3.19.2010

A Million Billion Trillion Quadrillion Questions

I want to know all about the relationship between Jesus and the Father. I mean, Jesus was fully man, so did He experience times (like, maybe, in the wilderness) where He felt the seeming abandonment of the Father that we sometimes feel? Or did He have the gift and blessing of perpetual nearness because He was special?

At the cross, He cried, "Why have You forsaken Me?" But was this the only time He felt this ache?

In Matthew 3:13–17, Jesus is baptized, and the Father says, "This is my Son." It is interesting to note that Jesus' sonship is exactly what Satan attacks when the Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness to be tried in chapter 4. Satan says three times: "If you are really the Son of God..." But that's besides the point.

How much did Jesus know while on earth? Was He omniscient as a man? When He was being tempted, how did He know what to say? Did He only know what the Father spoke to Him and what He learned in Scripture?

In Isaiah 50:4–5, we see that Jesus was given the tongue of the learned and that the Father opened His ear to hear. The Father woke Him up every morning in order to teach Him the things of the learned. In other words, Jesus had to learn stuff. In other other words, Jesus didn't always know everything.

Really?

How much did the Father tell Him? When did He learn it? Did He know, even as a child, that He'd be dying the way that He did and why?

Obviously, He knew a lot as a child, because the way He was able to teach from the Scripture.

I sometimes get so caught up in the divinity of Jesus that I forget how lowly He must have been in His human form. Even though He was God, He gave up His heavenly home (and, apparently, His omniscience...anything else?) to come here and be like us. He was even humble for a man... not just because He was God and became a man...He was also humble compared to other men in how He walked in His everyday life as a man. I mean, He really laid it down every day, saying, not My will but the Father's. So...I want to know about what life on earth must have really been like for Him.

I mean, Jesus was totally dependent on the Father's voice. In John 5:19, Jesus says that He can't even do anything by Himself, He only did what He saw the Father doing. He was given the gift of the Father's voice. He was given grace and strength on earth to hear, to do, and to speak whatever the Father was saying.

Jesus was so strong! He was strong because of His relationship with His Father! Even not knowing everything, even in the weakness of being fully a man, even with all doubts and temptations and insecurities assailing Him, He "did not turn away or rebel" from the voice of the Father when He could have (Isa. 50:4). That's amazing.

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