(A continuation of C.J.’s interview with pastor and author Dr. Sinclair Ferguson)

Sinclair Ferguson: The struggle of our minds is to submit to Scripture, because our minds wander all over the place. I sometimes wonder why it’s so difficult for us to sit down and think about the Lord Jesus for five minutes when we can think of almost anything else in the world for five minutes. And when I think about that I think, “My, how far we have to go.” And, therefore, it is going to be very hard discipline to bring my mind and my spirit under the Word to really listen.

This was the thing that professor John Murray helped me with. The development of the humanity of the Lord Jesus has meant more to me than I think—than I have ever even tried to communicate. To think that he grew in stature—I understand that. And I can understand that he grew in wisdom, although that is a bit of a shock sometimes to Christians.

How did he grow in wisdom? He grew in wisdom by meditating on the Scriptures, not because it kind of fell on his head because he was the Son of God.

And that he grew in favor with God as well as with man—I just find that stunning. And when you get over the other side of that statement, that he grew in favor with God, then you realize I have got to see why. I read the rest of Luke’s Gospel. I have got to see why that was.

C.J. Mahaney: Ok, so how did he grow in favor with God (Luke 2:52)?

SF: How long have we got?

CJM: As long as it takes you to explain it.

SF: When I think about the Lord Jesus, I’m thinking about the way in which here he is—at twelve years old—asking questions. And I think he was asking questions. I think he wanted to know the answers. And as he explored the answers, they were obviously startled by his insight. I think the reason for that was because in a twelve-year-old-boy kind of way, like some of our youngsters, he can come out with very direct questions that after years of managing to manipulate themselves around people and avoid the important questions—they just get straight to the heart of the matter.

I assume by twelve he had memorized a lot of the Scriptures, and now as he grows, the level of obedience to which he is being called, the tests are getting harder. And as he advances through each of these tests, the Father responds like any father who goes along to watch his children play in a competition or something.

I could imagine a boy running down the touchline with a football and scoring and the father, if he is a Christian, doing it very quietly, but just saying, “That’s my boy. I have always loved you. And I always knew you had talent. But now I see it.” Or a child overcomes a huge obstacle and the father’s heart just leaps. Or in a marriage relationship, the day you got married you thought, “It is not possible for man to love woman more than I love this woman!” And now you look back and think, “I have so many more reasons to love her.”

And so the relationship between the Son and the Father in the Son’s incarnate and humiliated days is a relationship.

With respect to his having taken our flesh, in that flesh the relationship grows and the tests become harder. And the test in Gethsemane is unspeakably hard for him. Because it seems to me that what is happening there is he is being called to do what his humanity can never want. He has been called to give himself to the abandonment of the One who has favored him all his life.

I really do see that as the ultimate reverse of Eden. In Eden God is saying to Adam, “Do this just because I am God, not because you can read off this tree, ‘Do not touch.’” And I personally don’t think that tree was really any different. I don’t think the fruit was poisonous. I don’t think you could have walked past it and said, “It is obvious that we shouldn’t eat it.” That would not so much have been a test as an instinctive response. But I think it’s in its sameness to the others that God says, “For my sake, trust me. Don’t eat from it.”

And yet we are told—and I find this fascinating, that in Genesis 2 we are told about all the trees, that they were attractive and delicious. And in 3 we are told that this tree was also attractive and delicious, so that the only thing that stops me is because God has said, “Don’t eat.” I am going to trust him.

And here is Jesus in a position where, for Adam, every natural instinct is to take the fruit of the tree, but God has said don’t do it. And Adam should have not taken it because God said it. And here, for Jesus, his natural instinct is to say, “Please, not the cross, not the cross.” But the reason he does it is because “the cup that my Father gives me to drink, will I not drink of it?” (John 18:11) I mean, it’s unspeakable, really.

CJM: It is, indeed. [weeping]

SF: I think we all will be weeping in a moment, C.J.

It’s just, you know, that you can’t see this truth by thinking about yourself. So that’s what lies behind this “smuggling character into the work of grace.”

When we sit round like this and start talking about it, we begin to realize the depth of this truth. When we are preaching we are kind of trying to hit the ball down the middle of the fairway. But in a way it is easier to communicate this, I think, when we are just sitting around like this, as friends talking, than when we have got the multidimensional distractions of a preaching situation.

-----------------

Photo © 2008, Lukas VanDyke