A Second Eden

  Advent Blog; Day 5
                                    
A while back, whilst on a retreat in the Isle of wight, I was trying to start practising biblical meditation. I was reading, at the time, Andrew Murray's (No, not the tennis player) excellent book on the subject of humility. A book the modern publishers had somewhat ironically put on the back of, "The greatest book on humility ever written". Mr Murray has long been dead and had no hand in this so we may excuse him! Each chapter started with a portion of scripture and on this occasion it was the passage from the second chapter of Paul's letter to the Philippians. Remembering my schooling in biblical meditation from an amazingly Godly man called Campbell McAlpine from my days with YWAM, I decided to 'take it for a walk'.

have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

 Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
 rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.

(Philippians 2:6-7)

 

As I walked the steep paths of St Boniface downs I stayed very much "in" that phrase "who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped." Yesterday we looked at Jesus becoming a man, out of love and out of a divine desire to rescue us.  Love, of course is just part of the motivation. The thing I discovered on that walk is not so much hidden. I had known it before. It was just a deeper understanding of it. We often think of Jesus' humility as an act of love. It was and it wasn't. We see Jesus as the humble wing of the God team. There is almost a condescension in Jesus deigning to walk with us humans. To think this way is a grave, grave error.

 Here is the secret I discovered. If Jesus is "in very nature God" (IE God through and through) and he did not consider equality with God something to be grasped (there is no competition between the members of the trinity, only love and esteem) then what he did, any of them would have done. The result of his like-godness is his "making himself nothing". I therefore conclude; God is humble. That is a staggering thought. You may all be saying, at this point, well yeah, of course he is! To me this thought had never quite occurred in this way before. Almighty God, in whom pride would be a virtue, has no pride.

 You see, we think of God as requiring worship from all he has made, of being jealous for our love and attention. All these attributes isolated make for a pretty insecure omnipotent, insisting that he is all important and gets his dues. But we forget that Love is at the heart of God. The Father loves the Son and the Spirit. The Son loves the Spirit and the Father, The Spirit loves the Father and the Son. Each of them would do anything for the others. God is the only being in who this kind of self love would be appropriate. Out of love he created us and he sustains us. The best thing for us is to worship him, it is for our highest good. God is humble, truly, because he is the only entirely self aware being. He does not have too high a view of himself, he has a correct view. I said earlier Jesus' humility both  was and was not an act of love. It was not an act of love in the sense that it was not humility for loves sake, out of necessity. It was humility for humility's sake. It was an extension of the humility that already existed within the Godhead. It was God, simply being God. It was in his nature to walk with us, talk with us, to cry with us, to suffer with us, to bleed with us. In the beginning God did not stand at a distance. He walked in the Garden with Adam and Eve. In this second genesis we see Jesus, the second Adam, turning 1st century Palestine into a second Eden. God walked with mankind. In Micha we are told that one of the three things that are required of us is to "Walk humbly with our God". At Christmas our God came to walk humbly with mankind.