Ants in the Pants of Faith

The movie ‘Gladiator’ is the story of a great general who becomes a slave, who challenges an emperor, and dies to restore Rome to its people. It’s fiction.

But there is a great story that is true, of One who was in the form of God, who did not count equality with God as something to be forcibly seized and exploited for personal gain; who instead emptied himself, disrobed his glory while retaining his identity, and took the form of a slave, that is, the likeness and appearance of a human, an incomprehensible self-abasement or lowering, the magnitude of which will require an eternity to grasp, a lowering of stature and of divine power and honor the likes of which will never again be known in the entirety of the cosmos.

And as if that were not enough, he abased himself a second time, to the point of an ignominious and excruciating death on the cross for the sins of the world, an experience so alien and divorced from existence in the Godhead as to render rational explanation meaningless.

This is the mind of Christ – the mind that treats others as more important than one’s self, that considers the interests of others over one’s own. The one who died to enable people to be restored to life (true life, abundant life), to, like Christ, ultimately triumph over death, to be restored to their Creator.

You want a story? That’s a story. A story to be told for all eternity to the praise and glory of God the Father.

— by Robert A.J. Gagnon with editing and addition by Jeff Wilson