The Biblical basis for
Jesus’ Humanity
By Jake Kohl
The Biblical basis for
Jesus’ humanity can easily be seen in the Gospels. In the Gospels Jesus
exhibits His humanity in many ways. Jesus gets tired and He slept (Luke 8:24),
Jesus became hungry and ate (Mark 2:15), Jesus would weep over Jerusalem, (Luke 19:41), and He would feel physical pain
as He was beat and crucified, and like man He died (John 19). Along with these
examples of the humanity of Jesus John 1:14 says, “And the Word became flesh
and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory of the only Son from the
Father, full of grace and truth.” The humanity of Jesus is not limited to just
the Gospels. In Galatians 4:4 Paul wrote about the humanity of Jesus, and
Hebrews 2:9 describes Jesus in His humanity.
The biblical bases for
Jesus’ deity are written throughout scripture.
“There are eight aspects to Jesus’ claim
to deity. (1) In the gospel of John He used the Jehovistic I AM, that
identified him with deity (John 8:25, 56-59, 18:6, 8). (2) Jesus claimed to be
the Old Testament Adonai (Matt. 28:19).
(3) Jesus identified Himself with God in the baptismal formula (Matt.
28:19). (4) Jesus claimed to be one with the Father (John 10:30). And that the
person who saw Him was seeing the Father (John 14:9). (5)Jesus assumed a
prerogative that belonged to God when He claimed to forgive sins (Mark 2:5-7).
(6) He asserted Himself as deity when He allowed people to worship Him (Matt.
14:33; 28:9; John 20:28, 29). (7) Jesus claimed omnipresence, omniscience and
omnipotence (John 3:13). And finally, (8) Jesus claimed to have a special relationship
with the father, by how He addressed Him, “My Father” (John 5:18). (Towns, 2008)
Jesus is both God and Man at the same time
through what is termed the Hypostatic Union. In the carnation of the Son of
God, a human nature was inseparably united forever with the divine nature in
the one person of Jesus Christ, yet with the two natures remaining distinct,
whole, and unchanged, without mixture or conclusion, so that the one person,
Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man (Elwell, 2001). We see in scripture
that Jesus prayed to the Father. Jesus also has a genuine human nature which is
distinct, but not separate from His divine nature. If Jesus was not a human
being, and thus was only the Father, He obviously would have no need of prayer.
The prayers of Christ arise from the genuineness of His human nature, not His
divine nature. This is not to say that "Jesus only prayed as a man"
or that "Jesus only prayed in His human nature," but it is to say
that Jesus only had need of prayer because of His human nature.
The fact that Jesus is both God and man is
very important for us. It means as a human, He shares in our human weaknesses; He
knows what it is like to be human and tempted and is therefore able to
represent us in the presence of the Father where He pleads to Him on our behalf
(Hebrews 5, 7). Because He is fully God, He is able to show us what God is like
(John 14:8-11). But more important because He is God, He is able to pay for our
sins and bring us into a relationship with God again (Colossians 1:19-20).
Jesus needed to become incarnate because we needed a Savior to reconcile us
back to God, which we were unable to do ourselves because of our nature of sin.
The danger of overemphasizing or denying either
the deity or humanity of Christ, is if we overemphasize
his deity we deny his humanity and lose our high
priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses. If we overemphasize the
humanity of Christ we deny his authority and weaken the power of His words and
belittle the transformative power of His supreme
sacrifice.
Some of the common objections to the traditional understanding of
Christology are that God and Christ had to have two wills or centers of
volition or that the human nature of Christ had to have independent subsistence
(Elwell,
2001). In response, Christ had two natures, both human and divine. Jesus first is
truly human, and then discovering his divinity in and through his humanity:
"God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself" (2 Cor. 5:19). This had to happen in order for humanity to be
saved from eternal separation. Hence, Christ’s humanity is an example to my
life because He understands the human nature of temptation and sufferings that
we go through. He knows how I feel when being let down by others, ridiculed,
spat on, and just plainly abused by humanity.
References
Elwell, W. (2001). Evangelical
dictionary of theology. (second ed., pp. 583-584). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Acedemic.
Towns, E. (2008). Theology
for today. Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.
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