A Devotion from Samuel Willard

For your sakes he became poor.  —2 Corinthians 8:9

Christ humbled himself in his birth.  The humiliation of the birth of Christ consists mainly in its humble state. There were indeed notable flashes of his glory attending his birth by which God testified that he was the Messiah. But his birth itself was accompanied with an awe-inspiring humility, as he abased himself through it. He was born for us, and so he was born in a condition appropriate to our need. He showed in his birth what sin had made us. There are a few things we may take notice of as properly belonging to his humiliation:

1. He was born under a sentence of condemnation. As soon as he put on our nature, he stood under the doom of the Law. He was born to die and was adjudged by it as soon as he was human. We are all born children of wrath in our natural state, and he put himself in our place, and therefore came to fulfill the Law (Matt. 5:17), and this is the main article of it. He intended to be made a sacrifice; God prepared him a body for this (Heb. 12:5). Justice took hold on him as soon as he came into the world and did not discharge him until it had taken its satisfaction of him, and he lived in view of it all his days and spoke of it frequently.

2. He was born of a sinful woman. It was a particular condescension of the Son of God to be born of any of Adam’s sinful children. True honor in God’s account consists in holiness, and sin is to him the vilest disgrace. Original sin in Christ’s mother had made her more contemptible and ignoble than anything else could; had she been an empress, it would yet have been to Christ a degrading of himself to derive his humanity from her. As it is a disgrace to have a traitor as one’s father, so it is no less to have a sinner for one’s mother. Thus Christ, though without sin, would be intimately related to sinners, for whose sake he came into the world.

3. Joseph and Mary were very poor and wretched. Mary was his true mother, as really as any other mother is the mother of her children. And Joseph, though not really his father, was commonly accepted so, and the honor or contempt of his father’s condition reflected on him. They were indeed descendants of King David, but they were reduced to an inferior condition, little to be regarded among rich and wealthy neighbors. Joseph was a carpenter, a laborious calling that was not very profitable.