Was Jesus "Perfected" as Opposed to "Perfect"? - Ramifications

 

 I want to try to work through what the possible ramifications are to the thought experiment that I have been conducting lately. It has taken longer for me to think through this than I would have imagined, but we also had the celebration of Christmas in this time frame, so my mind was otherwise engaged as well. 

If you are unaware of what that thought experiment is, you can catch up on it by clicking here and here to read what my thoughts have been thus far. As a quick reminder for those who have read the articles already, the main concept that I have been exploring is whether or not Jesus was perfect in His being throughout His entire earthly existence or if He was perfected through His sufferings, in particular in the time of His ministry.

The one main thing that remains unchanged, regardless of where one may land in this discussion, is that Jesus died as the perfect sacrifice. If He didn't, then His death would have accomplished nothing at all, He would have merely been another good man that died. Even with the teachings and miracles that marked His life, if He was not the perfect, unblemished lamb, then He could not have taken our punishment for our sins upon Himself; He would have had to pay for His own sins.

Maybe He did. 

What or who is to say that Jesus did not pay for His own sins on that cross which He had committed prior to becoming perfect, while at the same time paying for all of our sins? That still doesn't change the fact that the Bible tells us that He was the perfect sacrifice (Heb. 9:14, 1 John 3:5, 1 Peter 1:19), that no deceit was found in Him (1 Peter 2:22) and that He did, in fact, take the punishment for our sins upon Himself as recognized by God the Father (Romans 3:21-26). 

In fact, is there any way that the truth of the Good News is somehow diluted or weakened by the possibility that Jesus had to be perfected prior to His sacrifice? During His ministry, which is the time frame in which we are presuming that He attained His perfection, Jesus was healing people miraculously, speaking prophetically and teaching things that men had not previously known or considered. He did all of this after having received the Holy Spirit upon His baptism. Does it change anything regarding the path to our salvation if Jesus was perfected on the way to the cross?

One verse that jumped out at me while I have been researching this topic was John 8:29 which says, "And He who sent Me is with Me; He has not left Me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to Him.” Jesus acknowledges that He is not acting of His own volition, but with the company of His Father in Heaven, as is indicated by the capitalization of the references to "He" and "Him". Jesus says this in the midst of His ministry, but we don't know if He means that this began only in the time of His ministry, or if this had always been the case.

I was reading John 8:28 in order to gain context for verse 29 when I noticed what it says; " but I speak these things as the Father taught Me." When did Jesus get taught these things? When did He need to get taught these things? If Jesus is God, which He says that He is and we believe that He is, then He knew this through all of eternity in Heaven and He did not need to be taught. But we see here that Jesus Himself says that He was taught by the Father, so this had to have occurred sometime during His incarnation on earth.

We know that Jesus fasted for 40 days alone in the wilderness immediately after His baptism. Do you know who else fasted for 40 days alone in the wilderness? Moses. He actually did it twice, on the summit of Mount Sinai. But we also know that Moses was in God's presence while He was on that mountain and that He talked with God during that time. Moses is understood to be the one who wrote the first five books of the Bible, which includes the entire time of the history of earth and God's interactions with the earth and it's people, which was all well before Moses' time. It occurred to me many years ago that God spent that 40 days on Mount Sinai not only teaching Moses the Laws and Statutes of God, but also revealing to Moses the story of creation and revealing to Moses what he was supposed to record as the beginning of civilization. So if God taught Moses during those 40 days on Mount Sinai, does it not make sense that God could have taught Jesus during those 40 days in the wilderness? The Scriptures offer no explanation for why Jesus removed Himself from everyone and everything during that time. I am beginning to think that Jesus may have entered His time of extreme fasting and seclusion in order to be taught by God, much as Moses was so many centuries earlier.

As I noted in my first writing on this topic, we know very little about Jesus prior to His ministry. We know a lot about His ministry, though logic tells us that He did and said much, much more than what can be contained in the breadth of the Gospels, as John also tells us in John 21:25, "And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written." We also know about His birth and a little about His youth by what was written, but Jesus was alive for 30 years before His baptism and the start of His ministry, so what we don't know we can only back-fill with logical conclusions using clues gleaned from the Scriptures.

I think we get one clue when Jesus visits His hometown. We see that Jesus is referred to by the townsfolk as "the carpenter's son". In Matthew 13:54-57 we read of this encounter that Jesus had with those who knew Him for His entire life. "He came to His hometown and began teaching them in their synagogue, so that they were astonished, and said, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers? ⁵⁵ Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary, and His brothers, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? ⁵⁶ And His sisters, are they not all with us? Where then did this man get all these things?” ⁵⁷ And they took offense at Him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household."

See how the men identify Jesus not as a prophet or a teacher but merely as "the carpenter's son". I think that this is an indicator that Jesus' youth was no different than anybody else's. Then there are the observations that they make about the carpenter's son, that He has uncommon wisdom and miraculous powers, and they wonder "Where then did this man get all these things?" This is a new side of Jesus that they had never seen before. We do know from the Temple experience when Jesus was 12 years old that He had an uncanny understanding of things relating to religion, but maybe He didn't share this with others around Him during His younger years. I am reminded of the wedding at Cana, where Jesus' mother Mary pushed Jesus into performing His first public miracle, though Jesus' response to His mother was, "My hour has not yet come.", and this miracle occurs, again, after Jesus' baptism.

Again, even with adding this bit of information to what we already have, we still don't have a very good picture of what Jesus' life was like before His ministry began. I suppose that also indicates that there was little to speak of that could have any impact on the ministry and impact of Jesus' life.

So I think that we can see that it is a distinct possibility that Jesus was taught by God His Father what it truly means to live fully submitted to the Spirit, and Jesus left the wilderness suddenly endowed with power to perform miracles and to teach others about God. This leads to the only ramification that I can think of to the possibility that Jesus was perfected through His life, and that ramification is that Jesus proved through His life that holiness is achievable through full submission to the Holy Spirit. I cannot think of anything that could be detrimental to the Christian faith system by the truth of this doctrine. 

I recognize that this could be a difficult idea for people to grasp if they have spent their entire life in the belief that Jesus was always perfect, but what hope does it offer to those of us who desire to pursue holiness as the Scriptures instruct us to do! There is hope through the working of the Holy Spirit, though for fallen man, I suspect that it will take significantly longer than 30 years.

As always, please leave me a comment on this if you have any thoughts on it.

Addendum January 6, 2025:  As I am working on writing another article, it occurs to me that Jesus' struggles and temptations that He bore were enough to teach Him how to attain to perfection without the need for Him to have actually sinned in the process, which would negate the necessity for Him to have to pay for His own sins in His redemptive work on the cross. It is a simple concept, yet one that escaped me in the writing of this and previous articles; that Jesus could be both perfected through trials that all men face and yet have remained sinless in those trials.