The Condescending Creator

God is not an invention; He is the Inventor. And the Great Inventor has taken the initiative to walk among his people.

Read: Psalm 113 // Focus: Psalm 113:5-6

He is the God who stoops.

No one in a million years could ever have invented a condescending deity like that. Even if we had thought God up, it would have been a long stretch to imagine One moved by interest in the plight of his creation, full of compassion and pity, extending grace and mercy, exuding love and kindness, much less One who actually stoops to do something about it.

The God who stoops—who’d a thunk it?

Whenever man invents god, there you find a deity who is unapproachable, aloof, angry, interested only in his subjects keeping him happy and characteristically impossible to please. But God is not an invention; He is the Inventor. And the Great Inventor has taken the initiative to walk among his people. As John Henry Newman quipped,

I sought to hear the voice of God and climbed the topmost steeple,
But God declared: “Go down again – I dwell among the people.”

A God who dwells among his people! It is no wonder the psalmist begins his song with a hearty, ‘praise the Lord” as he tries to grasp this Condescending Creator. He is a God who condescends to lift his people up and fill their lives with satisfaction: “He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap” (Psalm 113:7); he gives them significance: “he seats them with princes, with the princes of his people” (Psalm 113:8); and fills them with unbridled joy: “He settles the childless woman in her home as a happy mother of children” (Psalm 113:9).

He is the God who stoops—imagine that!

And this God who stoops was at his condescending best when he not only walked among his people, but when he became one of them. You see, he was not merely a God who got his hands dirty for a day before returning to the riches of heaven, he became poor for a lifetime so we through his poverty we could become rich for eternity.

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” (II Corinthians 8:9)

He is the God who stoops!

The late Carl F. H. Henry, arguably America’s preeminent twentieth-century theologian, put it simply, yet profoundly: “Jesus Christ turns life right-side-up, and heaven outside-in.” The Condescending Christ stooped to lift fallen humanity from the quagmire of sin into the undeserved riches and indescribable glory of Almighty God.

Yes, thank God for a Savior who stooped!