The Transcendent Measure

...he was in the form of God… but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant…
(Philippians 2:6-7 – ESV)

The twin truths of God in heaven and God with us, His transcendence and His immanence, respectively, are two facts that must be so if we are to be redeemed. God must be above and beyond mere human power in order to save us, and He must have come down to us in Christ in order to bring us home to heaven.

Having said that, and understanding that both truths are equally important to our redemption, we now must come to a crucial realization. We must focus first on God’s transcendence and then let it inform our understanding of His immanence. Only then can we more fully appreciate just exactly what the enormity of Christ coming down from heaven and taking on a human body means, and then we can also see just how far God in Christ is taking us up.

If we fail to do this, then that is why we see Jesus as being more our buddy or simply our needy friend instead of the Sovereign Lord of the Universe, and we develop our understanding of atonement along the lines of emphasizing His humanity over and above His divinity.

In this warped scheme the reality of Christ’s immanence takes precedence over the reality of His transcendence, but this is not the true order of things, for the Son of God was first and foremost transcendent. He was holy and wholly other than that of the creation before He entered into it. It wasn’t that we could draw near to Him because we are somewhat like Him; it is that He had to draw near to us because we were nothing like Him at all.

Now let us get the order right, the Son of God was the Son of God from all eternity, and before He was the Son of Man, He was indeed God of very God. Only in the fullness of time did He condescend and come to earth as the suffering servant of the glory of God. We must see Jesus Christ as the Son of God, as above and beyond any and all creation, in order to realize the eternal significance of His coming down below to save human beings.

If we fail to rightly understand the immanence of Christ through the transcendence of God, then we will make the mistake of thinking Jesus came to save us because we were worthy of saving. Instead we must realize that Christ Himself made us worthy to be saved, thereby displaying great glory in that He showed that God Almighty can take a poor speck of insignificant dust such as we rotten humans are and lift them up to the heights of heaven itself.

When we see the depths of our depravity set against the heights of His holiness, then and only then can we begin to understand the titanic transcendence of the glory of God and then and only then can we begin to see the true measure of God’s love toward us in Christ.