1. The Humanity of Christ.
A. Its Reality.—This may be shown as follows:
(a) He expressly called himself, and was called, “man.”
John 8:40—“ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth”; Acts 2:22—“Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God unto you”; Rom. 5:15—“the one man, Jesus Christ”; 1 Cor. 15:21—“by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead”; 1 Tim. 2:5—“one mediator also between God and man, himself man, Christ Jesus.” Compare the genealogies in Mat. 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-38, the former of which proves Jesus to be in the royal line, and the latter of which proves him to be in the natural line, of succession from David; the former tracing back his lineage to Abraham, and the latter to Adam. Christ is therefore the son of David, and of the stock of Israel. Compare also the phrase “Son of man,” e. g., in Mat. 20:28, which, however much it may mean in addition, certainly indicates the veritable humanity of Jesus. Compare, finally, the term “flesh” (= human nature), applied to him in John 1:14—“And the Word became flesh” and in 1 John 4:2—“every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.”
“Jesus is the true Son of man whom he proclaimed himself to be. This implies that he is the representative of all humanity. Consider for a moment what is implied in your being a man. How many parents had you? You answer, Two. How many grandparents? You answer, Four. How many great-grandparents? Eight. How many great-great-grandparents? Sixteen. So the number of your ancestors increases [pg 674]as you go further back, and if you take in only twenty generations, you will have to reckon yourself as the outcome of more than a million progenitors. The name Smith, or Jones, which you bear, represents only one strain of all those million; you might almost as well bear any other name; your existence is more an expression of the race at large than of any particular family or line. What is true of you, was true, on the human side, of the Lord Jesus. In him all the lines of our common humanity converged. He was the Son of man, far more than he was Son of Mary”; see A. H. Strong, Sermon before the London Baptist Congress.
(b) He possessed the essential elements of human nature as at present constituted—a material body and a rational soul.
Mat. 26:38—“My soul is exceeding sorrowful”; John 11:33—“he groaned in the spirit”; Mat. 26:26—“this is my body”; 28—“this is my blood”; Luke 24:39—“a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having”; Heb. 2:14—“Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same”; 1 John 1:1—“that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life”; 4:2—“every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.”
Yet Christ was not all men in one, and he did not illustrate the development of all human powers. Laughter, painting, literature, marriage—these provinces he did not invade. Yet we do not regard these as absent from the ideal man. The perfection of Jesus was the perfection of self-limiting love. For our sakes he sanctified himself (John 17:19), or separated himself from much that in an ordinary man would have been excellence and delight. He became an example to us, by doing God's will and reflecting God's character in his particular environment and in his particular mission—that of the world's Redeemer; see H. E. Robins, Ethics of the Christian Life, 259-303.
Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 86-105—“Christ was not a man only amongst men. His relation to the human race is not that he was another specimen, differing, by being another, from every one but himself. His relation to the race was not a differentiating but a consummating relation. He was not generically but inclusively man.... The only relation that can at all directly compare with it is that of Adam, who in a real sense was humanity.... That complete indwelling and possessing of even one other, which the yearnings of man toward man imperfectly approach, is only possible, in any fulness of the words, to that spirit of man which is the Spirit of God: to the Spirit of God become, through incarnation, the spirit of man.... If Christ's humanity were not the humanity of Deity, it could not stand in the wide, inclusive, consummating relation, in which it stands, in fact, to the humanity of all other men.... Yet the centre of Christ's being as man was not in himself but in God. He was the expression, by willing reflection, of Another.”