Magnificent Obsession by David Robertson

Author:David Robertson [Robertson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christianity
Publisher: Christian Focus Publications
Published: 2013-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

He emptied Himself

But I am getting a bit carried away – put it down to my Magnificent Obsession! If the resurrection proves that Jesus is the Son of God, and if that firms and clarifies the understanding of God as Trinity, lots of questions remain. What was Jesus doing before He was born? Why is there no indication of this Trinity in the Old Testament? Well, as Augustine again pointed out, the teaching of the New Testament is latent, not patent, in the Old Testament. There are hints and indications of this. The use of the term Elohim (which is plural) for God, for example, the use of the word ‘us’ in ‘Let us make man in our image’ (Gen. 1:26), the ‘us’ again referring to God in the plural. And there are at various times what are called, theophanies (appearances of God), in the historical narrative of the Old Testament – here the ‘angel of the Lord’ is sometimes seen as a pre-incarnation appearance of Christ.

Now we are getting to what the Trinity really means in speaking of the ‘incarnation’. The resurrection proves to us the identity of Christ as the Son of God, which in turn explains His miraculous birth. Christ being born really is ‘Immanuel’ – God with us. He is God incarnate.

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God,

did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,

but made himself nothing,

taking the very nature of a servant,

being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to death—

even death on a cross! (Phil. 2:5-8)

And so we have come full circle. The glorious second person of the Trinity was sent by the Father and enabled by the Spirit to live as a human being, show us the love of God through His teachings and miracles, die in our place so that our sins could be forgiven and be raised from the dead, before ascending into heaven. Marcus Brigstocke writes of his desire for God:

I wish there was a God. I wish for that God to exist now and for all time. I wish to be fully conscious of God and more importantly for Him to be fully conscious of me. I wish for God to be powerful, infinitely wise, kind, loving, fair and, when necessary, willing to carry out humiliating and painful corrections on my fellow human beings. 11

Jesus is that eternal, conscious, powerful, wise, kind, loving, fair and just God.

In some senses the presence of Jesus on earth is a bit like the TV programme, The Secret Millionaire, in which a very wealthy person goes to live and work amongst the poor and only when the person has gone (and send on the subsequent cheque) do they realize just who they had amongst them. Jesus came and lived with us. We didn’t recognize Him. We didn’t know who He was. We mocked Him and we crucified Him. He was ‘despised and rejected of men’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.