PERFECT MAKEUP OF JESUS

PERFECT OF SPIRIT - EMOTION - WILL

We commence with SPIRIT, for that is the essential fact in man. For an understanding of the perfection of His Spirit again let the analysis of INTELLIGENCE, EMOTION, and will be accepted. In all of these, and in their combination, Jesus of Nazareth realized the Divine thought, and there­fore was ABSOLUTELY PERFECT.

In Him intelligence was unclouded. In the Divine economy there are three ways in which men may know God, through creation, through revelation, and through direct communication.

All these avenues were open to Jesus, and through them He saw all that was to be seen. To Him creation was an open book, revelation was radiant, and communication with God was immediate and uninterrupted. These things can be said of no other. Creation is not an open book to man. God is allowing him by the slow and tedious proc­esses of the centuries to learn to read its secrets. To Jesus all these secrets were apparent.

The REVELATION OF THE SCRIPTURES, while perfect in themselves, are not perfectly understood because of the clouding of man's intelligence, and it is out of his limitation that all the misinterpretation and misunderstanding of the cen­turies have risen. To Jesus all the words of revelation rang with the meanings of God, and He knew Him and understood His message in the holy writings.

The communication of men with God even of the saints, is intermittent and partial interfered with often by moods and frames. His was perpetual, the Divine voice sounding in the deepest consciousness of His soul, and He, answering with the naturalness of a child, in the immediate presence of the Father.

In this connection hear the testimony of the men of Nazareth. To this little village on the hills He had been taken as an infant on the return from Egypt, and there for the next twenty-eight years the greater part of His life was spent. At the age of twelve He had been taken to Jeru­salem, and in all probability had visited the Holy City each subsequent year; but most likely all the remaining months of the years were passed in Nazareth. The people of Nazareth would know Him perfectly. It was a little town standing out of the run of the ordinary traffic of the country. So far is it removed from the ordinary course of events that it seems as though no invading army has ever touched it; and there is great probability that the syna­gogue standing today is the very one in which the Lord read the words of the law. It was a small and unimpor­tant place, where in all likelihood everyone knew everyone else, and would be perfectly familiar with the boy who had grown up in the shop of the village carpenter, and had finally Himself succeeded His reputed father in the work of that shop.

At about thirty years of age, He had turned His back upon the village. After an absence of a few months He returned, and as His custom was, visited the synagogue on the Sabbath day. But now what He did was unusual and unexpected—He opened His mouth and began to speak to them, and as they listened to Him they were astonished; and immediately someone asked the question, "Whence hath this Man these things? And, what is the WISDOM that is given unto this Man?" (Mark 6:2)

To gather the full force of the question it is necessary to understand what they meant by WISDOM. According to Trench the word so0za, signifies clearness of understand­ing, and is a word used only "as expressing the highest and noblest." As these men of Nazareth listened to Him, what surprised them was that they heard in His teaching, such wisdom as was proof at once of great intellect, and great goodness.

There is a yet more remarkable statement recorded about Him in the Gospel of John. Coming from Galilee to Jerusalem He taught in the temple. Speaking here was a very different thing from speaking in the synagogue at Nazareth. Here were gathered and centered the light and scholarship of the day. Here a false accent, or a misquo­tation of ignorance, would immediately have been detected. When Savonarola came to Florence for the first time, his magnificent eloquence of conviction was counted nothing, because of the objectionable Lombardy accent. When Jesus passed from the villages to the metropolis, and opened His mouth to teach, surrounded by the most critical ears of His day, "the Jews therefore marveled, saying, How knoweth this Man LETTERS, having never learned?" (John 7:15) Now this word grammata, translated "LETTERS," is a most sig­nificant one. It only occurs in one other place in the New Testament, "And as he thus made his defense, Festus saith with a loud voice, Paul, thou art mad; thy much learning is turning thee mad." (Acts 26:24) Festus meant by the word "LEARNING" exactly what these men meant by "LETTERS." Festus detected in the speech of Paul, all that he had gained from his careful training. There was the accent of the school of Gamaliel, and it was this tone of knowledge that the Jews were astonished at in Jesus when they spoke of His knowing letters. "When they said, How knoweth this Man letters, having never learned,” they meant that He had never studied in the schools, and yet possessed all that the schools could give Him. The remarkable thing was that Jesus showed Himself familiar with the literary methods of His time, which were confined to the disciples of the popular teachers. He did not speak amongst them as an earnest and yet ignorant Man; but by His use of language, and His evident familiarity with the philosophies of the schools, He impressed the Jerusalem crowds, and in astonishment they exclaimed, "How knoweth this Man letters, having never learned?"

Men have to learn, to study, to go through processes of training, to obtain what He possessed without these proc­esses. To return to the Gospel of John, notice that He answered their question: "My teaching is not Mine, but His that sent Me. If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from Myself." (John 7:16-17) While that passage is generally quoted as declaring a philosophy of Christian dis­cipleship, and while it has that application, it should never be forgotten that the first intention of the words is that of an answer to a question of the Jews, and is our Lord's ac­count of His knowledge of the things that astonished His hearers. The Man Who perfectly does the will of God is the Man Who understands all mysteries; and is familiar with facts which ordinary men only understand by long effort and study. The secrets that lie hidden in Nature, fallen man with clouded intelligence must search after; but God's unfallen Man will read them upon the open page of Nature, discovering immediately the deepest philosophy ­of life. Never let Christ be robbed of the royalty of intellectual kingship. He was in no sense ignorant or illiterate He never learned, for there was no necessity, for learning. LEARNING IS A PROCESS MADE NECESSARY BY THE FALL OF MAN, AND THE SIN OF THE RACE. God's perfect and unfallen Man needed no such.....process, being sinless; He knew letters without having learned. In Him was most perfectly ful­filled the wonderful words "The secret of Jehovah is with them that fear Him." (Psa. 25:14) THIS KNOWLEDGE IS POSSIBLE FOR OTHER MEN.

This intelligence operated not only in the realm of Na­ture, but in keen and marvelous accuracy of understanding of the inner secrets of other human lives. As John de­clares, “He needed not that anyone should bear witness concerning man; for He Himself knew what was in man." (John 2:25) Telepathy and thought-reading are great mysteries to the mind of men today, mysteries towards the solution of which a few are bending all their mental power, while the rest watch, and smilingly imagine that they are either playing tricks, or are themselves being tricked. And yet this whole realm of the communication of the mind of man with the mind of man is part of the estate lost through sin. In it Jesus was at home. He knew the thought of sin, and the lustful desire, and the hidden malice, and the trembling aspiration after God; and to watch carefully His dealings with the varied men and women, who crossed His pathway, is to see the method of an intelligence the caliber of which cannot be understood, for He read the inner thought of the heart of each as an open book.

Let workers for God in dealing with individual souls ever keep this in mind. He knows the secret of the heart of the one to whom the worker is talking. There are times when in dealing with men of intellectual mold there has come the temptation of imagining that Jesus of Naza­reth was not able perfectly to satisfy the capacity of their great minds; shame on all such unworthy doubt. Be it ever remembered that Jesus, the Son of Mary, was Prince of scholars, Master of learning, King of wisdom, His ene­mies being His witnesses. He had the gpammata, the wisdom of letters, which they so coveted, though He never passed through human process to reach the human result.

He was moreover perfect in His EMOTIONAL NATURE. His affection was undivided.  Unclouded intelligence issued in perfect consciousness of God. Seeing God perfectly in the ways and works of God, He loved God perfectly. Herein is the deepest meaning of His own words,"Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God." (Matt 5:8) Himself pure in heart, He saw God perfectly, and this was to realize the Divine unity. Let this sequence be carefully noted. First, unclouded intelligence producing perfect consciousness of God; secondly, perfect consciousness of God reveals the unity of God and of all things in God; thirdly, this discovery capturing the whole heart and neces­sitating perfect love.

This unity of God was the central fact for the understand­ing of which the Hebrew nation had been created. "Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah." (Deut. 6:4) To see and know God as Jesus saw and knew Him is to discover this unity, and therein to discover the unity of all the purposes of Deity,—that through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

This vision of the unity of God captures the heart of man. The consciousness of the One Who creates and maintains unity, is the perfection of love in the soul of man. Thus the passage already quoted in Deuteronomy concerning the unity of Jehovah is immediately followed by the command, "And thou shalt love Jehovah thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." Jesus knowing with unclouded intelligence was perfectly conscious of the character of God, and the unity of His purpose, and loved Him with all His heart. The Man of unclouded intelligence was the Man of undivided affection.

Then follows the fact of the UNOPPOSING WILL. The will is the citadel against which all the forces of temptation are directed, and within this citadel Jesus repelled these temptations in the light of unclouded intelligence, and the power of undivided affection. He saw God perfectly, and there­fore He loved God perfectly, and therefore He obeyed God perfectly, and was able to say, "I do always the things that are pleasing to Him." (John 8:29)

In this analysis of the SPIRITUAL PERFECTION of Jesus, there must ever be kept in mind the interaction of these three facts within the spiritual nature. Love, through light, appealed to will. Will, responding, strengthened love and increased light. That is the perpetual process in human life. Yielding to God, light falls upon the pathway, and creates love. Love suggests obedience. The will, impulsed by love, yields to light. The experience that follows obedience increases love and light, and thus there is perpetual prog­ress, growth, development in the grace that makes men grow in favor with God and man.