Choosing Humility: The Legacies of Augustus and Jesus

Paul says when the time had fully come, God sent his son born of a woman under the law to redeem those under the law that we might receive adoption to sonship. Because you are his sons, God sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, the spirit who calls out Abba Father. [00:02:47]

In the ancient world like in ancient Rome as was the case with Caesar Augustus, adoption was not something that was done in order to have pity on orphans or to help them out. If you wanted to you could take an orphan into your family no problem. You might make them slaves or members of the household. [00:03:31]

Adoption was not done of babies. It was actually done when the head of the household did not have a clear heir and wanted to find somebody who would be able to take care of steward what had mattered most to the potter familia. So Julius Caesar looked around and Caesar Augustus is obviously a man of immense gifts. [00:03:47]

God looks at you. God says I've given you gifts, I've given you abilities, I've given you talents, and now I'm sending my spirit to be with you, so you are my heir. I believe that you will be able to do what it is that I want to accomplish through your life, not through anybody else's life but through yours. [00:04:19]

Caesar says I celebrated two ovations and I was 21 times saluted as imperator. The senate decreed still more triumphs to me all of which I declined. On 55 occasions the senate decreed with thanksgiving should be offered to the immortal gods on account of the successes on land and sea gained by me. [00:04:48]

Now contrast this with the kind of victory that Jesus won, which was not with swords and bows and arrows. Paul says in his letter to the Colossians, and having disarmed the powers and authorities Jesus made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them, not through brutality and war and death but through the cross. [00:06:10]

Thanks be to God who always leads us as captives in Christ's triumphal procession. Jesus has won the victory but we don't go around strutting like Caesar, like generals. Paul lived as a slave to Jesus as a captive in everything's getting turned upside down. [00:06:38]

And then Jesus came along and he said now when you give if you're tempted to puff yourself up instead of telling everybody what you do he says when you give don't announce it with trumpets. Now in Rome when people gave they would announce it with trumpets when Caesar did stuff like this. [00:08:08]

Don't let your left hand know what your right hand's doing so that your giving might be in secret. So today if you feel obscure, unknown, unnoticed don't you be discouraged because your heavenly father sees what is done in secret. [00:08:28]

At the end of Caesar Augustus's life, Barbara writes about this in the book, the final statement inscribed to him as he was dying to people was, I have played my part well now give me applause. When Jesus was dying he was mocked and what he said was father forgive them for they don't know what they do. [00:08:45]

Caesar was the ruler of the known world. If you were to ask in all of literature since then what's the mention of Caesar that has been read the most time that has been studied by the most scholar that is the most familiar to the human race and it is a passage written about an act that took place. [00:09:12]

Caesar does that in a little part of the world where he's never been a little man he never knows never know named Joseph goes to a little town that he would never visit named Bethlehem where oh by the way the prophecies were that the messiah would come from, and so the most famous decree that Caesar ever made. [00:09:34]