As Jesus Grew, His Purpose Became Increasingly Clearer

Last year at this time we introduced you to the writing of various authors at The Jagged Word. This article caught my eye when I saw the original title (below, click to link) and thought it would be a good fit here. The author of this piece is Cindy Koch.

What Jesus Did Not Know

He heard it a million times from his mom; son of God, born of a virgin. When he was younger, he did not really know what all those words meant. Everyone was nice to him and he had a special place when they went to temple. He remembered the old men looking at him with tears in their eyes, and the widows would touch his little shoulder when he walked by. They told him that he was born of the Spirit, and there was much he would do in his lifetime. When he was little, he tried to imagine what it was he would get to do.

And the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom. And the favor of God was upon Him (Luke 2:40).

He read it a million times in the Scriptures. It is written, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession” (Psalm 2:6-8). “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore” (Isaiah 9:6-7). His wisdom about the deep things of God were remembered from the beginning of all time. The Word he once spoke from creation and now heard through the prophets kept his heart and mind focused on the will of the Father in Heaven.

He wondered a million things as he grew up in the fear of the Lord. He was Son of the most-high, why did he ache with sadness? He was able to heal and give sight to the blind, would there ever be an end to this need for restoration? He spoke with the authority of the everlasting Word of God, why can people not recognize his voice? His purpose in life was to lead God’s beloved creation through repentance to everlasting salvation, why do they refuse to listen?

Jesus must have expected more out of this creation. The wise and holy son of God learned to be incredibly disappointed. Fulfillment and meaning lay right in front of the servants of God, and they turned away from young Jesus. Healing and wisdom called directly into the ears of the chosen people, and they raged against his holy name. Day by day, Jesus grew in the wisdom and understanding of what it looked like to be the Christ, the Son of God. Day by day he understood what it must take to save such an undeserving hoard of unbelievers.

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented (Matthew 3:13-15).

He began to know what he must do. His righteousness, his wisdom, his healing, his sonship, it was for them. It was to be given to this wicked and unloving generation. Even the repentance they failed to do, right now at John’s passionate call, it was the responsibility of this righteous Son. Jesus began to understand his long-promised kingdom in reference to those who would reside within the gates. Here in the Jordan, Jesus was coronated in the gritty black mud of his unmerited repentance.

And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:16-17).

Jesus seemed to know this from the beginning. He was the Son with whom God was well pleased. He was sent to do the work of the Father, and he would do it well. But the pleasing work of the Father looked a little darker than Jesus might have imagined. The repentance of the world felt thick and heavy stepping out of the water that day.

The worst of it was, finally, looking around at the people whom he came to save. They had no idea. The adulterous, guilty generation blindly believed their own baptism of repentance was enough. They wanted to fulfill the Law and do it right, but John’s washing with water only highlighted their sin. So, they left the water, trying to sacrifice and clean up their life to please the Father in Heaven. They were made alive in their sin, only to find out they were already dead. Yet, if they trusted in their repentance and their reconciliation, these poor miserable sinners unknowingly heaped sin upon sin; trusting in the Law to bring life, trusting in themselves to follow the Law.

Unbelief, misunderstanding, selfishness, unrighteousness, these were the brothers and sisters Jesus discovered in the Jordan. Pain, sorrow, disgust, separation, these were the riches Jesus learned to inherit on this earth. His journey of deep wisdom and pure understanding ultimately exposed the bowels of a rotting humanity. And while we were still sinners, Jesus died for the ungodly.

“This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Did Jesus Get Sick?

I’ve been feeling ill all day. Just now, I realized I neglected to schedule a devotional here. Proving that I still have a vestige of my sense of humor, about 30 minutes ago, I asked myself, “Did Jesus ever get sick?”

When we say Jesus, just to be 100% clear, we’re referring to Christ incarnate.

A possible go-to verse on this would be Hebrews 4:15

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are–yet he did not sin.  (NIV)

Some will want to argue that this verse is to be interpreted solely with respect to temptation. So let’s keep going. Philippians 2: 7-8 reads,

Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. (7 NLT)

And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (8, ESV)

So far we’re making the argument that in his earthly body, he would have known what it meant to experience illness.

But then, about 40 years ago, an elder in our church proposed that Jesus had leprosy. He based this on Isaiah 53: 2b-4

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. (NIV)

At this one, I draw the line and say, “No!”

The reason is that in the scripture leprosy is a type of sin. (See this article for an explanation of Biblical typing.) Jesus was without sin. End of discussion. Jesus identified fully with the human condition when he “took on flesh,” and leprosy was common in that time and place, but where something has another layer of meaning, I think it goes too far to suggest something with such a strong sin-identification.

So, back to the question which forms today’s title…

A ‘yes’ at Culture Watch:

Second, as already mentioned, we are arguing from silence here. Very little is actually known about the earthly life of Jesus. As has been rightly stated, the gospels are basically extended introductions to the passion narratives. The last week of Jesus on earth receives most of the attention in the gospels, while his first thirty or so years of earthly life are largely passed over. Indeed, Paul seems to glory in not knowing Christ “after the flesh” (2 Cor. 5:16 KJV).

But even so, can we in fact know that Jesus never experienced illness? One way to approach this issue is to simply ask a number of questions about the life of Jesus on earth. Did Jesus ever:

Have nappy rash?
Have croup?
Cry as a baby?
Have a runny nose?
Have a headache?
Lose a tooth?
Have indigestion?
Throw up?
Have insomnia?
Have mosquito bites?
Get sunburn?
Suffer physical exhaustion?

True, not all of these conditions have to do with actual illness as such, but they help make my point. Just how exempt was Jesus from the common ailments and ordinary frailties of life? We do know of some human frailties experienced by Jesus: he was tired (John 4:6); he was thirsty (John 19:28); and he was hungry (Matt. 4:2).

We can tease all this out even further: Did Jesus ever fall as a boy and scrape his knee? If so, did that scrape get infected? Or did it heal instantly? These kinds of questions have to do with just how we are to understand Jesus and his full humanity.

A ‘no’ at this Protestant Reformed site:

First, Matthew 26:38 and Romans 8:10 make clear that sin makes the body weak, in fact, dead. But Christ’s body was neither dead nor weak.

Second, Jesus did not defeat, and did not know illness; He only commanded illness in others to depart. What sense would it make for Him to be sick, if He needed only say a word in order to be healed?

Third, the lamb for the sacrifices in Israel had to be without blemish. This pointed to Jesus (I Pet. 1:19). If He had His own weaknesses and sickness, then it would have been good for Him to take care of His own blemishes.

A “third way” answer at New Life Church:

“Did Jesus ever get sick?” The Bible never recorded he did. In fact, whenever Jesus touched the sick, instead of them contaminating him, he “infected” them, if you will, with his own cleanness. He actually touched lepers whose terrible skin disease was considered unclean (Luke 5:12-15; 17:11-19). He himself was touched by a woman who had been hemorrhaging blood for twelve years (Matt 9:20-22; Luke 8:43-48). No doctor could heal her. No medicine could help her. Jesus was declared unclean by the laws of Leviticus, yet this woman was healed when she touched the fringe of his garments.

When Jesus felt a cold coming on (or the nasty flu that was going around) did he zap himself with healing power? Great Physician, heal thyself (Luke 4:23). Was he the only little boy who never had to wash his hands because of germs? Many scholars say, “No! Jesus never got sick.”[1] They claim he had a perfect human body like Adam and Eve before the Fall. In fact, Jesus would not have even suffered and died unless he submitted himself to death. His genetics were uncorrupted since he never sinned and did not have a human father to tie him back to Adam’s sin. Surely, he suffered human weakness like hunger and thirst and tiredness, but he did not need to suffer illness. Yet although did not need to suffer, I like to think that Jesus chose to suffer illness. After all, he had a human body and he was “one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15b).

Jesus eventually suffered the final human weakness by his death on our behalf. And if he submitted his perfect body to a human death, then certainly he could submit his body to sickness, yet without sin.

There are other views as well, but at the end of the day, the Bible doesn’t really answer this question.

 

 

 

The Divine One Became Human

^{Numbers 23:19} God is not human, that he should lie,
    not a human being, that he should change his mind.
Does he speak and then not act?
    Does he promise and not fulfill?

The “God is not a man that he should lie” text may seem out of place on Easter Sunday. I hope to show how it fits.

Two women were having coffee on the back deck of a home overlooking a ravine. The 7-yearold son of the hostess walked out from the woods covered in mud, holding a hammer and a piece of wood and sporting a small cut on his forehead. The woman who was a guest couldn’t help but laugh at the sight, prompting the hostess to remark, “What can I say, he’s all boy.”

So was the incarnate Christ all human or all divine?  I believe that scripture teaches us that the second person of the triune God was all human in that he entered fully into the human experience, but that he was supremely divine.

What does it mean to be human?

^{Gen 1:26} Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…

We are somehow a reflection of God, but let’s not confuse that by thinking that God is not a whole lot different than us.  He is wholly different from us.  (See last month’s article on Transcendence.)

Next down the list of “beings” are the angels. And then we’re third on the list:

^{Psalm 8:4} what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
    human beings that you care for them?⁵ You have made thema little lower than the angels
    and crowned them with glory and honor.

This verse is reiterated in the New Testament:

^{Hebrews 2:7} You made them a little lower than the angels;
    you crowned them with glory and honor

So the hierarchy looks something like this:

1. God
2. Angels
3. Mankind
4. Horses
5. Ants
6. Cats

…well to some of you anyway. (I’m a cat-lover, but I know some of you feel the list is accurate!)

So the second part of God, who is three-in-one, doesn’t decide to enter our world as an angel — though some teach that this happens in what are called theophanies — but instead appears as a man.

And so we find this verse in Hebrews,

^{Hebrews 4:15} For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—

which many might quote to show the humanity of Christ, but the verse in full reads:

^{Hebrews 4:15} For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.

That’s what it means to be divine.

Which is why I believe I can state with authority that Jesus was fully human, but was (and is) supremely divine.

It’s in that context that I was struck by the passage in Numbers we started with today. It’s the nature of humankind to lie. So Jesus enters in the the human condition, which is a condition filled with the vulnerabilities that led Eve and Adam to disobey.  The text in Numbers, “God is not a man that he should lie;” which is a prophetic word from God given through Balaam, reminds me of two things:

1. Though co-creator and sustainer with God the Father and God the Spirit of all that we see on this planet, it is contrary to the very nature of God to enter into the human condition.  It would be like one of us incarnating into the form of one of the beings lower on the above list.
2. Despite this, it was in the nature of humanity, the nature of us, that when one such as Jesus appeared, we killed him. If you met someone who never told a lie, would your first reaction be to kill them? I guess that depends on what they were being honest with you about!

The reason that Jesus was the perfect sacrifice is that he was “yet without sin.”  Despite his humanity, despite a 40-day fast in wilderness conditions, Christ showed himself triumphant over the worst temptations his greatest enemy had to offer.

Christ became human, but God is not a man. “What if God were one of us?” is the wrong question. “How can we become like God?” is also the wrong question.  The question is, and always has been,

^{Matthew 22:42} “What do you think about the Christ?

You can go to church when the pastor is preaching from I Corinthians 13, and totally get the whole thing about love. You can go to church when the minister is speaking from Ephesians 5 and grab on to the idea of mutual submission in marriage.

But if you only go on Christmas and Easter, you’re picking the two most obvious markers on the Jesus timeline, but also the two most difficult topics. I will never grasp the intricacies of incarnation and atonement. The more I look at these, the more I am lost in the absolute otherness of God’s ways and plans.

I stand in total awe and wonder at Amazing Love.

Son of God, Son of Man

Crosswalk.com is running a series of excerpts from the book Praying the Names of God by Ann Spangler.  You might want to dive in and cover the entire study, or better yet, pick up a copy of the book.  Here’s the link to today’s reading.

The Name

Like the Father, Jesus is God. He always was, always is, and always will be. But unlike the Father, Jesus is also a human being. Though  charged with blasphemy and crucified for claiming to be one with the Father, Jesus’ resurrection validates his claim to be God’s Son in a unique way. When we confess our belief that Jesus is the Son of God, we share in the love the Father has for the Son, becoming adopted children of God.

Though Jesus was the Son of God, he was also the Son of Man, a title that emphasizes both his lowliness and his eventual dominion. Near the end of his life, when the high priest asked him whether he was the Son of God, Jesus no longer avoided the title but said that he would one day “see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Matthew 26:64).

When you pray to Jesus as Son of God and Son of Man, you are praying to the One who is your Brother and your Lord.

Key Scripture

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.” Matthew 16:15 – 17

Praying the Name

In the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him. “He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! He’s the King of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, ‘I am the Son of God. . . .’ ” And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.

At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus’ resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!” Matthew 27:41 – 43, 50 – 54

The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. Deuteronomy 33:27

Reflect On: Matthew 27:41 – 54 and Deuteronomy 33:27.

Praise God: For sending his beloved Son.

Offer Thanks: Because God considers you his child.

Confess: Your faith in Jesus as the Son of God.

Ask God: To deepen your sense of being his son or his daughter.

Have you ever played a game in which you let yourself fall backward into someone else’s arms? It’s difficult not to hedge your bets, not to sneak a look around to see whether the other person stands ready to catch you. Now imagine a more difficult challenge. This time you stand with your back toward an open grave and your task is to fall backwards into it. Your friend has assured you he will be there to catch you as you fall. The success of this venture depends on two things: your trust and your friend’s ability to keep his promise.

I imagine that Jesus’ death must have been something like that. Though he was God, he had to fall back helplessly into a human grave, trusting that the Father who loved him would raise him up. To do this, Jesus had to have been absolutely secure in his identity as God’s Son. In fact, Jesus never called God by any other name than Father, except once, when quoting directly from a psalm. Over and over, it was always “Father”:

* Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?
* Father, protect them by the power of your name.
* Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am.
* Abba, Father, everything is possible for you.
* Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.
* Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

Jesus was crucified for one thing — for claiming to be God’s Son. So it is interesting to note that when the earth shook at the moment of his death — the exact moment when the Son, falling into the grave, had need of his Abba’s all-powerful arms to raise him up — the centurion and those with him guarding Jesus exclaimed in terror: “Surely he was the Son of God!” (Matthew 27:54).

Abba, a word derived from baby language to describe Almighty God! A word that would have sounded shocking to pious Jews! This is how Jesus expressed his relationship with Yahweh — as my Daddy, my Dear Father. It is the way he wants all of his followers to think of God.

Listen to what Paul says to the Galatian Christians:

“Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father’ ” (Galatians 4:6).

Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. This, then, is how you should pray: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” How much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! If you forgive others when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Because of what Jesus our Brother has done for us, we too have become children of God. As his sons and daughters, we can be absolutely confident that underneath our deepest griefs will always be the everlasting, ever-loving arms of God our heavenly Father.

Related article on the Humanity of Christ.