How divine was Jesus?
Hey, thanks again for sending in your questions related to our recent sermons. As you know, we’ve been going through the Book of Mark in this last week. We came to a passage where Jesus goes to his hometown. And really, people had a hard time believing who Jesus was because they were over focused on Jesus humanity and thought, Jesus is just like us. How could we need him?
Why would we bow to him? Why would we need his forgiveness? Because we grew up with him. He’s nobody special. And even he might have some questionable origins related to when Mary became pregnant.
People in the town seemed to maybe not believe Mary’s story because of the name that they called Jesus. So the question this week is, how divine was Jesus? We spent a lot of time this last Sunday talking about Jesus humanity, but how divine was he? And the answer is, he’s fully divine. Colossians, the fullness of the Godhead rest in Christ.
And if you’ve been following along with the rest of our Mark series, Mark has given Jesus identity, both his divine identity and his human identity, all over the place. Until this point, we’ve really focused more on his divine identity. Jesus calling himself I am the divine name. Mark, the narrator, who of course, wrote the biography of Jesus, but from the narrator voice, calls Jesus I am just. In the first passage, John the Baptist goes forth preparing the way of the Lord.
And that’s quoting a passage from Isaiah, that’s Yahweh, when it refers to Lord. Jesus, of course, claims he has the ability to forgive sins which they thought only God could do. So throughout the Book of Mark, Mark goes back and forth. Mark clearly shows Jesus’divine identity and also his human identity. And the two of those together are the unique natures of Jesus.
The early church figured out that Jesus did not have one nature, but two. He had a fully human nature, and at the same time, he had a fully divine nature. And it’s not like the divinity was mixed with the humanity. So he was some kind of demigod. They were two separate natures, but the person of Jesus really embraced both of them at the same time.
The earliest misunderstandings of Jesus’identity after death and resurrection was letting go of the human nature. That continued to be a struggle for people, like it was a struggle for people here in the passage of Mark that we just studied last week in the early, were one of the first heresies was this kind of gnostic idea that the body, the flesh is bad and that the Spirit and the divine is good. And Jesus needed to first didn’t really come in the flesh because flesh is bad, and we know Jesus isn’t bad. And then also Jesus needed to get rid of his body to escape back to the divine.
In one John, chapter four, John writes, anyone who claims Jesus did not come in the flesh is a spirit of the Antichrist.
So it’s really have to embrace his humanity for reasons we talked about this last week. Whatever is assumed is not healed. And we really have to embrace his divinity because God really came here. Even in that passage in one John four, when it says anyone who denies Jesus Christ came in the flesh, he’s really claiming both natures of Jesus because he says Jesus Christ came, which means he existed before being in flesh. And then also he came in flesh.
So then he had flesh. He had these two natures. It’s over and over again in Scripture. Mark has said both and both at different points in history have been stumbling blocks for people. Some people lean more toward Jesus divinity.
Some people lean more toward Jesus humanity. But the biblical position, which is repeated over and over again, is that Jesus really has two natures, a fully human nature and a fully divine nature. So yes, Jesus is divine. Fully divine. And Jesus is human.
Fully human. Well, we hope that helps and we will see you next time.