Monday's Meditation: His Humanity, Our Example

The great theologian Abraham Lincoln once observed that God must love the common man because he made so many of them. He was on to something. From the beginning God the Father has loved people! He made people, he talks to people, and he accomplishes his work through people. The humanity of Jesus is not so much an exceptional act of God as it is the crowning act of God.  

It should be no surprise then, that when God Himself wanted to accomplish the redemption of the whole earth, He did so through a man.  Jesus, 100% God, was also 100% man.  The religious authorities in his day could not accept the idea that a man could  forgive sin, that a man could open the eyes of the blind, or that a man could cleanse lepers with a touch. Sin, blindness and leprosy were contagious, men should flee from them all!  But the Man Jesus Christ came with a heavenly contagion that set the oppressed free.

God’s method, revealed in scripture, is to use people. Before Jesus, God partnered with people: Abraham, Sarah, Moses, and Ruth. In Jesus, God sent a man. After Jesus, he commissioned men, “Go therefore into all the world . . .” (Matthew 28:18) Why is this significant? We need to see that God has always chosen to work through humanity to accomplish his purposes in the earth. Jesus, our model, demonstrated the potential of a human life lived in total submission to the Father. Jesus healed and taught and discipled not by virtue of his divine nature but by the grace of being a Man fully submitted to God. He didn’t raise the dead because he was the Boss’ Son, he did so to display the full potential of a human life in partnership with God.

To grasp the humanity of Jesus is to grasp the hope that Christlikeness is possible for each of us. His intention is to reproduce Himself in the lives of his followers, to launch a community of God’s sons and daughters capable of the kind of character and power demonstrated by the only begotten Son of God. God only "fathered” one child, but He has chosen to adopt untold more, and each adopted child is called to the family business.