He Took Our Nature (Gal. 4:4)
Many of His contemporaries considered Jesus an unusual person, yet they each knew Him to be a human being, a man. When the Samaritan woman rushed to her village to spread the word about the unusual Jew she just had met at the well, her announcement was straightforward: "Come, see a man" (John 4:29, NIV). Hers was the universal testimony of Jesus' contemporaries. Even after He had calmed the storm, the exclamation of those closest to Him was: "What kind of man is this?" (Matt. 8:27, NIV).
How do the following texts help support the fact that Jesus was a genuine human being of flesh and blood?
While on earth, Jesus voluntarily surrendered the independent exercise of the Divine attributes. He surrendered; He did not relinquish. The attributes remained in Him and He could have used them at any time for His own advantage, but He did not. The temptation to call on these attributes to extricate Himself from difficulty (in ways not open to us) was a major ingredient of His daily trials.
It is helpful to keep in mind that the Scriptures are not definitive on every point that stirs our interest. They make no overt attempt, for example, to spell out precisely how the human and Divine components of Jesus' nature are related. But they make it clear that Christ was one unified person. They do not discuss the technicalities of this union, limiting themselves, rather, to the clear confession that such a union did occur, that the Son made of a woman was, indeed, the Son of God (Gal. 4:4). "Christ did not make-believe take human nature; He did verily take it. He did in reality possess human nature."—Ellen G. White, Lift Him Up, p. 74.
Why is Christ's humanity so important to us? What does it mean to us to know that Jesus became a human being? How does it encourage you to know that Jesus shared our human limitations?
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