The Greatest Mystery

I've been reading Knowing God by J. I. Packer, and I highly recommend the book to those (probably very few) of you who haven't read this classic. I appreciate Dr. Packer's giftedness in presenting profound spiritual truths in a very readable way. I just finished chapter five, which deals with what the author describes as the greatest mystery of the gospel - the staggering Christian claim that Jesus was God made man. A number of different ideas have been proposed to explain what happened when the Second Person of the Trinity took on humanity. Philippians 2:7, from what is commonly referred to as the kenosis passage, says "[Jesus] made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men." "Made himself nothing" doesn't mean that Jesus put off his metaphysical attributes (omnipresence, omnipotence, or omniscience) while retaining his moral attributes (love, holiness, truthfulness, etc.). Nor does it mean that Jesus renounced all his specifically divine powers and self-consciousness. "When Paul talks of the Son as having emptied himself and become poor, what he has in mind...is the laying aside not of divine powers and attributes but of divine glory and dignity." (p. 60)

But in the Gospel narratives we read of situations where Jesus' knowledge and power seemed limited; then at other times, he displays his omniscience and omnipotence. "The impression of Jesus which the Gospels give is not that he was wholly bereft of divine knowledge and power, but that he drew on both intermittently, while being content for much of the time not to do so. The impression, in other words, is not so much of one of deity reduced as of divine capacities restrained." (p. 61-62) Part of the revealed mystery is that Jesus, as the Son of God, was in total submission to, and dependent on, the Father to think and act as the Father directed (John 5:19, 30; John 6:38; John 8:28-29). "The God-man did not know independently, any more than he acted independently. Just as he did not do all that he could have done, because certain things were not his Father's will, so he did not consciously know all that he might have know, but only what the Father willed him to know. His knowing, like the rest of his activity, was bounded by his Father's will." (p. 62)

Dr. Packer concludes: "We now see what it meant for the Son of God to empty himself and become poor. It meant a laying aside of glory (the real kenosis); a voluntary restraint of power; an acceptance of hardship, isolation, ill-treatment, malice and understanding; finally, a death that involved such agony - spiritual even more than physical - that his mind nearly broke under the prospect of it. It meant love to the uttermost for unlovely human beings, that they through his poverty might become rich. The Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity - hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory - because at the Father's will Jesus Christ became poor and was born in a stable to that thirty years later he might hang on a cross. It is the most wonderful message that the world has ever heard, or will hear." (p. 63)