The Man Who Is God (Part 2 of 4)

You have probably at one point or another wondered about Jesus. What was his childhood? What was he like?

What was he interested in? Could people already tell that he was special? While the Bible doesn't give us a lot of specifics, today on Truth for Life we'll look at the ordinary and extraordinary details about Jesus that the scriptures do reveal. Alistair Begg is teaching from Luke chapter 2. What we have in this little incident is the only recorded material in the Gospels of the life of Jesus as a young boy, as a growing young man.

There's no question that it does give to us the fourfold developmental stages in the life of a young person, but I can't imagine that that's the whole reason that we have this record. What, then, is the business to which he refers? Didn't you realize, he says, that I must be about my Father's business? So I said to myself, Well, I need to understand this business.

What is the activity? Christ's business, if you like, was to make absolutely explicit the free, universal offer of the gospel. And as I listen to some of you regurgitate to me what you think it is I'm saying, I realize how deficient I'm becoming in my instruction. Because as I listen to some of you talk, you sound as though you're becoming increasingly fearful in your evangelism.

Lest, somehow or another, you may goof it up and find that the wrong people are getting saved, you know. John Duncan, the late John Duncan of Scotland, reasoned it out in this wonderful way. He said, Sin is the handle by which I take Christ. And this is what he wrote. I don't read anywhere in God's Word that Christ came to save John Duncan.

But I read this. He came to save sinners. And John Duncan is a sinner, and that means he came to save John Duncan. How can it be simultaneously true that only the predestined are saved and that God commands all men to believe?

Frankly, I don't know. But I do know this, that both horns of the dilemma are equally valid, that the offer of the gospel is a universal offer. Perhaps the key is in the great prayer of Augustine, Lord, give what thou dost command and command what thou wilt. What does God command? He commands faith.

And yet he also gives it. And the faith required is my faith, my believing, my trusting, my doing. Nobody believes for me.

Nobody believes in a vacuum on my account. I understand the message of the gospel. I face the fact of my sinfulness. I come as an individual to trust unreservedly in Christ. That is something that I must do if I am to be saved. That is why I say to you again and again, the issue is not whether you were confirmed or baptized or grew up in the United Church of whatever it was.

The issue is this. Have you ever come to Christ and acknowledged that you are a sinner and that it was his business to redeem those who believe? And then you said, Lord, I believe in you. Now help me with all of my unbelief.

It is there that the transaction takes place. And yet—and here is the mystery—that while it is my faith and it is my trusting and it is my doing, yet nevertheless I do it by the grace of God, because the faith that he commands he also gives. Do not allow a perverse approach to an understanding of the doctrine of election to tie your tongue in relationship to making clear to men and women that they may come to Christ and that they may be saved if they will believe in the Lord Jesus. That is our message. That is our proclamation. And anything less than that is less than the proclamation of the gospel and is less than the Father's business concerning which this twelve-year-old boy mentions. So, I say to myself, well, that's the activity.

I've done enough about that for the time being. What about his identity? Well, you say, well, it's Jesus who's saying this.

Yeah, I understand. But what are we saying about this? Especially in relationship to the two summary statements—the child growing and becoming strong and being filled with wisdom and so on—many of us are a lot closer to the heresies of the first century than we realize. The first heresy that coursed through the church did not have to do… It had to do with the person of Christ, but it did not have to do with the denial of the deity of Christ. It had to do with the denial of the humanity of Christ. And men began to say that the body of Christ wasn't a real body. It only seemed to be a body. Docetism, D-O-C-E-T-I-S-M, which was the heresy that while God was truly God and had come in the flesh, that he had not inhabited a real body. That it was a phantom body, if you like, and that somehow or another it was less than normal. Now, where did they come up with this?

Well, it's very easy. They believed that matter was evil. Spirit could be good, but matter had to be evil. Therefore, physicality could not be something that God embraced.

Because God is absolutely good, matter is definitely bad, so you cannot combine a good God with bad matter and of anything but something that it shouldn't be there. And so, in order to preserve the deity of Christ, they denied the humanity of Christ. Now, in many of our private thoughts, I say to you again, I think we're closer to that than we realize. That in order for us to uphold the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ—which, of course, is vitally important—we may unwittingly be letting go of a real grasp of a Christology which has a human Christ who is absolutely real. And of course, when you read the Gospels, you find that they are replete with evidences concerning this. The apostle John, who more than any of the Gospel writers was concerned to establish the credibility of Christ's deity, is the one who records for us that when the soldier plunged the spear into the side of Christ, that what came out was all the normal material of physicality. And in those references to his hunger, to his thirst, to his tiredness, to all of these different elements, we are gaining a picture, in rebuttal of early-century nonsense, a picture that is of the true humanity of Christ. Christ was a real baby, and a real twelve-year-old, and a real teenager. So when we read about the development of the child in verse 40 and again in verse 51, we need to understand what is being said. Now, let me just remind you that the doctrine of the incarnation is this—that the second person of the Trinity became incarnate.

What does that mean? It means at least this—that his body had the same biological composition as yours and mine. It had the same anatomy and the same physiology, the same central nervous system, and the same sensitivity to pain. It means that one half of his chromosomes were provided by Mary, his earthly mother, and the other half were provided miraculously in the creative act of the virgin perception. Therefore, we must not think of Jesus as humanity. You know, that God became humanity.

No, God became man. And like every other child, the humanness of Jesus was specific and peculiar to him. He wasn't every man. He wasn't the composite man.

He was a first-century Jewish kid, growing up in a backwater province in a stinky little town. That's who he was, and that's where he was. It's a silly phantom notion, and a blasphemous notion, that conceives of Christ being able to dunk every basketball, make every putt, win every race, solve every problem. That is a phantom Christ.

No! He could run a hundred yards in as fast as he could run it, and he couldn't run it any faster. And as he got beyond fifteen and seventeen and nineteen and twenty, he didn't get faster and faster and faster.

He got, like you and me, slower and slower and slower. But because we've got a warped view many as of Christ, we've got this idea that Jesus sprouts wings and goes up the street and gets all of his tools back and knows exactly where they all are. No, no, no, no, no. That's docetism. That's heresy. Jesus snaps his fingers and makes planets.

Jesus twinkles around with his hands, and fish jump out of the water. All of that nonsense, which you can find in the mall, emerges from closed Bibles and empty heads and people with fantastic imaginations. And it is an indication of the fact that we wrestle against spiritual wickedness in the heavenly places, that our friends and our neighbors may turn those books of nonsense into bestsellers while at the same time never cracking their Bible to find out what God has said to us about the person of his Son. We shouldn't be surprised by that. We say, Is that about it?

Yeah, it is about it. But I've got one more for you before we stop. If he was really human in terms of his physicality, he was also really human in terms of his psychology. He had a real soul. The Shorter Scottish Catechism in answering a question concerning the Incarnation makes this point. It's answer twenty-two, for those of you who want to go and check. But in answering the question about what has happened in the Incarnation, part of it says this, in taking to himself a true body and a reasonable soul.

Suke. Now, the reason that the church labored so hard with this was because this was the basis of another heresy, and Apollinarius, in the early centuries, taught that Jesus did not have a real soul. That he was not, while he may have been okay physically, that when it came to the matter of psychology, that he wasn't like anybody else. Because you had a human body with a divine soul, the logos, the eternal Word, and, says Apollinarius, what you have in Christ is the union of divine matter with a human body. But no human psyche.

And so, in the fourth and fifth century, you find that this notion is repudiated by the church. They insist that Jesus was complete and perfect godhood, and he was complete and perfect manhood, he was complete in terms of his physical nature, and he was complete in terms of his human psychology. Well, you're sitting there saying to yourself, I wonder if this really matters a rap.

I want to tell you it does. Because that's the mention here of his growing in wisdom, because he had a human mind. Jesus had a human mind. When you think of Jesus' physical growth, you don't imagine that taking place miraculously, do you? You don't think that people came over to the carpenter shop, and one day he was, you know, eighteen inches long, and they came back, and the next day he was four foot six?

No. He grew incrementally. His bones lengthened. According to the genetic composition that was unique to him, he had his own DNA. In the same way, when we think about the development of the mind of the Lord Jesus, you don't think, somehow or another, that this took place in a way that was beyond the ordinary, do you? You don't think that Jesus emerged from the womb being able to say his alphabet, do you? I think some of you do. You don't think that he knew his colors because he was Jesus?

No. His mother sat with him the same as other mothers sat and said, Green, this is the grass, the grass is green, the sky is blue. He said, Jesus, you've got the green and the blue mixed up again, son.

It's green, blue, yellow, so on. That he would go out and play, and he would come home and he would ask questions, and his mother would answer his questions, Joseph would answer his questions, and he would grow in his understanding of things. He became wiser.

That's what he's saying. He grew in wisdom. He became better informed.

He accumulated an ever-increasing fund of common sense. James S. Stewart, in a wonderful passage, a Presbyterian minister from Scotland of an earlier era, he says that the boyhood influences of Jesus were the very things that allowed him to grow in wisdom. And he articulates them. He says, for example, Jesus was a student of nature. He went out, and he looked, and he saw the lilies, he saw the birds, he saw the harvest, he saw the shepherd. And as he thinks about these things, he begins to develop in his understanding of them, and that becomes the source of his illustrative material. He says then in Matthew 6, consider the lilies, how they grow.

They don't toil or store away in barns, and God looks after lilies. He says, it's time for the harvest. He says, I'm the good shepherd.

The good shepherd knows his sheep. He's a student of nature. He's a student of human nature. He observed people. He watched people as he grew. And he then steps up, and he begins to teach the people, and he says to them, to what can I compare this generation? And then he says, they're like children sitting in the marketplace.

Where did that come from? It came from his observation. He knew what it was like when children sat in the marketplace, and one said they could play the flute, and the other one said they couldn't play the flute, and one said it's my turn, and the other said it's my turn, and the sulky disgruntlement of the children becomes the focus of his illustrative material.

How is he able to see? And one stood, and he prayed to himself, saying, I thank thee that I am not like other men. Where did he come up with this picture of religiosity? He was a student of human nature. He'd observed it. He's a student of nature, a student of human nature, a student of Scripture.

Do you ever think of that? That Jesus studied his Bible? That he studied Genesis and Deuteronomy and Isaiah and the Psalms and Jeremiah?

Can we honestly say, without any notion of being incorrect, that Mary calls him down for his dinner? She says, Now, come down for your dinner, and I want you to know, and I want you to tell me at the table if you've done your Bible memorization. Because I don't want to go up to your bar mitzvah with you and find that you're just dribbling down your chin. I want to know that you know the stuff. Because when you are bar mitzvahed, I want you to know the stuff, Jesus. I want to know that you know it, and I want you to come and tell me when you've done it. And he grew in his knowledge of the Scriptures.

The fact that you find that so difficult to understand is because of what I said at the beginning. We have a phantom Christ in mind. And so, when he is tempted in the wilderness, how does he respond to the temptation? He quotes the Bible. How is he able to quote the Bible? Because he learned the Bible. When did he learn the Bible? When he was growing in wisdom and knowledge. He was a student of carpentry. "'Is not this the carpenter's son?'

they said with a sneer." And of course he was. It's a wonderful thought, that for the greater part of his existence, he was working with his hands—hammers, nails, chisels, the whole business, whatever they used in those days. And he was a student of home life. He grew up with brothers and sisters, as you'll find in Matthew 13 and Mark 6. His father Joseph seems to have died early on, so Jesus as the elder brother would have been the man around the house. And I think his parables reflect that growing wisdom. He was able to talk about the lady who lost a coin over somewhere down in the corner, and they had to take all the furniture out and sweep the whole place and find it. He'd been there. He was able to talk about the leaven in relationship to the cooking process and the baking process and the quantities of leaven and flour.

How do you do that when you're a thirty-year-old man? Where do you come up with that stuff? He understood the plight of the homeowner who had an empty cupboard and a visitor down at the front door going, Hey, I'd like to stay the evening. And all these factors play in to the child growing, becoming strong, being filled with wisdom, and the grace of God resting upon him. So in other words, he underwent normal intellectual development. He learned by observing the world, by listening to his mother, and by searching the Scriptures. He wasn't ignorant of anything he ought to have known, but he was, at the human level, not omniscient.

Some of you are going, Whoop! Wait a minute. He knew everything that it was necessary to know. The Father made everything known to him that the church needed to know, but he was not at the human level omniscient. If we knew nothing other than his statement in Mark chapter 13 concerning the return of Christ, he says, Nobody knows the time when the sun will reappear.

Neither angels nor even the sun himself, he said, I don't know that. Calvin says, There would be no impropriety in saying that Christ, who knew all things, was ignorant of something in respect of his perception as a man. Now, that does not mean that the Lord was fallible.

He was infallible. But infallibility does not depend upon omniscience. Does this matter?

It matters incredibly. For without a real human Christ there is no atonement. Without a divine Christ there is no atonement. The great high priest who ever lives to intercede for us was the twelve-year-old boy in the temple saying, Don't you understand that I need to be about my Father's business?

And therefore we do not have a high priest who is somehow removed from and distanced from our infirmities, but we have one who is tempted in all points, like as we are, and yet without sin. So that this morning, when we come into a place like this and we say to ourselves, You know, I don't know that anybody really understands my psyche. I don't know that anybody understands the longing of my souls.

I don't know if there is a person to whom I can go. I want to tell you there is one to whom you may go, and I want to offer him to you as your only Savior and friend. And he is real, truly man, truly God. Have you ever truly trusted him? It is critical for us to understand that Jesus was fully God and fully human.

That is Alistair Begg with a life-altering question. Have we trusted Jesus? You're listening to Truth for Life. If you'd like to find out more about what it means to believe in Jesus and to trust him as your Savior and your friend, you can watch a video titled The Story. It's on our Learn More page. You'll find other helpful teaching there as well, including messages from Alistair that look at the person and work of Jesus and what it means to be a Christian.

Visit truthforlife.org slash learn more. Now, as we entered the last few days of the year, we are amazed at the ways that God uses Truth for Life to reach a huge audience across the United States and also around the world. Because Alistair's teaching is available online, it can be downloaded for free, and as a result, we have a large global population that relies on Truth for Life as a source of daily learning and encouragement. Alistair is here with us today. Alistair, thinking about that is really extraordinary. Yes, thanks, Bob.

I'm staggered by the fact that more than 50 million messages have been downloaded in various forms in 2022 alone. And so, as we reach the final stretch of this year, we rely on your support to close out the year in a financially strong position and to be able to look to the development of the work in 2023. And for that reason, and more reasons besides, we'd love to hear from you today, and Bob can tell you how. You can give your support by donating at truthforlife.org slash donate. Our offices are closed today because of the Christmas and New Year's holidays, so we're not able to take your donation over the phone. If you'd like to mail a donation to us, you can do that. Send it to Truth for Life, Post Office Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio. Our zip code is 44139.

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Not by subtracting something, but by taking something. Join us tomorrow as we find out what it is that Jesus took on. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life. Where the Learning is for Living.