Gairney Bridge

Yesterday in the mail I received the latest edition of Tolle Lege (”pick up and read”), the book catalog of Reformation Heritage Books. On the cover was a short article entitled “A Condescending God.” I have always loved that term “condescending”, even though the meaning has morphed somewhat in our modern culture. The author of the brief article, Jay T. Collier, writes:

“The term ‘condescending’ has not always carried the force of an insult. Today, if someone is labeled condescending, it is generally understood as an attack against his or her character. This is largely due to the idea that everyone is equal and that no one is really better than another. However, years ago, people were not as offended by the idea of different ranks among men. In fact, to attribute condescension to someone then would have been to recognize an honorable trait indeed.”

Later, Collier comments:

“The prime example of condescension is in the way God relates to His creatures. The truth is that God is so highly exalted that He is beyond our comprehension. … While man cannot comprehend God, God stoops down as it were and reveals Himself. He has left His fingerprints on His creative work, and has more explicitly revealed various aspects of Himself and His ways in the Bible. … Furthermore, this condescension is magnified when we consider how the gulf between Creator and creature has been intensified by our sinfulness. It is certainly God’s right to leave sinful humanity to its own deservedly dark end of destruction. Yet God stoops. How amazing!”

Collier suggests that when we consider God’s great and voluntary condescension toward us, we should respond by “contemplating it with delight and humility combined with an attitude of worship[,]… meditating on all the He shows Himself to be.” The Westminster Confession of Faith says this about God’s condescension:

“The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto him as their Creator, yet they could never have any fruition of him as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant” (VII:I).

Let us give glory to our great God, the One who created us, the one who reveals Himself through His creation and His holy word. And let us most especially give thanks for the ultimate condescension on His part, His coming to earth as Jesus Christ, that lost sinners would be redeemed through Him.

“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 made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.    Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name,  so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”  (Philippians 2:5-11)

“The LORD is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens!  Who is like the LORD our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?” (Psalm 113:4-6)