God in Human Flesh
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2017 · 26 March 2017
The central person throughout the New Testament is Jesus Christ. He is presented as the Savior, the King, and the Lord. He is God, the Son, who became a man to live a perfect, sinless life, then to die as a redeemer for sinners, paying fully the debt for sin and to rise from the dead. He then ascended into heaven where He now lives, interceding for His own and someday shall return to establish His Kingdom on earth.
Because salvation is only in Jesus Christ, the New Testament begins with four gospels, four historical accounts of the life of Jesus, focusing on who He is and what He did. If you are saved from your sins, if you are to escape hell and enter heaven forever, it will be because you believe in Jesus Christ and what the Scripture says He did. Therefore the gospels present Him as God, the Son, the Savior of the world, and the Lord.
And all of Luke has been designed to make very clear, who Jesus Christ really is. Zacharias, the Old Testament priest, and his wife Elizabeth affirmed the identity of Jesus as the Messiah. The angel Gabriel identified who Jesus would be, Immanuel, God with us. The angels in the field talking to the shepherds identified who He would be. Joseph and Mary knew who He was and gave testimony. And the old people in the temple, Simeon and Anna; their testimony is added to all the rest.
But Luke is not finished. There is one more testimony that is critical, and that is the testimony of Jesus Himself. And that is our focus tonight. There are critics that have said that Jesus was just a man and at the age of thirty he began to realize his messianic expectation. And he was pressed into acting the role of a Messiah for the sake of what turned about to be an ill-conceived attempt at revolution. All of this, are misrepresentations. The fact is that from His conception on He was God in human flesh.
At the age of twelve, He was fully aware of exactly who He was and why He had been sent into the world. At the age of twelve He had been living in obscurity in Nazareth. There was no external pressure to make Him become something He was not. When He declared Himself in this passage in verse 49 to be the Son of God, He did it because He knew by that age exactly who He was. So added to the testimony of men and angels is the testimony of the God-Man Himself.
We meet then in Luke 2:39-52 the child who is God. From birth to thirty, when He embarked upon His public preaching ministry, we know nothing by way of biblical record except for this one incident. Now if God picked one incident and one statement, you can be sure it is of monumental consequence, and indeed it proves to be so. The statement focuses on the fact that He knew exactly who He was and why He had come.
From birth to twelve is covered in verse 40, “The child continued to grow and become strong, increasing in wisdom and the grace of God was upon Him." From age twelve to thirty is covered in verse 52, "Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature and in favor of God and men." And in the middle in verses 41 to 51 there is only a glimpse of Jesus and only one sentence of Jesus as the incarnate God living in this world.
Verse 40 refers to physical development and becoming strong, and that is added by the phrase "increasing," or "being filled with wisdom," and that refers to the spiritual development. In twelve years Jesus grew physically and He grew spiritually to the place where He was filled with divine wisdom. He had reached the age of twelve. It tells us that in verse 42.
The Jews considered the age of thirteen the age when you became a son of the law and you stepped out from under the shelter of your parents and you became an equal to your father under the law of God. You went from being a boy to being a son at the age of thirteen. His human mind had developed to the point where it could contain the mind of God. He had developed a full understanding of divine wisdom.
Verse 40, "The grace of God was upon Him," and that's because He was perfect, He was sinless, so He received the favor of God resting on Him as God's Son in whom He was well pleased. He progressed from perfect innocence to perfect knowledge and perfect holiness. He was tempted in all points, the temptations of an infant, of a young child, of a teenager, yet without sin. He identifies Himself not only to Joseph and Mary who needed to understand who really was in charge of His life, but also to all of us.
Verse 41-45, “His parents went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover. 42 And when He was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem according to the custom of the feast. 43 When they had finished the days, as they returned, the Boy Jesus lingered behind in Jerusalem. And Joseph and His mother[l] did not know it; 44 but supposing Him to have been in the company, they went a day’s journey, and sought Him among their relatives and acquaintances. 45 So when they did not find Him, they returned to Jerusalem, seeking Him.”
At the age of thirteen they made that transition which later became known as bar mitzvah and a ceremony was developed. It was traditional that at the age of twelve the son was taken to the Passover so that that child would get a full exposure to all of the implications of the law of God that were played out in the Passover which occurred on a Sabbath and then was followed by a seven-day feast called the Feast of Unleavened Bread.
Jesus watched the sacrificial lamb be slaughtered for His family to take and eat, and must have fully known in His own mind an image that pictured His own death as the Lamb of God, who alone could take away the sins of the world. He knew that He was come to seek and to save those which are lost. He knew that He had to die and three days later rise again. What captivated His mind is too high for us to begin to understand.
When His parents were on the way back, it says in verse 43, Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. Their assumption was, as we noted in verse 44, that Jesus was with relatives or acquaintances. They had never known Him to do anything other than what was right, appropriate and expected by His parents. But, according to verse 44, at night at the end of the first day's journey they realized He wasn't there and they didn't find Him.
They waited overnight and then, verse 45, return to Jerusalem and then waited until the next day, before they began to look for Him. And that's why verse 46 says, "It came about that after three days," they finally found Him in the temple. Can you imagine how difficult it was to find Jesus at a time when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims were in the big city of Jerusalem?
And when they did find Him, it says in verse 46, "Sitting in the midst of the teachers, both listening to them, and asking them questions." The teachers were seated. We don't know who these teachers were. Luke is kind to call them teachers, but from now on, he calls them lawyers or scribes, and he never calls them teachers again.
He reserves that word teacher for Jesus only. Once Jesus was the teacher, nobody else is worthy to be called by Luke a teacher. Living in the out-of-the-way place called Nazareth, to be able to sit in the midst of the great Jewish teachers, those expert in the law, expert in the prophets, expert in the holy writings of the Old Testament and the Pentateuch, was a great opportunity for Jesus.
Jesus was the listener. This is a favorite method of Jewish teaching, this dialogue method. The customary pattern for teaching in Judaism, and even by the apostle Paul, was for students to gather around the teachers and stimulate discussion by asking questions. This would engage in dialogue. Paul says that in Acts 17:2, "He reasoned with them out of the Scripture," in a question-and-answer format.
But Jesus will never be the student again. Verse 40 tells us that He has been growing in His physical ability to comprehend. He is listening to how they understand the truth of God. He has a hunger for discussing the truth of God, something that was all there ever was in pre-incarnate fellowship with God. Someday He will ask questions of teachers again, but questions that only He can answer.
Verse 47, "And all who heard Him were amazed at His understanding and His answers.” He was stimulating questions. Maybe they weren't capable of giving answers, or they asked His view on things, which is amazing when you think He is only twelve-years old. They were amazed, it says. And that is a response all through the gospels. Verse 33, “Joseph and Mary, were amazed at the things that are being said about Him."
This is found repeatedly throughout the gospel story. Jesus creates astonishment and amazement, the kind of wonder created by the presence, power and wisdom of God. But there is no pride here. There is no self-centeredness, self-promotion and there is no arrogance. His questions are so penetrating, so insightful and so powerful that they generate astonishment from the teachers who surround Him.
Verse 48, “So when they saw Him, they were amazed; and His mother said to Him, “Son, why have You done this to us? Look, Your father and I have sought You anxiously.” His parents finally found Him and they were astonished like the other people. Jesus astonished everybody all the time. But their astonishment was most of all because of where He was. He seemed impervious to human circumstance.
Here He was three days later. Where had He stayed? What had He eaten all this time? Those things were not on His mind at all. He was engaged in a dialogue about the Old Testament. It was amazing to His parents. And they were personally perturbed because for three days they have been without Him. His mother says to Him in verse 48, "Son, why have You treated us this way?" And this is the first time the sword pierces Mary's heart.
Look at Luke 2:35, Simeon said, “a sword will pierce through your own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” This child had been a great joy. After escaping Herod, after escaping the slaughter, they had returned back from Egypt to Nazareth. The child was obedient, compliant, submissive and loving. And Mary loved that Son like no other child and that Son loved her like no one ever loved her. There had never been a sword, but now there was a sword.
Mary is taking it personally. It is a normal motherly rebuke but she was putting the blame on Him saying, “Son, why have You done this to us? Look, Your father and I have sought You anxiously.” She assumed that He had been hiding from them. But He hasn't been hiding from them. He was not disobedient. But they're taking it personally because of the stress of three days.
The whole scene was necessary because they needed to be reminded of His real and true identity. And it was necessary to make a relationship break between Jesus and His earthly family because they were just temporary. He had come to do the will of His heavenly Father, as He says over and over again, particularly in John's gospel. And though the break will not be implemented for eighteen years, it is announced here.
We see that in verse 49, “And He said to them, “Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?” This is a profound statement. These are the only words recorded of Jesus in thirty years and they tell us who He was and why He came. In other words, you know who My Father is and you know this is My true house.
Verse 50, “But they did not understand the statement which He spoke to them.” They knew who He was. They knew He was virgin conceived. They had been told that by God through an angel. They knew He was the Messiah, the Son of David. They knew He was God in human flesh. They knew what kind of a child He was. They could see it manifest in everything He said and did.
But they still didn't understand what He meant. What He said is so profound that some of us are still trying to figure out what He meant. And this often happens. There were a number of times when Jesus said something to the disciples and they didn't understand it. What Jesus meant was, "You are temporary, God is My true Father, and the home in Nazareth is temporary, I belong with God's people.”
So in verse 51, “Then He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was subject to them, but His mother kept all these things in her heart.” Jesus continued for eighteen more years to be their child until He was thirty years old and began His ministry. His relation to God, did not nullify His duty as a human to His earthly parents. He was an obedient child all through His birth to twelve years and He would be an obedient adult.
But after thirty, that relationship changed. In Mark 3:31 when she came to find Jesus with some of her other children, the crowd said, "Your mother is seeking You.” And Jesus said, “Whoever does the will of My Father in heaven, the same is My brother, My sister, My mother.” So He distanced Himself not because He didn't love her, but because now He was the Savior doing what the Father wants.
And then in verse 52; from the time of this incident when they went back to Nazareth until He began His ministry around the age of thirty, "Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and men." Here in His adult life, He was still growing stronger in divine truth and spiritual favor with God. He will become the teacher and make it clear that He is God's Son and He will move to die on the cross and rise again.
But for all the thirty-three years, Hebrews 4:15 says that He was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. He had to come down to earth to live a perfect life so that we can take His place before God. And for a brief moment it all comes into focus. "I'm not your Son, Joseph and Mary, God is My Father.” Let's bow in prayer.