Why Jesus’ Full Humanity is Important 1: Our Freedom, Truth, Victory, New Birth and Adoption in Christ

Jesus is fully human. When he was born as a man, that man was in every way like us, except that he was without sin... The fact of Jesus' full humanity is important because without it we have NOTHING--no life, no forgiveness, no peace with God, no promise of God's kindness or guidance, no power, no resurrection, no hope.

Jesus is fully human. When he was born as a man, that man was in every way like us, except that he was without sin–that is, he never departed from trusting his Father and obeying his Father’s voice, though tempted as we are. Hebrews 2:14-18, 4:14-16 and 5:7-10; Philippians 2:5-7. The fact of Jesus’ full humanity is important because without it we have NOTHING–no life, no forgiveness, no peace with God, no promise of God’s kindness or guidance, no power, no resurrection, no hope. I will show this below.

When I say that Jesus was–and still is–fully human, like us, I do not deny his divinity. I have shown in another place that Jesus is self-existent and eternal like his Father. See, Jesus is. I have also shown that Jesus is the Son of God. I invite my readers to read these pages.

I have also demonstrated at some length in another place that Jesus is the “Son of Man,” fully human. And I have shown in an earlier post on this blog that Jesus reconciled us to God (not God to us, because God wasn’t our enemy) by giving us himself, not by giving us his “merit.” See, No Merit–The Golden Key to Freedom. I will also not repeat those demonstrations in this post, but will invite my readers to review those pages instead.

Instead, this post will discuss only the reasons Jesus’ full humanity is important, and the things we must lose if he was something else. Many associated with the Church since its earliest days have erroneously tried to reconcile Jesus’ divinity with his humanity by teaching he was something other than normally human. For example, some have taught that Jesus, when he appeared in a body on earth, was a phantom that was all God but never really human (See, Docetism). Others said he was a man who was born biologically human but (at some point in his life) was so totally hijacked by God that his human nature ceased to exist or to function, something that can never happen to us. And many professing Christians to this day seem, in practice at least, to believe he was a superman who was superficially like us but in reality so much superior to us that we may never aspire to be like him. If any of these descriptions fit Jesus, our salvation is worthless.

In answer to all of these false, non-human pictures of Jesus, John wrote:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God;  and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.  You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them.  We are from God; he who knows God listens to us; he who is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

1 John 4:1-6

John amplifies this point in his second letter:

For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist.

2 John 1:7

Note carefully that the way to tell a truthful spirit from a false spirit, the spirit that tries to take the place of (Greek, anti-) Christ, is that the spirit of God declares that Jesus Christ came “in the flesh“–i.e., was human like us. Even demons declare Jesus to be divine, the Son of God. See, for instance, Matthew 8:28-30 and Mark 3:11-12. If they can’t keep us bound to cultural idols, or to the belief that Jesus is a myth or was merely human, demons are quite pleased to keep us believing that Jesus was merely divine, not really human, and therefore can’t really be in a constructive personal relationship with us. The one thing the spirit of lies can’t safely permit us to believe is that Jesus the Messiah is both the Son of God and human like us, because, if we take that message to heart, we will follow Jesus and be free of the lie.

Ellul gave a good, though long, explanation of the sense in which the “spirit of error,” the spirit of lies or lying, the work of the father of lies, is used here:

I will likely discuss each of the forms of lies about Jesus Christ identified by Ellul in this passage in later blog posts, but, for now, the question is why we shouldn’t think of Jesus as merely divine, or as a superman, rather than as a human like us. What will we lose by thus reducing Jesus to less than fully human?

The first thing we will lose is suggested by the language of 1 John 4:2-4, quoted above: we will lose our victory. We know we are of God because we confess Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, and, because of that faith, “we have overcome them”–that is, the anti-Christ spirit of the world and those that follow it. Later in the same letter, John adds:

Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him… For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is the one who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

I John 5:2, 4-5.

Our victory comes only through our “faith.” But contrary to false teachings that have always been present in the church (and are, unfortunately, very prevalent today), this “faith” in which lies our victory is not simply belief in what God “has done” (in the past) to secure our “eternal salvation,” with no reference to our present life. The “faith” that brings our victory is also not “a faith” in the traditional ecclesiastical sense of that term–i.e., the entire system of doctrine and practice of a single Christian denomination, or the agreed “essential” doctrines of a number of denominations. Nor, on the opposite extreme, is our victory found in some free-floating “faith” that God is able (if he so wills) or willing to do things for us at our convenience in our worldly circumstances (“believing God for” things, as one present wing of the Church likes to say). Instead, as this passage says, the faith that contains our victory is a very specific kind of faith: absolute reliance upon the fact that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and was born as God’s Son, a human like us. Our reliance on this fact, then, assures us that we too can be, and have been, “born of God,” into a new life.

As this also suggests, another thing we will lose if we surrender Chris’s humanity is our adoption as children of God. According to Paul’s letter to the Romans, Jesus’ coming and dying as a human and being raised from the dead as a human were necessary for our adoption, which comes as part of the same package with our justification from sin, our freedom, and the presence of the Holy Spirit within us:

 Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.  For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit…

However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. So then, brethren, we are under obligation, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh—for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.

Romans 8:1-5,9-17.

If Jesus was not fully human, God has no basis to adopt sinful humans as his children. But because Jesus was fully human, and lived a sinless life despite normal human weaknesses by reliance on the Holy Spirit, God offers us adoption as his children and the opportunity to learn to live by his Spirit just as Jesus did. Jesus’ reliance on the Holy Spirit, and all of the good things that follow when we do likewise, will be unpacked in the next two posts.