Paradoxes of the Bible #1
Jesus: The God-Man
Jesus the Man: part 1
- Find a quiet place without distractions.
- Be comfortably alert, still, and at peace.
- Say the Lord’s Prayer. Sing or cant the Jesus Prayer.
- Pray for family, friends, neighbors, and yourself.
- Slowly and carefully read the passage of Scripture.
- Nothing is more core to Christianity than the humanness of Jesus. If Jesus is God only, there is no death on the cross, but then merely a trick, a misperception, a lie, and worse, no atonement for sin.
- From the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, we see the human nature of Messiah as evidenced in Psalm 2 and 22. From Isaiah 7 we see a person born of a virgin, a miracle yet a birth of a human being.
- Moses instructed the people to kill a lamb without blemish, take the blood and place it on the posts and lintel of the doors so no death would come to that house. Jesus is our Passover Lamb.
- In the Greek Bible, the New Testament, and in a way we do not understand, God is born, the Word, becomes flesh.
- We see so much of the real man in Jesus. He is begotten of God (John 3:16), tempted (Matthew 4:1-11), hungry (Matthew 4:2), thirsty (John 19:28), tired (John 4:6), angry (Mark 3:5), sighing deeply (Mark 8:12 & John 11:33), crying (John 8:35), and dying (John 19:28-34).And the list could go on and on.
- No doctrine has been more attacked than the humanness of Jesus with the lone exception of the deity of Jesus. The reality is, if Jesus were not fully man, His death on the cross is meaningless and of no effect.
- If Jesus is God and not the God-man, then there is no actual death. It must be that He is both God and man at once.
- This is beyond reason from the human standpoint; it must be revealed and believed.