Knowing God: Chapter 5 - God Incarnate

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Knowing God chapter 5 focuses in on two significant truths about the first coming of Christ:

  1. His incarnation and
  2. the kenosis. 

The incarnation is the truth that the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, became fully human and was born Jesus of Nazareth. The incarnation makes sense of the other miracles of His life, death, and resurrection. Jesus is both fully man and fully God. (cf. key verses of John 1:1-18 and 2 Cor 8:9)


The second topic of the kenosis may not be as familiar to us. “Kenosis” is the Greek word in Phil 2:7 translated “emptied” (ESV). As Dr. Packer points out Christ emptying Himself was “the laying aside NOT of divine powers and attributes [Christ did not become less God] but of divine glory and dignity.” (cf. John 17:5) The King James Version renders the meaning well: “[Jesus] made Himself of no reputation.”


As Dr. Packer succinctly summarizes it: Jesus’ incarnation and emptying (kenosis) is not deity reduced but divine capacities restrained. 


Rightly understood, Christ emptying Himself meant “a laying aside of glory (the real kenosis); a voluntary restraint of power; an acceptance of hardship, isolation, ill-treatment, malice and misunderstanding; finally, a death that involved such agony—spiritual even more than physical—that his mind nearly broke under the prospect of it.”


This is the Lord we serve, the One who’s image we seek to properly bear, the One whom we seek to glorify as He glorified the Father. And if He so willingly emptied Himself, we, too, must willingly do the same that others might know and glorify Him.

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