Something Jesus Didn't Know

[In his sermon from January 27, 2019, Pastor Mitch Chase of Kosmosdale Baptist Church in Louisville, KY spent some time helpfully and worshipfully exploring Jesus’ words from Mark 13:32, “But concerning that day or that hour [of the Son’s return and the Final Judgment] no one knows, not even the angels in Heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” A transcript of this portion of the sermon follows:]

“How can the Son say that He does not know something?

“We should see [Jesus’] claim that ‘the Son does not know, but only the Father’ as in the same category of other truths about Jesus in His humanity. Let’s follow a certain line of reasoning here by borrowing events from the other gospels. In His humanity, Jesus became truly hungry. He became truly thirsty. He became truly tired… In Luke 2:52, we’re told that Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, regarding His humanity. These are all things that we can affirm as part of His genuine humanity. Jesus was not pretending to be human. He did not just appear to be a man. He was truly Man, with a human mind, who said to the Father in Mark 14, ‘Not My will but Your will be done.’ His humanity, in His weakness and frailty, was on display again and again. He was born, He needed to grow, His brain had to develop… He had to learn to speak, learn to walk, learn to write: truly human. We must not be so eager to affirm His deity that we deny to Him a genuine humanity. That’s not helpful; it creates an imbalance that fails to make sense of a whole host of gospel passages.

“I think we can understand certain actions of Christ in His ministry as according to the divine nature or according to His human nature in different episodes. Such as: when Jesus walks on the water, when He forgives sins, when He claims, ‘Before Abraham was, I am,’ when He stills the storm, He’s doing these things according to His divine nature; these are not things that a mere man does. But when He is thirsty, when He is tempted, when He has to walk from one city to the next, when He sleeps because He is tired: all of these are a part of a category showing His humanity is on display as well in the Gospels. This is the paradox of the incarnation. And you [the reader] see these things going on, and yet it is one Person, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, [who has] two natures on display in His ministry.

“Jesus knew, as a man, what the Father gave Him [to know]. As an obedient Son, He lived in submission to the Father, saying that He does what the Father gives Him to do, and all that the Father gave Him to say, He has said. And so, as a man, what He knows is what He has been given to know. So when He says, ‘The Son does not know,’ I think He is speaking about the same way in which we would see genuine tiredness or thirst; He’s saying, ‘It’s not given to Man to know the time of the [Final] Judgment; it’s not given to Man, and I am one too.’

“So in His claims, He is demonstrating and putting on display what elsewhere we see as His truly human nature. He lived in prayerful dependence upon the Father and Spirit. He walked in a manner that was pleasing and sinless, and also fully human.”

[Listen to the entire sermon HERE.]