“And Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man” (Lk. 2:52, NASB).
What we think of Christ is the most important thing that can be said about us. So said a preacher I once heard, and I believe that what he said is the absolute truth. Nothing can possibly matter more than knowing the Lord, and knowing Him as He is, not as we would like Him to be, nor as we may imagine Him to be. The Word of God takes great pains to give us particular information about our Lord’s characteristics, just so that we will not indulge in vague and irreverent speculation about His nature. In spite of this specificity, there are some aspects of the Lord’s nature, His humanity or His deity which are not fully exposited in Scripture. When we come upon such things, we must not speculate. There is an element of mystery in Christ–a point at which human minds must humbly admit their own incapacity, and be in awe before a greatness which even eternity can never exhaustively reveal.
You would think that this would be self-evident to Christians everywhere. Yet there are those who seem to believe that every mystery should be revealed by the penetration of human logic. Not fearing to go beyond the words of Scripture, they make confident assertions about things concerning which God Himself has said nothing to us. They speculate about the nature of the Lord’s humanity, or about the extent of His deity, or about the order in the Godhead, or about other such sacred things.
In many cases, these people mean well; they hope to open new and beautiful truths to our appreciation, or to show the sufficiency of Christ for every experience, or some such thing. But we should remember Uzzah, who put his hand to the ark, thinking to steady it, and was struck down by God for his irreverence. Being well-meaning does not mean that we can touch anything with impunity. If God cared so much for the ark, which was only a picture of His Son, what shall we say God thinks when we casually put a hand on the honor and reputation of the Son Himself? Let’s be careful!
Much unruly speculation has been generated by the verse in Luke 2:52. Little is said in Scripture about the childhood years of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the mind reels at the thought that God Incarnate could ever have been a child. What could it mean? What could He have been like? What could He have done? There is abundant fodder for guess-making in this. How could He in Whom all things consist increase in anything? Human minds race to form the picture of what these years could hide.
False gospels and atheistic teachers have supplied abundant pictures of this period. They would have him behaving as a spiritual upstart, or making clay birds for His own amusement. Such portraits are reckless and blasphemous. We must not dwell on such things. Alas, it is not just false teachers who have fallen to speculating about the Lord’s hidden years.
Recently I read an article by a beloved and faithful brother, in which he guessed that the Lord experienced the frustrations of the carpenter shop. How the One who created the tree could be frustrated by a piece of its wood I do not know; nor do I know how He who knew all the secrets of men’s hearts could have difficulty knowing how to make a simple article of furniture. But to this brother it was a great source of comfort to think that the Lord struggled with these things as we all do. Comforting or not, it was irreverent guesswork.
In fact, we find very little written in Scripture concerning the hidden years of Christ. I say little because it is not true to say that there is nothing. The Lord Himself made a very important statement about those years, one by which we should find all unruly speculation governed. It is found in Luke 2:49. This verse fits into the incident in the Temple, in which the Lord’s earthly parents had lost Him and then found Him after a search of three days. In gently rebuking their fear and confusion, the Lord said, Did you not know that I had to be (lit.) in the things of My Father?
Let us think for a moment about what this rebuke implies. Perhaps an analogy will help. Suppose I borrow a sum of money from my brother, and that I agree to repay it a week later. Suppose that then he discovers that he has a sizable debt which is coming due on the same day upon which I agreed to repay him. Knowing that there is only one day in which to retrieve his money and cancel his own debt, he becomes increasingly fretful as the week progresses. When I arrive at his house on the repayment date, I find him agitated and upset with me. Imagine that in my defense I offer the following: Did you not know that I would repay you?
What would have to be true, in order for me to successfully offer such a defense? Suppose I had many times before borrowed money and failed to repay him on time; would such a defense work for me then? What if had returned the money only fifty percent of the time? Would he not justly say to me, I thought that this would be one of the times when you were late. What if I had only failed him once or twice? Could my general pattern of consistency remove from his mind the memory of the few times I had proved unreliable? No, the only way in which my rebuke could carry perfect weight is if at all times, in all situations I had been faithful in respect to my obligations.
For this reason, on the testimony of our Lord Himself, I maintain that in all that He did during the hidden years of His childhood our Lord was doing the work of His Father in Heaven and being about His business. I do not know all that that means. I know only that whether in the carpenter’s shop or in the marketplace, whether at home or traveling on the road, whether in glorious Jerusalem, in the busy streets of Nazareth or in the obscurity of Bethlehem, the Lord Jesus was at all times doing the will of His Father. Beyond that, let us be too reverent to speculate. Let us just marvel at Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and forever.