Fruit Picking

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Fully a Man

Ever had those moments when you are reading and suddenly a door opens in your mind and you suddenly find yourself looking at the same scene through an entirely new window. That's how this article started.

I was quietly reading Ravi Zacharias' excellent book "The Grand Weaver (2007) when on page 40 I read:-

"One fascinating verse tells us that the author of our salvation himself has been made 'perfect through suffering' (Hebrews 2:10). I have often pondered this text. How is One who is already perfect, perfected."

I looked up, and a door opened .....

We talk often about Jesus being fully God and fully man and what we say is indeed true. But do we really ponder everything that entails? Jesus was well versed at being fully God. However when He was born of the virgin Mary that was the first time ever that Jesus had experienced being fully man!  He was the ONLY - begotten - Son of God . Not only that, but being the only Son of God to be begotten of the flesh nobody else in Heaven knew what it was like either. Everything Jesus experienced in the flesh He was experiencing for the very first time. Pain, exhaustion, hunger, thirst, the emotional havoc of hormones, the weakness of the human body, ... the reality of mortality and the ability to die or be killed. We forget that this was all a new personal experience for Jesus. He who is God was now learning firsthand what it was like to be human. But even more, not just what it was like to be man but what it was like to be A man.

I must admit that I had never before wondered why it was Moses and Elijah who met with Jesus on the mountain and not mighty angels like Gabriel or Michael. But now I think I understand perhaps why. Jesus was soon to face, as a man, great temptations, pain and suffering, and death. Neither Gabriel, nor Michael nor any Angel knew what it was like to face such things as a mere mortal man ..... But Moses and Elijah did!

However I had before wondered what it was in the Garden of Gethsemane that would so distress the Son of the Almighty God that He would sweat as if sweating blood and utter such soul wrenching prayers and pleas. And wondered also when He said "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" was He talking of His sleeping disciples .... Or of Himself? Jesus was about to endure such, pain, agony, and torment as none in Heaven ever had, and about to taste what no immortal being tastes - death! His soul was willing but would His flesh be able to endure to the end? He who had never suffered pain or death was about to suffer and endure the most horrific, painful, agonising death imaginable ... For the very first and last time.

For as the Son of God, and as the Son of man, Jesus had no more, and no less than any man has - the promises of His Father in Heaven. All that He set aside in Heaven, and all that He endured on Earth, He did solely on the promise of enablement, resurrection and restoration given by His Father in Heaven. Jesus asks of every man and woman no more than what He has been willing to do Himself. To set their selves aside by faith and relying solely on the promises of God be obedient to Him in all things.

And being obedient even to death in both spirit  and in the flesh Jesus was made perfect as both Son of God and Son of Man. For as Son of God He had out of obedience, and by faith, surrendered equality to the Father and suffered to be made to become a little lower than the angels that He might experience and endure life and death in the flesh as a Son of Man. So that in His faithful suffering and obedience He might obtain perfection as the perfect Son of God AND the perfect Son of Man and in doing so be the perfect and worthy Saviour and Lord of both the Sons of Men and the Sons of God. The Lamb of God without blemish in either Spirit or flesh. For the perfect Son of God became the perfect Son of Man in order that in Him the imperfect Sons of men might become the perfect Sons of God.

D.J. Ludlow

Author

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