Jesus the Man
Posted by Steve - August 20, 2008
Did Jesus do certain miracles because of his deity? Was he able to walk on water because he was God? Despite frequent evangelical assertions that Jesus was “100% God and 100% man”, it often seems that we totally ignore the humanity of Jesus. Everything that he accomplished seems to be chalked up to, “Well, he was God, so he was able to do those things.” In this episode, Ray and Steve take a look at the humanity of Jesus and revelation in scripture that deals with that topic.
Beyond the Box is the podcast of Raborn Johnson and Steve Sensenig. We have been encouraging each other in the journey outside the bounds of institutional religion for several years now and share many of our candid thoughts and questions in our podcast.
November 20th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
BigC from bearcrawling.com turned me on to your podcast. I really enjoyed this episode. Thanks for all the pondering…
November 22nd, 2008 at 12:36 pm
JeffinLA,
Thanks for stopping by. Hope you’ll stick around and add your voice to the conversation
January 26th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Interesting podcast. For what it’s worth, I mostly side with you on this one. I don’t know how you can get in this discussion without discussing whether or not Jesus was God – as you found out.
The verse that comes to mind is Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees in John 8:58. At the moment, that’s the only example I can find of Him basically saying that He is God (or at least on some sort of par with God) other than maybe John 14:9.
The statements in John 8 seem to make it clear that Jesus, on some level, is NOT what any other human is or will be.
January 26th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
I need to hold my thoughts until after the podcasts…otherwise I end up doing this all the time. Just a thought on why Jesus had to be anointed.
John said that he needed to be baptized by Jesus. No doubt he was right. And he and his family recognized Who they were seeing. So there is an understanding by those “in the know” that this man was not a man like any other (at the least). Thus, for Jesus to be baptized was necessary to follow the pattern already set down. It wasn’t that Jesus didn’t already have the Spirit of God (otherwise His debating with the theologians of the day at 12 years of age was a mere act of human genius expressing itself…and his response just one of arrogance and self-importance), but rather that there was something that Jesus – in the form of a man – had to go through. Hebrews 5:8 says He had to learn obedience. That doesn’t mean He sinned (otherwise Hebrews contradicts itself – 4:15), but rather that He was submitted to earthly masters and outward forms for a time so that there would be no deviation from what was laid down in the Old Testament. Not that Jesus necessarily needed the overt ceremony, but that the anointing was necessary to inaugurate His open, earthly ministry. A lot like they would have anointed kings as a public declaration.
That’s what I see going on there.