Passage of the Day: Philippians 2: 6a [see highlight passage in bold/underlined] … 5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross!
9 Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the Name that is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
My Journal for Today: When our first granddaughter, Sydney, was just under two years of age, she was sitting on my lap as I read her favorite book, which was a children’s Bible where there were illustrated depictions of various Bible stories/characters. Sydney’s mom, our daughter, and her dad had taken her through this book many times; and she could name the names of all the Bible characters in the book. I was so proud of our first, and rather precocious, grandbaby at the time.
Well, on this occasion, Sydney was naming all the characters as we came to each story page; and when we got to the first depiction of Jesus, Syd named Him “God.” Thinking that rather curious, especially after she had named all the other characters by their given names – even “Zacchaeus” – I asked her if the “God” character she had named had another name, … to which she replied matter-of-factly, “Well, PawPaw, it’s Jesus!” And, with my chest pounding with pride, I told her she was exactly right!
I use this story to illustrate that even a two year old can understand what the Apostle Paul was teaching in today’s highlighted text … that Jesus was, by His nature, God (see Phil. 2: 6a above). The NASB renders this phrase, “[Christ Jesus], Who, although He existed in the form of God.” And in today’s Strength for Today entry, John MacArthur explains that an even stricter wording from the Greek might be “Jesus, in His inalterable being, was God.” And that reality was what little Sydney, my two year old granddaughter had grasped, … something I didn’t fully understand until I was 39 years old, when the equality of Christ as God became evident to me.
Some of us are slower than others! ;)
This month, we are going to see more of Christ’s divine nature in my devotional entries which are led by John MacArthur’s study. However, as Christians we must first grasp … and believe, … as did little Sydney, that Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter’s apprentice, was and is God, fully expressing Himself and living in human form, being the full essence/character of God even as He walked this earth and most certainly as He lives now, having been resurrected to be rejoined with His Heavenly Father. And from that truth, all we see and learn about Jesus is God’s way of showing Himself to us in Christ’s humanity.
Stay tuned!
My Prayer Today: May You be praised, Lord, for becoming like me, yet without sin. Amen
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