It is needful
in all considerations of the truth of the Person of the Son of God to remember
that no one but the Father has full knowledge of Him. This is true whether we
speak of His deity or His humanity. Only the Father knows the full perfections
of what He is in His essential nature as one of the Godhead, and He only fully
understands the absolute perfection of the manhood He was pleased to assume. On
all questions concerning the Person of the Son of God we are dependent
altogether on the revelation of the Word of God.

The simple
remembrance of this will check any tendency to engage in speculation on what
has not been revealed. At the same time, we ought not to be deterred by the
greatness of the subject from entering the fields of inquiry which God invites
us to search out. It will not be forbidden knowledge that we are seeking, but
knowledge that is intended for us to possess.

Much has been
said of late in many quarters of the human limitations of the Lord Jesus. In a
good deal that is current teaching on the subject there is manifest error as to
His Person. He is robbed of His true glory as a divine Person. In fact, the
human limitations He so graciously entered into are used to deny that He was
divine, and thus, in such minds, the Christ of God is destroyed.

That He is God,
in the true and real sense of the term, revelation abundantly asserts. He is
Immanuel—God with us. If He were not divine in the highest sense, this could
not be true. But to be true He must also be man in the true sense of what
humanity is. He is then both God and Man.

Now it ought to
be evident that, as God, He knew no limitations that Deity is not subject to.
He had full divine power, could and did use it. He possessed full divine
wisdom. He knew all things. he knew them divinely. It was in Him as absolute,
essential knowledge. It was the power and wisdom of the Godhead.

Before He
became incarnate He was equal with God. It was not a usurped equality. It
belonged to Him by a divine right. But though being in the essential form of
God, He was pleased to assume the form of a servant, to enter into the human
conditions and limitations of men. In this place which He took, human
conditions and limitations applied to Him. It was not as God that He grew in stature
and wisdom, but as man. Both these things are said of Him, but it was only true
of Him as man, as being in man’s human conditions.

Now He is set
before us in Scripture as perfectly fulfilling these human conditions. He never
drew on His divine power and wisdom merely for Himself, however freely He used
them for others. Having entered upon the path of men, He trod the path as men
have to tread it. Men need the counsel and wisdom of God. They need to seek
these where God has given them. In man’s path the Son of God sought the wisdom
of God, sought it where God had put it for me, and found it. He could say, “I
will bless the LORD, who has given Me counsel” (Psa. 16:7). In all His human
conflicts He used only the means which God has provided for men to gain their
triumphs—the written Word of God. He did not meet the devil with His divine
knowledge, but turned to what God had written for men to live by. “It is
written” was His oft-repeated answer.

There is no
need of denying His deity in order to explain His dependence on the Father.
While thus we preserve the truth of His divine Person, which Scripture again
and again asserts, at the same time we get a more exalted view of the
absolutely perfect obedience and dependence of the blessed Lord. If the very
Son of God Himself could come down into our human path of dependence, and there
perfectly fulfill the human conditions of that path, what honor has He thus put
upon the path! If He could put aside His absolute, perfect, divine knowledge,
and tread the path as if He were not a divine Person but a mere man, and then
say as in Psalm 16, “The lines are fallen unto Me in pleasant places; yea, I
have a goodly heritage,” does He not thus teach us the perfect blessedness of
the path it is our privilege to tread—a path of submission to God, of
dependence upon His will, of obedience to His written Word?

May the Lord
help us to abide in the truth, and above all, the truth of His Person—to
realize that He was very God and very Man. And while we trace His human path,
may we realize how perfectly human He was without losing the divine glory that
everywhere shone forth as manifesting Him to be One who had in grace assumed
the human.

(From Help
and Food, Vol. 22.)