How does scripture describe what it meant for Jesus to come from glory and travel all the way to what we call “Good Friday,” the day when he was crucified? Here’s a very thoughtful and sobering look at the journey he took to retrieve us from the far country:
The humbling of the eternal Son proceeded in a long sequence of ever-lowering stages culminating in death and burial. Each step is an historical event told in the Gospels as a real and true narrative of a fully human life. Taken together, key events of the humiliation of the Son reported in Scripture are pictured as this poignant sequence of ever-lowering steps:
Being in the very nature God
He does not grasp for the equality with God due Him
He empties Himself
He voluntarily gives up unbroken independent exercise of the divine attributes
He is conceived by the Holy Spirit
He is born of a poor virgin in a humble manger
He was born a Jew, a son of the law
He was made one gender on behalf of two, a man, born of a woman
He willingly took the form of a servant
He first became a child
He become subject to human growth and development
He was circumcised signifying subjection to law though He was Giver of the law
He was made like His brothers in every way that He might make atonement
He humbled Himself
He became obedient
He became voluntarily subject to instruction by parents
He worked in economic subjection lacking property
He was a common laborer in a manual occupation
He voluntarily subjected Himself to the teachers of the law
He faced all the ordinary discomforts of human finitude
He took up our human infirmities
He was despised and rejected by men
He endured the reproaches and ill-treatment by others
He was a man of sorrows, familiar with grief
He faced suffering of body, mind, and spirit
He endured political subjection to unjust political authority
He became obedient, even unto death
Even the death of the cross
He experienced the abandonment of His followers
He became a cruse for us, dying “outside the camp”
He was buried in a borrowed grave
He descended into the nether world to preach to the captives
Each step descended further than the previous one. It was an ever narrowing descent from heaven to hell. In sum He as Son of God humbled Himself in every conceivable way. He became obedient to reveal the true nature of humanity amid the dreadful conditions of the history of sin. In doing so He was prepared to serve as the representative of humanity in the Father’s presence, presenting to God the perfect obedience due from humanity (Rom. 6:14; 13:10).
What the law was powerless to do “God did in sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering” (Rom. 8:3). “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:2; Gal 3:13; 4:4-5)
Nowhere in nature is the heart of God so fully revealed as it is in the history of Jesus: “God’s transcendent power is not so much displayed in the vastness of the heavens, or the luster of the stars, or the orderly arrangement of the universe or His perpetual oversight of it, as in His condescension to our weak nature,” wrote Gregory of Nyssa. “We marvel at the way the Godhead was entwined in human nature and, while becoming man, did not cease to be God.”
–from Classic Christianity by Thomas Oden