“Let us think of the poverty of our Lord Jesus Christ:
‘Though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor.‘ (2 Corinthians 8:9)
This poverty was voluntarily undertaken for our sakes. There was no need that Christ should be poor except for our sakes.
Some persons are born poor, and it seems as if, with all their struggles, they could never rise out of poverty; but of our Lord Jesus Christ it can truly be said that “He was rich.”
Shall I take you back in thought to the glories of the eternity when, as very God of very God, He dwelt in the bosom of the Father? He was so rich that all He possessed was as nothing to Him.
He was not dependent upon any of the angels He had created, nor did He rely for glory upon any of the works of His hands. Truly, heaven was His abode; but He could have made ten thousand heavens if He had willed to do so.
All the greatest wonders He had ever made were but specimens of what He could make. He had all possibility of inconceivable and immeasurable wealth within His power.
Yet He laid aside all that, denied Himself the power to enrich Himself, and came down to earth that He might help us.
His poverty was all voluntary; there was a necessity laid upon Him, but the sole necessity was His own love. There was no need, as far as He was concerned, that He should ever be poor; the only need was because we were in need, and He loved us so that He would rescue us from poverty, and make us eternally rich.
Our Lord’s was also very emphatic poverty. I believe that it is quite true that no one knows the pinch of poverty like a person who has once been rich.
It is your fallen emperor who has to beg his bread, who knows what beggary is. It is the man who once possessed broad acres who at last has to hire a lodging in a miserable garret, who knows what poverty is.
So was it with the Savior; He was emphatically rich. You cannot press into the word “rich” all that Jesus was; you have to feel that it is a very poor word, even though it be rich, with which to describe His heavenly condition.
He was emphatically rich; and so, when He descended into poverty, it was poverty with an emphasis laid upon it, the contrast was so great.
The difference between the richest and the poorest man is just nothing compared with the difference between Christ in the glory of His Godhead and Christ in His humiliation, the stoop was altogether immeasurable.
You cannot describe His riches, and you cannot describe His poverty. You have never had any idea of how high He was as God; and you can never imagine how low He stooped when He cried, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? (Matthew 27:46)”
-Charles H. Spurgeon, “Poverty and Riches,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, vol. 40 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1894), 40: 266–267.
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