Day 3: Jesus is Also Perfectly Human

Jacob’s wellwas there, and Jesus, worn out from his journey, sat down at the well. It was about noon. JOHN 4:6, EMPHASIS MINE

When Jesus saw her crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying, he was deeply moved in his spirit and troubled. “Where have you put him?” he asked. “Lord,” they told him, “come and see.” Jesus wept. JOHN 11:33–35, EMPHASIS MINE

Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity. PHILIPPIANS 2:5–7B

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN driving down a road during a rainstorm, and noticed a big body of water gathered to one side of the road—one that you’re sure you’ll hydroplane on if you don’t have enough time to swivel the wheels around the puddle? We’ve all been there, and we’ve all probably thought the exact same words: Avoid catastrophe! Problem is, when we dart our wheels away from the puddle, sometimes we overcorrect, sending our car into another type of potential danger. Often there’s a ditch on the other side of the road awaiting us, and if we’re not careful, we’ll drive our car straight into that parallel catastrophe on the other side of the road—even if it was for good reason. Overcorrecting from one sort of danger can sometimes lead us into another sort that’s equally disastrous.

If that’s ever happened to you, don’t worry. You’re not alone. Almost everyone overcorrects at some point, Christians and non-Christians alike. In fact, you could say church history is one course-correction after the other, swinging to and fro to avoid catastrophe, which oftentimes led to overcorrecting.

Just over one hundred years after the matter of Jesus’s divinity was conclusively settled at the First Council of Nicaea, another formal meeting of Christian leaders convened at the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451. Why another council? What else could possibly need to be settled? Well, an “overcorrection” took place after Nicaea. People were convinced about Jesus being God, which is great, but the pendulum had swung so far in that direction that a new theory had emerged: namely, that Jesus was fully divine but wasn’t fully human. One leader who held this unorthodox view went so far as to insist that when Jesus cried at the tomb of Lazarus, they were faux tears—the tears of an actor!2 Here we have a quintessential example of driving into one theological catastrophe in order to avoid another. Ultimately, the Council of Chalcedon affirmed that Jesus Christ has two natures; that He was and is truly divine and truly human at the same time, that we don’t have to give up one in order to affirm the other. In short, this is the point in history where God’s people learned how to avoid the puddle and the ditch when it came to who Jesus really is.

This whole history lesson is why we now call Jesus “God incarnate.” He’s fully God, but incarnated as a human. Or, as I said before, Christ is truly divine and truly human at the same time. Granted that’s a mouthful and a mind-full. I think it’s even more difficult than playing Twister at my age to wrap our human cognition around the fact that Jesus is perfectly divine and perfectly human at the same time! But leave it to my academic crush whom I introduced you to yesterday, Dr. J. I. Packer, to further elucidate this truth for us:

It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in this; the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is the truth of the Incarnation.3

I wholeheartedly agree . . . the more I think about the King of all kings humbly condescending to wear an ancient pair of Pampers, the more gobsmacked I get! As an adult rabbi, all Jesus did was speak and the wind and waves obeyed Him (Mark 4:35–41). All He did was touch a leper and the disfiguring disease immediately left the poor man (Matt. 8:1–4). All He did was walk up to a commotion taking place on a spooky tombstone-strewn hill called the Gerasenes, where a legion of demons was tormenting a man, and His mere presence caused that evil gang of satan’s4 minions to have a conniption fit because they recognized His supernatural supremacy (Mark 5:1–13). Yet, before King Jesus chose to express His divine power and majesty, He stooped to be potty-trained, to learn Aramaic (the New Testament sayings of Jesus are typically recorded in Greek, but His native tongue was Aramaic—more specifically, a Galilean version of western Aramaic—although Luke 4:16–20 reveals that He also read and spoke Hebrew5), to do His chores, and eventually to saunter down a dirt road to school like all the other little boys in Nazareth.

He really was fully God and fully man at the same time. And that miraculous reality of what supersmart theology people call the “hypostatic union” is why the author of Hebrews could describe Jesus as our empathetic High Priest:

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. (Heb. 4:14–16 niv)

If you and I could understand, even in part, just how much this passage conveys about our Savior’s deep understanding of our human experience, if we could but remember that this Scripture means our Savior can say, “Been there, done that!” with regards to every single emotion in the human continuum—including our deepest grief and most difficult struggles—it would dramatically increase our security as His stumbling saints. Jesus is not some faraway, dispassionate, untouchable, cape-wearing superhero who redeems us from a distance, y’all! Instead, He’s an up-close, incarnate, compassionate Redeemer who intimately relates to every, single, thing we’ve been through or are afraid of going through.

Marinate for a moment in the juxtapositional miracle of Jesus’s divine humanity, and I bet you’ll find yourself leaning more fully into His embrace. Because since He’s capable of knowing us completely, His love is surely unconditional.

• REREAD HEBREWS 4:14–16. What phrase is the most meaningful to you and why?
• WHAT PERSONAL “WEAKNESS” do you most need Jesus to empathize with this season?
• IN WHAT WAYS do you treat Jesus as if He’s only divine, but not human? What do you miss out on when you forget about His human nature?