Jesus: Like Us in (Almost) Every Way

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​Interestingly, one of the harder things for the ancient peoples to believe about Jesus was that He was truly human. When a person rises from the dead, it isn’t too difficult to believe that they are truly divine, but the idea that Jesus was also truly human was a little much. Many at that time thought that Jesus only “appeared” to be human, walking around the earth like some sort of phantom. It was just too hard to imagine.
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It is hard for us to conceive as well. It is hard for us to express that God experienced limits in the person of Jesus. It is hard for us to believe that Jesus actually does understand where we are coming from. He doesn’t know our weaknesses in just an academic sense. He has actually experienced our troubles physically AND emotionally. All those things that we would say makes us human from a theological understanding to a popular understanding were true of Jesus.
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There are practical reasons for exploring this doctrine. I think the area that this improves the most immediately is patience in the hard things of life.
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Military training is a really hard thing to get through, particularly if you want to join the best of the best. For example, I heard one sort of training exercise where a recruit had to run across the beach, fill his mouth with salt water, run back to a bucket way too far away, spit the water into the bucket, and then go back for another mouthful, continuing this exercise until the bucket was full. Once full, the instructor kicked the bucket over and flatly said, “Do it again.” Now, you might think that the instructor is just trying to torture the recruit until you hear that the instructor was once a recruit. The instructor has seen combat. He actually knows what is coming, and sees the ability to follow orders even through great disappointment and fatigue as important to build in the coming generation. If the instructor were just a civilian, a non-combatant, the temptation would be to stuff him in the bucket, but because the recruit knows that this instructor has not only done this exercise himself and has survived in part because of it, he will continue with the training.
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Jesus doesn’t ask you to suffer without having done so Himself. Jesus will never ask you to go somewhere He hasn’t gone, suffer something that He hasn’t suffered, because at the end of the day, no matter what we suffer, Jesus endured the very wrath of God on the cross.
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So let’s examine this doctrine that we especially celebrate at Christmas time, the incarnation, God taking on human nature, on Jesus being fully human.
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Jesus is truly human
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What does it mean to be human? This is a question that we are increasingly wrestling with today, but the Bible answers that in Genesis 1 as a creature made in God’s image. They come in two flavors, male and female, but both are equally made in God’s image, both equally human. At the core, that is what it means to be human. There are many other attributes that are found with that identity that are physical (arms, legs, eyes, that sort of thing) and some that are less easily seen (the ability to think, the possession of a soul).
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As humans, we are creatures of God’s creation. This means that we are not God and are different from Him. God is eternal, having neither beginning nor end, nor having any real boundaries whatever. He is outside of space and time and has nothing on which He depends (like air, blood, or food). We are very different. We can only be in one place at one time and are wholly dependent on all kinds of things.
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One of the very first people we depend on is a mother. Jesus had one, too! One scholar noted that we often talk about the “virgin birth” of Jesus, but the birth itself really was quite ordinary. What was remarkable, though, was the conception (John Frame). Mary never knew a man, yet she carried the embryonic Christ in her womb. Just like us, half of Jesus’ genetic material came from Mary. The other half from the Holy Spirit. Jesus would have had physical characteristics that would have made Him recognizable as Mary’s son. Perhaps He got her nose or her smile.
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Ok, you may say, Jesus had to enter the world in some way, but what about once He was here? Did Jesus really need to be nursed or go to school? Yes and yes. Just like any other child, Jesus had to learn things. This is why our passage says that He grew (or progressed) in wisdom and stature. At one point in His life, He was two feet tall and had to grow. The Gospel of Luke records in chapter 1:80 that the baby John the Baptist grew and the exact same word is used to describe Jesus in
Luke 2:40. By the same token, he had to learn, which is why it is said that He progressed in wisdom. He had a fully human mind that needed to learn and memorize.
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It may sound surprising to phrase it this way, but from the outside, there would be nothing special about Jesus. I know “Away in a Manger” says that “the cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, but little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes” but that’s ridiculous. All babies cry, especially when they are woken up by a cow. Jesus would have been no different.
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So can we say that Jesus was dependent as an adult? In His humanity, yes he was. When Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, in Matthew 4 it had been 40 days since He had anything to eat, and the text says that He was hungry. Jesus wasn’t pretending to be hungry. He really was hungry, and not in a “oops, I forgot to eat lunch today” sort of hungry but a “I haven’t eaten in nearly a month and a half” sort of hungry. Jesus’s body is basically breaking down muscle at this point. Jesus knows what it means to be starving. He knows what it means to be emotional “weeping (Luke 19:41; John 11:35), being moved (John 12:27), feeling grief (Matt. 26:38), being furious (John 2:17)” (As Bavinck points out in his dogmatics).
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Now, why are we going over this is such exhaustive detail? Well, believe it or not, it is critically important for our salvation. It was said by the ancient theologian, John of Damascus, “that which is unassumed is unredeemed.” What that means is Jesus has to be like us in every way because if Jesus was, say, missing a human mind, then it wouldn’t be changed in our salvation. We sin with our minds as much as we sin with our hands, and every sin needs to be paid for. Not only that, but every act of goodness has to be done as well. We need to not only avoid sin but accomplish righteousness in all our members. Jesus has to be righteous in every respect in every member we have. This is why He must be like us in ALMOST every way.
Jesus is sinless in every way
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Now, why do I say “almost” every way? Well, there is one crucially important difference between Jesus and us: sinlessness. Hebrews 4:15 tells us very clearly, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, [and here is the key phrase] yet without sin.” Jesus not only never sinned, but didn’t have a sinful nature.
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Now, why do we stress all these things? Why is it so important for Jesus to be fully human yet without sin? Well, there are a few reasons, with the help of Augustine, why this is important to us.
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Jesus needs to be our perfect sacrifice.
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Jesus being without sin is an absolutely critical difference between us and Jesus. Without this being true, Jesus could do nothing for us. If Jesus was a sinner, then He would have to pay for His own sins, and there would be no way for Him to pay for ours. That is what the priests of the Old Testament had to do as the writer of Hebrews points out in
Hebrews 7:27 “He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself.” (Letham, 531).
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Jesus needs to be our re-creation.
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Now, you may say, “Wait a minute! I thought he was like us in every respect. To be human is to be a sinner, so what’s the deal?” Well, being a sinner wasn’t the original design of humanity. Adam and Eve were originally sinless. Humans being sinners is only a given after
Genesis 3. Taking the original design for human beings means that being righteous is what it means to be truly human.
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We’ve had a number of food recalls lately because certain diseases have gotten into spinach or ice cream, or something of that nature. If someone’s only experience with these foods is with the contaminated ones, that person may assume that sickness simply comes with ice cream. But we would not say, not that original ice cream was this way. So if we wanted to show what true ice cream was supposed to be, it would need to be remade. It would need to be re-created.
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That is what Jesus is doing here. Jesus’s perfection is the picture of what it means to be human, and His work is restoring us to true humanity. The ancient theologian Augustine sees sin as not just corruption, but a corruption that is sliding us into non-existence. After all, sin is moving away from God, and God is “being” itself. For Jesus to save us, we need to be re-created, and that is just what He is doing. And what better person to recreate us than the person who made us in the first place? (Augustine, 93).
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When we are united to Christ by faith, our souls are restored (Psalm 23:3). We are given a new nature, the nature we were originally created to have. To be a Christian is to be human.
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Now, of course, we still are living in our corrupted flesh here on earth warring with the Spirit as
Galatians 5:17 points out, “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.” But one day that is going to be remade as well!
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Jesus needs to be our example.
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We need to be shown how to be human, and Jesus does that in His life. John Frame, one of my favorite theologians, points to 1 Peter 2:21 to make this point: “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.” And it isn’t just the “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” part of Jesus’ ethic (as revolutionary and difficult as that is on its own), Frame points out that following Jesus’s footsteps necessarily involves self-sacrifice, even to the point of death (Frame, 885). He points to Philippians 2:5–8 “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” If we want to describe ourselves as loving, that’s what we need to do according to  1 John 3:16 “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.” We have a Savior who laid down His life for us. I mean, it was humiliating enough just to become human, but to become human in this sinful world, AND die for it is simply staggering (Frame, 883, quoting John Murray). Think back to the worst sin you’ve committed, the one that haunts you in the silence of the dark. Know that Jesus knew about that sin and all the other ones. He died for you anyway. And He could only do that by taking on human nature.
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So what does this mean for us today? We have a God Who understands us intimately and calls us to a sacrificial life of righteousness. He has already gone before us, so let us follow after Him.
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