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)

He Became Poor For Me

It is difficult for the human mind to understand what it means to be God. As the creation, humanity struggles with its identity as a creature formed by the hand of God to be an eternal creature. The world is the sphere of human experience, and while there are challenges to consider, the vastness of the universe and man’s place in it make it impossible to pin down the idea of God’s dwelling and who Jesus was before coming to earth. Paul seeks to peek behind the curtain of the nature of Christ, saying that what the Son of God was before was nothing like what He became.

Is it possible to think of someone who possesses riches beyond the imagination, giving all of that up to be the lowest, poorest, most despised, and rejected person on earth? What makes the transition more remarkable is that the one who possessed all the riches created what He will become. Jesus was God. He was with the Father, dwelling in the radiance of the eternal glow of glory immeasurable. Before the world was created, the Son of God accepted the will of His Father to divest Himself of everything He possessed as God to become a creation of flesh. In the incarnation of flesh, Jesus would suffer all the frailties of the human experience. He would know warmth and cold, hunger and plenty, happiness and sorrow, and most of all, temptation.

God would live for more than thirty years in a fleshly body and feel the dread of the lust of the flesh. He would challenge the lust of pride. Jesus experienced the lust of the eyes that consumed so many in the world. For thirty years, He was the son of a carpenter whom few paid any attention to, and He was barely noticed. Jesus shared a home life with His half-brothers and sisters. He stood out among the young men who came to Jerusalem each year, but no one sought His counsel or witnessed His power through miracles. Jesus was a man from Nazareth, and that was all. No followers and no miracles. Deity had become flesh. It was not until Jesus was thirty years old that the world began to realize who stood in their midst.

Jesus was rich and became poor so that the world could rise from the despair of its filth to be cleansed in His blood. What Jesus did was not for Himself but for the sake of the world that walked in the darkness of sin. He became poor to bring light to a dark world. His poverty was taking on the flesh of humanity to offer to the world the greatest riches known to man – the salvation of the soul. The contrast is stark when the world realizes that the greatest riches are found in the blood of Jesus Christ. What the world wants are the riches of gold, silver, and pleasure. Those riches are counterfeit. The true riches are found in what Jesus came to offer through His poverty. To be rich is to be filled with the spirit of God, to long for the hope of eternal life. That is why Jesus came. He offered the riches that can never be taken away.

The only reason the world has been given the gift of grace is that Jesus became poor and, through His poverty, suffered the humiliation of the cross, rejection by the world, and being despised by His nation, giving His life to enrich the soul of man with love. Jesus gave a full sacrifice to the world, and the world did not deserve His sacrifice. Jesus was rich and became poor. The world was poor and can be rich through Jesus Christ, but that choice is left to the will of man. What makes the whole story of Jesus tragic is that He left the glory of Heaven to bring hope to a lost and dying world; and for the most part, the world does not care.