The Counterintuitive Christ
Written by Nicholas T. Batzig |
Wednesday, January 4, 2023
If Jesus came after the expectations and desires of sinful men and women, He would have come in a display of pomp and power that leant itself to human wisdom and pride. Instead, He came in weakness, poverty, obscurity, and ignominy. When, by faith, we receive Him as the eternal Son of God, though veiled in the weakness of flesh and set in the context of these counterintuitive circumstances, we have our eyes opened to see the wisdom of God at work.
Everything about the circumstances of the coming of Christ into the world was counterintuitive. We tend to pride ourselves on the fact that we know this. However, the more we bring the pieces together into focus, the more astonishing it all becomes. Consider the following counterintuitive details surrounding the birth of Jesus:
The One who dwelt in inexpressible light with His Father and the Spirit, from all eternity, left that eternal glory to become man in the womb of a young, poor Jewish virgin (Luke 1:34). The One who rules and reigns as the King of Kings was not born in Rome, Greece, or Jerusalem (i.e., centers of power, status, and influence) but in the small and insignificant town of Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). He who sits enthroned in the heavens, was laid in an animal feeding trough (Luke 2:7, 12, 16). He who brought the stars into existence, calling each one by name, went nameless during the first week of His incarnate life (Luke 2:21). The One who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, was born to a mother who was so poor that she didn’t have enough to offer the proper sacrifice for His consecration (Leviticus 5:7; Luke 2:24). On the eighth day, the infinitely holy One received a covenant sign that indicated His need for a blood judgment to cleanse sinful corruption and impurity–as the substitutionary sin-bearer, though He Himself was without sin (Luke 2:21). He who was the long awaited King of Israel was welcomed only by a handful of despised shepherds and traveling Gentiles at His birth (Matt. 2:2; Luke 2:15).
Of course, the counterintuitive circumstances of the coming of Christ into the world also serve to highlight the glory of His divine being. The eighteenth century Scottish theologian, John Maclaurin, captured the juxtaposition of the base humiliation and exalted glory of Christ throughout His life in his sermon, “Glorying in the Cross of Christ.” He wrote,
His birth was mean on earth below, but it was celebrated with hallelujahs by the heavenly host in the air above; he had a poor lodging, but a star lighted visitants to it from distant countries. Never prince had such visitants so conducted.
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Think Little
Thinking Little is what Jesus did when he spent his first thirty years in quiet, obscurity, obeying his parents in Nazareth. It’s why he spent his three-year ministry training 12 disciples, and confined himself to a small area, in order to change the world.
In 1970, the author Wendell Berry wrote an essay called “Think Little”. He argues that in order to sustain the Green Movement over the long-term, it can’t just be something we expect Big Thinkers in government to fix. It’s got to be dealt with by personal change in how we live. “For most of the history of this country [the USA] our motto, implied or spoken, has been Think Big. A better motto, and an essential one now, is Think Little”. P.54. By Think Little, he means we need to stop hiding behind general, vague slogans, and get specific. We need to build our marriages, care for a garden, and switch the lights off. There’s nothing Christian about the essay. But I love the basic idea.
“Don’t Think Big. Think Little.” I wish Christians would adopt this mindset.
This doesn’t sound obvious, at first, does it? As Christians, we have all kinds of reasons to Think Big. Our God is Big, after all. Isaiah tells us “the nations are like a drop from a bucket” to him (Isa 40:15). The Great Commission is Big; Jesus sends us out to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19). The consequences are Big—people will spend an eternity in heaven and hell depending on how they respond to Jesus (John 3:16). Therefore, having big ambitions for Christ’s kingdom seems only natural. Surely, we want the little mustard seed to grow big (Matt 13:31-32)? Jesus is Saviour of the world (John 4:42).
But it’s precisely at this point that the danger of Thinking Big appears. It gets very hard to disentangle our promotion of Christ from self-promotion. Every Christian ministry knows this, if they’re honest. It’s scary how building platforms and “brand” have become part and parcel of our thinking. We feel the pull of the internet, and the size and scale of the audience it offers (especially among the young), and we’d love to harness it for Jesus Christ. But before we know it, our well-meant enthusiasm gets sucked into the hype of Big Thinking. Fads and bandwagons periodically roll through the Christian church. So-and-so becomes “the Next Big Thing”. The Think Big slogan doesn’t fit very well with the spirit of John the Baptist, who said, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).
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The Arc of the Ark Story
Baptism corresponds to the ark story because the arc of that story was death and life. Baptism is the Christian’s public declaration that God has brought us through the waters of judgment. Through union with Christ, we have been brought safely into everlasting life. The Lord Jesus, the true and greater ark, is our refuge. And in Christ, we are delivered and not condemned.
The account in Genesis 6–8 is about a staggering judgment on the world. Everyone who is not on the ark perishes. The flow of the account works like this:
In Genesis 6, Noah is told to build an ark.
In Genesis 7, the promised flood comes upon the earth.
In Genesis 8, the flood waters subside.Genesis 7 is about the death of the world. We’re told, “The waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep. And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all mankind. Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died” (Gen 7:20–22).
When we imagine the world covered by water, we can recall the state of creation in Genesis 1. “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Gen 1:2). It was from this condition that God brought forth land (1:9–10). Then God made creatures for the land, including people made in his image (1:20–31).
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Lessons from Mainline Decline
Reinterpreted Christianity may appeal to the deconstructing, but it does not win the hearts and minds of the lost. We have no guarantee that faithful churches will thrive. But after almost 60 years of constant mainline decline, we have a pretty good idea of how churches die.
I grew up in the mainline church, and it won’t be until I’m nearly 80 years old that I will have spent more of my life outside the mainline church than inside it. I was born, baptized, confirmed, and ordained in the Reformed Church in America, a smallish (originally) Dutch denomination that, with its roots dating back to 1628 in New Amsterdam, boasts of being the oldest Protestant denomination with a continuing ministry in the United States. I am thankful for the many good people, good churches, and good pastors in the RCA. I met Jesus in the RCA, so there will always be reasons for gratitude.
But somewhere in my college years (at an RCA school), I realized that the denomination I grew up in was considered a part of the mainline tradition. So named for the affluent suburbs along Philadelphia’s main railroad line, the term “mainline Protestant” came to be synonymous with the old denominations that broke toward modernism (instead of fundamentalism) and often wore the label ecumenical (even if some of them still claimed to be evangelical).
If you aren’t a baby boomer or a student of religious history, it can be hard to fathom the cultural influence and social cohesion that once resided in mainline Protestantism. At its height in 1965, mainline Protestant churches counted 31 million members out of a U.S. population of less than 200 million. Most Protestants were in the mainline denominations, and the country’s cultural norms were set, for better or for worse, by the old school Protestant establishment.
Almost 60 years later, all of that has changed. In its recently released demographic report, the Presbyterian Church (USA) announced it lost another 51,584 members. From a membership peak of 4.25 million in 1965, the PCUSA rolls are now down to 1.19 million. And that membership decline hardly conveys the severity of the situation. In the last reporting year, the denomination dissolved 104 congregations and dropped four presbyteries. More than 40 percent of the congregations have fewer than 50 members. Almost a third of the denomination is more than 70 years old, and another 26 percent are older than 55. Keep in mind that only 16 percent of Americans are 65 or older. The PCUSA is literally dying.
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