Riches, Rags, Riches

Riches, Rags, Riches

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich.

2 Corinthians 8:9

In a sky full of glittering stars there are some which by their peculiar, enchanting quality draw our gaze. Our text today, amidst the sparkling array of texts in the Scripture, is one such verse.  We read here, in magnificent summary, the substitutionary work of Christ.  By graciously impoverishing Himself, Christ has endowed us with eternal wealth.  The apostle makes reference here to the wealth which Christ enjoyed.  We ought to consider carefully the implications of what it meant for Christ to be ‘rich.’

In terms of possessions all was His.  Nothing in the realm of God, the Great King, could not be justly claimed as being the possession of His only Begotten Son.  Besides the rightful possession of all, there is the fact that Christ possessed all power.  He exercised absolute sway over all that He had created in concert with His Father and the Holy Spirit.  Christ enjoyed as well the honor which was afforded to Him by virtue of His position as the Second Person of the Trinity.  Angels described Him in adoring terms as the thrice-holy Lord of Hosts.  He also enjoyed that abiding, complacent love relationship with His Father and the Holy Spirit.  These are but a few, brief reminders to us of the wealth of our Savior. They serve, however, to cause us to marvel at the grace which Christ evidenced, which the writer of Corinthians says that we “know.”

We are also well familiar with the poverty which Christ endured.  Our catechism summarizes the humiliation of Christ eloquently when it speaks of His ‘being born, and that in a low condition, made under the law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of God, and the cursed death of the cross; in being buried, and continuing under the power of death for a time.’  We cannot even begin to comprehend the enormity of the grace required to act with such condescension.  The most abundantly overwhelming fact revealed within this text is that we are the people whom Christ enriched by His self-denial.  It is through this voluntary impoverishment by Christ of Himself that we have been made eternally rich.

We are now the sons of God by adoption, having all the rights and privileges of heir-ship.  We can now read our title clear to eternal dwelling places.  We have eternal life, and eternal occupations await us.  We have the exciting prospect of eternally dwelling in the presence of Christ and the whole company of the redeemed.  We are the possessors of wealth unimaginable.  What more could Christ have done that could elicit from us our love and gratitude?  Let us throughout this day spend time in praise and thanksgiving to Christ for His grace in descending from riches to rags in order that we might ascend from rags to riches.

Precious Savior, our Living Christ, 

we give thanks and praise for the sacrifice

you made in becoming poor that

we might become rich.

Where the Bush is Burning

Tomm Tice