When God Grew Up
“And Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.” ~Luke 2:52
These are, for my money, some of the most amazing words found anywhere in human literature. They tell the story of God in our nature growing up. This is “He who built the starry skies,” who is “very God of very God.” He is the “everlasting Light” and “heaven’s all-gracious King.” There He is: sharing the very nature of God Himself, upholding the universe by the word of His power, turning the pages of human history by divine right. And yet here He is: enclosed in the body of a little boy. Immature, He needed to grow up.
He needed to grow up physically. There is no controversy here. His body grew from embryo to fetus, from fetus to wriggling newborn, and onwards from giggling infant to clumsy toddler. He needed to grow through all the stages of childhood– those awkward preteen years, the surge of hormones heralding puberty, as step by step the Son of God reached His way towards adulthood.
As Christ’s body grew, His mind also grew. In His human nature, God developed intellectually. The catechism puts it beautifully: He took to Himself “a true body and a reasonable soul” (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 22). Christ did not merely wrap His divine mind in a human body. The incarnation went deeper than that, beyond the body. Jesus took to Himself a human mind and a human soul. In our flesh, God suffered the indignity of learning, of being taught, of needing to be taught. While He grew in wisdom, Jesus, of course, was never foolish. He just needed time to grow, to blossom into full maturity. Speak to Him when He was thirteen and then again when He was thirty, and you would have witnessed appropriate and full development. With Jesus there was no wasted potential. The prodigy became the fully fledged genius.
Most amazingly of all, during this whole process, Jesus grew in favor with men and with God. Apart from the Holy Spirit’s inspiration, who would have dared make a statement like this? How could the Son possibly have had any more favor in the eyes of God, His heavenly Father, than He always had? Well, of course, we must begin by stating very plainly: Jesus was never out of favor with God the Father. He was the perfect Son. Without denying that, however, as Jesus grew up, His capacity to respond to the vicissitudes of life grew with Him. He became better and better at dealing with difficult situations, difficult choices, and difficult people. And so, analogous to an earthly father, His heavenly Father became more and more proud of what His Son was doing and who His Son was becoming. This pride reached its zenith as Christ, in His last full measure of devotion, mounted the cross in triumphant and climactic obedience to lay down His life for the lost.
The writer to the Hebrews tells us that Jesus learned obedience through the things He suffered (Hebrews 5:8). This is true, but He also learned what it was to be finite, to be frail, and to be a victim. Our elder Brother understands our weakness from the inside. Hallelujah, what a Savior!