Matchless: The Life and Love of JesusSample

Day 2: The Early Years

Read Matthew 13:55 and Luke 2:40,52 and then watch the video.

Here come the biggest questions of all: When did Jesus know that He was the Son of God? Was He the perfect Child? Did He ever talk back or get in trouble? 

I will not pretend to be an expert on any of this—quite frankly because there are too many gaps to make any conclusive statements about His childhood. 

So what was He like? Here is what we do know: 

Jesus was born sinless, and Scripture says that although He was tempted, He did not sin. Now, was He capable of sin? That deep theological question has been around for centuries, with solid scholarship on both sides of the issue. I believe Jesus couldn’t sin because of the nature of God. He could be tempted, but it would be against His character to sin. 

So what’s sin with regard to an infant or child? My remedial definition would be anything that’s willful disobedience. 

For example, Jesus may have accidentally run into another child while they were playing or broken a dish, but He never actually sinned. 

It’s a hard concept, isn’t it? I mean, if He was God, then He was born with all of the knowledge of God. True. But He was also fully man. In my head, I imagine it to be a situation where God chose to limit the knowledge His Son had in order to allow Him to experience life the way that any other little boy would have. 

If so, Jesus probably didn’t know that He was the Son of God for a good bit of His early years. When Scripture says He “grew” in the previous verse, and later that he “increased in wisdom and in stature” (Luke 2:40,52), I believe it’s an indication that He continued to learn how to be strong and wise—all the while with the favor of God resting on Him.