The Cost of Peace

It's a beautiful truth that we have peace with God. Though we are born as enemies of God, warring against Him, Jesus has brought his people peace with God. But at what cost? From beginning to end, the cost was so great we cannot approach full understanding of it. Philippians 2:5b-7 speaks to the cost to Jesus:

"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 found in the likeness of men."

"[M]ade himself nothing" translates a Greek word literally meaning "to empty himself." There has been much theological debate on what was emptied out of Him. We know that He didn't empty Himself of divinity. Jesus never stopped being God. However, the text doesn't give us any details about specific qualities or abilities of which He emptied Himself. What we do know is that the emptying is modified in these verses by "taking the nature of a servant" and "being made in human likeness." In light of these modifying phrases, listen to what two of my favorite commentators have pointed out about this "emptying":

Gordon Fee states: "Christ did not empty himself of anything; he simply 'emptied himself,' poured himself out. This is metaphor, pure and simple."

Richard Melick adds: "[T]he emptying is that God became human, Lord became servant, and obedience took him to death . . . This passage affirms simply that Christ left his position, rank, and privilege."

Both speak to the cost of our peace: Christ had to leave the privilege and glory of His holiness (His separate-ness from the creation or His other-ness) and be used up as something beneath Himself to do it. His emptying through humiliation climaxed in a horrible death. The One who couldn't die was sent to be killed.

I think this cost is captured in the terrible irony of a phrase Paul uses in another of his epistles: "making peace by the blood of His cross." (Col. 1:20b). Reconciliation through bloody wounds and death. Peace through an emptied out and slaughtered Savior.

We have been transformed from men who hated God and who God hated (Psalm 5:5-6) to men who love Him and are loved by Him (Eph. 2:4). But it was not a cheap transaction. It was not a peace that was free. Sure it cost us nothing. But it was of profound, monumental cost to our Savior. A cost that we will ponder for all of eternity. A cost for which we worship Him all of our days. Yet we will never fully grasp it. We do not know what it is like to leave the glories of the God-head to be made flesh and die. Yet He is merciful and reveals the measure of this sacrifice to us slowly, incrementally...the only way finite creatures can handle it.

Do you have trials today? Relationship problems? Sin struggles? Depression? Financial distress? Consider the cost of the Savior to buy you peace. Meditate on it. Hope is yours wherever you find yourself if you have peace through His blood. "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" (Rom. 8:32)