Did Jesus have an unfair advantage over us? We sometimes speculate as to what it was like for Jesus when He was being raised by Mary and Joseph. Even the concept of Jesus being raised is hard to grasp; did the one who raised the dead need to be raised?
We know He was perfect. Scripture makes that clear, for He “was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15).” But did Jesus emerge from the womb with divine awareness of all things, or was He closer to ordinary? When talking about his Christmas hit song “Mary Did You Know?” Mark Lowry said, “The one who spoke the world into existence was now uttering unintelligible baby noises.” As much fun as it is to daydream about God in the flesh using his divine abilities in His adolescence, we have no reason to believe that Jesus was anything other than a normal child developmentally as He learned to crawl, then walk, then run. He fell and cried, He skinned His knee, and sometimes He didn’t like His dinner.
We get the impression sometimes that if Jesus played baseball with the neighborhood kids in Nazareth, He only hit home runs, when in reality, He would have struck out at times too. As a young carpenter, He probably hit His thumb with a hammer, and made a chair that wobbled.
We might think Jesus had an unfair advantage over us because He knew Scripture perfectly. He is the Word, after all. Quoting Scripture to the devil? Piece of cake. Those were His own words spoken 4,000 years earlier. If we were Jesus we could do that too.
But not so fast. In his essay titled “Jesus’ Submission to Holy Scripture,” Ian Hamilton wrote, “We must guard against thinking Jesus short-circuited the normal human process of maturation…Jesus’ understanding of the content of Scripture, and the inherent authority embedded in the content of Scripture, did not come to Him all at once. His knowledge of God’s Word was not supernaturally implanted in His DNA in the womb of the Virgin Mary.”
Think about it: Luke tells us Jesus “increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men (2:52).” Jesus increased in wisdom? Doesn’t this necessarily imply that there was some wisdom He initially lacked? The author of Hebrews wrote in 5:8 that Jesus “learned obedience” (this does not mean He was ever disobedient, but that He had to learn the rules of right and wrong).
Please don’t think I am trying to strip Jesus of His divinity. But in truth He beat me to it as He willingly laid aside some aspects of His God-ness. Paul wrote that Jesus “made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men (Philippians 2:7).” Just a year ago I wrote a column titled “God Can’t Learn” where I argued that it is impossible for an omniscient God to learn anything, and yet now I argue that Jesus had to do exactly that. Jesus laid aside aspects of His divine nature in order to save us. The substitution demanded that Jesus be like us. A God is too far away to save us, and a man is too close to save us, so Jesus became the God-Man.
As Hamilton concluded in his essay, if Jesus did not have to learn, then “His humanity would not be our humanity.” If Jesus had an unfair leg up on us, then He didn’t truly become like us, and would not have been an eligible substitute.
Jesus knew Scripture because He put in the work to commit it to memory, and there is no reason we cannot do the same.
Comments