Jesus as a teacher
One of the gifts of the Spirit is that of teaching, and Christ was a born teacher. Acquired ability amounts to but little where the spirit of teaching is wanting. Christ was a teacher both by virtue of His nationality, since all Jews were called to be teachers, and also by direct appointment; for He had to accomplish in His own life what the nation had refused to accomplish. He carried with Him no credentials, no statement of scholarship signed by the doctors of Israel, for none of these schools had known Him as a pupil; yet Nicodemus, a master teacher in Jerusalem, after listening to His words, sought Him in the quiet evening hours, and addressed Him as Rabbi,—Teacher. In the course of the conversation this learned man said, “We know that thou art a divine teacher, for no man can do as Thou except God be with him.” It was as a teacher, and more, as a divine teacher, that He was known from the very beginning of His ministry. His ministry was a ministry of teaching. He was known as a teacher, not so much by the words He spoke as by the life He lived, and the works He did.
As a teacher, success depended upon the life
The words of Bushnell are true: “We can see for ourselves in the simple directions and freedom of His teachings, that whatever He advances is from Himself.” He was giving Himself, and that He had a self, a divine self, to give is due to the education of the child and youth. God’s image was perfect in Him, and when the time of ministry came, there shone from Him what previous years had been developing in Him. This is the object of Christian education. The same author further says: “He is the high-priest ... of the divine nature, speaking as one that has come out from God, and has nothing to borrow from the world. It is not to be detected ... that the human sphere in which He moved imparted anything to Him. His teachings are just as full of divine nature, as Shakespeare’s of human.” What a commentary on the two systems of education, the one choosing inspiration as a basis; the other, the product of the human brain!
He taught as one having authority
Bushnell continues: “In His teaching He does not speculate about God, as a school professor, drawing out conclusions by a practice on words, and deeming that the way of proof; He does not build up a frame of evidence from below, by some constructive process, such as the philosophers delight in; but He simply speaks of God and spiritual things as one who has come out from Him, to tell us what He knows. And His simple telling brings us the reality; proves it to us in its own sublime self-evidence; awakens even the consciousness of it in our own bosom; so that formal arguments or dialectic proofs offend us by their coldness, and seem, in fact, to be only opaque substances set between us and the light. Indeed, He makes even the world luminous by His words—fills it with an immediate and new sense of God, which nothing has ever been able to expel. The incense of the upper world is brought out in His garments, and flows abroad, as perfume, on the poisoned air.” And no wonder, for from a child He had breathed the atmosphere of heaven. Every child should have the same privilege.
Principles of Christ’s education
When the two teachers, Christ and Nicodemus, the representatives of two systems of education, the divine and the worldly, met, Christ outlined to his questioner the principles upon which His system was based:[48]—
1. Its primary object is to prepare its pupils for the kingdom of God, a spiritual kingdom.
2. The first step is a spiritual birth; for “God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship in spirit.” “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”