I would like to focus on two statements in Romans 8 in our study of Jesus Christ. Verse 32 says that God “did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all.” Jesus Christ was not spared from anything God planned for Him. 

 

Philippians 2:6 says, Christ Jesus, “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped.” As God He could never be something less than God, but He could lay aside the outward manifestation of being God. 

 

In His high priestly prayer in John 17 He prayed that the glory He shared with His Father might be restored to Him. Evidently He had laid that aside when He took upon Himself the likeness of sinful man. The Father didn’t spare Him from laying that glory aside. 

 

The Father also did not spare Him from identifying with man so He could become man’s Savior. He was given up by the Father for all of us. In verse 3 it says that God sent “his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man.” 

 

The Bible Knowledge Commentary explains: “Jesus was sent not in sinful flesh but in the likeness of it. His human nature was protected and preserved from the indwelling principle of sin that has plagued all other human beings since Adam…He was also sent, literally ‘concerning or for sin’…In other words He came to do something about sin. What He did was to condemn it; by His death on the cross…‘passed a judicial sentence on it’…so that those in Christ are not condemned.” 

 

Take time to praise God for the fact that “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” That includes you if you have trusted in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1).