Discussions about Jesus’ nature are nothing new to the church.  They have been around ever since its beginning.  One Bishop in the Fourth Century described the situation he faced like this:

If in this city you ask anyone for change, he will discuss with you whether God the Son is begotten or unbegotten. If you ask about the quality of bread, you will receive the answer that “God the Father is greater, God the Son is less.” If you suggest that a bath is desirable, you will be told that “there was nothing before God the Son was created.”2

In the 21^st Century, the problem has yet to be resolved.  Books are coming out right now that talk about the nature of Jesus from all sorts of angles,3 which have led Robert Bowman and Ed Komoszewski to pen these insightful words:

Interpretations of Jesus are fraught with bias. He’s a powerful figure whom people want on their sides – and they’re willing to recreate Him in their image to enlist support. Animal-rights activists imagine a vegetarian Jesus. New Agers make him an example of finding the god within. And radical feminists strip him of divinity so that Christianity doesn’t appear sexist. “Frankly, it’s hard to escape the feeling that our culture has taken Jesus’ question ‘Who do you say that I am?’ and changed it to ‘Who do you want me to be?’”4

But what does the Bible say about the nature of Jesus Christ?  Specifically, what does it say about His humanity?

I. JESUS WAS BORN

Since the birth of Jesus has already been dealt with on this website,5 there will not be much to say here.  To sum it all up, Jesus Christ did not fall from the sky.  He was not beamed down from Heaven or teleported from the throne of God to Bethlehem.  He was born.  He was conceived in the womb of Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit.  He lived and grew inside of her like any child would, and then He left Mary’s womb to begin His life as a tiny baby in a manger.

Several passages talk about the birth of Jesus.6  The most comprehensive one may be Matthew 1:18-25:

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows: when His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. And Joseph her husband, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her, planned to send her away secretly.

But when he had considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife; for the Child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She will bear a Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which translated means, “God with us.”

And Joseph awoke from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, and took Mary as his wife, but kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a Son; and he called His name Jesus.

II. JESUS GREW UP

Second, the Bible says that Jesus grew.  All things that live on this earth grow.  Plants grow.  Animals grow.  Bacteria grow.  And, yes, human beings grow.  The Bible says that this is exactly what Jesus did when He lived among us.  He grew up from a boy into a man.

Luke 2:39-40 says that after Joseph and Mary presented the baby Jesus in the temple:

They returned to Galilee, to their own city of Nazareth. The Child continued to grow and become strong, increasing in wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him.

This verse is often passed over as of little importance but the implications of it are staggering.  What did it mean for Jesus Christ to grow?  Why was His growth necessary since He had everything He needed before He was born?  And what in the world would He grow into?

It only makes sense that the Son of God would never need to grow into anything.7 But it also makes sense that, in order to be fully human, the Son would have to set aside some of His divine attributes.  He would have to temporarily give up some of the ways that He expressed His deity.8

Think about it.  From the time He was conceived, Jesus gave up His right to be everywhere all at once.  God is everywhere all of the time and Jesus would have experienced that in Heaven.  However, man is not everywhere all of the time.  He can only be one place at a time.  In order for Jesus to become a man, He would have had to temporarily set aside His omnipresence.9

Jesus would have also temporarily set aside His right to be all-powerful10 and unchanging11 and eternal (to name a few).12  He never set aside God’s nature, but He did set aside His right to express that nature to its fullest extent when He entered this world.  John Calvin explains it this way:

There is only this difference between us and him, that the weaknesses which press upon us, by a necessity which we cannot avoid, were undertaken by him voluntarily, and of his own accord.13

Out of love for us, Jesus Christ became one of us.  In order to do that, He shared our weaknesses in His human body.  He did not have to.  As Calvin pointed out, He did so voluntarily.  Philippians 2:7 says, He “emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.”  And one of those weaknesses that He took on Himself was that of growing.  He started His life as a baby and ended it as a man.

III. JESUS WAS TEMPTED

Temptations are part of what it means to be human.  We live in a sinful body in a sinful world and we have sinful desires.  In the words of John Owen,

[Man] is always under the power of a strong bent and inclination to sin. And the reason why a natural man is not always perpetually in the pursuit of some one lust, night and day, is because he has many to serve, every one crying to be satisfied.14

For some, that may sound a little extreme but it is nothing less than what the Bible teaches.15

However, the Bible also teaches that, while Jesus gave up some of His divine attributes when He took on flesh, He kept many of them.  One attribute He kept was that of holiness.  Holiness is “the doctrine that God is separated from sin.”16  “To be holy is to be morally blameless.  It is to be separated from sin.”17  Holiness means that God has absolute moral perfection.  It means that God does not sin in any way whatsoever.

Several passages speak of the holiness of Jesus Christ.  Second Corinthians 5:21 says,

He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

Hebrews 4:15 says,

For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.

In John 8:46, Jesus spoke to His perfect holiness when He asked a crowd of Jews: “Which one of you convicts Me of sin? If I speak truth, why do you not believe Me?”

But, while Jesus did not sin, He was tempted to sin.  While He never lost His holy nature, He was enticed to do so on several occasions.  The most interesting one is probably the time He was tempted by Satan in the wilderness.  Mark 1:12-13 gives the shortest account of this event:

Immediately, the Spirit impelled Him to go out into the wilderness. And He was in the wilderness forty days being tempted by Satan; and He was with the wild beasts, and the angels were ministering to Him.

There were only two other people that we know of in Scripture who were personally tempted by the Devil – Eve18 and Job.19  Whereas Eve and Job gave into the temptation, Jesus Christ never did.  He remained holy as God is holy.  He kept His sinless nature throughout His life.

Anyone can tell you that it is harder to resist sin than to give into it.  Yet Jesus never sinned.  He never disobeyed a single command of God.  His temptations must have been more powerful than any man ever experienced, but Hebrews 4:15 says that He never once gave in to them.

IV. JESUS WAS HUNGRY & THIRSTY

It probably goes without saying that human beings get hungry and thirsty.  We live in bodies that have physical needs.  We have stomachs that must be filled and throats that must be quenched on a regular basis or something bad will happen to us.  According to some studies, a person can only last several weeks without food before he dies.20  The same studies also report that a person can only last several days without water.21

Jesus was no different.  He had to eat and drink to replenish His body.  When He did not do that, He became hungry and thirsty like the rest of us.

Matthew 4:2 says, “And after He had fasted forty days and forty nights, [Jesus] then became hungry.”  Matthew 21:18 says, “Now in the morning, when He was returning to the city, He became hungry.”  Mark 11:12 records, “On the next day, when they had left Bethany, He became hungry.”  Luke 4:1-2, repeating what Matthew 4:2 already mentioned, tells us,

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led around by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil. And He ate nothing during those days, and when they had ended, He became hungry.

Jesus was also thirsty.  This is not mentioned as much in the Gospels but, on a few occasions, the Apostle John mentions Jesus’ thirst.  John 4:7-8 says,

There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.

John 19:28-30 mentions Jesus’ thirst on the cross.

After this, Jesus, knowing that all things had already been accomplished, to fulfill the Scripture, said, “I am thirsty.” A jar full of sour wine was standing there; so they put a sponge full of the sour wine upon a branch of hyssop and brought it up to His mouth. Therefore when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, “It is finished!” And He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.

Not only was Jesus challenged spiritually; He was also challenged physically.  He underwent everything that we undergo in our physical bodies, which leads to a fifth point.

V. JESUS WAS TIRED

Jesus’ three years of ministry were full of constant activity.  He worked incessantly.  Healings, miracles, teachings, and one-on-one conversations filled up all of His time.  As a result of this, the Gospels state that massive crowds came to Him from all over Israel.  Mark 3:7-8 says,

Jesus withdrew to the sea with His disciples; and a great multitude from Galilee followed; and also from Judea, and from Jerusalem, and from Idumea, and beyond the Jordan, and the vicinity of Tyre and Sidon, a great number of people heard of all that He was doing and came to Him.

John 3:25-26 gives a complaint from John the Baptist’s disciples about the immense popularity of Jesus:

Therefore there arose a discussion on the part of John’s disciples with a Jew about purification. And they came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, He who was with you beyond the Jordan [i.e., Jesus], to whom you have testified, behold, He is baptizing and all are coming to Him.”

This cannot be emphasized enough.  We often think of Jesus walking around the countryside of Israel with only 12 men following Him.  There were certainly times when this was the case but, most of the time, Jesus was lost in a sea of people.  He was so popular that He had difficulty getting away to rest.  John MacArthur described His plight in the following words:

Multitudes continued to follow Jesus wherever He went . . . What Luke describes is a tireless, nonstop campaign of daily teaching and public ministry. Crowds pursued Jesus constantly, daily, from sunup to sundown. In the rural regions of Galilee, even a few hundred people would constitute a massive throng – certainly large enough to overwhelm a village the size of Capernaum. But the swarms of people continued to grow until they numbered in the thousands.

All four Gospels record the feeding of the five thousand – an astonishing number, given the fairly sparse population of the region. And more amazing yet, the Gospels all indicate that such large crowds gathered relentlessly on a daily basis, even following Jesus into the wilderness, making it virtually impossible for Him to find any kind of solitude.22

And it all made Jesus tired.  It wore Him out.  Jesus worked Himself to the point of exhaustion.  There were times when His earthly body shut down for need of rest.

Mark 8:35-59 records the most famous example of Jesus resting.

On that day, when evening came, He said to them, “Let us go over to the other side.” Leaving the crowd, they took Him along with them in the boat, just as He was; and other boats were with Him. And there arose a fierce gale of wind, and the waves were breaking over the boat so much that the boat was already filling up. Jesus Himself was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke Him and said to Him, “Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?” And He got up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Hush, be still.” And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm.

Jesus was so worn out from His ministry that He slept through a storm, and not just any storm, but a storm so violent that it frightened the disciples (who were experienced fishermen).  The storm was so bad, verse 37 says, that water was coming over the sides of the boat and filling it up.  Yet Jesus was sound asleep, causing the disciples to ask, “Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?”  Jesus did care.  He was just tired.

This is all to say that Jesus was fully human.  He experienced exhaustion and fatigue just like any normal human being would.

VI. JESUS HAD EMOTIONS

 

Emotions are not sinful in and of themselves, but they can lead us into sin if we follow them.  Jeremiah 17:9 says,

The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it?

If we follow our heart, we are going to be deceived because our heart is sick.  If we base our lives on our feelings, we are going to do evil.  This is a truth that we should all remember in a world full of therapy and psychiatrists.  Having said that, however, it must be pointed out that nowhere does the Bible say it is a sin to express emotion.

In fact, Jesus was sinless and He showed emotion.  Emotions separate human beings from machines.  Jesus was no machine.  He experienced every feeling that we do and kept His perfect holiness before God.  Here are a few of the emotions that He expressed.

On a few occasions, Jesus felt compassion for those who were in need.  Matthew 15:32 says,

And Jesus called His disciples to Him, and said, “I feel compassion for the people, because they have remained with Me now three days and have nothing to eat; and I do not want to send them away hungry, for they might faint on the way.”

Matthew 20:34 says,

Moved with compassion, Jesus touched their eyes; and immediately they regained their sight and followed Him.

Jesus also loved people.  Mark 10:21 says that during His conversation with the rich young ruler, Jesus expressed love by confronting him.

Looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him and said to him, “One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.”

Jesus demonstrated Godly anger when He cleansed the temple.  While the word “anger” does not appear in any of the Gospel accounts of this story, the idea is certainly there.  John 2:13-15 says,

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And He found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. And He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.

John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the Bible and it shows Jesus feeling sorrow over the death of Lazarus.  It simply says, “Jesus wept.”  Luke 22:39-45 shows Jesus feeling agony in the Garden of Gethsemane as He anticipates His upcoming death on the cross.

Jesus felt.  He had emotions.  He was a human being who experienced the toils of heartache and the excitement of joy.

VII. JESUS DIED

Finally, Jesus’ humanity was most clearly seen in the fact that He died.  Every man dies.  Every one of us experiences the horror of death.  It is part of what it means to be human.  With the exceptions of Enoch23 and Elijah,24 all of us will meet God after leaving our mortal bodies behind on this earth.  We will pass behind the veil of this life and enter into eternity with only our souls to take with us.

Jesus Christ was no exception.  While He would rise from the grave after His death25 and then ascend into Heaven with His resurrected body,26 Jesus still died.  In fact, it could be argued that Jesus’ entire life was lived in light of His death.  As B. B. Warfield puts it,

The death in which [Jesus’] life ends is conceived, therefore, as the goal in which His life culminates. He came into the world to die . . . His life of humiliation, sinking into His terrible death, was therefore not His misfortune, but His achievement.27

There are several instances in the Scriptures where Jesus told His disciples about His upcoming demise.  He made it very clear to them that His ministry would culminate in a terrible death and a glorious resurrection.

Mark 9:30-31 says,

From there they went out and began to go through Galilee, and He did not want anyone to know about it. For He was teaching His disciples and telling them, “The Son of Man is to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him; and when He has been killed, He will rise three days later.”

Mark 10:32-34 says,

And again He took the twelve aside and began to tell them what was going to happen to Him, saying, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes; and they will condemn Him to death and hand Him over to the Gentiles. They will mock Him and spit on Him, and scourge Him and kill Him, and three days later He will rise again.”

John 12:30, 32-33 says,

Jesus answered and said . . . “And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself.” But He was saying this to indicate the kind of death by which He was to die.

Jesus came to live as a man in order to die as one.  He was completely human.  He was born, He grew, He was tempted, He was hungry and thirsty, He was tired, and He showed emotion in order to die as a member of the human race.  His death was totally unique in that He had perfect control over it.  John 19:30 says that at the cross Jesus said, “It is finished!” and then “bowed His head and gave up His spirit.”  Not only was He sovereign over all of the events leading up to His death, but Jesus was also sovereign over the very act of dying.  As Lord of heaven and earth, He decided when He would die.

His death was also unique in that He died in the place of others.  In John 10:11, Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.”  Normal people cannot die in the place of others; they must die in their own place.  Even if they die while saving others, ordinary humans do not suffer the punishment for someone else’s sins.  But Jesus did.  His death was one of a kind.

But Jesus’ death was still a death.  The Son of God did die and He died because He was also the Son of Man.

CONCLUSION

The identity of Jesus Christ has divided Christians for centuries.  Take a glimpse at church history and you will see that Christians throughout the ages have held council after council to try and figure out Who Jesus was.  The Council of Nicea, the Council of Constantinople, the Council of Ephesus, and the Council of Chalcedon all met in the early years of the church to hammer out a definitive statement on the nature of the Son of God.28

However, the controversy has never really ended.  F. F. Bruce once wrote, “Indeed, it is perfectly clear that no character in history excites more general interest, even today, than Jesus does.”29  He was right.  Just end a prayer in Jesus’ name at a National Prayer Breakfast or tell your college philosophy professor that you believe salvation is only possible through Jesus and you will get an unpleasant response.

All of this controversy might lead someone to ask, “What does it really matter?” “Who cares if Jesus was fully human?” “Does it really make a difference if He was just part God and part Man?”  And the answer is “Yes!”  If Jesus was not a Man, then He could not die in the place of men, and we would have no way to get into Heaven.  If He did not live sinlessly as one of us, then He could not offer up a sinless sacrifice on our behalf and we would all go to Hell.

Our eternal destiny hangs on the truth of Jesus’ humanity.  We could never be made right with God without it.  That is why all of the controversy matters.

 

 

 

1. Walter Martin, The Kingdom of the Cults (Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House Publishers, 1985 ed.) 58, 204. To prove this point, the works of popular Christian cults such as the Jehovah’s Witness and the Mormons could be cited. In their book, The Truth Shall Make You Free, the Jehovah’s Witness state that “the true Scriptures speak of God’s Son, the Word, as ‘a god.’ He is a ‘mighty god,’ but not the Almighty God, who is Jehovah.” In his own words, the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, who is still revered today as a holy man, took this one step further and claimed that “God” was once a man like us who achieved “Godhood” by His perfect life.  Therefore, as the Son of God, Jesus is a “god” but no more a god than the rest of us can be.  Here is what Smith said: “I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined that God was God from all eternity. These are incomprehensible ideas to some, but they are the simple and first principles of the gospel, to know for a certainty the character of God, that we may converse with him as one man with another, and that God himself; the Father of us all dwelt on earth the same as Jesus Christ Himself did . . . Here then is eternal life, to know the only wise and true God. You have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves; to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done; by going from a small degree to another, from grace to grace, from exultation to exultation, until you are able to sit in glory as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power.” [↩]
2. Quoted in Bruce L. Shelley’s Church History in Plain Language, Third Edition (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 2008) 99. The author of this quotation is never named by Shelley. [↩]
3. To read a book that downplays Jesus’ deity or any specific statement about Him, see Judah Smith’s new book Jesus Is: Find a New Way to be Human (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 2013). To read a book that clearly teaches Jesus’ deity, see Robert M. Bowman, Jr. & J. Ed Komoszewski’s Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2007). [↩]
4. Putting Jesus in His Place, 17. [↩]
5. See “The Perfect Man” in Issue 7 of JTST. [↩]
6. See Is 7:14; Micah 5:2; Lk 1:26-38; 2:1-20. [↩]
7. Malachi 3:6 says, “For I, the Lord, do not change.” James 1:17 says, “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation
   or shifting shadow.” To be God is to be changeless and, since Jesus Christ is God, it only makes sense that He could never change. [↩]
8. The Bible makes it very clear that Jesus never once laid aside an ounce of His divine nature. There are innumerable statements in Scripture that clearly speak to the deity of Jesus. For some of these, see “The Deity of Jesus Christ” in this issue of JTST. However, with that said, the Bible also makes it clear that Jesus did lay aside some of the prerogatives or functions of deity when He became a man. [↩]
9. Scriptures that speak on the omnipresence of God
   include Ps 46:1; 139:7–12; Prov 15:3. [↩]
10. This is known as the attribute of omnipotence. See Job 38:4–6; Jer 32:17; Dan 4:35. [↩]
11. This is known as the attribute of immutability. For verses on this attribute, see footnote 7. [↩]
12. This is simply known as the eternality or infinity of God. See Deut 33:27; Is 43:13; 44:6. [↩]
13. Commentary on the Harmony of the Evangelists: Matthew,
    Mark, and Luke, Volume First (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005, ed.) 166. [↩]
14. Overcoming Sin & Temptation, ed. by Kelly M. Kapic & Justin Taylor (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2006) 73. [↩]
15. Man’s temptation to sin is powerfully illustrated by the Apostle Paul in Romans 7:14-15, 18: “For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate . . . For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not.” [↩]
16. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand
    Rapids: Zondervan, 2000 ed.) 1243. [↩]
17. Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness (Colorado Springs, Col.: NavPress, 2006) 15. [↩]
18. Gen 3:1-7. [↩]
19. Job 1:6-2:10. [↩]
20. “How Long Can a Person Survive without Food?” borrowed from www.scientificamerican.com as of 3/26/13. [↩]
21. “How Long Can the Average Person Survive without Water?” borrowed from www.scientificamerican.com as of 3/26/13. [↩]
22. The Jesus You Can’t Ignore: What You Must Learn from the Bold Confrontations of Christ (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 2008) 81-82. [↩]
23. Gen 5:21-24. [↩]
24. 2 Kings 2:1-14. [↩]
25. Matt 28; Mk 16; Lk 24; Jn 20-21. [↩]
26. Lk 24:50-52. [↩]
27. The Person and Work of Christ (Philipsburg, N. J.: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1950) 17. [↩]
28. To see a concise and helpful chart on all of these councils, see Bruce L. Shelley’s Church History in Plain Language, 114. [↩]
29. Jesus: Lord & Savior (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1986) 20. [↩]