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MESSIAH IN A BUBBLE-TOP LIMO

I’m going to ask you just about the oddest Thursday question to ever go out over the Voice of Prophecy airwaves . . . and we’re talking 75 years of radio broadcasting. So brace yourself — here goes: Did Jesus Christ really and truly come down to this earth some two thousand years ago? Was He really here? Did He really leave heaven and spend 33 years on this weary little planet so far from His own true home?

Well, if you’re a born-again Christian believer, you’re probably throwing up both hands and careening off the freeway in disbelief. “Pastor Lonnie, the tofu cheese has slid off your cracker!” (Actually, around here we prefer to say, “The crust has come off your communion bread.”) Let me hasten to take us to the rock-solid Word of God, and then we want to prayerfully consider a most important question.

We’ve been in Ephesians 4 for a while now, and it doesn’t look like the off-ramp to chapter 5 is coming up any time soon. Yesterday, though, reading through verse 8, the apostle Paul quotes back to a verse in Psalms where it describes Jesus the triumphant and resurrected Lord “ascending on high, leading captives in His train, and giving gifts to men.” But now here are verses 9 and 10, and this is where we ask the admittedly hypothetical question: “Did Jesus Christ ever really and truly come all the way down here?”

“(What does ‘He ascended’ mean,” Paul asks, “except that He also DESCENDED to the lower, earthly regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.)”

It’s true, isn’t it, that you can’t return from a trip you never take, and you can’t come back from where you’ve never been. Jesus can’t go UP to heaven without being down HERE on earth — correct? Of course, that’s kind of a moot point for most of our audience. The average believer, and even most secular people, will concede that a person named Jesus, a religious leader born in Bethlehem on or around 4 B.C., did live here on earth for some 33 years. At one point, this Man certainly WAS here.

By the way, some people stumble over the Bible expression, “He also descended to the lower, earthly regions.” What does this mean? Does it fit into the theology of some where Jesus, between the crucifixion on Friday and His resurrection on Sunday went down into hell to preach to the spirits held prisoner there? (I Peter 3 has a much-debated passage which sounds like that.) But in the Tyndale New Testament Commentary, Dr. Francis Foulkes writes about that phrase as follows:

“Above the highest heaven He ascended, and He had been to the deepest depths of earth. This may mean simply this earth, so low in comparison with His heavenly home; or it may denote the fact that He suffered the greatest humiliation when He endured death itself, and thus descended to what Scripture sometimes calls ‘the depths of the earth.’”

But on to the harder question — and I’ll have to explain what I mean. Was He REALLY here? Did He experience earth living as we do? What I’m thinking about is this: I imagine that if President Bush were to travel to one of the world’s poorest spots, he might fly in on Air Force One, ride in a limo to the best (or maybe the only) hotel in the country — in fact, they might specially construct a place of luxury just for him — eat only delicacies (or perhaps his flown-in, imported favorite pork rinds and pretzels from Crawford, Texas), and sleep in his own bed with a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders bedspread that’s got a United States of America Presidential Seal on it. In other words, he’s there . . . but he’s not really THERE. And it’s a point of some discussion in the Christian world today: was Jesus Christ here fully as a human being, feeling what we feel, hurting as we hurt, struggling as we struggle, weeping as we weep, tempted as we are tempted? Some students of the Word pose the question this way: “Did ‘Jacob’s ladder’ reach all the way down from heaven to earth?” The Bible says in Hebrews 4 that He was “tempted in every way, just as we are.” Romans 8:3 reports from the presidential palace that He spent 33 years here “in the LIKENESS of sinful flesh,” and we think to ourselves: “Hey, I’ve got real sinful flesh, not just something like sinful flesh.”

There’s a book being heavily discussed in my own denomination right now, entitled Touched With Our Feelings, by Dr. J. R. Zurcher. And it dissects the many and varied threads of theological thinking in what we call “Christology,” the study of Jesus and His nature. How was He both God and man at the same time? Did He descend to Bethlehem simply as a divine creature who just LOOKED like a human baby, but without the ability to struggle with sin and temptation? The author quotes from a G. C. Tenney, who wrote from Australia with this memorable line:

“There is but little sympathy in the thought of Jesus having met our temptations in His divine capacity and nature. They would be but a thistledown wafted against a mountain.”

However, it’s undeniably true that the Bible has Jesus coming to this X-rated world en homoiomati sarkos harmartias — “in the LIKENESS of sinful flesh” — while you and I show up at the delivery room en sarki hamartias — “IN sinful flesh.” So we ask very humbly: how hard a camping trip was it for Christ, being down here but maybe not really getting bruised like we get bruised?

Well, friend, may I remind you, courtesy of Isaiah 53:5, that Calvary was more bruising than anything you and I will ever bump up against in our whole lives. “He was bruised for OUR iniquities.” Let’s not ever foolishly think that Jesus had an easier life down here than we do.

It’s true that there are undeniable differences between Jesus and us. He was human and divine; we are only human. The Bible calls Him “that holy thing,” and such a description could never apply to us. “Holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens” is the “Christology” resumé provided by Hebrews 7:26. Jesus didn’t have evil propensities, and we experience them on a 24/7 basis. “We should have no misgivings,” writes one of the leading founders of my own church, “in regard to the perfect sinlessness of the human nature of Christ.” And yet the Bible assures us that Jesus knows our every weakness, that He identifies with us, that He is a faithful high priest who has experienced our turmoil and pain. He didn’t just float by this planet in a bullet-proof 747; He made Himself completely vulnerable, right from when He was an actual human fetus, “enlarging cell by cell inside a nervous teenager,” to borrow a Philip Yancey line.

There’s a wonderful essay we remembered from a few years ago on this program — and, speaking of “Did Jesus really come down here? — it was written by the late C. S. Lewis for use at Easter. This is taken, by the way, from The Grand Miracle . . . and is it ever. It goes like this:

“Think what that descent is. The coming down, not only into humanity, but into those nine months which precede human birth, in which they tell us we all recapitulate strange pre-human, sub-human forms of life, and going still lower into being a corpse, a thing which, if this ascending movement had not begun, would presently have passed out of the organic altogether, and have gone back into the inorganic, as all corpses do. One has a picture of someone going right down and dredging the sea bottom. . . . Or else one has the picture of a diver, stripping off garment after garment, making himself naked, then flashing for a moment in the air, and then down through the green, and warm, and sunlit water into the pitch black, cold, freezing water, down into the mud and slime, then up again, his lungs almost bursting, back again to the green and warm and sunlit water, and then at last out into the sunshine, holding in his hand the dripping thing he went down to get.” And then Lewis quietly concludes: “This thing is human nature; but, associated with it, all nature, the new universe.”

Isn’t that an incredible picture? Listen, Jesus Christ wasn’t just here . . . He was so HERE that He was laying on a cold slab in a tomb outside Jerusalem. He didn’t just touch people; His hands touched the cold steel of nails. The trees He had created from a great distance became the crown of thorns pressed down on His forehead. Let’s never accuse Jesus of staying at a safe distance, or of failing to experience the hurts of this world. And as Paul says here with such power, the only way Jesus could ASCEND was to first DESCEND. You can’t use the return stub of your plane ticket until you’ve used up the outbound portion.

And the closing bit of good news, again from the Tyndale commentary:

“‘The ascension of Jesus meant not a Christ-DESERTED, but a Christ-FILLED world’ because of the giving of His Spirit. Secondly, we are to realize that the ascended Lord whom the Church now worships is the same as He who came down and lived among men, sharing their sorrows, trials and temptations, and therefore that He feels those of His people today.”