Clough Hebrews Lesson 27
Doctrines of Kenosis – Hebrews 5:7-8
…verse 14 through
There are two New Testament passages that parallel this section of Hebrews. One of them is Romans 8:34 which we have studied, and the other one is 1 John 2:1-2. Those are two parallel passages that fill you in on the high priesthood of Christ point from Paul’s point and from John’s point of view and those passages are important so you can compare vocabulary and realize that this is not a doctrine taught just in Hebrews. It is taught by whoever authored Hebrews; it is taught John and it’s taught by Paul. In fact, Jesus Christ Himself taught it in His high priesthood prayer, John 17. So this whole area of Christ’s life, what he is doing now in heaven, is of fundamental importance to the Christian life.
And if you look in Hebrews 5:5-6 where we left off last time we find the author is moving into an area of Christ’s qualifications. He spent the first four verses, you recall, on showing the two key qualifications from the Old Testament of a high priest. One was that he had to be appointed by God. The priesthood could not be designed by man and you couldn’t get voted into its office; you had to be called, and God gave the terms of the calling. The second qualification was played down in most of the Old Testament Scripture and that was that the priest had to be a sympathetic one and he had to be one who knew what he was doing as far as going before God on behalf of His people. So when Hebrews takes the first four verses and these two qualifications, now in verse 5-6 it’s going to deal with the appointment, that Jesus Christ truly is called of God.
Last time you recall that there was in the
first century, and probably previous to that, the idea of a dual Messiahship,
shared between a lay Messiah and a royal Messiah. The lay Messiah was, according to Psalm 2,
the priest, the king, the son of David; and the priestly Messiah had to be out
of the Levitical priesthood. And this is
the only way, they thought, they could get this idea across that Christ the
Messiah could be both king and priest, because obviously what tribe was the
king tribe in
And the classic answer that the Christians
gave the Jews of their day in verse 5-6, that Christian’s priesthood, and this
is shocking to a Jew, Christ’s priesthood is a Gentile priesthood, because he
says: “…but He that said unto Him, You are my Son, this day have I begotten
You,” there’s a quote from Psalm 2, there’s the lay Messiah, there’s the royal,
the king Messiah, [6] “The same one says in another place, You are a priest
forever after the order of Melchizedek.”
Melchizedek, back after the days of the flood, Melchizedek was the
king-priest of a place in the Bible called
And Psalm 110, from which this quote in
verse 6 is taken commemorates the fact that when King David conquered
Now we come to the interesting passage and there is a tremendous amount of doctrine in the next several verses, beginning at verse 7. To understand this and catch the point we’re going to stop before we get into the details of verse 7 and look at the big picture from verses 7-10 and see if we can analyze the grammar. There’s one big long sentence here. So let’s see if we can find main verbs and participles and so on so we don’t lose the forest for the trees. Those of you who are taking Greek, you should have enough now to know that it’s very important you pick the words in the sentence that fit the right verbs so this will be practice; this is a good place to start because in verse 7 you have some participles and you have a main verb. Where and what is the main verb in verse 7? “Offered” is not the main verb. You may not know what the verb means but can you see the three verbs in there? Where’s the main verb? The main verb is “learned,” that’s in verse 8; verse 7 and 8 together, I misled you. Verses 7 and 8 are connected, actually verse 8 is also connected to verse 19 by a very interesting grammatical problem, but verses 7 and 8 are all one, and the main verb is “learned.” So go to the main verb of a verb first and work backwards from the main verb. Get used to that because you’ll be misled if you don’t do that.
The main thing is that he “learned” something. Now, there are two verb forms in verse 7, offered and what was the other one? [someone answers] Well, supplication, he offered up prayers and supplications, the offering up is one verb. [others talk] okay, “to save” is an infinitive and for a while we won’t bother with that, that’s just part of a supplementary clause, but “he offered up,” “he was heard.” Both of those are participles and both are an aorist tense, “offered up” and “heard.” Now when you see the participles and both of these are aorists, the action of an aorist participle precedes chronologically or logically the action of the main verb. I’ll say it again; when you have aorist participle, the action of that participle precedes either chronologically or just logically the action of the main verb. So we have two actions preceding the “learning,” the “offering” and the “hearing.” And after that then Jesus learns.
Then there’s a parallel, forgetting the last section of verse 8 because it involves problem in itself, “by the things which He suffered,” in verse 9 you have a similar situation. Can you see the main verb in verse 9. What’s the main verb in verse 9. [someone answers] All right, this is the central action of verse 9, it’s “He became,” change in status. So “He became.” Now what’s another verb you notice in verse 9, “being made perfect,” there’s a participle. And then notice another verb in verse 10, “Called of God.” So now let’s look, we’ve got six verbs in line here and let’s divide them into two sets of three. You’ve got two participles, a main verb; you’ve got two participles, a main verb. You’ve got “offered and heard” in order to “learn.” And then later on we’ll get into verse 9; we probably won’t reach verse 9 tonight but it’s parallel. The main verb is “became.”
The reason why I’m pausing here before we get meshed in all the fine print is so you can get the flow of the thing. Hold on to the main verb, that main verb is what anchors the whole passage. If we go through the passage and you come out thinking more of the offering of the prayers, thinking more of the hearing of the prayers than you do the verb “learned” something’s wrong, I’ve failed as a teacher and you’ve failed as a student. So let’s get our sights; the sights have to be zeroed in on the main verb, to learn, that’s where the center of the action is. Everything else is to explain that main verb. How did Jesus Christ learn?
Before we can go further, we’ve dealt with the grammar, the big picture of the grammar, now we have to deal with the big picture of the doctrine. We had a request at prayer meeting because of the various believers who think that you can downgrade doctrine in favor of love, and you can never do this because you cannot love apart from doctrine. Otherwise what you are calling love is an emotional sensation inside your soul and that isn’t love Scripturally. So don’t let anyone ever sell you that you have to dump doctrine in order to love. It that’s the case, one wonders why did the Holy Spirit make complicated Scriptures like this? Doesn’t the Holy Spirit love? He loves in a godly way and godly love always requires knowledge.
Now in the doctrine of the person of Christ we have to go over three doctrines; one doctrine you already know, the doctrine of the hypostatic union which states what? Undiminished deity and true humanity united without confusion in one person forever. That is the balanced statement about the person of Christ. Notice it doesn’t say two people, Jesus is not a schitzo, He doesn’t have a dual personality or something. It is two natures, one person; notice that about the doctrine of the hypostatic union. That comes out, we can diagram the problem here, we’ve got His humanity and we’ve got His deity but they’re united in one person, and that’s going to involve some thinking now when that one person is going to learn, through one side of himself, hypostatic union. So the doctrine of the hypostatic union is critical to appreciate this learning that Christ is going to do.
Why? Can deity learn? Think about it for a moment. No. Somebody explain why deity can never learn a thing? Omniscience; deity is by definition omniscient and if you’re omniscient you can’t learn anything. That’s something to remember when somebody says he’s an idiot, he can’t learn. You say well I know somebody else that can’t learn either and they’re not an idiot. So an omniscient God can’t learn a thing; God has never learned a thing. God has never learned one thing in history. So when it talks about learning, when Christ learned, then what nature must be spoken of? By the doctrine of the hypostatic union it leaves only one possibility, His humanity. So the learning experience is that which has to do with Christ’s human nature, as we have seen so much in this epistle.
There’s another doctrine that we have to master and that is the doctrine of Christ’s impeccability. The doctrine of Christ’s impeccability. What’s that big word mean? Can you see the stem? Does anybody know what that means? Sin, now that you have the root, figure out the word. When you have an “im” on the front that’s i-n, not, and ability, not able to sin and that’s the doctrine of Christ’s impeccability. See why it’s good to have vocabulary. Vocabulary helps you think. Now I realize we use four syllable words here and I also realize every once in a while somebody walks sin and they get discouraged because they can’t understand the vocabulary. Just stick with it; the only reason you can’t understand the vocabulary is because basically you have a very lousy vocabulary and… really, I don’t mean to pick on some of you but it’s just typical of where you’ve come from or the education you’ve had or something and you’ve got a very poor vocabulary. Now I’ve tried in my teaching not to invent specialized vocabulary for the sake of the fact that many of these tapes go to other believers and other groups and I try to stick with orthodox terminology and this is what I’m giving you. These aren’t Charlie Clough labels, this is church history, you can go back in look in any systematic theology and these are the terms.
Impeccability, what it does not say: it doesn’t say that Jesus Christ was like Adam in the sense that Jesus was open to temptation and might or might not have sinned. Impeccability is a more potent thing; impeccability is that Jesus was opened to temptation but it was 100% certain He would never fall to it. And it is because, what would happen to the hypostatic union if His humanity fell. It would be destroyed; Jesus Christ and the plan of God, then was 100% certain He would never yield to any temptation. Yet the temptation that it was certain He would have victory over, that temptation was real temptation. Now let me just warn you about the doctrine of impeccability. A heresy develops over this doctrine. Every doctrine leads you into heresy if you’re not careful. And the heresy here is that people take the doctrine of impeccability, most of the time they don’t know what that means, but this in effect is what’s happening, they take the doctrine of Christ’s impeccability and then they conclude Christ wasn’t really tempted. Now this passage we’re coming on just blasts that thing into a tub. Christ was genuinely tempted though it was certain He would never fall to it. That is impeccability.
Then there’s a third doctrine that we have to know the doctrine of Christ’s kenosis. Anybody know what the word kenosis means. [someone answers] no, you’re on the wrong track about the knowing, sometimes modern theologians… in fact the death of God theologians are called the kenotic theologians. Now what do the death of God theologians today do with Christ’s deity. What’s their central claim, the death of God theologians. [someone answers] They even go so far as to say that God died and therefore he metamorphise into something else. Altizer himself has said that God died, God-deity died on the cross and God, as we knew Him in the Bible, no longer exists. That’s why they’re called Christian atheists if you can stand the two words together. But they’re called kenotic theologians and they’re called kenotic theologians because they have taken this doctrine and over-extended it. They have made Christ’s deity disappear completely.
Now from what I’ve said, what do you think the true doctrine of kenosis is. [someone answers] He voluntarily gave up His power; okay, we’re getting close, Jesus Christ voluntarily gave up His power. Let’s generalize it and make it more specific. What was it that He gave up? [someone answers] He didn’t give up His humanity, He affirmed His humanity. [someone else answers] All right, deity, the divine attributes. Now He couldn’t have given them up in the sense He became God, that would destroy hypostatic union, right, He still was God. So we have to refine our terminology here. How can we express the fact that Jesus Christ walked around as a simple Jewish carpenter, except for about two or three times nobody ever was conscious of the glory of bare deity. The doctrine of kenosis, Jesus Christ gave up the independent use of His attributes. Whenever He exercised any of His attributes it was totally within the will of God. He gave up the use of His attributes.
Now why do you suppose that’s a critical doctrine for this passage of a sympathetic high priest. Why do you suppose it’s important to know that Jesus Christ surrendered, voluntarily, the use of all of His attributes while He was on earth, unless the Father gave Him permission here and there to do it, to break them out? [someone answers] That’s a good point, that’s certainly part of the case, that if Jesus Christ had had His, you might say, had His deity manifest what would have happened to everybody around Him? That’s part of it but there’s something more important for you as Christians. [someone else] Okay, it makes His tests real. What was Satan’s temptation to Him when He was hungry? Remember, lunch, snap your fingers and you can make this rock turn into bread. Now what did this do to the intensity of the temptation toward Christ’s person now; if He is able, indeed, to snap His fingers and turn that stone into bread, and yet faced with the pressure of hunger He refuses to do it, now what does that do to Christ’s temptations? Does it make them stronger or weaker? It makes them stronger.
So you see why the doctrine of kenosis is
important? The doctrine of kenosis is
what makes Christ’s testing so very real.
See, it’s one thing to be tempted because you’re hungry, because you’re
tired, because your body just caved in and you have a job to do and you can’t
get it done, you know, study for a final and you just peter about
Now putting yourself in Christ’s shoes and thinking of some events in Christ’s life that you know of, if you were Christ when do you think you would be most tempted to press the button? Under what kind of conditions? [someone answers] All right, face to face with Satan, good point. Wouldn’t you love to blast him. But He didn’t. In other words, when Satan came up to Christ he was just goading Him, is what he was doing, he was just goading Him deliberately to see if He would break forth because he knew that once Jesus Christ pressed the button, what would that do to the whole kenosis and therefore to Christ’s priesthood. It would tube the priesthood out. See, because if Christ had relied upon His deity to face the temptation in the wilderness with Satan, then He would not qualify as a sympathetic priest because tonight you could say well, Christ can’t sympathize with my trials, after all, when He was faced with a trial He had His deity to rely on, I don’t. So Jesus was tempted that time to press the button.
What would be some other times in His life, do you think? [someone answers] All right, toward the hour of His crucifixion, Christ openly said at one point that he could for legions of angels and they’d take care of the whole problem just like that. So Jesus Christ, faced with the increasing pressure, day after day toward the end of that last fateful week in His life, He could have pressed the button, but He didn’t. Okay, now we’re prepared for the passage.
Hebrews 5:7, “Who, in the days of His flesh, when He offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save Him from death, and was heard in that he feared, [8] Though he were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.”
Now let’s look first at “in the days of His flesh,” that passage is not teaching, as some think it does that after Christ died and rose he no longer has flesh. The word “flesh” in this passage refers to His mortal flesh as contrasted to His immortal flesh. Did Adam, one second after creation, have mortal flesh or immortal flesh. Mortal, because mortal flesh means susceptible to death, it doesn’t mean it has to die but it means it can die. So Jesus Christ had mortal flesh. If you’d looked it’d been very similar to ours; it was mortal flesh. Not only was it mortal flesh but it apparently wasn’t looking like Adam and Eve before the fall; Christ’s flesh was likened after our sinful flesh, so He had in His own body a flesh that, for the appearances, looked like ours, though He did not have the sin nature in His body as we do. So Jesus Christ, then, has mortal flesh and that is what is this word means, “Who, in the days of His flesh,” and that means during the time period between His incarnation and His death.
“… having offered up prayers and supplications,” now the word “having offered up” is a word that means to give by way of praise or sacrifice. Now the word “sacrifice” is a word we think because we’re reading the Bible over and over we think of the blood sacrifice and so on, but it’s an unfortunate thing that our Old Testament is translated the way it is because in some cases the “sacrifices,” so translated in English, the Hebrew word isn’t “sacrifice” at all, it’s “gift.” So the primary idea behind sacrifice is gift; a sacrifice is a sacrificial gift, is what it is. So if you think of the large class of gifts, sacrifices are a subset of that large thing called gifts. They’re sacrificial gifts, gifts that are worth much. Christ gave His own life, so it was a sacrifice but it was, nevertheless a gift.
So we have the gift concept here and we, as Christians, are to give. Don’t worry this is no signing of cards for a pledge. The giving of the Christian involved assets God has given you first. It involves, basically, positive volition. Now let’s list some things that the New Testament has as that which is offered up; try to explain the word “offered up prayers” here. The word you’d expect, He’d offer up sacrifices, but it isn’t there, He’s offering up prayers. So we have two things, sacrifices in the sense of the blood sacrifices; prayers, another thing, money is also used in the New Testament, what are some other things that Paul speaks of having given up. The very life, which would involve time and strength. What is the first commandment? “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind and with all thy strength.”
And so the loving of God is a giving. Remember the definition of love? Giving. All right, so when a man loves God what does He do for God? He gives God things. Therefore, coming down to our own generation which is so mealy-mouthed and sentimental compared to the hard, almost laborious content of the Old Testament and New Testament, loving Jesus means doing what He tells you to do and giving your life to Him. And that means the details of your life. So loving, just because somebody says I love Jesus or something like that, what it means is I give to my God what He has given to me. See, this is a concept missing in much of our Christian environment.
So Jesus Christ is giving something. And He’s giving “prayers and supplications” and both of these are emphasis on petitions. In other words, the author of Hebrews picks out one thing Jesus gave. By the way, Jesus didn’t have much money to give so He couldn’t have given that, and He gave His life and He gave prayer. He offered up prayer and supplications. You normally don’t think of those as gifts but the Bible considers prayers as gifts; both words are used, both are roughly synonymous, but both emphasize Christ’s humanity because He prayed as a man, as one with a human nature, and since He had human nature, hypostatic union, Jesus Christ could pray prayers in certain ways, and they’re given in two words, “with strong crying and tears.”
Now there’s a saying that Dr. Westcott, who is one of the great commentators of the book of Hebrews, a Jewish saying that goes like this: There are three kinds of prayers, each loftier than the preceding. There is prayer, and then there is crying out loud, and then there is tears. Prayer is made in silence, crying is made with a raised voice, and tears overcome all things. So at the time that this epistle was written it was well understood in Jewish circles there were three levels of intensity to prayer, what the normal word for prayer, which would be silent prayer to yourself, then there would be the crying, that doesn’t mean going around bellyaching or something; crying is just the word that means to speak out loud. That means prayers that were audible to someone nearby. And then third, tears would be tears, those are the intense prayers.
Now obviously he’s talking about the Garden of Gethsemane, but apparently also talking about several other times in Jesus’ life and it’s very tempting to ask, how did this man know about these kinds of prayers because the Gospel writers only report one time in Christ’s life where He had this kind of prayer and that was in the Garden of Gethsemane. But this passage seems to intimate that this happened several times in Christ’s life. So Christ prayed and he prayed out loud and He prayed with much involvement in His prayer.
Now if you will look hard at that it will correct in your mind false views of Christ’s person. That’s why I started tonight with the doctrine of kenosis, because if the doctrine of kenosis is correct, Jesus interacted with His God in the daily affairs of His life. He was not a hyper Calvinist who just believed that fate would decide. Oh well, I’ll just leave it in the Lord’s hands. It’s very interesting, I was talking about prayer one time in the Psalm series and I mentioned this and somebody said well you know, something sounds wrong about that, because I thought that the Bible says that we’re just to totally relax in the Lord and let Him take care of the problem. And yet here, obviously it doesn’t look like Jesus is very relaxed if He’s praying with tears. That isn’t much the sign of relaxation.
Well then, why does Jesus Christ Himself not
appear to relax? For the reason that
faith has a resting and a doing side and there are times, such as in the
You see, prayer, this is one of the dangers we have; you can go the fatalistic route. Let’s look at the extremes: fatalism. Fatalism means no prayer, what’s happened is going to happen so why bother. Prayer in this sense is meaningless if you’re a fatalist. On the other hand you can go this thing where it’s more or less man, we’ll say man dictates to God. That’s white magic, that’s all it is, God, you’ve got to do it this way, period, it’s Your final will. Now that prayer is wrong. There is a combination or a proper thing in between here where you have an intensity to the prayer, that is that the prayer is doing something, it’s not just words going around in the atmosphere; prayer is doing something and yet it is subordinate. In the final analysis it is not insubordinate prayer. It is prayer that in the final analysis is willing to accept God’s will. Yet it is not content to accept what currently appears to be God’s will. That’s the difference.
True prayer, think of the
So the petitioning that is going on is an
active petitioning. So when you look down here and you see “crying and tears”
that is the perfect prayer life of Jesus Christ, so that should get you away
from fatalism in your prayers. Said
another say, biblically if we are praying the way God wants us to pray you
should have a sensation that at the other end of the line we have somebody who
can bring changes into our environment.
Not only that, but Jesus Christ in the
All right, so He offered prayers that were
active, that were doing something.
Notice what it says, “unto Him that was able to save Him from death,”
now if the doctrine of kenosis is wrong, why would it be correct to drop that
whole clause out? Think of Jesus in the
“…He was able to save Him from death,” now the next part of verse 7, if you have a question. [someone says something about what happened to His deity and during the three hours] His omniscience was suppressed at that moment, as it was most of the time when Christ… Christ’s omniscience only shows, I can only think of five or six times in the Gospels where He shows His omniscience with any clarity. [someone said what do you mean by…] Well, by the doctrine of kenosis, where was His radiant glory, same place that was, it was in some way suppressed. [more said] We don’t know, because we do not know how to define personality. If you could give a comprehensive definition of person then this would become a theological problem. But the classic orthodox out is that you can’t totally define person because we’re made in God’s image. So we’re always dealing with an open concept when we’re dealing with “person,” meaning that we don’t know what we’re really talking about. We know some of what we’re talking about by person but we really don’t know all there is to know about what “person” is.
I’ll tell you another place where it’s obvious He didn’t know and didn’t exercise His omniscience was when His disciples said when are You going to return. He said it’s not for you to know, My Father only knows. [more said] Yes, in other words if for some reason, like one or two times in the Gospels He called… He so to speak, exercised His omniscience, apart from that He never did. Where, obviously He never touched His omniscience or any of His power was when He was growing up as a boy. The early church had a problem; people made Jesus in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries there were people making the baby Jesus like super boy, and they’d have these stories about Him throwing rocks up in the air and they’d turn to bread and all the rest of this kind of stuff was going around. And the early church put the quietus on the whole thing on the whole thing because they emphasized the doctrine of kenosis, that Jesus Christ growing up as a boy never exercised His deity, because He could never benefit from having to rely on His deity growing up or He would never have bona fide human growth.
[someone asks ?] He knew that but I’ll tell you where He obviously did, and you’ve got a better example than that, is when the police came up and they said is Jesus here, and He said ego eimi, and they all fell down. He used His deity real good there, that’s all He said, two words, ego eimi, and it’s the Old Testament word for Jehovah, I AM. Remember what God told Moses in the burning bush, when he said who am I going to say sent me, He said tell them I AM sent you, ego eimi, and Jesus when He said ego eimi, there’s by the way the New Testament proof of His deity, sometimes you hear people say Jesus never claimed to be God. He certainly did when He said that: ego eimi, and if you look up in a Greek concordance, every time the verb to be is used with the first person it always has an object, except there. eimi always has, I am something, right? You always have to have an object with the verb to be. But that’s the only place in the Bible where the verb to be has no object, when it’s used of God’s essence.
Okay, so the second verb here in this passage, after He “offered up prayers, … and He was heard” “He was heard,” or “having been heard,” literally, “from His godly fear.” So He prayed, we’ll put petitions and He was heard. And the cause of His being heard was “His godly fear.” Now notice that, the Father didn’t answer Jesus’ prayer because He played favorites with Jesus. If Jesus was heard in His prayer life it was by the same quality that you and I can have in our prayer life, the godly fear. And it was that reason that Jesus was heard. “Godly fear” is the word for maturity, always used in the New Testament for maturity, it means that He had a mature understanding of Bible doctrine in His humanity and He knew how to pray and He prayed properly designed petitions that were in line with God’s will. That’s why He was heard. He was heard in that he was spiritually mature. It doesn’t say he was heard because He was God; it says He was heard because He was spiritually mature; the passage has to do with His humanity. Remember the main verb was to learn, if the main verb to learn has to do with His humanity, the subject of the action must be the humanity, and therefore the subject of the action of verse 7, all throughout one end to the other is humanity.
Now we’ve got a concessive clause in verse
8 where it says, “Though He were a Son,” “though He were the Son.” In other words, the point is this is a denial
of favoritism, that God the Father did not treat His Son special, in any
special way, but His put His Son down and played the same ball game by the same
rules that every other believer in history plays by. So “though He were a Son, yet He learned
obedience,” and the word learned is an aorist, it sums up all the moments of
time from His incarnation on to His death; that’s all summarized at one point
with the verb to learn, put in the aorist tense. “He learned obedience,” this is not just
obedience in a servile way. People often
have the caricature of the military that they teach people to obey,
period. Well, sometimes some of the
training approximates that but it’s not just learning to obey, if you look in
the original Greek it has an article in front of the noun, it means “the
obedience,” and when you have an article in front of the noun it’s referring to
a particular kind of obedience and this is obedience within the will of God, of
course. This is godly obedience. And He learned this over a process of time, some
30 plus years. So this shows you that He
was still learning in the
Then it singles the whole class out, “through the things which He suffered.” Now let’s couple this learning experience of Christ with the prayer. He’s making His prayers, His prayers are answered. Now if you left it with that you’d say Christ learned most in His life through prayer. Well, that’s true but that answer doesn’t tell you everything. The next phrase, “through the things that He suffered,” or “from the things that He suffered.” Now what things did Christ suffer?
Turn to the prophecy of Messiah in Isaiah 50:5-9. Now this is a perfect summary of obedience. “The LORD has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious,” now this is Christ in His humanity and here is the picture of Messiah, He heard God’s Word and he wasn’t rebellious, that’s saying thousands of tons of stuff right there. In other words, when the Word of God went in His ear it was “Yes Sir!” The man who led me to Christ put it this way, he said that’s the kind of obedience that if God says jump off the building you ask for instructions on the way down. And it’s not talking about just a blind fanaticism, he didn’t mean it that way, but the point was, it was a “Yes Sir!” toward the authority of God’s Word. “I was not rebellious, neither turned away back” that means to postpone or procrastinate, I’ll do it tomorrow concept. [6] I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair; I did not hide my face from shame and spitting.” Now that’s the things that Christ suffered. Let’s go through the doctrine of suffering for a moment and see how much you can retrieve. What are the six reasons why we suffer as believers. [people answer] The fall. Rebellion. Divine institutions. Identification with Christ in Satan’s world. Testimonies. And learning. Look at those six reasons and let’s see which ones apply to Jesus Christ. The fall He suffered in the sense He voluntarily participated to identify Himself with a fallen race but He didn’t suffer from the fall like you and I suffer from the fall because He participated in it by His own will. Rebellion—that’s out. Divine institutions, He suffered in a modified way of the fall. He certainly suffered here because He was in Satan’s world. He suffered in order to learn, He suffered to be a testimony. So Jesus Christ suffered in all the categories except one, that you suffer in.
And this passage goes on in verse 7, “For the Lord God will help me,” now notice this, notice the unromantic very cold-hearted teaching, “The Lord God will help me, therefore shall I not be confounded; therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed.” You couldn’t ask for a verse of Scripture that expresses determination more than the one you just read. That is the most powerful verse I know to express wholesale determination. [8] “He is near that justifies me. Who will contend with me? Let us stand together. Who is my adversary? Let him come near to me.” See that aggressive attitude. Now by the way it’s verse 8 that Paul later takes with modification for Romans 8.
Now the phrase, “I will set my face like a flint” is an expression for the extreme form of positive volition, that faced with the most titanic pressure Jesus Christ is going to go positive toward God’s Word and it required, because of the tremendous pressure, it required absolutely no emotional support at that time. Jesus Christ, if He relied on His feelings and on His emotions He would never have said prophetically a thing like this, “I have set my face like a flint,” doesn’t mean oh I feel so spiritual today, I must blah, blah, blah before I trip on out or something. Now Jesus Christ never involved Himself in that idiotic thing. In fact, Jesus Christ never spoke in tongues, I wonder how He made it. But Jesus Christ set his face like a flint, and the same attitude of verse 5, verse 6, verse 7 is a section of Scripture that ought to be taken out, some of you who have problems, particularly in defying God’s Word, just take that out on a 4 x 6 card and apply it. Just write it out and stick it somewhere where you have to see it when you go to bed, see it when you wake up, see it when you eat, see it when you sit down to study, see it when you get up from study, have it all over the place. And that will give you a good daily surrounding of Christ’s mentality.
Now let’s turn back to the New Testament, to Philippians 2:5-9 and see how all this applies to the Christian in a more direct way because this is the classic passage in Paul. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. [6] Who, being in the form of God,” see, there’s the deity, “thought it not robbery to be equal with God,” there’s the kenosis, doctrine of kenosis, He was not equal to God while He was on earth because He voluntarily gave up the use of His divine attributes independently of God’s will. [7] “ But made Himself of no reputation,” that means He did not rely in any way on His deity, “and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men. [8] And being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself,” there’s the word for kenosis, there’s where the doctrine comes from, “He humbled Himself and became obedient,” notice became obedient “unto death, even the death of the cross. [9] Therefore, God also has highly exalted Him,” but before the exultation there had to be a period of securing actual real historic learned obedience.
Now if “the same mind,” verse 5, that was in Christ is to be in ours, then as verse 12 goes on to say, in this passage, “Wherefore, my beloved, as you have always” felt spiritual? No, “where you have obeyed, not as in my presence only but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation,” etc. So you see the theme? Obedience. Obedience!
In Philippians 4, let’s go there for the same theme, how he carries on obedience. Talking about anxiety in verse 6, “Be careful for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.” He’s talking about human viewpoint anxiety but notice, if what we have said tonight about prayer, it doesn’t mean that you just have some little diddly prayer and some two second prayer is going to settle deep patterns of anxiety in your life because they’re not. If what we have seen in Jesus’ character about His kind of praying is true, and is a model for us, then when you read verse 6 and it says “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer,” it means intense forms of prayer. Praying with the determination that you are going to get an answer to what it is that’s troubling you and you are going to pound on God’s door until He comes. That’s the kind of praying that will result in no anxiety and let “the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your heart.” And then in verse 8, “Finally,” think on these things, that’s doctrinal things, and verse 9, “Those thins which you have both learned and received, and heard, and seen in me,” think about it? NO, it says do them. So you see the obedience.
Now that is the solution and the very unromantic solution the New Testament gives for maturity and peace and joy in the Christian life. There’s no simple secret pill that you can take that’ll hop you up in a day, or five minutes or so, it is a long term thing, a pattern of obedience. If Jesus Christ had to learn obedience, then how much more, Chrysostom said when he commented on the passage of Hebrews. So the theme, then of Christian maturity is going to be one word: obedience. All other things are superfluous.
In conclusion, how does everything that we have said leading up to this point of obedience, do any of you see how that fits the original creation mandate. Think all the way back to when the whole thing started. Learn to think the Bible as a total, think your way through Scripture backwards and forwards and you’ll get a doctrine under your belt, work it through the categories until you can think it back through each way. Let’s take the doctrine of kenosis, the whole thing has been Christ as a man became obedient through history, He is the model for Christians. Now relate it, what about creation, what was man created to do. [someone answers] Right. Jesus Christ fulfills, doesn’t He, the creation mandate for man himself. Don’t think of Jesus, as often has happened in church circles, we think of Jesus as a superman. Get that thinking out of your head. It’s not Jesus is man plus something; Jesus simply is man. In His humanity Jesus is not a superman. Anything you see admirable about Christ’s humanity is nothing super. Everything that we have seen about Christ’s humanity that attracts us is what the ordained destiny of man originally was at creation. Christ is fulfilling no super image, He’s fulfilling the ordinary image. He is an ordinary man in His humanity. The reason He seems to be a superman is because we are so far below our created standards that we look up and we think He’s superman but He isn’t. He’s where we should be, in His humanity. That’s why Christ has foru books, called the Gospels, devoted solely to His life, so you can get a good picture of His life as a model.
Father we thank …