One of the blessings in my life is that I had an amazing father-in-law. John Alise was not only a man of God but he was also a great high school math teacher and football/baseball/wrestling coach.
One of his pet peeves was when someone would say something along the lines of, “I’m trying my best, I’m giving it 110%!” Mr. Alise would say, “No, you’re not! You can’t give 110% because all you have is 100%, that’s what 100% means!”
As a mathematician, he’s correct — 100% correct.
God, however, is not limited to our math.
The Bible teaches that Jesus is fully, completely God, as we’ve shown here, here, and here.
But we’ve also seen here, here, and here that Jesus is fully human. He is still fully man. Jesus is today both divine and human and will be for eternity. He will always be God the Son and Jesus the Messiah born in Bethlehem.
Jesus is both God and man. He isn’t half man and half God. He isn’t three-fourths man and one-fourth God or vice versa. He’s 100% God and 100% man.
How is this possible? Nothing can be 100% one thing and 100% another thing, right?
Yet this is what the Bible teaches.
Over the centuries, theologians have tried to understand and explain this doctrine, and they haven’t always gotten it right.
One early error was called Docetism, and the Apostle John spoke against this teaching:
By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. (1 John 4:2-3a)
The key phrase in that passage is “in the flesh.” Docetism taught that Jesus was God but was not “in the flesh,” in other words, he wasn’t human at all. He only appeared to be. There are a lot of Christians today who tend toward this way of thinking without even knowing it. It happens when we think of Jesus as God who just needed a human body to walk around in. We focus on his Godhood but not on the weakness of his humanity. We don’t like to think that Jesus had any weaknesses, but the Bible teaches that Jesus is human.
Another wrong idea, called Apollinarianism, taught that Jesus took on humanity, but not entirely. He had a human body, but his soul was divine. This belief was rejected early in church history because, well, if Jesus didn’t have a human soul, then he really wasn’t human at all. Again, the Bible teaches that Jesus is human.
Some people have taught that Jesus is two separate persons, one human, and one divine, both sharing the same body. But this is also wrong because Jesus is one person, not two. He doesn’t have a split personality.
Finally, there’s a belief that Jesus is neither fully God nor fully man, so he’s a hybrid. Like a Labradoodle that isn’t either a Labrador Retriever or a poodle, Jesus is a third kind of being altogether, a God/man combo. But that would mean that Jesus was part man and part God, and the Bible teaches that he is fully man and fully God.
So, again, how is it possible for one person to be 100% God and 100% man?
We must admit that this is one of the world’s great mysteries. We’re only finite human beings, so we’ll never be able to understand this teaching completely. The best we can do is to look at what God has told us in the Bible and draw a conclusion based on that information.
For starters, the Incarnation (the act of the eternal God the Son becoming human), wasn’t about Jesus giving up his deity. When Paul writes that Jesus “emptied himself” (Philippians 2:5-8), he’s not saying that Jesus stopped being God or was any less God.
The Incarnation wasn’t about Jesus giving up his deity but about Jesus gaining humanity. He wasn’t God minus some of his Godhood; he was God plus manhood. He didn’t stop being in his nature what God the Father is, but he added a human nature and accepted limitations on his deity when he walked the earth as a human.
In John 1, the Apostle says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” (John 1:1-2). Then in verse 14, he writes, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
John is saying that Jesus, the Word, “became flesh,” he became human, and we’ve seen his glory as the only eternal God the Son.
At the Incarnation, the Word became human — but he’s still the Word. Jesus, though he became human, was still completely, 100% God.
Mark that truth down as absolute, and we’ll continue in the next post.