Philippians 2 | Exalted in Death

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

I'd like to share with you for a few moments this evening from the New Testament Epistle of Philippians.

Where we come before the cross of Christ that has power to make us clean.

It's not just a man hanging on a cross, but it is God Himself exalted through death.

If you have a Bible, you can turn to Philippians chapter 2.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

If you would like to follow along, but you don't have one, I believe it's page 980 in the Pew Bible in front of you.

I'd like to read Philippians chapter 2, beginning in verse 5.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be held on to at all costs, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men.

And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

To the glory of God the Father.

Amen.

Seventy-five years ago, Pastor S.

Lewis Johnson referred to the death of Christ on a Roman cross as a very strange exodus.

Why do Christians revere it and him so?

It's a fair enough question.

Why would we call this Good Friday and celebrate a cross and a death on a cross?

Well, the answer is in this passage written by the Apostle Paul to the ancient church in Philippi.

We explain the death of Jesus Christ in this way.

When Christ was born a human being, the eternal God demonstrated an infinite humbling so that he might die on that cross in order to ransom people captive to sin.

We revere the cross and Jesus Christ because it is through the humiliation of the cross and the indignity of death that God the Father highly exalted him.

The holy God was exalted in death.

That indeed is a strange exodus.

I would like us to probe this strange exodus for a few moments in four ways.

By identifying the path of exaltation, the plan of exaltation, the pronouncement of exaltation, and the provision of Christ's exaltation.

First, consider with me for a few moments the plan, I'm sorry, the path first of Christ's exaltation, the path.

The road that the Lord Jesus traveled to the place of exaltation was not vague.

It was not in any way uncertain.

The path that he traveled was not choked with brush and weeds, and so making it indiscernible.

God's own statement in Scripture makes it perfectly clear.

He humbled himself.

The Son of God was not forced to take on the humiliation of a slave.

The King of heaven was not assassinated nor forcibly removed from office.

The King of glory was not ordered to be stripped of his divine royalty by taking the form of a human being.

The humbling of Jesus, the Holy One, was not a travesty brought on him from some force outside of himself.

No, it was a reflexive action.

He humbled himself.

But that ought not to surprise us.

Both Matthew and Luke record the words of Jesus spoken to those who would follow him.

He said, For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

Jesus spoke those words to those who followed him, thus giving God's prescribed path to recognition, not by self-exaltation, but by humbling oneself.

Now we humble ourselves when we let someone edge in line in front of us at the restaurants, the grocery store line.

We humble ourselves when we do not insist on our own way.

We humble ourselves when we acknowledge that we're wrong.

And then, because we're sinful human beings, we turn around and feel proud about our humbling.

And thereby undo the humbling.

We feel as though that kind of humbling for us is sufficient, and so it then makes us feel good.

But we are mere creatures, we are mere human beings.

Jesus is the Son of God.

Simply allowing somebody to step in line in front of him does not seem comparable to what we would do.

Because Jesus is the Son of God, his humbling is infinitely greater than any that we might endure.

And he accomplished it in a sinless manner.

I tried to write up some way to explain it, and then I simply decided that Jonathan Edwards could do it better than I could.

Jonathan Edwards is considered by many to be the greatest theological mind that America has ever produced.

And he preached that in Jesus we find infinite holiness and infinite condescension.

Here's what he said, and I quote, Christ, as he is God, is infinitely great and high above all.

He is higher than the kings of the earth, for he is king of kings and lord of lords.

He is higher than the heavens, and higher than the highest angels of heaven.

So great is he that all men, all kings and princes are as worms of the dust before him.

All nations are as a drop of the bucket, and angels themselves are as nothing before him.

He is so high that he is infinitely above any need of us, above our reach that we cannot even be profitable to him, and above our conceptions that we cannot even comprehend him.

Christ is the creator and the great possessor of heaven and earth.

He is the sovereign Lord over all, he rules over the whole universe and does whatever pleases him.

His knowledge is without bound, his wisdom is perfect, his power is infinite, his riches are immense and inexhaustible.

And yet, yet he is one of infinite condescension.

He condescends not only to the angels, but to such poor creatures as us.

Not only so as to take notice of princes and great men, but of those who are of the lowest rank and degree, the poorest of the world.

Those who are commonly despised by their fellow creatures, Christ does not despise.

Christ condescends to take notice of beggars and the people of the most despised nation.

Yes, he condescends to take gracious notice of children.

His condescension is sufficient to take a gracious notice of the most unworthy, sinful creatures.

And his condescension is great enough to become their friend, to become their companion, to unite their souls to him in spiritual marriage.

It is enough to take their nature upon him to become one of them, that he may be one with them yet even more.

He brought himself yet lower for them, even to expose himself to shame and spitting.

Yes, to yield up himself to an ignominious, a shameful death for them.

The path of exaltation was the path of humility.

And that is the path set before every human being by God Himself.

Christ followed the path of infinite humility, and God highly exalted him.

We are called to that same path.

We are called to humble ourselves and take up our cross, that is, to follow Christ, to reject our own independence and our own self-centeredness and our own pride and trust in Christ.

That's the path of humility.

Everyone who lays down his own self-rule, who submits their own little kingdom to the great king, will be exalted.

Follow Jesus on the humble path to exaltation.

Now notice the plan of exaltation.

And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death.

Even death on the cross.

The ultimate humbling.

The ultimate humbling is when the author of life chooses death.

The path was the road of humility.

The plan was to be so humbled that the author of life would experience what was impossible to undergo in his deity.

By definition, God must be eternal.

God cannot die.

But man can die.

So the eternal one did not hold on to his divine prerogatives, but made himself nothing by taking the form of a human slave so that the author of life in his humanity might die.

But this is no normal human death, is it?

Christ Jesus did not reach the end of old age and die from natural causes.

The Lord did not contract an earthly disease that caused his body to waste away into death.

No.

Even death on a cross.

First, for God to take on human flesh, human form.

And not simply any form, but as though he were a slave.

God the Son, possessing all the rights and privileges and prerogatives of deity, set them aside to take the position of one without rights.

He was humbled in death.

The God of life died.

And the ultimate humiliation was the death of the cross.

The cursed cross.

But that, we know from Scripture, was the eternal plan of exaltation.

After the Lord's resurrection, which we'll see on Sunday morning, he met some disciples walking on the road to Emmaus.

They were so overcome with grief and searching for answers and explanations that they didn't even recognize the Lord Jesus.

And he comes up alongside them and speaks with them, and he ends up confronting them, in essence, saying, Oh, foolish ones and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.

Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?

It was necessary.

It was the eternal plan of humility leading to exaltation.

Now, Jesus spoke to them of the prophets.

And he walked them through the prophets.

We don't know exactly what he said to them, but we can imagine that he would have taken them, for instance, to Isaiah.

Perhaps we could think of Isaiah 52 and 53, where God prophesied, Behold, my slave shall act wisely.

He shall be high and lifted up and shall be exalted.

Many of you were astonished.

Because his appearance was so marred beyond human appearance, human semblance, that his form was beyond that of the children of mankind.

And later in chapter 53, it says, Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted.

The reality was he was wounded for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities.

Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace.

And with his stripes, we are healed.

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him.

To put him to grief.

And he would pour out his soul to death.

Do you see that?

The eternal, predetermined plan of God was for the Son of God to walk the path of complete and utter humility and ultimate humiliation for us.

Listen again.

He has borne our griefs.

He carried our sorrows.

He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities.

He brought us peace.

We are healed.

My friends, please do not leave this evening without walking the path of humility through the plan of Christ's exaltation.

Submit yourself to the crucified King by faith in his death in your place, because you ought to have died that death.

And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross.

It must have felt like a devastating end to events.

As the bone-chilling sound of rock grating upon rock sounded from that garden tomb when the body of Jesus was laid in place and the tomb was sealed with stone and a Roman guard.

Darkness would have come quickly at the end of that day.

Darkness filled with sorrow and searching.

But God's ways are not our ways.

The crucified body of Christ the Lord filling the tomb was not the end but the beginning.

For the scriptures must be fulfilled.

The one who humbled himself must be exalted.

The greatest fulfillment of that truth lay in the sealed tomb guarded by Rome's best.

God's plan was that exaltation would come to Christ the Lord through the path of humility.

Then comes the proclamation of exaltation.

Therefore, God has highly exalted him, bestowed on him the name that is above every name.

So that the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth.

Follow the path in your mind once again.

You have to close your eyes to do this, that's okay.

The Son of God, equal with God the Father in all of eternity, fully God, who reigns supreme, became as a slave.

The innocent slave then dies a horrendous death.

And now the one who was a slave reigns supreme over all.

He has been exalted as Lord.

Through the humiliation of death comes exaltation.

The rejected one now triumphs.

Gloom and sorrow have been replaced by glory and exaltation.

And this is an astounding proclamation.

It's astounding on the one hand because there was another individual claiming lordship during that time.

Astounding on the other hand because of the claim made in this pronouncement.

You see, there was another person in Rome who claimed the title of Lord, and that was Caesar.

When Paul says that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord, he understood that that would be received as an utterly shocking statement.

He was letting his readers know in no uncertain terms that the crucified and risen Jesus, not the Roman Emperor, was the sovereign ruler of the world.

The world would never bow en masse to a pompous Caesar, but to Jesus who is the Christ.

And they would do so because of his exalted name.

The apostle references Isaiah 45 here, where Isaiah records Yahweh, the sovereign Lord, saying that every knee would bow and every tongue would swear allegiance to him and only him.

That he is the savior of all humanity.

What is astounding is that the Apostle Paul now says that Jesus is that Savior.

Jesus is that Lord.

All other claims to deity are false, including Caesar's.

In the New Testament, we are shown that Jesus is the one who is worshipped.

Jesus is the one who is adored as Lord.

Jesus is Yahweh, that sovereign Lord, who followed the path of humility, planned with pain, and is now proclaimed as the sovereign God over all.

And he is given the name.

Yahweh.

Lord.

The Jews have another name, even today, that they replace Yahweh with because they revere the name of God and don't say it.

So in place of Yahweh, they will often use Hashem, which is Hebrew for the name.

So when Paul says that the Father highly exalted Jesus and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, everyone reading this letter who is That all familiar with the Old Testament would have instantly begun twitching in their seats.

He wouldn't go there, would he?

Certainly he's not.

He's not gonna.

No.

Don't you dare connect the name of God with that crucified blasphemer.

Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.

So that the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Yahweh in the flesh.

This Jesus is the God man who took the form of a slave and is now exalted as the sovereign master of the universe.

This Jesus who was mocked, despised, spat on, and abused, and who suffered the shame of death on a cross is Yahweh himself.

And because the Father has so highly exalted him, there is coming a day when the whole world is going to acknowledge that Jesus is highly exalted.

Every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that the crucified Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

And that now brings us to the wonderful provision of Christ's exaltation.

So what do we now know?

We know that Jesus, the sovereign God of creation, the author of life, humbled himself in order to die on a cursed cross, and through that death he was exalted above all.

That's really summarized for us in the book of Hebrews, Hebrews chapter 2 and verse 9, where it says, For us, we see him, that is Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

That's his humbling.

Crowned now with glory and honor, that's exaltation, because of the suffering of death.

So that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

Humility and death.

And now crowned with glory and honor.

Now the author of Hebrews wanted to make a point.

He wanted to make the point that Jesus was the ultimate high priest.

That's why he says in Hebrews chapter 2, therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect by dying, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God to make satisfaction or propitiation for the sins of the people.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

So follow me now.

Follow me now.

The God who is worthy of all worship humbled himself to become a high priest in order to bring sinful people back to God.

Later in Hebrews it says so.

But he was appointed to exaltation.

By him who said, You are my son, today I have begotten you.

He humbled himself and he was appointed by God the Father for exaltation.

Now, here's the conclusion.

Here's the provision that comes through the Son of God being humbled and exalted by the Father to the position of a high priest.

Hebrews chapter 7.

Hebrews 7 · chapter mention

Consequently, because of all of this, as a result of all of this, he is able to save.

He's able to save to the uttermost.

Not partially, not just a little bit, not halfway, and you go the rest of the way.

Not if you come alongside and do your part.

To the uttermost, he is able to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.

For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, one who is holy, one who is innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and what?

Exalted above the heavens.

Now this high priest has no need, like those fully human, only human high priests, who have to offer sacrifices daily, first for their own sins and then for the sins of others.

Because Jesus did this once for all, when he offered up himself.

The God of life, the eternal holy one, followed the path of humility, fully embracing the plan of death on a cruel cross on the way to eternal exaltation, so that he might save to the uttermost those who would draw near to God through him.

Therefore, he has been given Hashem, the name, not any name, but the name above all names, the exalted name.

Yahweh, the sovereign Lord, to whom all will bow.

For those of us who have already bowed in repentance to the saving Lordship of Jesus Christ, those of us who have forsaken our sin and our own personal efforts to be righteous, who have in faith cast ourselves at the cross on Christ alone and who have confessed Him as Savior and Lord, that day of confession will be the day of greatest delights.

It will be a joyful victory celebration of an army of triumphant soldiers in the processional march of our conquering king.

But if you persist in unbelief and you cling to your own kingdom and your own sin, refusing to walk the path of humble trust in Christ, then this confession of Christ as Lord will not be the adoring praise of a worshiper before his long-awaited king.

No, it will be the despairing admission of a conquered enemy who is forced to bow in resentful submission to the sovereign king whose power you can no longer deny.

And nothing will remain but for you to enter into everlasting destruction.

Martin Luther wrote, You must accustom yourself to think that Jesus Christ is a real Savior.

And you are a real sinner.

God does nothing for fun nor for show, and he is not joking when he sent his son and delivered him up for us.

He made that perfectly clear through the exaltation of his son through death on a cross.

And he now bids you to follow him in humble trust.

Come to the one, exalted in death, who is able to save even you.

And if you do that on Sunday morning, you'll see that the tomb is empty.

Lord Jesus, we come and we bow before you, exalted in death.

Recognizing and giving praise to who you are and what you've done.

Not in us.

There's nothing in us that is righteous and acceptable.

But only you.

Only you.

Through the humble cross and an exalted Lord.

We give praise and thanks to you as we remember and confess you in this moment.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.