JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

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make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child.
And there was no illusion or deception in this: the babyhood of the Son of God
was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in
fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the incarnation."2
C. S. Lewis of Oxford University wrote:
"If you want to get the hang of the incarnation, imagine what you would feel
like if you had to become a cockroach or a garden slug."3
Evidence for the Humanity of Jesus Christ
Greek mythology is full of stories of gods who walked the earth giving the impression
that they were men. They looked like men. They talked like men. They acted like men. But when
the need arose they cast off their pretense, manifested their powers, and revealed their divinity.
They were not really men, but gods in disguise.
Some early Christians, the Docetists (who are not without their modern cousins such as
Christian Science) thought of Jesus in this way. He was God, looking like man, but not really
man. But as we have already seen the Christian Church decisively rejected all such views and
labeled them rank heresy. Jesus was truly a man.
Peter Bayne beautifully put it:
"Jesus Christ has trod the world. The trace of Divine footsteps will never be
obliterated. And the Divine footsteps were the footsteps of a Man . . . not
an angel, not a disembodied spirit, not an abstract ideal, but THE MAN
JESUS CHRIST."4
Christians have too often taken the edge off Jesus' humanity in their portrayal of Him. In
His humanity Jesus comes off as dehumanized. Believers sometimes talk about Jesus Christ as
though He had walked down from heaven a ready-made man, with a complete outfit of true ideas
in his Head; as though He had only pretended to be a babe in the cradle. New Testament scholar
R. T. France put it:
". . . at least in popular [evangelical piety] there is a strong tendency to a form of
unacknowledged docetism, a Jesus about whom the 'real' truth is that he is God
and whose humanity is a convenient temporary vehicle, but not to be taken very
seriously when it comes to discussing the possible limitations on his knowledge or
his power, or the degree of his conditioning by the cultural milieu of first-century
Palestine."5
But that is not the picture we find in the Bible. Jesus is not superhuman. He did not walk
six inches above the ground. Jesus is as much man as He is God. He is the God-Man.