Is God Vulnerable???

"Would you like to study the Bible?" the smartly dressed ladies at my door asked. I had already figured out by their magazine, their professional appearance and their persistence that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

"OK," I said, "if you take fifteen minutes to present your beliefs, and then give me fifteen to present mine. Can we do it that way?"

They agreed, and I sat them at my dining room table with glasses of water. This mother and daughter team spent their fifteen minutes of the "Bible study" reading from their little blue book and trying to convince me of several things, one of which was the idea that Christ was a created being, intrinsically lesser than God.

My fifteen minutes had arrived. Rather than address the whole gamut of their belief system, I chose the idea of Christ being less than God.

"You see," I said, "you’re right in a way. Christ put Himself in a position of submission to the Father. But He was not innately lower than God. That’s the beauty of the gospel! Jesus chose to lower Himself, not just to a position of submission to God, but to the lowest point in the universe, hell itself!"

I quoted Philippians 2:5-8, the famous passage on Christ’s condescension. Then I preached, "This verse says that Jesus was equal with God, but that He made Himself a servant, then a man, then died the death of the cross! This shows us the nature of God’s love! He is willing to humble Himself in order to save us! He was lower than God, not by native right, but by His own choice, and the very fact that He was willing to lower Himself proves that He was God, and equal with God, because He manifested the self-sacrificing character of God!"

By now my voice was cracking and tears were in my eyes. I was dead in earnest with these women, who were staring at me in disbelief, probably wondering if I had all my crayons in the box.

They never came back.

A while later I met an Arian/Anti-Trinitarian over the Internet. He sent me a book, asking for my response. The book conveyed the same basic idea that Jesus was a created being, and texts which supposedly supported this idea were listed in an organized little column. I emailed him back the same response I had given to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Jesus chose to submit Himself to God as part of the condescension process.

I never heard back from him.

Two totally different religious groups, Arians and Jehovah’s Witnesses, were stumbling over the same stumbling stone—the idea of a vulnerable God. They couldn’t see how Jesus could be equal with God and still place Himself in submission to Him. To be fair, this is a hard thing to understand, for the natural heart cannot reconcile Christ’s omnipotence and His humiliation. How could someone who is all-powerful be all-submissive at the same time? How could someone who is innately equal with God ever assume a position lower than God?

The answer is that He chose it. Think carefully about this for a minute. The tension in this issue is between two things, power and submission. Jesus both had all power and laid down that power. The reason we can’t comprehend this is because if we had all power, we would never lay it down! Carnal human beings cannot possess power and submission at the same time. So we do one of two things with this Jesus who has both. We either make Him powerful and proud, or submissive and powerless. Either He didn’t submit at all, we think, or He submitted because He had to.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Arians fell into the second camp. They couldn’t see how Jesus would ever give up the God-status He had by right, so they took away that God-status. They made Jesus submissive because He had to be.

There is another way to make the same mistake. Do we who maintain Christ’s divinity fall into that ditch at times? Do we make Him powerful and proud? Could it be that the rejection of the idea of Christ assuming fallen human nature stems from this basic aversion to a willingly vulnerable God? Could we be fitting God into a human-shaped box when we disallow the idea of a Holy God assuming sinful flesh? Oh, yes, we can see that Jesus "made Himself of no reputation," even though He was "equal with God," submitting Himself to the Father by choice rather than by necessity. But then the second step comes when Jesus "took upon Him the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of men," and we stumble over the idea of a God who would make Himself vulnerable to temptation.

My concern is that once this trend is begun, we will follow it to its logical conclusion and reject the cross itself. Do you remember what the people of Jesus’ day said to Him as He hung naked before the ogling world?

"Save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from that cross!" railed the crucified thieves.

"He saved others, He cannot save Himself. He is the King of Israel; let Him now come down from the cross and we shall believe in Him!" mocked the Jewish leaders.

The heart-cry of the irreligious and the apostate religious world was the same. "If you were really God, you wouldn’t allow yourself to be victimized! The fact that you are submitting to this humiliation is conclusive proof that you are not God! We will not believe in a vulnerable God! Power and submission are mutually exclusive!"

Another issue presents itself in this context. What of the idea of a waiting Christ? Do you remember the portrait Harry Anderson painted of Jesus knocking at the front door of a house? There was no doorknob on the outside. The artist desired to make a statement about Jesus’ willingness to wait for us to open the door of our hearts.

The portrait was based on Revelation 3:20, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone years My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me." While we may appropriately apply this passage to us as individuals, its intended audience was the church of the last days—Laodicea. Jesus waits at our collective door, unwilling to barge in, even though He could if He chose to. The only two things I would change about Anderson’s portrait is I may have it raining and cold outside, and I would have Him knocking on the door of a church. Jesus would be shivering a bit, holding the sleeves of His robe around His hands to keep them warm. He would be pleading with the people on the other side of the closed church door to receive Him fully so that she could prepare both herself and the world for the His second advent.

Some do not accept the idea that Jesus is waiting. They believe that the moment of Christ’s coming is not affected by the church’s or the world’s readiness or lack of it. They see this as blasphemous in that it places Christ "under the control" of man. Truly it is blaspheme to put God in such a position, for in doing so we make ourselves God’s gods! But the biblical idea of a waiting Christ found in Christ’s message to Laodicea does not present such a distortion. God is not under human control, but rather He chooses to wait until His people are prepared for Him (see 2 Peter 3:8, 9). Rather than indicating a lack of control, the patience and longsuffering of God indicate a self-control that can only originate with the Divine.

Perhaps this rejection of a waiting Christ is all part of the human tendency to repulse a vulnerable God. Perhaps for us to admit that God is allowing human factors to help determine the time of His coming presents us with the age-old tension between omnipotence and submission. My fear is that as time lingers on it will become unarguable that there is, in fact, a delay. Will we then be tempted to reject the vulnerable, waiting Christ?

No, no. May it never be. Rather let us understand what Psalm 62:11 says; "Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this: That power belongs to God and lovingkindness is Thine, Oh, Lord." Power belongs to Him, and so does lovingkindness. The Submissive Christ, the Incarnate Christ, the Crucified Christ and the Waiting Christ are one and the same Jesus. They are the willingly vulnerable Jesus, our Forever Friend. They are the Jesus who went from heaven to hell, not because He had to, but because He loved us.