More Distance Than We Think

I'm sitting here in our family room, tree lit, kids asleep, Joanna reading her Bible, and a pretty clean house. The house wasn't so clean earlier; it took a little work throughout the day to get it this way. But the distance between a dirty house and a clean house wasn't so great today, b/c the house wasn't in terrible shape. Exactly UNlike the world Jesus was born into. It was a wreck ... and the distance He came to get here was enormous ... we were literally worlds apart. The distance from dirty to clean wasn't much for us today because we were kinda close to clean already, but the distance from dirty to clean for humanity is enormous. And it's because this distance is so great that Jesus came to earth. But the fact that we don't realize just how far from clean we are is the reason we don't realize just how far from earth Heaven is. It's the reason we aren't as amazed as we should be at the incarnation. The distance covered in the incarnation was more than we think.

I fear that we underestimate just how great a distance it was. Often because we don't think we're really that bad; we don't live with an honest assessment of how desperate we are without Christ. Or we tend to think we deserved a Messiah; God's ultimate plan was my salvation and so of course Jesus came (and if it's such a given that He would come ... then it probably wasn't too big of a deal for him to get here). These presumptuous thoughts lead us to misunderstand that the life of Christ was defined by sacrifice, even in the incarnation. Jesus stepped out of glory, as Paul said in Philippians 2 ... "he emptied himself." He didn't slightly alter himself; He didn't forgo some of his glory; He didn't pretend to hurt while all the while maintaining a god-like resistance to human pain. We think we sacrifice when we go on a one week mission trip to a lesser developed nation ... for one week. How bout out of the glory of Heaven into a feeding trough ... to begin a 33 year journey. He went the distance, a whole lot of distance ... to get to us ... so we could get to Him.

John 12:41 offers some insight for understanding the great distance from Heaven to earth: "Isaiah said this because he saw His glory and spoke about him." What is John talking about? When did Isaiah see Jesus? More tomorrow.