan, sin and the world but to rise to his heavenly throne and rule the cosmos. Many Christians recognize the Lord at the Father’s right hand interceding for them (Heb. 4:14-16). But he is not only interceding. He is also ruling and reigning from the heavens by the power of his Spirit and Word in the world (Eph. 1:20-23).
Here the final axis of V reaches its preordained summit:
God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:9-11, bold emphases supplied).
Conclusion
Christ descended from his Father’s throne in great humiliation to become incarnate and die for the world’s sins. But he died to rise and rule. This is why Advent and Christmas may never be severed from Good Friday and Easter (Great Sunday). Our Lord’s great redemptive complex is calculated to save sinners and incrementally abolish the power of sin’s curse in all of the Father’s “very good” creation.
This Advent and Christmas, let’s celebrate Jesus Christ’s incarnational humiliation as well as his resurrectional. V is for victory.
May God bless each of you this Advent season.
Yours with kindness,
Founder & President, Center for Cultural Leadership
The free society our U. S. Founders secured by God’s blessing with their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” is under withering assault today from the Left and Right. Some critics believe the Founding basis (including its indisputably Protestant distinctive) has outlived its usefulness. Others argue the nation was a botched experiment from the start. Still others simply hate and wish to destroy our common heritage, which ironically provides these ingrates the freedom to criticize it in the first place.
Globalist Marxisms have captured huge swaths of the U. S. Left and the Democratic Party. Usually this is Cultural Marxism, which sees the Founding as inherently oppressive: white supremacy, heteronormativity, self-centered individualism, enslaving patriarchy, greedy capitalism, Western imperialism, and the last residue of Christian culture are entrenched, retrograde oppressions that must be overthrown to pave the way for the revolutionary, just (egalitarian) society ruled by a bureaucratic Leftist elite. The goal, as in all other Culturally Marxist societies, is to harness the state to marginalize and emasculate the family, church, and business. This is how Globalist Marxism destroys the glorious and God-glorifying American Dream. This destruction is unfolding before our eyes.
Tribalist nationalisms, on the other side, have transformed generous sectors of the American Right into a European-style, blood-and-soul conservatism the U. S. Founders were intent to abandon. Their war on economic liberty, their identity-politics collectivism, their centralizing nanny statism, their institution-destroying nihilism, their lust for a Great Leader to enforce their will (all often sprinkled with racism) poison the American Right and the Republican Party. I denote specifically some National Conservatives, the Integralists, the New Right, “Christian” Nationalists, and the Bronze Age Mindset new masculinity (the “Lost Boys of Conservatism”) — all ideas not merely “post-liberal” but also post-Christian in practice.
Two factors unite both globalist Marxisms and tribalist nationalisms, despite fierce, unbridgeable disagreements: (1) a numbing, base ingratitude for the United States of America; and (2) an eagerness to employ the sledgehammer of the state to enforce their “common good” will on society.
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P. T. Forsythe, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (London: Independent Press, 1909), 316.
Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., Resurrection and Redemption (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1978, 1987).