Boy Jesus in the Temple

As a boy, Jesus amazed the teachers in the temple. His thinking was crystal clear.

His acumen was without parallel. And as a 12-year-old child, He could think more profoundly, more consistently, more acutely than the most learned theologians of His day. This is one of the only glimpses we have of the boy Jesus, but it's enough to show us that He was no ordinary child, and everyone around Him recognized it. Thanks for listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Friday.

I'm Lee Webb, and we are featuring Dr. R.C. Sproul's series, What Did Jesus Do? Today's lesson helps us focus on the earliest indication of Jesus' divine nature. Today we're going to look at a passage that usually receives very little attention, but I think is important to that understanding of His work, and that passage is the record of His visit to the temple in Jerusalem when He was 12 years old. This is one of the rare passages that we have in the New Testament that teaches us anything about the so-called lost years of Jesus between His birth and the beginning of His public ministry that took place at about age 30. And so we wonder, what was He doing all of those years? What was His life like as He was growing up in Nazareth, working presumably in the carpenter shop of His father Joseph?

About the only thing we know between His dedication at the temple and His earthly ministry is that visit to the temple except for the brief interlude of the family's flight into Egypt as Joseph had been warned in a dream not to return home, but rather to seek protection from Herod by fleeing into Egypt. And it wasn't until Herod died that he was told by the angel that it was safe to return to Nazareth. Now, those lost years are the subject of somewhat fanciful, creatively imaginative, apocryphal gospels that were penned in the second and third centuries by the Gnostic heretics in an attempt to show that they had equal authority to the apostles. They would use the names of the apostles basically as forgeries for their documents like the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas and the like.

Of course, these books were clearly repudiated and rejected by the early church as being not of apostolic origin or having canonical authority. There's been a flurry of interest in them now since the bestselling work of Dan Brown on the Da Vinci Code where much of the speculation there was drawn from these apocryphal books. They tell fanciful stories of Jesus as a boy, for example, kind of a trivial use of His supernatural powers.

When He was playing by Himself and was lonely, He formed the figure of a bird out of the dirt and then did His magic, and the bird came to life, and He was able to play with the bird. Or if He had playmates that gave Him a hard time, He brought down judgments from heaven against them. This kind of thing is so plainly apocryphal and frivolous that they certainly are not worthy as historical records of the life of Jesus. Basically what we're told is that Jesus as a boy grew in knowledge, in wisdom, and in stature. And we see a brief glimpse of that growth in the record in Luke's Gospel of Jesus' visit to the temple, which I'll read for us now.

In chapter 2 of Luke's Gospel, beginning in verse 41, we read this account. His parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover. And when He was 12 years old, they went up to Jerusalem according to the custom of the feast. And when they had finished the days as they returned, the boy Jesus lingered behind in Jerusalem.

And Joseph and his mother did not know it. But supposing Him to have been in the company, they went a day's journey and sought Him among their relatives and acquaintances. So when they did not find Him, they returned to Jerusalem seeking Him. Now so it was after three days they found Him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, both listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard Him were astonished at His understanding and at His answers.

And so when they saw Him, they were amazed. And His mother said to Him, Son, why have You done this to us? Look, Your Father and I have sought You anxiously. And He said to them, why did You seek Me? Why did You seek Me?

Did You not know that I must be about My Father's business? But they did not understand the statement which He spoke to them. Now one of the things that's so fascinating about this text is this episode accentuates and emphasizes the response of the theologians of Jesus' day to this 12-year-old boy who appears in the temple as an incredible child prodigy, having mastered so much knowledge of the Scriptures and of theology that He was confounding them both by the answers to the questions that He heard and by the questions He was posing to them. Now the first thing I want to look at here with respect to this matter has to do with the knowledge of Jesus, which was so radically different from everybody else in the country.

Why? When we look at our doctrine of sin, when we look at the biblical teaching of the fall of the human race, we realize that in that fall, the effects of sin permeate the whole human person. It not only exposes the body to physical maladies, to diseases, to death, and to other infirmities whereby the body is weakened severely by the fallen condition, but the fall also had a significant impact upon the minds of human beings. And that impact we call in theology the noetic effects of sin, the noetic effects of sin. That's a concept that's usually not articulated every day in the life of the church. But the concept comes from the Greek word nous, which is the word in Greek for mind.

And so noetic means of or pertaining to the nous or of or pertaining to the human mind. Now Paul teaches us in the very first in the very first chapter of Romans that the consequence of sin in rejecting God's revelation that He gives to all of us through nature is that our minds are darkened. Sin clouds the mind.

It impairs our ability to think clearly. Now we are still left after the fall with a capacity for reason. We can still, even in our sinfulness, add two and two and come to the conclusion that they mean four.

Or we can still work syllogisms and other philosophical problems. Yet at the same time, each one of us is given to making mistakes in our thinking, and at times very serious and costly mistakes. It's become an adage in our culture to say that to err is human, that that is a constant reminder of our fallen humanity. Why is it, you know, I've often wondered when people are exposed to so much of the same information, they come to such radical conclusions. Have you noticed that? That sometimes even when we meet other Christians, we find that we're in serious disagreement one with another.

Why? Is the Bible that confusing and that lacking in clarity that people come to such disparate conclusions as to what it teaches, and those conclusions can be held with fierce tenacity and create all kinds of divisions and disruptions within the life of the church, within the lives of family members, and destroy human relationships. We all have the same material. Well, we can say some people study more diligently than others, and so they're more likely to have a better understanding of the material they're studying, but all of us fail to love the Lord our God with all of our minds, and so all of us fall into periods of slothfulness and failure to really apply ourselves intellectually to the understanding of Scripture. Not only that, in our sinful condition, we come to the text with certain biases, and the biased person can often miss the forest for the trees because his mind is held in captivity by that bias. If you were raised in a particular tradition, went to a particular church, and were taught the doctrine of that particular church, you may have received doctrinal teaching that was incorrect, but it came to you that you were taught.

It came to you from people you trusted, maybe from your parents, maybe from your pastor, and that's the way you were taught to think, and we talk about then the creation of love lines, where I have a certain prior commitment to the denomination in which I was reared, or to the views of my parents or my professors, and it's very hard to cut those love lines and be open to correction from a better understanding of what the Scripture teaches. Not only that, the very act of thinking itself has been weakened by sin. I used to teach a course in logic, and I would give assignments to my students after they learned the various kinds of logical fallacies that we were seeking to avoid. I would say, okay, now I want you to come in tomorrow with an example of the commission of each one of these fallacies that we've just studied. Maybe we've looked at 20 of them, informal fallacies.

And I say, I want you to come in with examples of these from tomorrow's newspaper. And it would not be difficult to find an example of every one of those fallacies present in the latest news bulletin. In fact, in our textbook, when we would look at examples of these fallacies, we would draw them not from popular journalism, but we would draw them from the greatest minds in the history of the world.

We would see a logical error apparent in a statement from Plato or from Descartes or from Immanuel Kant or for David Hume or John Stuart Mill, because all people, even those who are exceedingly bright, are given to making logical errors. Now can you imagine a human being functioning mentally without any of the noetic effects of sin? Up until this point, the world had never seen a sinless human being. So Jesus, in His sinlessness, in that He did not participate in original sin, was not weakened by these same problems that I've just been talking about, so that His thinking was crystal clear. His acumen was without parallel. And as a 12-year-old child, He could think more profoundly, more consistently, more acutely than the most learned theologians of His day.

He didn't come there to show off. He came there to learn, because that is what He had been doing for the first 12 years of His life. Now you understand the second matter that this raises, and that is the relationship between the divine nature and the human nature. Some people say, well, of course Jesus knew the answers to all these questions. Wasn't He God, and isn't God omniscient? Yes, He was God incarnate, and yes, God is omniscient, but touching His human nature, Jesus was not given a divine brain. He was not endowed in His human nature with a divine attribute of omniscience. Now the divine nature could communicate information to the human Jesus, and we would see from time to time Jesus astonishing people with the supernatural knowledge that was at His disposal.

But the divine nature did not communicate the divine attribute of omniscience to the human nature, as some have tried to argue throughout church history. That would have been a violation of His true humanity. So in any case, we find Jesus coming now to the temple. It was customary that a year before a boy did His bar mitzvah, that His family would bring Him to the temple, that He may become accustomed to the procedures that would be followed there in Jerusalem the following year. And people would come from great distances coming up to Jerusalem for the Passover. And here Jesus' family was coming from Nazareth, and they would come not only with the immediate family but with cousins and aunts and uncles and other acquaintances from Nazareth would caravan together.

And this was commonplace that the people from various villages and towns would come together to make the trip. And so they make the trip, they make their visit, and they leave, and they're gone a whole day. And Mary says to Joseph, where's Jesus? And Joseph says to Mary, I don't know.

I thought you were watching after Him. He must be with one of the other members of the family in the caravan. And so they made this search through their friends and relatives, and to their shock, Jesus is nowhere to be found. And He's already been missing now for more than a day, and they have to make another day's journey to go back to Jerusalem to retrace their steps to see if they can find Him. By now, you can imagine the anxiety that's overcome Mary and Joseph wondering about their unusual son and where He was. And so the record tells us that after three days they found Him in the temple in the midst of the teachers, and we read, and all who heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers. So when they saw Him, they were amazed, and His mother said to Him, Son, why have You done this to us? Here's a case in point that one could use to argue against the sinlessness of Jesus. After all, He's now really bothering Mary, and she's asking, why have You done this to us?

She sees this as an offense to her and to her husband and to the whole family. Jesus says, why did you seek Me? They said, why did you do this?

Jesus says, what's wrong with you? Why are you seeking Me? You should know where I was. You should know what I was doing. Do you not know that I must be about My Father's business? That they didn't understand this statement which He spoke to them.

And so there's a problem of knowledge here. Mary and Joseph didn't know where He was or why He was doing what He was doing. He did know what He was doing and had a clear understanding of why He was doing it.

He was doing it. And so there's a sense here in which Jesus mildly, politely, kindly is rebuking His mother for not knowing what, in light of all of the revelation that had been given to her, particularly at the time of her annunciation, that she should have known. She had been meditating and pondering these things all these years wondering really what is the destiny of my Son?

What is the meaning of the occasion of the virgin birth that I had and the message that was given to me by the angel Gabriel and then later by the prophetess Anna and also from Simeon in the temple? Who is this child? What's going to become of Him?

What's He doing? And He says, don't you know I'm supposed to be about My Father's business? You can imagine Mary saying, yes, and your Father's business is carpentry back there in Nazareth, and that's where you should have been, helping your dad. Jesus is speaking about His heavenly Father. And this also gives us an insight into His work.

Here even at age 12, in His growing awareness, in His growing self-consciousness of what His task is on this earth, at least He knows this much, that He has a job to perform for His Father. And that job has to do somehow with the temple and the things that are being discussed there in the temple. Now as the Son of God incarnate, we also understand that there is a subordination of sorts between the Son and the Father in the Trinity. We speak about the economic distinctions in the Trinity, that is, the distinctions that have to do with the work of God. It is the Father who sends the Son. It is the Son, as I mentioned earlier, who comes and accomplishes the work of redemption.

It is the Spirit who then is sent to apply the work of redemption to people. And so here even the earthly Son, together with the divine second person of the Trinity, is aware of this subordinate responsibility. And Jesus has this compunction.

He has this compulsion to do what the Father has sent Him to do. Later on it would be said of Him that His meat and His drink was to do the will of the Father. And I think it didn't take long for Mary and Joseph, even though they didn't understand it altogether, they certainly understood that Jesus had a mission before God that they had been informed of. Again, they didn't know the details, but I think they talked much at length on the way back to Nazareth about this episode.

But I'm glad that it's incorporated by Luke, and Luke's the only one who tells us about it. And when Luke writes his gospel, the beginning of the gospel, he tells us that he had undertaken to give a factual account, and the historical indication is that he interviewed Mary, because we have more information about his birth and his infancy and his early life from Luke than from anyone else. And so I'm sure that by the support of the power of the Holy Spirit, along with the testimony of Mary, we're getting this account that prepares us to understand Jesus' growing self-consciousness and focus on the mission that has been given to Him by His Father. This story really shows us that even as a boy, by His perfect example, Jesus was teaching us how we should relate to our Father in heaven.

We're glad you've joined us today for Renewing Your Mind, and we are wrapping up our highlights of Dr. R.C. 's role series, What Did Jesus Do? In this series, R.C. shows us that Jesus' perfect life is just as important as His death and resurrection.

In 12 messages, he uncovers what it means for Christ to be the second Adam. We would like for you to have this two-DVD set. Just give a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries, and we will be happy to send it your way.

You can give your gift when you call us at 800-435-4343, or you can make your request online at renewingyourmind.org. Chris Larson, our president and CEO, has stopped by the studio. Chris, we're always quick to say that Ligonier Ministries is not here to replace the local church. Our goal is to come alongside the church to support the church with the resources that we produce and publish.

That's right. We think of ourselves as a Monday-through-Saturday ministry because we want God's people worshiping with the local church on the Lord's Day. And we're there to come alongside and actually really underneath the church. And so this testimony comes from a pastor in Louisiana.

His name's John. Ligonier is a great resource for solid biblical teaching and solid theological teaching based on the Bible. And it's a great way to learn and grow in the knowledge of Scripture, theology based on Scripture, Christian life based on Scripture. It's a delight and a joy for me to be able to partner with this ministry. I know this ministry has integrity. I know this ministry has leadership that can be trusted. I know that this ministry is not about promoting itself, but about promoting the gospel of Jesus Christ and the knowledge of God based on Scripture.

It doesn't waver from that. I want to be on that team. And that's really what we strive to do, to be a team member with the local church. I would say to our listeners, if your church is not using Ligonier resources in their discipleship and Christian education programs, give us a call and we'll find out ways that we can serve you. It's possible that your pastors and church leaders, they may not know of all that Ligonier has to offer them. So give us a call and we've got a program to partner with the local church and there'll be some significant savings that we can offer your congregation. Yes, and we do hope you'll take advantage of that. Thank you, Chris. Next week on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. Sproul examines the promises concerning Jesus that we find in the Old Testament, promises that were made to Jeremiah and Isaiah, but promises that go all the way back to Abraham, even to Eve. I hope you'll join us for that beginning Monday for Renewing Your Mind.