Jesus Came as a Baby to be Our Perfect Savior

God became a baby.  Have we ever tried to wrap our heads around the mind-boggling nature of that idea?  The ever-living Creator of all things became a human infant.  When He did so, he went all in and became fully human baby subject to all of the frailties of life that any child encounters.  Jesus likely cried when He was hungry, became cranky and probably kept Joseph and May up at night when He was teething.  He had to learn to eat solid food, to feed Himself and to walk.  God who designed fingers probably spent time sucking his thumb.   While the universe He made swirled around Him, Jesus spends years as a helpless child in a little town in Isreal.  It is an amazing fact to ponder.  God choose willingly to come as a baby when He did not have to do so.  So why did Jesus come as a baby of all things?

Since Jesus is God and is all powerful, we know that Jesus could have simply come as He was.  We see events known as Christophanes in the Old Testament where He appeared before Joshua or Abraham for brief periods of time.  God could have simply appeared and “boom” like Emeril instantly brought His reign onto the Earth – again sounds good until you consider where we stood that evening 2000 years ago.  He could have also come as a full grown man.  He was choosing to be human, He might as well jump right into humanity at age of ministry at 30 years of age and get going.

Why even come in the first place as a man?  Jesus could have sent the angels that praised His birth to the Shepherds that evening to clear all the sinners out for the rest of us.  This sounds good until you realize “all the sinners” would include us.

Instead, Jesus was sent as a defenseless, helpless little baby.  He could not feed Himself, keep Himself warm or otherwise do anything for Himself.  He arrives into the arms of a poor teenage girl and her husband in a manger of all places.

Jesus Lived Fully as a Man

Jesus then waits 30 years before beginning His earthly ministry, teaching and healing on the way to the Cross.  A lifetime we don’t have much of a record of other than knowing that His family was poor.  Based upon the conditions of the world at the time, His life would have been hard as a result.  An agrarian society in the ancient world involved tons of hard work.  Tremendous sweat and toil were involved in the most simple tasks.  Jesus as the eldest son would have been involved in all of it.

Jesus experienced all of the dirt and grime and difficulties of life during that time period.  As full man, Jesus experienced the hunger, exhaustion, pain, sweat, and temptation that make living life as a person on this earth so different from the Eden that God intended for His people.  We know specifically that He was tempted. exactly like we are, but did not sin.  He lived the hardest things in life and yet stayed without sin following His Father’s will.

Again why?

Jesus Lived Our Struggles

Simple answer: So that Jesus would be our perfect Savior.

It says in the Book of Hebrews that Jesus was made perfect through suffering and learned obedience through suffering.  This does not mean that Jesus did not know obedience before His incarnation.  It does not mean that He was not perfect.  He is eternally perfect and always united in will with the Father.  Rather, when Jesus left the throne of heaven and put on humanity, He experienced the frailty and sinful nature of man as a man.  This was feeling it in a way that He had never done so before, as a man.  Fully God, fully man –  God experienced the horrible pull of His flesh tempting Him to turn away from the will of God.  When Satan tempts Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane He feels the temptation.  Jesus feels the pull and experiences the allure of sin.  He knows the power of it and the weakness of man.  He understands our pain as a result.

Jesus sweats blood in the Garden of Gethsemane resisting sin.  He pleads with God over the Cross and on the Cross itself over with the pain of sin.  Jesus makes His flesh be obedient to God every time and never does sin.  But He also lives through the high cost of doing so.

Do you think that God made flesh whose very flesh sweated blood knows what we go through when we struggle with our own flesh?  Hebrews speaks of this:

We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect was tempted as we are, yet without sin.

Hebrews 4:15

Jesus was Tempted in Every Way

Left on our own people trend towards the figure of God as the unapproachable scary bearded guy in the sky perpetually angry with us.  God is far off and cannot really care about the problems of sinful man, can He?  To reach man, God sends His Son to become one of us and live just like us.  We have a Savior that knows exactly what it is like to be us and that we can relate to.

Who is afraid of a baby or a toddler or the local carpenter?  Who does not want to approach a Savior who sits by a well alone, exhausted and thirsty or weeps with us over His friend’s death or who likely mourned His earthly father Joseph’s death?

One of my favorite moments from the life of Jesus is when He is in the synagogue at Nazareth, His hometown.  He stands up in public and reads from the Messianic prophecies of the scroll of Isaiah then says:

Today this has been fulfilled in your presence. 

Mic drop.  Bam! That is just awesome!

He reads from Isaiah 61:

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me,
Because the Lord has anointed Me
To preach good tidings to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives,
And the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
² To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,
And the day of vengeance of our God;
To comfort all who mourn,
³ To console those who mourn in Zion,
To give them beauty for ashes,
The oil of joy for mourning,
The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;
That they may be called trees of righteousness,
The planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.”

Jesus Lived His Message

It is a great proclamation of the Messiah on the surface but it gets even better with examination.  Look at the bolded text.

Jesus came as Messiah to preach good tidings to the poor.  He lived a life of poverty.  Do we think that this life experience makes Him the perfect Messenger to give good news to His people?

Jesus lived a life that involved being brokenhearted.  His weeping for Jerusalem comes to mind as an example.  Do we think this makes Him the perfect Healer for those who are brokenhearted?

Jesus mourned, He was a prisoner, He dealt with a spirit of heaviness.  He lived as one of us starting as a little baby so His message would be personal.  He is the perfect Savior for us because He is one of us.  One that can know how bad it is and yet still say Come to Me, Come boldly to the throne of grace.

We do not have a Savior that is far off, but one who walked with us, grew with us, played with us, was tempted like us and experienced life and death like us…all so that we can live like Him.  It is a wonderful deal from a perfect Savior.

Love to all,

Tom

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