Jesus Christ is fully human, just like we are
In the fall after my freshman year at college I took a job as a framing carpenter and have been building things out of wood, on and off, ever since. It’s been especially tough on my fingers. I have stapled them, hammered them, pinched them, crushed them, frozen them, electrocuted them, put thousands of splinters in them, and, once, driven a three inch spike into them with the air nailer. And so this is my problem: I know that Jesus worked for years as a carpenter too, just like me, but my inclination is to say that maybe Jesus is too perfect to have ever hit his fingers.
But you know what? He isn’t. Jesus was the kind of carpenter who mashed his pinky every now and then, because that’s precisely what it means to be a real human carpenter. It’s not sin, it’s just being a real human with a real job and living in our real world, a world that is totally broken by Sin. And so he knows the pinch and burn that comes when you clip the back edge of your ring finger with a hammer, along with all the other far more serious things, because he actually was a normal human being just like you and me. Jesus does not merely share a few traits in common with us; he is “in every respect like us, his brothers and sisters,” (Hb 2:17) having a human body like ours, a human nature like ours, a human personality like ours, human emotions like ours, and having endured all the limitations that come with being a regular human.
This is what Paul is getting at when he says in Galatians 4:4 that “God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law.” Jesus came into this world just like we do, as a baby, and was subject to all the same kinds of restrictions and conditions that we are. Jesus did not come as a ‘super-man’—armed with a collection of powers that insulated him from the real world—but as an actual man, a human being just like us. He hit his fingers in the wood shop, annoyed his parents, got frustrated with his disciples, cried his eyes out when one of his best friends died, and lived as a subject to the law of this world his whole life long. This is the marvel of the incarnation, isn’t it, that Jesus, the eternal Son of God, became an actual human being, just like us.
Why? He did it because it was necessary for our salvation. You see, just as our whole human nature was broken by the fall, our whole human nature needed to be restored and recreated by God. To do that, God the Son brought the whole of our broken human nature into himself and purified all of it by making it his own. As Gregory of Nazianzus (one of my favorite theologians) said, “that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.” (Letter 101, NPNF2, vii.440) The thing is this, Jesus only rescues the humanity he carries with him to the cross. If Jesus only took up a part of what makes me a real human being, then only a part of me has truly been saved. In fact, part of what it means to call Christ our healer is acknowledging that he has indeed taken real human flesh and real human nature into his own Person and restored it by his touch. Being human was essential to his mission. Hebrews 2:14 says that “because God's children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death.” Jesus Christ is our savior because he was willing to become everything that we are.
The humanity of Jesus is therefore serious business. 1 John 4:2-3 says that anyone who denies “that Jesus came in a real body . . . has the spirit of the Antichrist,” (the technical term for denying the full humanity of Jesus like this is ‘Docetism’). If Jesus Christ was not fully human, then he never truly gave himself on the cross for our sins, and our humanity has never truly been redeemed. But he was fully human, human just like you and me, and he did give himself up to rescue us from our sins and create a new way of being human. The first critical thing to remember about Jesus Christ is that he became a totally real human being, just like we are.
Jesus Christ is fully God, just like the Father is
In the Old Testament we are introduced to God as the one who calls the universe into being and who sets the standard for life and morality, the one who judges the nations and chooses one of them to be his very own and bring his salvation to all people. He is the great and only God who rules over all creation, both seen and unseen. In Exodus 3:14-15 he gives Moses his name, so that his people can know him and call upon him. This name—usually written ‘LORD’ in our Bibles—is ‘Yahweh’ (sometimes given as ‘Jehovah’ in older writing). It is Yahweh who placed Adam and Eve in the Garden, Yahweh who invited Abraham to be his friend, Yahweh who rescued his people from Egypt, Yahweh who cast down the walls of Jericho, Yahweh who selected David as king, and Yahweh who spoke through the prophets.
Only with this picture of God before us—of all those stories we know about our mighty God at work in the Old Testament, of Israel singing together at the defeat of Pharaoh at the Red Sea: “The LORD is a warrior; Yahweh is his name!” (Ex 15:3)—can we really give a Christian answer to the question ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’. Because, as George Pardington rightly says, Jesus Christ is the Yahweh of the Old Testament. (Christian Doctrine, 234)
Who is Jesus Christ? He is LORD, he is totally God, just like the Father is. Jesus Christ is Yahweh. It is Christ who spoke to Moses from the burning bush, Christ who met Joshua with sword in hand outside Jericho, Christ who sat with Abraham outside Sodom, and Christ who wrestled with Jacob and negotiated with Gideon.
The Church of the New Testament, of course, calls him ‘Lord’ hundreds of times, using the same word that their Bibles used for Yahweh. (Most of the New Testament writers, along with the majority of the earliest Church, used the Greek translation of the Old Testament, called the ‘Septuagint’; the New Testament word for ‘Lord’ is the same Greek word that is used for ‘Yahweh’ in the Septuagint; the significance of applying this term to Jesus would therefore have been unmistakably clear for both them and their early readers.) More explicit yet, there are several passages where the New Testament writers quote a passage of the Old Testament about Yahweh and tell us expressly that this passage applies to Jesus. Thus we learn the true depth of belief in the earliest Church, and what the first Christians meant when they confessed, right from the very start, that “Jesus Christ is Lord.”
The Gospels are all thus unafraid to use name Yahweh to refer to Jesus. Quoting Isaiah 40:3 they present John the Baptist as the one preaching repentance in anticipation of the arrival of Jesus the Messiah and calling out, “Prepare the way for the LORD’s coming.” (Mt 3:3, Mk 1:3, Lk 3:4, Jn 1:23) Prepare the way for the LORD, clear the road for Yahweh. Hebrews too names him as Yahweh, quoting 1:10-12 from Psalm 102, as does Peter, quoting 1 Peter 3:12-15 from Psalm 34.
And in perhaps the clearest passage of all, the apostle Paul shows us what ‘Lord’ means for him when he talks about the identity of our Lord Jesus Christ. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, Paul writes in Romans 10:9 that “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” And then to make sure we all understand what he means by saying ‘confess Jesus as Lord’, he reiterates the passage he is quoting from the Old Testament, Joel 2:32, where it says that “everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved.” (Ro 10:13) Everyone who calls on the name of Yahweh will be saved; everyone who confesses Jesus as LORD will be saved.
Jesus is the LORD—is Yahweh—just as the Father is, even if this Trinitarian mystery is difficult for us to fully comprehend. It’s why Jesus can say that “the Father and I are one” in John 10:30, why he doesn’t rebuke Thomas who falls down at his feet worshiping him as “my Lord and my God”, why John calls him “the only true God,” why both Paul and Peter call him “our God and savior,” and why “the Jewish leaders tried all the harder to find a way to kill him. For he not only broke the Sabbath, he called God his Father, thereby making himself equal with God.” (Jn 20:28; 1J 5:20; Ti 2:13; 2P 1:1; Jn 5:18). Being ‘God’ is not an abstract quality that Jesus possesses in equal measure with the Father and the Spirit; God—Yahweh—is who he is, and we cannot rightly talk about Jesus if we fail to remember this. Jesus is not merely similar to the Father; he is the same God, the same Yahweh, that the Father is. Sometimes, to make this point clear, theologians say that Jesus is ‘of one substance with the Father’ (the Greek term is homoousios) as a way of expressing as carefully as possible that the Son is God in all and every way that the Father is, and not just the same kind of being as the Father (the latter being the heresy of Arianism). In human history, the clearest marker of Jesus’ divine nature is his resurrection—he was shown to be the Son of God when he was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit.” (Ro 1:4)—but his divinity did not begin there. “In the beginning,” says the Scripture, “the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (Jn 1:1) It is this Word, this pre-existent and fully divine Son of God, who became a human so that he could save us. The second critical thing to remember about Jesus Christ is that he is fully God—fully Yahweh—just like the Father is.
The humanity and deity of Jesus Christ are united in his one Person
There are two bad options for describing the way that the human and divine natures of Jesus Christ are united together. The first bad option is thinking that his two natures are somehow melded or combined together to form really just one nature (this is, broadly speaking, the heresy of Monophysitism). This could mean that they are mixed together to form a new kind of nature that is partly human and partly divine, or that Jesus’ divine nature functions as his soul/mind/will while his human nature serves to provide him with a body. The problem with this option is that it leaves Christ without a full human nature (which would mean that some parts of ourhumanity are not redeemed) or without a full divine nature (so that he is not Yahweh with the authority to forgive sins and create us anew). At its worst, this kind of thinking can end up producing a Jesus Christ who is neither human nor divine, but some sort of ‘third kind of thing’. It is never the right decision to describe Christ by saying that his two natures are somehow combined into one.
The other bad option for talking about the human and divine natures of Jesus is to consider them so separately from one another that it becomes impossible to think of Jesus any longer as one real person (which is, roughly, the heresy of Nestorianism). Christianity doesn’t teach two Christs or two Jesuses, one human and the other divine: Jesus Christ is one real Person. When we describe his two natures, we cannot let ourselves stop short of talking about how in Jesus Christ they are genuinely united together: that was the whole point of the incarnation, wasn’t it? There is only one Son; we should never allow our eagerness to preserve the completeness of his two natures to in the end cause ourselves to break his Person into two.
So, we cannot merge the natures, and we cannot undermine the unity of his Person. What then do we do? The short version of the answer (and the one you should memorize) is that we always remember that Jesus possesses two full natures, one human and one divine, that have been miraculously united in his one Person: two natures, one Person. Put another way, in the incarnation the eternal Son of God took on another nature—a human nature—and incorporated it into his own being without diminishing or distorting the divine nature he already had, and without subdividing his Person into parts.
The joining together of the human and the divine in Jesus Christ is a union that takes place in his Person; his own Person is both the ‘location’ of the union and the source of the power that unifies his two natures. Paul paints a picture of this in 2 Corinthians 4:6 when he says that “God, who said, ‘Let there be light in the darkness,’ has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ.” When we look at the face of Christ we see both the man Jesus and the glory of the eternal God the Son. One face—one real Person—two natures. The (important) technical word that is used to describe this relationship is ‘hypostatic union’. Remember: hypostasis is just the Greek word for Person. The ‘hypostatic union’ is not a style of uniting or a name for the product of the two natures. Rather, it is primarily a statement describing the location of the union: Christ’s two natures are united in his Person—his hypostasis—without being mixed together or breaking his Person into parts. When I look into the face of my savior I see both the man Jesus and the ever-living Yahweh: two natures, one Person.
Who is Jesus Christ? Fully human, just as much a human as I am; fully God, just as much God as the Father is. These two natures aren’t blurred together, nor do they stretch him so that he begins to break apart. Rather, in his own almighty Person, he holds the two together without difficulty and without sacrificing the one for the other. Like Paul said: “Christ himself was an Israelite as far as his human nature is concerned. And he is God, the one who rules over everything and is worthy of eternal praise! Amen.” (Ro 9:5)
If I was preparing for accreditation I would . . .
• Read the first two chapters of Harry Blamires’ incredible book on this topic, The Offering of Man
• Make sure I understood the term ‘hypostatic union’, and the definition ‘two natures, one Person (hypostasis)’
• Memorize Romans 9:5, Galatians 4:4, and John 1:1
• Be aware of the important phrase ‘of one substance with the Father’
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