God Things in Small Packages

Never despise or resent the small and obscure seasons of your life, because God things come in small packages.

There are two parallel and even competing impulses in our culture. We simultaneously value going big while we also admire going small. In our city in coastal South Florida, folks will buy multiple house lots on the water so they can build a massive house; all the while others are minimizing, purging, and building tiny houses or living and traveling in an RV. This back-and-forth between big and small happened with cell phones, too. For awhile, it was a race to see who could make the smallest, sleekest phone. It started with the Zach Morris brick phone on Saved by the Bell, then Nokia, then the Motorola Razr. Phones got smaller and smaller and smaller. But now it’s about bigger again, and maximizing screen space. Compare an average-sized smartphone now to the original iPhone. We wonder, “How did they survive in 2009 with those tiny screens?” We have cultural proverbs celebrating both big and small, as well. We believe, “The bigger, the better.” But also, “Good things come in small packages.”

There’s a tension here that illustrates the heart of Christmas itself. The heart of Christmas is the mysterious union of the big and the small. The great and powerful God becoming a small and weak human baby. In Christianity, we call this reality the “incarnation.” It sounds like a big, theological word, but if you break it down, it makes a lot of sense. “In” means “in.” “Carne” is the Latin root for flesh. So it literally means the “in-flesh” of God the Son. The incarnation means that God the Son became a human man “in flesh.” This mysterious reality is at the heart of Christian faith and, in fact, at the heart of the universe and reality as it actually exists.

The Red and Yellow Word

Through the womb of the virgin, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The Word refers to the eternal Son of God, who took on a human nature. He became flesh, he incarnated himself into the human experience. What God had known previously by observation, he came to know by experience. He was one person with two natures, a divine nature and a human nature. He was not merely wearing a human costume and pretending. He was a true, human man. Neither did he mix God and man together, and create a third kind of new thing, like when my kids mush Yellow Play Doh into Red to make some kind a sort of muddy Orange color. When Yellow mushes together with Red, both colors are lost forever. Both are now just Orange. That kind of mushing together is exactly the opposite of the Incarnation. The mystery of the incarnation is that Jesus remains fully God and fully man, without mixing the two and also without separating the two. Imagine that Red represents Godness, divine nature and that Yellow represents humanness, human nature. The one person of God the Son with a fully Red nature added a fully Yellow nature to himself, but these two never mixed to make Orange. Instead, Jesus was fully Red and fully Yellow in every way, yet never in such a way that the Red and the Yellow mushed together to make Orange.

The Big and Small

When Christ Jesus took on human nature, he never stopped being God. Instead, he willingly decided to add human nature to his personal experience and identity, “existing in the form of God, he did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity” (Philippians 2:5–7). The Big One got small. One of the great theologians of the church, Hilary of Poitier points out that “the world possesses the power of growth in things that are born, but it does not possess the power of growing smaller. Behold the trees, the seeds, the animals! Gaze upon man himself. He always develops by growth, but never shrinks by becoming smaller. Even though he may shrivel with age, it is not within his power to grow smaller and form a new man in himself. In other words, he can’t change from an old man back into a child.” God stuns us with the power of growing small, while also remaining Big.

God delights in Big and small. When God’s people came out of exile in Babylon, they rebuilt the temple. Some who remembered the greatness of the former temple mourned about the paltry glory of the rebuilt temple compared to Solomon’s grand building: “many of the older priests, Levites, and family heads, who had seen the first temple, wept loudly when they saw the foundation of this temple” (Ezra 3:12). It was small and insignificant in their eyes. But there’s another part of this story. The Lord sees the small things differently, asking his people through his prophet “Who despises the day of small things?” (Zechariah 4:10). “Not me,” says the Lord.

If the Lord doesn’t despise a day of small things or a season small beginnings, we shouldn’t either. The counter-intuitive power of God in the incarnation and crucifixion sees smallness as significance and weakness as strength. God accounts greatness differently than we often do. In his power, he united himself, the Creator, with the smallest seed of creation. There was infinity and majesty hidden in that infancy, so never despise or resent the small and obscure seasons of your life. Because God things come in small packages.