Parenting the Perfect Child

When you picture in your mind's eye Jesus growing up as a boy in Nazareth, what kind of images does that conjure up for you? You discuss this with someone who ignores the implications of the Incarnation and they're already bored. Yeah, yeah, God became a man. Yeah, we know that. But you're thinking all along that Jesus is running around Nazareth. He has a robe on like all the other little boys did in the custom of the day, but underneath is this Superman suit.

The bullets will only bounce off his chest. That's not the truth of the Incarnation. We know, of course, that Jesus is God. But the truth of the Incarnation is that Jesus became a man.

He was fully God and fully man at the same time. That means that he experienced much of what we experienced. He could bleed. He could feel pain.

He probably fell and skinned his knees. It's possible that he was even bullied. In all of it Jesus was sinless. So here's the question for you parents out there. What would it be like to be the imperfect parent of a perfect child?

We're going to explore that question today here on Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey. This lesson is called Parenting the Perfect Child. Luke chapter 2 verse 52.

I want you to turn there. Just one verse that will summarize what happened in this little village called Nazareth. And Jesus, Luke writes, kept increasing in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and men. By the way, this is normal language for growth.

It's really not all that unique. In fact, in the Old Testament account of Samuel's growth, the text is similar. It reads, now the boy Samuel was growing in stature and in favor both with the Lord and men. First Samuel 2.26. In Luke's account of John the baptizer's growth is a little boy.

He writes in chapter 1 and verse 80. And the child continued to grow and became strong in spirit. If you look back at chapter 2 verse 40 here in Luke's gospel, he writes of young Jesus, the child continued to grow and become strong increasing in wisdom and the grace of God was upon him. When you arrive at Luke chapter 2 verse 52, you enter a scene that provides even more mystery for us regarding the boyhood of Jesus. Some would believe that Jesus had all the wisdom he needed when he was born and he just simply increased along the way.

But he had it all then. Well, Luke informs us that Jesus advanced. He increased in three ways. In fact, you might circle the three nouns that appear in your text. He increased in wisdom, in stature, and in favor.

I would agree with one scholar, a Greek scholar by the name of Lenski that these nouns are datives of relation. And the imperfect tense, Jesus kept increasing, tells us not only that he had progressed at this point but that he would continue to progress in these attributes. The truth is we find it hard to believe, don't we, that Jesus ever developed in any way.

That's why I'm making the point. Being the perfect child, it must have meant that his development was already perfected. He was the wisest 18 month old anybody had ever heard jabber away. That would have violated the human nature that he had and the normal boy that he was yet without sin. The truth is it would have been possible for Jesus to do something unwise without sinning. Being unwise is not the same thing as sin.

Aren't you glad about that? As you develop in your wisdom, as you walk in the ways of God, and we'll talk a little bit about what that word means. But Jesus here is 100% human. That means as he progressed, Luke wants us to know, and Luke, by the way, is the doctor. He's a medical doctor and he's the one that gives us this kind of language in his gospel alone. Jesus is going to progress from immaturity to maturity. As I mentioned in our last discussion, from silliness to sobriety. He will progress from naivety to discernment.

He will move from uninformed actions that made dumb or even dangerous decisions, as little boys often do, to informed actions. Jesus was not God humanized or a human deified. The mystery of the incarnation is that he had a divine nature and a human nature intermingling in that mystery.

He was 100% God and 100% man all at the same time. He caught a cold, just like every child developing his immune system. His nose ran. He sneezed. He stubbed his toe. He smashed his finger.

He might have needed a nightlight too. As he grew, he would fight temptation like any young man, the difference being he would never fail one time. The author of Scripture doesn't want us to miss this. That's why you get into certain texts and it's a mystery when it speaks of him in ways and you think, wait a second. You have to understand he's 100% human as well as 100% God. He was tempted in every point as we, yet without sin, Hebrews 4.15.

You discover the implications of that phrase. He was tempted just like we were in every point and you discover somebody who can feel exactly what you feel. Some who don't know me might think that I'm denigrating the Savior.

No, I don't want you to believe that. In fact, as we understand more of even his boyhood, it causes us to delight even more in the Savior. He understands what it means to grow in wisdom and grace against the normal resistance of the human condition with all its weaknesses. At the age of 30 or so, when he preached his first sermon in Nazareth, everybody said, isn't that the carpenter's son?

Paraphrased, who does he think he is? Nobody said, we knew it. We've been bowing down to him since he was 14. I mean, the clothing he always had on his body. Where did it come from? It's amazing. We figured that out a long time ago.

No, they didn't. Him? The Messiah?

He must have bumped his head in the shop one too many times. Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that Jesus' life was so normal as a boy growing up, so uneventful, so typical, so humble, so nondescript that when he made his announcement, no one believed him, especially those that had grown up with him. But all the while, without anybody really paying attention, and Jesus in that mystery even coming into a fuller and fuller knowledge of it as he grew, something was happening. And this text tells us that he was progressing in four, we'll outline it this way, four different aspects.

We'll call the first progression intellectual ability. Luke writes that Jesus kept increasing in wisdom, Sophia. Sophia for the believer is the appropriate application of God's truth to life.

It is God's word lived out. A wise person isn't somebody who knows more than everybody else in the church. It's the person who demonstrates the truth that they're learning. So he would have had to have learned then as well in order to demonstrate it, right? Of course, along the way, he would have learned that two plus two equals four and he had to learn to read and write.

The gospel writers indicate that he did both. So he had an education. But most importantly, he had to learn the sacred writings of the Old Testament. Now, during the days of Christ, in fact, for centuries before his birth and after his birth, a Jewish child's education began in the home.

His parents were his first teachers. They would have taught Jesus and the other siblings they had whenever they sat down on the house to talk, whenever they sat at the table to eat, whenever they went out on the way to walk or work or ride, and even before they laid down and got up in the morning. Their lives were bibliocentric, so to speak. God's truth, the Old Testament, which was what they had, was laced into their conversations.

It included God. Then around the age of five or six, a Jewish child was sent to school, to what they called in Jesus' day the house of the book. The school was attached to the local synagogue. Every village had a synagogue according to the law and every synagogue had its school. Edersheim's classic work on the life and times of Jesus, the Messiah, that he presented to the faculty of Oxford in 1931 revealed from archaeologists' findings and manuscripts extant and historians living during the days of Jesus that great care was given to the education of a child in the house of the book, typically taught by the leaders of the law, rabbis, whoever would be the officer of the synagogue, typically. In fact, I read that great care was taken not to send a child too early to school nor to overwork him when there, although my school had felt the same way in yours, right?

History records for us that school hours were fixed and attendance was shortened during the summer months. In many ways, the synagogue provided a foundation for the Western educational system, although we would all agree that the Bible is certainly not in the curriculum in most schools, at least those promoted by our Western world. The teacher was often elevated on a little platform if he had enough sticks to put together and the students sat around him on the floor in a semi-circle. The classes, of course, would be small in a little village like this.

It would have almost been like having a personal tutor. The rabbis considered that half-circle of students to be their crown. It was their love and their life as they sat at the feet being covered, the rabbis would speak, with the wisdom that came from the dust of the feet. Of course, this explains then Paul's comment of him in Acts chapter 2 verse 3 that he was educated at the feet of Gamaliel.

It was literal. For the first five years of a child's studies, once he entered school, the Old Testament was the chief textbook. They were taught to read and to write their common language, which would have been Aramaic, but more importantly the language of their law which was Hebrew. For those of you that have learned the Hebrew language, you may have found, as I did, that it is a very difficult language to learn.

I always envy my Jewish brothers and sisters here in the church that are redeemed who have come to faith in Christ but raised to know the Hebrew. I was at the mall a couple of days ago with everybody else frantically finishing up and had my kids with me. In fact, it's a little tradition made for each other so that we know they get what they want and then they buy surprises for their mother. I was with one of my daughters at this particular juncture and we're walking down in the main hallway, of course, the main aisle.

They have these kiosks and you can have even more opportunities to go in debt as you walk down the mall. One lady at one particular booth had a tray out with little cups and I walked by and she held it out to me. I looked in and it was lotion. It wasn't edible.

I would have stopped had it been that, but it was lotion. She offered it to me. She said something to me and I knew immediately her language. She was from somewhere else. I asked her, where were you from? She was a Jewess.

She was raised in Russia and she lived in Israel. I said, oh, I wish I knew Hebrew like you did. In fact, I asked her what languages she spoke. She said Russian and Hebrew. I invited her to our church, told her who I was and that I had spent time slugging through the Hebrew language. You need to understand that for Jews living in Jesus' day, it was probably just as convoluted.

She came to Kerry, if you can imagine it, via Russia and Israel. The Jews in Jesus' day had lost their native tongue. They had learned to speak Aramaic and Babylon. That was the official language of their captivity.

They had forgotten Hebrew. Their sons primarily had to be taught Hebrew. For men destined to teach the Scriptures, they had to learn to read and write in Hebrew so that they could then translate it into Aramaic and teach it to people who could understand it. Our Lord's discourses were for the most part in Aramaic. So we know from his first sermon in Nazareth that he got up to read and he read from the scroll in Isaiah. That means he knew how to read Hebrew. He'd learned it and also discovered that his first studies as a five-year-old in the house of the book, it was their custom to begin the lessons in the Pentateuch, specifically at the book of Leviticus. Then they'd work through different sections of the Pentateuch and on into the prophets. They would not allow anybody to copy anything from the Scriptures because they were so careful to preserve it, but they did make an exception for a teacher to be able to copy sections of it for teaching children.

That's how dedicated they were. So the very first lesson that little Jesus would have sat at at the feet of his teacher in the house of the book would have been Leviticus, what we call chapter 1, verse 1. And of course, for the sake of time, I won't have you turn, but let me read you what his first lesson would have involved. Here's the text of Scripture. Leviticus begins, God called Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting. Speak to the people of Israel. Tell them, when anyone presents an offering to God, present an animal from either the herd or the flock. If the offering is a whole burnt offering from the herd, present a male without defect at the entrance to the tent of meeting that it may be accepted by God.

Lay your hand on the head of the whole burnt offering so that it may be accepted on your behalf to make atonement for you. Imagine Jesus Christ's first school lesson was on the unblemished sacrifice for the atonement and forgiveness of the sinful human race which he had come to fulfill. Jesus wasn't born with the ability to read and write in Hebrew. He advanced. He increased. He went through his studies like you and I did. Secondly, Jesus advanced in physical maturity. Luke also writes in this verse that Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature.

You could render that age or even more literally, height. It's not the way Sandy grew up. In our home, my three brothers and I, we had, you know, as we grew up, we had one door frame and it would be marked. And we'd, you know, stand on our tiptoes, do everything we possibly could to somehow get closer to our older brother. And I hated that because of the four boys, I was the run of the litter. And I was shorter by at least a foot and a half from my older brother and only inches above my other brother beneath me who was four years younger than me.

So I didn't really like it. So I cheated every way I could to make it look like I was taller. I wanted to grow up. I wanted to be big.

Can you imagine Jesus Christ feeling that too? He wanted to grow up. He wanted to get big. He'd flex his muscles to his half sisters. He'd wrestle his father. He'd race.

He'd run. He'd tell his exploits of catching that fish, although he'd be telling the truth. It was really just about that big of a fish.

It wasn't that big of a fish, right? All male Jews, by the way, as they grew, even those destined to be doctors of the law, were expected to learn a trade. It was required that the Jewish father teach his son what the rabbis called, and I quote, an honest craft for to fail in this is to teach him crime, prepare him for a life of crime. So the apostle Paul, you remember, even though he was preparing to be a rabbi, he knew how to make what?

Tents. He'd learned the craft of tent making, probably his father's occupation. So Jesus was taught carpentry. This was the craft of his stepfather. He learned to size up a piece of wood like some of you can, know exactly where to cut it, know where the problems might be, maybe even not a bend it.

For carpenters in Nazareth, in this first century, the chief task would have been to carve plows for the farmers to use, but just for a moment slip into his sandals. You're 16, 17, 18. You know who you are now. You know who your father is. But imagine, between 12 and 13, 18 years, he dropped sweat over that plank of wood as he sawed and sanded and nailed. I couldn't help but imagine, just think, no, he's in there, nobody's looking.

Why not just twinkle his nose or snap his finger? There it is, a finished plow, a finished polished table. Imagine the business he could have cranked out for his dead. I don't know how Joseph does it.

It's amazing. Was he a good carpenter? Yes, and by the way, he didn't perform any miraculous signs until the hour of his announcement, which means he spent hours laboring in the shop. Third, Jesus increased in spiritual intimacy. Jesus, Luke writes, kept increasing in wisdom and stature in favor with God.

Now, that translation can be misleading to an English student. In fact, cults love this verse. They use it as a proof text that as Jesus grew up, he became more and more a favorite of God.

It's not what it's saying. The word favor is choris or grace. The next word, in fact, in the Greek text is the word para, alongside of. We use this word for para or para church ministry. It isn't a ministry directly related or funded by a local church, but it is a ministry alongside the church.

It is a compliment to the church. Jesus is not gaining grace from God. You could translate the phrase, Jesus grew in grace alongside of, as he walked beside God the Father.

That's the meaning. So the relationship between Jesus, the Son of God, and God the Father was a growing relationship marked by choris, marked by grace. I couldn't help but think of how Christ reflects our desire and he also reveals our failure, but he models our future.

Perfect fellowship, unbroken by selfishness and sin, one day eternally unbroken, unselfish, uncluttered, unending, transparent intimacy with God our Father. We see it as Jesus grows and pulls away many times to spend a night in prayer with his Father. He grew in this. He developed in this over time. Fourthly, he increased in social integrity. Luke writes, Jesus grew in favor with man. Alongside of man, he demonstrated grace. By the way, this doesn't mean that he grew more popular with people.

In fact, just the opposite is true. He grew in his graciousness alongside of people's offensive behavior. He withheld the full display of his power and judgment. He submitted to the agony of the cross.

Why? Because he would fulfill his very first lesson as a boy in Leviticus chapter 1. He would be the unblemished, atoning Lamb. You know, if we had Joseph and Mary here today, what would you ask them?

What was it like to raise the perfect child? Imagine being given the task of teaching the living Word. Imagine referring the prophecies of Scripture to the one who'd come to fulfill them. God effectively told a migrant worker, not a doctor of the law, a carpenter, I want you to teach the one who will become the greatest teacher to ever walk the planet. You prepare him for that. He, like every parent in this room, would have said, I am not capable. I'm not qualified.

I get it wrong. When you think about the record of Scripture, I wonder if Joseph ever thought, why Joseph of Nazareth? Why not Joseph of Arimathea? He was wealthy, trained, had access to tutors. He was looking, the Bible says, for the kingdom of God. He loved the law. The Bible says he was a righteous man. He was a member of the Sanhedrin. There's a man qualified.

That's the one to pick. I wonder if the stork got it wrong. Joseph of Nazareth, it was supposed to have been Joseph of Arimathea. I wonder if he felt that way. What would you ask Mary? Mary, were you ever up to this task? Now, the legends and the apocrypha and centuries of church tradition would have said, oh, she knew everything and she was perfectly qualified.

No. In fact, as we studied together, her first recorded words to 12-year-old Jesus were an ill-timed, undeserved, unwise scolding of Jesus. She probably thought later on, boy, I got that wrong. But this is great news because if God would choose them to parent the Messiah, maybe he knows what he's doing as he asks us to do what he's asked us to do. And whom has he chosen in this age?

Let me paraphrase Paul's writings to the Corinthians. Think about your appointment. Think about your calling.

Whatever it is, consider the place where God has appointed you. Have you noticed God did not choose among the brilliant? Not many with noble upbringing, not many with powerful connections, he has chosen the ordinary students to teach the brilliant.

He has chosen the weak and insignificant people in the eyes of the world to radically impact those who seem to be on top of it all. That's how God does it. I love the words of the songwriter, Mary, did you know that your little boy will one day walk on water? Did you know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters? Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new? This child that you've delivered will soon deliver you. Mary, did you know that your baby boy will give sight to a blind man? Did you know that your baby boy will calm a storm with his hand? Did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trod and when you kiss the little baby, your little baby, you've kissed the face of God? The blind will see, the deaf will hear, the dead will live again.

The lame will leap, the dumb will speak, the praises of the lamb. Mary, did you know that your baby boy is Lord of all creation? Did you know that your baby boy will one day rule the nations? Did you know that your baby boy is heaven's perfect lamb?

The sleeping child you're holding is the great I am. You know, having studied carefully these texts, I can say with certainty that Mary did not know, not fully, nor did Joseph. The boyhood of Jesus was a mystery to them both and they were unlikely candidates to parent this perfect child. Sometimes I wish that the Bible taught us more about Jesus' childhood than it does. Have you ever thought that?

But the little snippets that we do have are powerful. Catching a glimpse of the perfect son of God, growing up in a Jewish home and keeping the customs and the laws that he came to fulfill is meant to both challenge us and encourage us. And I hope it encouraged you today. This message is called Parenting the Perfect Child and it's the fourth and final sermon in Stephen's series entitled Beyond Bethlehem. This is Wisdom for the Heart. Our office is closed today, but there are still some ways you can interact with us. Our website is wisdomonline.org and you can replay today's broadcast, access Stephen's sermon archive and more. You can write to us at Wisdom for the Heart, P.O. Box 37297, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27627. I hope you have a wonderful Christmas Eve. Thanks for listening to Wisdom for the Heart.