Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
How can we measure love? We could begin by measuring the distance between the lover and the object of his love. This distance illustrates how great the love is—the greater the distance, the more remarkable the love. Or perhaps we might evaluate the greatness of love based on its costliness. Love often leads to great sacrifices, and the measure of the sacrifice illustrates the greatness of the love. We might also evaluate based on its effect—receiving great love changes the recipient.
When Jesus points to the greatest human expression of love, He combines all these features. He said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Here we see it on display. Great love bridges a great gap (death and life), it can cost everything, and it can save a life.
When we consider this, we cannot help but conclude that the greatest love of all is displayed in the incarnation, humiliation, and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The Creator God assumed a created human nature. He suffered humiliation, disgrace, and death. Jesus Christ, God’s only-begotten Son, shows the greatest love of all, and He shows that love by voluntarily accepting the greatest conceivable humiliation on behalf of those whom He created. It is in these acts of love that He brings those who are eternally dead and hopeless to new life.
Think about this: The greatest love is shown to us through the greatest humility and humiliation. This is an extraordinary truth. We all want to be loved, but no one likes to be humiliated or disgraced. We never want to appear as failures. For some, this drive to avoid disgrace supersedes almost everything else. It becomes the deepest impulse of the heart. Many people will do anything to appear successful, even if it means lying to cover up their own failures. But even for those who accept humiliation out of obedience to God, there is still the deep-rooted impulse to avoid any unnecessary indignity. None of us wants to be looked down upon; all of us want to appear successful. But in Christ’s love, we see this great gospel irony on marvelous display.
Jesus Christ is the God-man. He is the One through whom all things were created (John 1:3); He is the source of all life (v. 4); He is the eternal Light (v. 5). He is the “I am” of the Old Testament (8:58). He is the One who had all glory from the Father before the world even existed (17:5).
Because of our human limitations, we can hardly imagine the Son’s heavenly glory. The glimpses that we are given show something beyond earthly comprehension. The responses of those who glimpse it illustrate this. When Moses spoke with God and beheld an earthly semblance of the heavenly glory, his face shone brightly because he had been talking with God (Ex. 34:29). When Isaiah was confronted with the glory of the Lord, he fell on his face and exclaimed: “Woe is me! For I am lost” (Isa. 6:5). When John saw something of the glory of heaven, he fell on his face immediately (Rev. 22:8). At the very least, these descriptions are a reminder that the visual manifestation of the glory of God’s Son is something that humans on earth cannot picture, much less endure. Even a glimpse of it provokes immediate worship and fear.
This is the visible glory of God Himself. But the Son of God, clothed in indescribable glory and perpetually receiving worship from the angels, is also the One who says to His disciples on earth, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34). This work required, by its very nature, total humiliation.
How was the God-man humiliated? First, by assuming a human nature: a human body and a reasonable soul. Jesus Christ was born of a woman. He entered the world in humble circumstances as a baby, born of the Virgin Mary. He grew up as a boy, “increas[ing] in wisdom and in stature” (Luke 2:52). He experienced great hunger when He fasted and great thirst as He traveled (Matt. 4:2; John 4:6). More than that, He experienced the emotions common to humanity. He had compassion when He saw suffering (Matt. 9:36; Luke 7:13). He wept when His friend Lazarus died (John 11:35). Even though He knew that Lazarus would be raised, He was “deeply moved in his spirit” (v. 33). All these characteristics are common to us as humans, but they were examples of utter humility and humiliation for the glorious Son of God.
The Apostle Paul reflects on this when he writes, “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 grasped, but emptied himself, . . . being born in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:5–7). The glorious, eternal God of heaven assumed a created human nature. This is an unrivaled display of condescension and humility.
This was only the beginning. Not only did the Son of God assume a human nature and experience human frailty, but He also willingly subjected Himself to even greater disgrace. When we read the Gospels, we see Jesus rejected and subject to the follies and sins of those He came to save. He was looked down upon by others (John 1:46). He had to endure the burdens of life in a fallen world. He, the sinless One, entered a world of sinners and a world polluted by sin.
His years of public ministry began not with success or acclaim but with fasting in the wilderness and being tempted by the devil (Matt. 4:1–11). Throughout His life, He continued to be tested, having to endure the temptations that are common to human beings, though He was without sin (Heb. 4:15).
His suffering culminated in the events leading up to and including the cross. In those final hours, His humiliation and love were on fullest display. While in the upper room, Jesus shared a last meal with His disciples. He knew what was about to come, though they remained unaware. Then Jesus washed their feet. This was a menial task, performed on men who would turn on Him in a few hours. None of them seemed to truly grasp what He was about to do. Though He was fully aware of what awaited Him later that night, He voluntarily humbled Himself before them, doing the work that only a servant would do (John 13:1–30).
He then moved from the upper room to a nearby garden. There, the Son of God—the Word made flesh—pleaded with His heavenly Father about the suffering and humiliation to come. He alone understood the gravity of the events to come.
Here we must pause and remember that the suffering of Jesus Christ had been predicted hundreds of years before. Jesus surely knew the words of Isaiah and the significance of those words for what He was to face. Isaiah prophesied, “His appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind” (Isa. 52:14). “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (53:3). What we see recorded in the Gospels about the suffering of Jesus Christ—the rejection, the sorrow, the derision, the disfigured face—was prophesied before Jesus’ birth. He was acutely aware of what He was about to endure.
Yet He endured it. Jesus Christ was blindfolded and beaten (Luke 22:64). He was falsely accused (23:2). He was whipped, and branches with thorns were bent into a crown to be pressed into His head (John 19:1–2). Then He was crucified, enduring the most cruel form of torture and execution devised by the Roman Empire (v. 18).
While being crucified, He endured the indignity of mocking, and soldiers gambled for His clothes. While on the cross, He cried out to God, using the words of abandonment from Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).
We cannot imagine the human pain and loss and abandonment that the Son of God experienced at that moment. All of us suffer as sinners. Though we may be suffering unjustly, we know that our suffering in this life is a result of our complicity in Adam’s fall. But Jesus was the spotless Lamb of God, the glorious Son of God.
This is the greatest love, which God demonstrates in that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). This is a transforming love. All of us in Christ can declare with Paul this foundational testimony of our salvation: “The Son of God . . . loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).