The Bible Nerd

Whenever I am going through a tough time, I generally think about myself most of the time.  Ok, ok, maybe a lot of the time.  All right, probably all of the time.  I think about it before bed, driving around, while I am pretending to listen to other people talk in meetings… well, you get the point.  Thinking of others and seeing opportunities to model Christlike living isn’t always on my mind then.  Thank goodness Jesus was God and man, as it enabled Him to seize these opportunities to not only bless people with what He does, but also how He does it.  I believe this is the answer to several passages that people use to say that Jesus was “limited” in His divinity here on Earth.  That Jesus had to rely on God for all of His miracles, in the sense that Jesus couldn’t heal anyone on His own, but had to ask the Father to do it.  This has serious impact on how Jesus could be God and man during the incarnation.

In one of Jesus most memorable miracles, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, there is a beautiful example of the power of prayer, faith, and unity between Jesus and God.  John records the raw emotion of Jesus upon arriving at Lazarus’s home, describing how Jesus was “deeply moved” and “wept” from sorrow due to Lazarus’s death.  In this moment, the humanity of Jesus touches our hearts that He experienced the loss of a friend, while also sharing in the grief of the two sisters.  As He goes to pray for Lazarus, it would be easy for Jesus for once not worry about the crowd.  For once, He could just think about His friend and the wonderful miracle that was about it occur.  Yet, even then, He sees the opportunity for the disciples and those around Him to learn from what He was about to do.

Instead of a silent prayer, enjoying at least that amount of privacy, He prays out loud so that all might hear.  “Father, I thank you that you have heard me.   I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.”  Jesus was never worried that God wouldn’t answer His prayer.  He knows that He and the Father are one, so that whatever the Father would do in this situation is what Jesus would do.  Some Bible scholars say that Jesus couldn’t heal Lazarus on His own.  He had “emptied” Himself (Philippians 2:5), thereby limiting Himself during the time of the incarnation.  As I said before, my view is that Jesus was still fully God as man (Colossians 2:9-10).  He doesn’t pray because He HAS to, He prays because He is MODELING how we should pray and believe in the power of God.

It gets even better though.  The Gospels record the night before Jesus’ crucifixion in detail.  In particular, Jesus’ time of prayer and struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane is highlighted.  Luke 22:42 is one of the most famous quotes of Christ, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”   Did Jesus really think that the cup could be removed?  Did he honestly believe that there was another way rather than the cross?  If you say yes, you are definitely saying Jesus knowledge was limited while incarnated.  Yet, Jesus was fully man, therefore He had human emotions like stress and anguish over what He knew was coming.

Of course, Jesus knew the suffering of the cross was coming.  He had been predicting this for quite a while (Mark 9:30-32).  That is why He is in stress and anguish.  He knows the cost He is about to pay.  However, even in His greatest time of trial, He once again thinks about His disciples and all those who would read the Gospels.  In this, He can model submission to God, sacrifice for others, and ultimately a willingness to die for the salvation of many.

Remember, if all Jesus cared about was dying on the cross to provide atonement, He could have done it much easier and shorter than what He did.  Raising Lazarus was not necessary to Him dying on the cross and neither was praying out loud in the Garden.  That He did those things is supposed to radically challenge us in our faith, not radically challenge us in believing in the power of Christ or denigrating His divinity.  So, let’s stop arguing about this “mystery”, and instead get our minds wrapped around praying for people to raise from the dead and being willing to die for Jesus.  That’s enough to keep my feeble mind and heart busy for quite some time.

Sometimes I just never learn.  I can think of so many things that I just keep doing in life, no matter how many times it turns out horribly.  For example, why do I never ask what seat I have when I check in at the airport?  Do I really not want to bother the person checking me in?  Inevitably, I end up in seat 89Z, which is a lovely seat right next to the toilets.  Every minute or so, I get the pleasure of that blast of wind accompanied by a lung searing smell every time someone opens the door.  Why do I keep pressing the top button on my Iphone instead of the bottom one?  Do I think elves might have snuck in at night and changed their function?  I consider myself reasonably intelligent (though my wife may beg to differ), yet it appears to me that there are some things I never learn.

Which brings us to our question of the day, can Jesus learn?  If He can learn, then how can He be God?  God already knows everything, right?  Therefore, if Jesus has to learn things, people might come to the conclusion that He wasn’t really God.  Others might say that He gave up His “divinity” during the incarnation, and that is why He would need to learn things as we do.  We can thank Luke 2:52 for this, “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.”  WAIT a minute here.  How can Jesus increase in wisdom?  That would imply He was lacking wisdom.  For that matter, how can he increase in favor with God?  That would imply that He had “lower” favor before.

I believe that this verse (and others like it) do not imply that Jesus was not divine during His whole incarnation.  What Jesus did not do is simply incarnate into a fully grown man just before going to the cross.  Of course, Jesus could have done this and saved Himself time in the flesh, as well as the suffering He encountered through living in this world as a man.  The necessity was only that Jesus come in the flesh and die on the cross for sins.  You might argue that Jesus had to “be born in Bethlehem” and “born of a virgin” to fulfill Scripture, but those things did not affect the effectiveness of His atonement.  Jesus could have come as a man, and then would have predicted just that through the prophets instead of His birth and life.

That Jesus didn’t do the “easier” route challenges me to think through why He didn’t.  Yes, Jesus main reason for the incarnation was to provide a sacrifice for sin.  I have no doubts on that.  However, I believe the way He walked that out was to show us a living model of a righteous life.  In our next post, we will look at several examples of Jesus providing us the perfect example of humility, perseverance, integrity, and many other elements of the Christian life.  The very fact that He lives 30 years before beginning His ministry already challenges me with my love for others and willingness to lay down my life for them.

The verse about this whole issue that has touched me most is Hebrews 5:8, “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.”  Once again, we are confronted with Jesus learning something, and this time it is obedience.  Not only would Jesus not know something, but some might think He must have been disobedient before suffering.  As we have already established, we have to step back from looking with human eyes, and consider this from Jesus point of view.  Before the incarnation, Jesus was in perfect peace in His divinity.  Of course, He KNEW the future, and understood that He would suffer when He was incarnated.  However, until He was actually incarnated, He had never had that EXPERIENCE of suffering.  Jesus lived through persecution merely by being obedient to God’s will.  He did no wrong or disobedience to deserve that.

What I am struck with once again, is the love of Christ for us.  Not only would He go through the experience of growth as a human from baby to man, but He would also suffer as we do, but from no sin of His own.  Both came at a great cost to Him, yet His love for us drove Him to endure all of it for the sake of our forgiveness and eternal life.   I am signing up for the School of Jesus!

I will always take the whole issue on the divinity and humanity of Jesus quite personally.  I was reading an article on the Jesus Seminar in a magazine a few years ago.  This group of “Christian scholars” (and I use that first and second term quite loosely) got together in order to decide what parts of the Gospels were true and which were not.  You would think the thing that bothered me most was that they had the nerve to believe that they had the ability to to decide what parts of the Bible were authentic or not.  However, the first thing that caught my eye was where they were meeting to do this.  They were meeting in the exact same place that my wife and I had our wedding reception!  How dare they ruin my happy memories with their conference?  Couldn’t these guys have found a different place to abuse the Bible?  I am sure a meeting room was available at the Lake of Fire resort.

I find it ironic that early in church history, false teachers simply didn’t want to affirm the humanity of Jesus.  Gnostics were so focused on escape from the flesh through knowledge, that it simply blew their minds that God would inhabit an illusory, evil body.   It was much easier for their Greek philosophical minds to accept Jesus only appearing to have a body, then to radically shift their mindset.  (that’s not the ironic part, just hold on a minute).  Now, today, false teachers don’t want to affirm the divinity of Jesus, and are quite happy to reduce Jesus to a poor, Jewish, peasant philosopher.  To their rational, humanistic minds, it is much easier to believe in a wise Ghandi-like figure, than someone who walks on water and is born from a virgin.  I mean, if you believe this kind of stuff, what’s next?  talking donkeys???

For the next few posts, we will be discussing various challenges of the doctrine of Jesus incarnation.  In the midst of some of the posts (but hopefully not all of them), you may be tempted to throw your hands in the air and say, “Somebody scream!”  Oops, no, that is what you would say at a rap concert.  What I meant to say is, “Why does all this really matter?”  It matters because God’s covenant with His people in the Old Testament began with a great promise.  Exodus 29:46 says, ” They shall know that I am the LORD their God who brought them out of the land of Egypt, that I might dwell among them; I am the LORD their God.”  This was a RADICAL statement and promise from God.

Why?  Because the gods NEVER wanted to live with their people.  The gods lived up there or under there or out there, but never with man.  Why would they want to live with evil, mortal, stinky, weak, insignificant people?  The Greek gods lived on Mount Olympus.  Most Egyptian gods lived in the heavens or sky.  Sure, they would come down periodically just to mess with people and send them on meaningless quests or father a human child for fun, but there is no reason a god would live down here.  The whole point of religion has been to escape this world of suffering and get to where the gods are, not the other way around.  When the Jews failed to live up to their part of the covenant, Ezekiel 11:22-25 reveals that the glory of God departed from Jerusalem.

Yet, we know that isn’t the end of the story.  God made a promise and was serious about pursuing His relationship with man.  How serious?  So serious that He became a man to do so.  John 1:14 says, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory.”  That God would take on hunger, persecution, pain, tears, and eventually a horrible death on the cross to dwell with us is astounding.  But it gets better.  It matters that Jesus was God and man, because the New Testament tells us that He had to be so in order to be the perfect sacrifice for our sins.  Hebrews 10:14, “For by a single offering, he perfected for all time those who are being sanctified”.  Read all of Hebrews 9 – 10.  You will get the point that Jesus was the only sacrifice that would provide us with eternal forgiveness.

That is where these two things come together in the incarnation.  Not only does Jesus coming in the flesh show us God dwelling with us (hanging out with Lazarus, prostitutes, zealots???), but it also had to happen so that Revelation 21:3 could take place.  “Behold the dwelling place of God is with man.  He will dwell with them, and they will be his people.”  This is speaking of our living in eternity in heaven with God, which we can only enter into through the sacrifice of Jesus.  We get Eden back again, and it is all seen and due to Jesus being fully God and fully man.  So, umm, yes it matters.