In this special Easter episode of the Denison Forum Podcast, Dr. Mark Turman and Dr. Jim Denison reflect on the profound mystery of Jesus’ dual nature—fully God and fully man. Drawing from a unique Easter devotional by Dr. Denison, they explore how Jesus’ humanity invites us into deeper empathy, and how his divinity calls us to deeper faith. From Maundy Thursday to Good Friday and beyond, this conversation considers what it means to follow a Savior who knows our suffering and redeems it. Join us for a meaningful and timely conversation designed to help you experience Easter with renewed depth and clarity.
Powered by RedCircle
Topics
- (01:18): The humanity of Jesus: A deep dive
- (03:44): Historical struggles with Jesus’ humanity
- (10:29): Jesus’ choices and their significance
- (16:27): Relating to Jesus in success and temptation
- (20:30): The Profound relevance of Jesus’ humanity
- (30:45): Conclusion: Embracing Jesus’ love and humanity
Resources
- The God Who Feels Your Pain | Denison Ministries
- Was the cross really necessary? What does the Bible say about Easter? • Denison Forum
- How has Denison Forum impacted your faith?
About Dr. Jim Denison
Jim Denison, PhD, is a cultural theologian and the founder and CEO of Denison Ministries. He speaks biblically into significant cultural issues at Denison Forum. He is the chief author of The Daily Article and has written more than 30 books, including The Coming Tsunami, the Biblical Insight to Tough Questions series, and The Fifth Great Awakening.
About Dr. Mark Turman
Mark Turman, DMin, serves as the Executive Director of Denison Forum, where he leads with a passion for equipping believers to navigate today’s complex culture with biblical truth. He is best known as the host of The Denison Forum Podcast and the lead pastor of the Possum Kingdom Chapel, the in-person congregation of Denison Ministries.
Dr. Turman is the coauthor of Sacred Sexuality: Reclaiming God’s Design and Who Am I? What the Bible Says About Identity and Why it Matters. He earned his undergraduate degree from Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas, and received his Master of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He later completed his Doctor of Ministry at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University in Waco.
Before joining Denison Forum, Mark served as a pastor for 35 years, including 25 years as the founding pastor of Crosspoint Church in McKinney, Texas.
Mark and his high school sweetheart, Judi, married in 1986. They are proud parents of two adult children and grandparents to three grandchildren.
About Denison Forum
Denison Forum exists to thoughtfully engage the issues of the day from a biblical perspective through The Daily Article email newsletter and podcast, The Denison Forum Podcast, as well as many books and additional resources.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: This transcript was AI-generated and has not been fully edited.
Dr. Mark Turman: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Denison Forum Podcast. I’m Mark Turman, the host for today’s conversation. This is a special episode that we are putting together for you during the Easter week of 2025, and we anticipate that you’ll be listening to this on Holy Thursday. What’s sometimes called Maundy, Thursday, or. That wonderful day that we recognize as Good Friday, where the worst of all things became the best of all things because of what Jesus did for us in giving himself to the cross on behalf of our sin.
And so I’m sitting down today with Dr. Jim Denison, and we’re gonna talk about a special Easter devotional that we’re gonna attach to this podcast. And that you’ll be able to find here as well as on our website toward the end of Holy Week, again, on Good Friday, maybe Maundy, Thursday. Either of those days you’ll be able to get to this devotional.
And [00:01:00] Dr. Jim, you wrote this special devotional just feeling prompted by the Holy Spirit. To talk to us about Jesus’ humanity, what were you feeling like the spirit was pointing you to in this devotional?
Dr. Jim Denison: Yeah. Thank you, mark. Thanks for the privilege of the conversation as well. So glad to be able to do this with you.
So I was thinking about Easter, as we all do around this time of year, and focusing on what we so often do, which is the miracle of the resurrection, the empty tomb, Jesus defeat of sin and satan and death, and all the wonderful triumph. That is ours during this season. Mm-hmm. But I’ve also, in recent years, begun to think a little more toward this season around some things more liturgical traditions focus on specifically during Lent.
And that is to focus more on his suffering so that we can then be even more grateful for his victory, think a little more about what he went through, so that we can then be even more aware of the victory that he won for us on the other side of it. So in that context, I began focusing not just on Jesus victory, but on his humanity.
In the context of holy, weak, [00:02:00] and specifically what he did for us on the cross and at the resurrection, and as I began doing that, mark some things connected for me that I’d just never put together before. At the end of the day, I began to realize that Jesus experienced our humanity on such a level of depth as to make his life relevant for us no matter what we face today.
He experienced, for instance, and it’s in the paper, but he experienced a life growing up of such poverty, of such commonness, of such anonymity that he could understand our lives no matter what our background is. He experienced temptation, he. On a level that we can’t begin to understand. So whatever temptation we’re facing, he understands.
He experienced our suffering at the cross as we’ll talk about today. He experienced the depravity of being buried in a borrowed tomb, something most of us will never have to think about all that to say Jesus is relevant to us at a point of hurt in a way no other person could be. They told us in seminary counseling classes never to say, I know how you [00:03:00] feel, because that’s not true.
Even if your experience matches mine, I don’t specifically know how you feel while you’re going through it, but Jesus can say that, hmm. Jesus has literally faced everything we faced feels it right now because he dwells in us by His Holy Spirit, and so that makes Jesus relevant for us at every point of need in our lives.
On a level I’d never really thought about before. And that relevance is what motivated the paper and the part of the paper that we’ll talk about together today.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Just so much here to think about. And, and it, it took me, Jim down several roads, one of those roads being into some of the theology and historical theology classes that I experienced while both of us were at seminary and in other places as well.
Can you talk about just a little bit of the history around how. Christians over 2000 years and particularly maybe the first two or three centuries of Christian history, really struggled with Jesus’s humanity. That there’s actually a whole [00:04:00] long branch of theology and biblical discussion about was Jesus really human?
That kind of. You and I have talked in recent weeks about a new book that we just read. 1700 years ago, 3 25. This group of church leaders met in NAIA to talk about the core Christian message. One of those real controversies was this, this, this tension we feel between Jesus’ divinity and humanity.
Talk about that as kind of a little bit larger context of, of his identification with us.
Dr. Jim Denison: Yeah. It’s an issue for all of us. It’s a thing we struggle with because you and I, just like the people at the council that I see have been very much influenced by Aristotelian platonic thinking, western thinking.
And Aristotle, as you know, invented or at least codified the laws of logic, one of which is, is the idea the law of identity, A is B, or it’s not B, it can’t be both. I can’t be a person and an elephant if those aren’t the same thing. I can’t be both at the same time. God and human is not the same thing.
Those are [00:05:00] different categories. Those are different ontological realities we might say. So for us to come along and say that Jesus is fully divine and fully human, it’s like saying my car is fully a car and fully a horse, or it’s fully a car and fully a tree. And we come along and we say that can’t be possible.
They can’t be both at the same time, says Aristotelian Logic. And so you get all of these Christological formulations around the humanity and the divinity of Jesus and how to balance the one versus the other. And as you said, most of the time, people erred on the side of minimizing his humanity because they wanted to make so much of his divinity.
They obviously wanted to talk about his victory over the cross and the tomb. They wanted to talk about his miraculous capacities. They wanted to emphasize him as the divine son of God and should have. And so the way to solve this problem was to very much minimize or ignore sometimes his humanity.
One of the docetic theologians said that his humanity was to his divinity as a drop of honey in the ocean. I. For example, [00:06:00] that was one of the analogies that used, it’s there but barely there. Yeah. Just almost not there, you know?
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And we still
Dr. Jim Denison: do that today. I think as we think about Jesus, we think about him in the Garden of Gethsemane on Thursday night, and we wonder, was he really suffering with this decision?
I. Did he really face temptation like we do? Did he really have freedom to choose if this was always chosen, that he would die on the crossroad? And if he did, how hard was the choice? Really, since he is after all the divine son of God, and yet we find him in the garden of GEs, he sweating drops of blood. I.
Such pressure, such stress that the capillaries on the surface of the skin break, that’s an actual physiological thing that can happen under extreme stress, praying three times. Father, if it’d be possible, let this cut past from me. So the absolute humanity of Jesus is just as much a reality as the absolute divinity.
It’s our thinking that’s wrong, not the Bible. We’re asking the wrong question. We’re trying to do Aristotelian logic about biblical revelation. We’re trying to use [00:07:00] our finite little p brains to understand God’s nature and insisting that Jesus fully human, fully divine nature must somehow be logically e, e explanatory in order for us to accept it.
As I say, as Isaiah 55 says, the Lord says, my ways are higher than yours. My thoughts are higher than yours, and so they should be. I spent a few weeks in Turkey doing research for a book I wrote some years ago on the seven Churches, A Revelation. Our tour guide was a Muslim historian, actually.
He was doing a master’s in archeology at that time. And we had lots of conversations. And the trinity was what most bothered him as it does Muslims because they thought we worshiped either one God and were relying about three, or we worship three gods. And I tried to say to him, if I could fully understand God, I don’t think he’d be God.
Hmm. If I could fully comprehend God, either I would be God or he wouldn’t be God if my brilliant 11-year-old granddaughter and it took me this long to bring up my grandkids and this podcast that’s longer than usual for me. So yeah. You did well this time. Usually I’ve got there before now. Yeah. But even as [00:08:00] brilliant as she is, as she came home one day and said she had mastered calculus, I would assume maybe what she’d been told was calculus wasn’t calculus.
You don’t. Hmm. So if I could understand. Jesus. Full humanity, full divinity. At the end of the day, I would be God or He wouldn’t be God. But back to your point, it was this Aristotelian desire to make logical sense of the nature of God that led them to these christological heresies and controversies and all of that.
That was in the early years of the church and the early the seven councils of the church, as you recall, all of which on some level had to do with Christology because we’re trying to make sense of a God who transcends human sense.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And that’s where as one of my new friends said recently, we just have to understand that that belief is different from information or simply facts as we may see them or know them.
Yeah. Gem, I was was wondering as you know, when we get to this time of year and we’re celebrating Easter and. We, we, we do spend some time [00:09:00] and, and we spend a proper, in many ways, amount of time focusing on either the cross or the resurrection. I just wonder as we think about the significance of Jesus, do you think we sometimes minimize the.
Human reality of the 30, 33 years that he was on Earth. You know, we, we have this big celebration at Christmas. We have a big celebration at Easter as Christians, and do we sometimes just look at these 33 years as just kind of the prelude? Hmm. And we don’t fully recognize as your, your devotional really does point out, just some of the real basic realities of Jesus’ life over these three decades are, do we sometimes just diminish it too much as well? That was just prelude until he got to the thing he came to do.
Dr. Jim Denison: Yeah. I’m afraid we do. I think every word of the Bible is inspired for our sake, not just for theirs, but for ours.
It says at the end of John’s gospel, if everything Jesus did had been written down the world couldn’t [00:10:00] contain all the books that would be written thereof. So everything that is written down. It’s written down because that’s abiding relevance, not just for their day, but for our day as well. So when we read anything about Jesus earthly ministry leading up to the cross, we should understand that is relevant or it wouldn’t be there.
And it’s through all of that that we learned so much about Jesus. We wouldn’t know if we skipped from Christmas to Easter. From Christmas to Good Friday, we wouldn’t know that he calm storms. We wouldn’t know that he walks on water. We wouldn’t know about Jesus healing blind eyes and raising dead bodies.
We wouldn’t watch Jesus caring for women when people didn’t care for them in the day and touching lepers bodies and so much of his compassion, so much of his grace. But the thing I really wanna keep emphasizing, and I do this all through the paper, is the fact that Jesus chose all of this. He’s the only baby to chose it and choose his parents.
I didn’t get to choose my parents. They didn’t really get to choose me either. I don’t know if they were happy with what happened or not, but I didn’t get to choose them. He chose these peasants living in a town so small. It’s not mentioned even once in the Old Testament or by the [00:11:00] A historian Josephus in the town of Nazareth.
He chose. To live in the Galilee in the north. When the sophisticates lived down in the south, he chose to live an itinerant life at the home of a friend at the home of Simon Peter, as you and I have visited that spot beside the Sea of Galilee. He chose to live this itinerant lifestyle. He chose to die the way he died.
He could have died by stoning is, which is how the Jews executed. Remember there in Nazareth, he wanted to cast him off the cliff and stoned him to death, and he wouldn’t allow that. In past, he could have done that as Stephen was stoned to death, could have been beheaded, had he chosen to come to earth as a Roman citizen.
That’s how Paul was executed by the Romans. He engineered circumstances so as to die by crucifixion, because that’s the cruelest, most inhumane, most tortured, most painful form of death ever devised. Again, he can say, I know your pain. I know you’re suffering because I have been to the depth of suffering on a level that even you can’t understand well.
As you look [00:12:00] through his life, you see the relevance of his compassion all through his life. If you’re struggling for home, he was homeless. If you’ve been betrayed by friends, he was betrayed by friends. If you’ve been misunderstood, he was misunderstood. If you’ve been tired, he was tired by the wall of well of Jacob.
If you’ve been thirsty, he thirsted on the cross. If you have felt on some level rejected by the authorities. He faced that. He experienced that. So his life as well as his birth and his crucifixion and, and resurrection, all illustrate the incredible relevance of Jesus to every dimension of our lives and our experience today.
And I think that’s a lot of why the story is in the story, not just to connect A to Z, but to give us the rest of the alphabet as well.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. It’s just, it’s so profound to try to think about that God would try to so fully and choose to so fully identify with us. And as you were talking, it makes me just appreciate even more how Jesus’s suffering and stress did not start at the beginning of Holy [00:13:00] Week.
Mm-hmm. It didn’t his stress over what his mission was, did not start when he was arrested in the garden. That he was, and maybe I get you to comment on this, that even though he chose this as the greatest act of love and mercy and grace, even though he chose this, that does not mean that the stress from his earliest days didn’t create an incalculable burden for him.
Mm-hmm. Am I on the right track in that?
Dr. Jim Denison: I think so, absolutely. And again, it’s a good point to make. That’s kind of hard for our minds to balance. If I choose something, somebody might think I must have therefore wanted to do that. Hmm. There are times in our lives where we choose things because we want the outcome.
Even though we know the journey from here to there’s going to be horrible. I had spinal fusion surgery a couple of years ago. I chose to do that. And I chose to do that because I wanted the consequence of the surgery and the pain that I had to endure to get from here to there was part of the [00:14:00] process that didn’t make the pain any less painful.
Just because I chose to have the procedure. Most of us have made choices like that, whether it’s medical things or it’s a tough job that we chose to do, or a tough school that we chose to join, or a degree program or whatever it might be. We make some tough choices and that makes the process no less painful just because we chose, in fact, to do that.
On occasion though in Jesus’ life, by choosing to come, by choosing to experience life as he did, he choose to put himself in the position of a victim on occasion where people did things he didn’t choose. I. I’m convinced he didn’t make Judas betray him. The Judas used his own free will to do that. He didn’t make the Sanhedrin try him illegally at night and commit heretical acts against the divine son of God, and then slap him and beat him and mock him.
He didn’t make the Romans. Crown him with that crown of thorns that lacerated his scalp all the way to the skull or, or, or whip him with that ca of nine tails that, that that stripped open his, his back and, and, and some [00:15:00] many people under that actually died of blood loss. He didn’t, he didn’t make them do that.
Didn’t choose for them to do that. He chose to suffer on our behalf, and then he allowed us to misuse our free will. Mm-hmm. And so much of the suffering he experienced wasn’t something he chose. It’s something that happened because he chose, I. To come as and the incarnate son of God, but a lot of what he experienced wasn’t him wanting that to happen.
No. It’s something him having to experience because he wanted the consequence of that, which was his atoning death and his victory and resurrection on our behalf.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. I just amazing when you think about that as you point those things out that you get, you get a picture of not only Jesus’ choices in. His life, and in particularly in the journey to the cross, but the decisions that people around him were making and that are, that we are all accountable for our decisions.
They were not robots in a story that they didn’t have a choice about. That they were in many ways representing us in various ways and at [00:16:00] various levels. Good
Dr. Jim Denison: point.
Dr. Mark Turman: And I hope that’s one of the things that comes out of people engaging with this devotional. You do a great job of setting up how relatable Jesus is in what I would call the sense of lowliness.
As a peasant, as somebody born into poverty, as somebody who set of himself, he didn’t have a place to lay his own head. Lemme turn that around Jim a little bit and think, and, and ask you to comment. Do. Do you think Jesus can also relate to the successful? I remember my pastor when I was a young Christian teenager in college you know, he, he said something, you know, along the lines of for every person that can handle adversity, there’s only one person who can handle success well.
Mm-hmm. In, in, in what way? You know, as our folks listen to this podcast, as they go and read this devotional as part of their worship experience and, and journey with God this week I. How does that person that’s had various [00:17:00] kinds of, of success? I’m, you know, we, we’ve been basking in the last few days of the Master’s golf tournament.
I’m like, how would, how would somebody that lives that kind of a life see Jesus as relatable to them? When they have so many opportunities and advantages of life, where do we see that in Jesus?
Dr. Jim Denison: I would love to have that problem. Yeah. I would love to be a member at the, at Augusta National and I have actually some friends that are, and I would love to be one of those that would be a privilege for me.
The former governor of Georgia was a member of my church when I pastored in Atlanta, and my first spring there, came up after church one Sunday and asked if I would like tickets to the masters. I thought fasted and prayed about it for about two milliseconds.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah,
Dr. Jim Denison: what an incredible experience to get to go do that.
It’s like walking around a church on a golf course. It’s a, and man at the Rory McElroy, I mean, the whole story, I mean, I’ve written two or three articles about it now. It was an absolutely incredible deal. But how would Jesus, who, as you say, had no place to lay his own head, who grew up in such poverty, relate [00:18:00] to those who didn’t have such an experience?
What’s interesting, I think about the full gamut in spectrum of Jesus’ ministry is how connected he was to every dimension of that spectrum. While Jesus himself was homeless, the home he chose to live in was the largest home yet discovered in Capernaum. We think, as you know, we think of Peter as this ragtag, peasant fisherman.
Not true. Peter and Andrew, James and John had a fleet of fishing vessels. They had fishing servants to help do this. They, they harvested fish from the Sea of Galilee and dried it and sold it, apparently all across the nation of Israel. There’s early tradition that says that John, the beloved disciple, was the representative of their fishing business who handled the high priests account down in Jerusalem.
Hmm. And that’s why when Jesus was arrested and one of the court of the high priest John was allowed into Peter wasn’t ’cause they knew John, ’cause John was connected to them. In that way, the home where Jesus lived, Peter’s home in Capernaum is the largest home yet discovered in Capernaum. By far. It’s an absolutely amazing place as you and I have been there and have taken people there and shown [00:19:00] them that you think of Jesus friends and Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus.
You think of Jesus connecting in Luke chapter eight with with very, very notable women, one of whom was married to the number two under King Herod there in SRIs, and notable women who supported him out of their means. And so on the one hand, Jesus had, to whom on the other, he lived in what would’ve been a mansion for the day.
Connected with everybody in the middle, Gentiles and Jews, women and men demoniacs and lepers, all the way up to members of the Sanhedrin, the ruling council itself. Again, I can’t think of anybody in human history who can make the case. I know how you’re feeling, or I know your experience with the same level of authenticity as Jesus across the entire spectrum of human experience.
’cause that’s what he chose to live when he came for us.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Like no one else. For reaching and being able to understand and identify with those who are down, down and outers and what the, [00:20:00] what we might call the up and inners mm-hmm. At every level. And that he is just unique, like no other in his ability to do that.
And yeah, that I hadn’t thought about it in the terms that you just shared that, that he. I was able to cross and, and handle relating well across all of that spectrum. And even, I guess, kind of get a glimpse of it in his childhood when he is in the temple teaching. Mm-hmm. And he is able to handle that environment even at a young age.
And, and just how amazing that is. One of the things that your devotional brings out is not only how he connects and relates to us in those ways. But how he identifies and understands, you’ve written on this a number of times relative to temptation. And I wanted to, to get you to comment on this again as a way of, of encouraging people to read this devotional.
The Bible says in Hebrews that he was tempted in every way yet without sin. And then Jim, I think I, I stumbled. I believe it’s Isaiah 59, that makes a [00:21:00] reference to how we have piled up our sins. Mm-hmm. So there’s something of the compounding effect of sin that we experience that. I’m just wondering, is there any way that Jesus can relate to that?
Because number one, he never sinned a single time. Mm-hmm. So therefore he never had kind of the domino effect of how one sin leads to another sin that leads to another sin. And kind of like, you know, interest compounding just gets bigger and bigger. In some ways, our sin just gets bigger and bigger because it compounds on itself until we choose to trust him and repent, confess, and come back to him.
Does, does Jesus just kind of sidestep that or how should we think about that?
Dr. Jim Denison: That’s a good question. Years ago, I heard a pastor say something I’ve repeated often over the years, sin will always take you further than you wanted to go, keep you longer than you wanted to stay and cost you more than you wanted to pay.
Always right. And if right now you’re hearing those words and think they don’t apply to you, they especially apply to you [00:22:00] If that’s the case they don’t apply to Jesus because Jesus was tempted in every manner yet without sin. So to your point, does that mean we have found a place where Jesus is not relevant to our temptations because he never succumbed to them and therefore never experienced?
The way that sin leads you further and further into the quicksand makes it deeper and harder and more difficult for you. With all the guilt that goes with that, with all the grief and all the stuff that goes with that, he did not experience that. On the other hand, he experienced temptation on a level we never will because he never succumbed to temptation.
And so Satan had to tempt him on deeper levels than any of us have ever been tempted. Because the temptations got worse and worse and harder and harder and harder because he never succumbeded them. And so in the doing of that, Jesus faced greater temptations than we ever will, and at the same time, while he didn’t feel our guilty, understands it, while he didn’t feel the consequences of our sin, he grieves them.
For us and with us, and because his spirit lives in [00:23:00] us and feels everything that we feel because we’re in his hand and nothing can come to us without going through him, as it were, if I had a rock in my hand, you can’t get to the rock without going through my hand. And so it is that everything we feel, he feels, he doesn’t experience our guilt in the sense of his own sin, but he feels it because he feels what we feel and he experiences temptation on a level we never will.
’cause he continued to refuse it. I think it was CS Lewis that said that it takes a good man to understand badness. A bad person doesn’t understand badness because they’re in the midst of it. If you’re in a dark room and your eyes adjust, you don’t realize how dark it is, right? If you’ve been blind your whole life, you don’t know what sight is.
It takes a sighted person who loses their sight to understand what blindness really is. Jesus, because he was never, because he never succumbed to temptation, experienced the worst. Satan could bring. Satan brought everything he could think of to bear against Jesus on a level. You, we succumb so easily.
We crater so quickly [00:24:00] that we never have to experience. I. The full depth of what the enemy brings against would bring against us if we were like Jesus. But as I said, he feels our guilt, even if he doesn’t experience it himself. He experiences it vicariously by caring for us so much so he can still be relevant to it.
Yeah. He can still be relevant even to the consequences of misused freedom because he loves us and he feels it and he understands it as his spirit lives inside us.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And so pro profound to think about that. Yeah. That, that. The devil just had to keep upping the pressure. Mm-hmm. And, and did it in a way that is fully beyond our comprehension, but something to really help you appreciate what Jesus went through.
And that, you know, you start getting a deeper understanding of that passage in Corinthians. It says that no temptation is overtaken you but what is common to man And that, and
Dr. Jim Denison: Mark, I would add very quickly if I could, had he succumbed, we would’ve been lost. ’cause then he would’ve had his own sin to pay for it, the cross.
And he couldn’t pay for ours. He would’ve had his own debt to pay, so he couldn’t pay our debt. [00:25:00] If you owe a hundred dollars and I owe a hundred dollars and I’ve only got a hundred dollars, I can’t pay your debt and mine, right? It’s only because Jesus was sinless that he could pay our sin debt. So we today need to be so grateful to Jesus for never succumbing to temptation.
Not only so he could be the sinless son of God, as scripture says, but so he could therefore pay for our sin at the cross. We get to go to heaven because Jesus refused to sin on our behalf as well.
Dr. Mark Turman: Wow. Yeah. So much there. Let me got time for just a couple of more. Like I said, we really hope people will use this as well as this devotional to, to just really reflect in a new and fresh way upon the story of Easter the cross, the resurrection, every part of it.
Jim, Jim I know sometimes over the years I just have found, found myself wondering because. You know, it’s just, like I said, it’s just beyond comprehension that Jesus could be fully God, fully man. At the same time, how do we guard against [00:26:00] the idea that can sometimes creep into our minds that well, okay, maybe he was a man, but he always had this superpower in his back pocket.
And we know he had the superpower in his back pocket because. There were times that he did miracles. Mm-hmm. And sometimes he touched somebody, sometimes he did it remotely. He walked on the water. We know that there was this, this reminder that kept coming around at divine moments where okay, he’s not like the rest of us.
Mm-hmm. So how do we guard against that? That sense of he always had this. This card he could play, you might say, if he wanted to.
Dr. Jim Denison: Hmm. No, that’s a great question. To me, the fact that he had freedom to decide whether to play that card or not,
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Dr. Jim Denison: Is part of what makes both sides of this divine human equation relevant to us.
And it’s interesting to me how often the gospel writers is put them right in juxtaposition with each other. We think, for instance, about Jesus calming the seas, but we forget he fell asleep in the [00:27:00] boat because he was so tired. And they had to wake him and say, master, we’re perishing. Don’t you care that we’re drowning here?
And then Jesus gets up and rebukes the winds and the waves and the sea is calmed. And they were amazed, but the same one who had the divine power to, to calm the storm, he said, and I’ve been on the sea of Galilee in a storm, and it’s pretty scary stuff. And for him to do that, have that incredible power, and yet, but five minutes earlier, be asleep in the stern of the vessel because he was exhausted, brings this mystery.
Of his humanity and his divinity together. He had the choice to do that, but he also had the choice to be so human as to get tired prior to doing that. And so he had the God card, but he also had the human card. Yeah. And both of those are in the same deck. I. And he’s one. When he is the other. He’s the human.
When he is the divine and he’s divine when he is human. And if you can figure that out, let the rest of us know. That’s back to that kind of Aristotelian sort of logical conundrum that bothers us here. But I would hasten to say very quickly, while we get frustrated, I. [00:28:00] ’cause we can’t understand the divine human nature of Jesus.
The incarnation can’t figure out how God could be three and yet one. And God can be sovereign and we can be free. And the Bible can be divinely inspired and humanly written. And we struggle with these antenes, these conundrums. We have them in the rest of our lives too. We have them across life because our finite fallen brains really can’t understand not just God but the world.
For instance, the way light travels is known as boar’s model of complementarity. Back when I taught apologetics in the seminary, we’d talk about this. Light travels as particle, it also travels as wave. Depending on how you measure it, it can’t be both. And yet, depending on how you measure it, it is. So I actually had a physics professor that was back in seminary and was doing a second degree there, and he was in one of my classes.
The way he explained it was he said in his lab, light travels as particle on Monday, Wednesday, Friday as wave on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and on Sunday the lab is closed and they can do whatever it wants. That’s a conundrum.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: That’s at the very heart of [00:29:00] physical science. We say parallel lines never intersect, but we’d have to draw them forever to prove that.
We say that in the calculation of PI three, successive sevens do not appear. They haven’t so far out to billions of places, but who knows? There’s so much of what we just assume because we can’t prove so many things that are in balance and relational truth. Most of all, relationships can’t be proven.
Only experienced, right? I can’t prove you should listen to this podcast until you do. You can do the evidence for sure. You should look at our bios. You should check us out. You should see if this is a waste of time or not, but you can’t really know till you do. You can’t prove you should get married till you get married.
You can’t prove you should take the job till you take the job. You can’t prove that you should go to that school until you enroll in that school. That’s how relationships work, right? They don’t fit in logical test tubes and relationship with God like every other relationship. Works that way. So at the end of the day, we want to to impress a kind of logical consistency on our relationship with God.
[00:30:00] That wouldn’t work in our marriage, doesn’t work in our friendships, doesn’t work in any other dimension of life, and doesn’t work with God either. Hmm.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And yeah. And so now, now we’ve given all of our science and mathematical nerds a little bit to chew on as we come to come to the end ORs model of complementarity, something everybody says.
Yeah, I’ll remember that for sure. Yes. I’ll, and I’ll, I’ll put it right next to my. Complete misunderstanding of Moore’s Law that makes my phone work. Mm-hmm. Yes. And this and this computer that we’re using today Jim, to land this and, and like I said, encourage our folks to go and to find this devotional in the show notes or on our website.
You’ll also receive it as an email if you subscribe to our ministry. But, wrap this. Put a bow on this for today. Anyway as you have been thinking and meditating on Jesus’s humanity and the choices that he made on our behalf, what is in a word, if you can, what is the [00:31:00] hope that you have for, as people read this devotional, as they ponder in a fresh way, Jesus’s humanity.
What is, what is the end goal or a goal maybe of what you hope to see come out of that in, in each of our lives?
Dr. Jim Denison: Yeah. Thank you Marco. We’ll close with that. That’s a great way to do that. I can just speak from my own heart and assume that perhaps others could perhaps find some relevance in their story as well.
Across most of my life, after I became a Christian at the age of 15, there’s been a part of me in the back of me that really does struggle to believe that God likes me. Hmm. I know he loves me. He has to. He says in John one, John four, eight, God is love. That’s his nature is love is his. His character requires him to love me, as it were.
He, he can’t not love me because that he doesn’t have a choice. He says it were because he is right love, right? And so his character requires him to love me and there therefore, we have the cross, we have the rest. We have all that we’ve been talking about today. What I have a hard time understanding is that God also likes me ’cause I [00:32:00] struggle to like myself.
I am aware of the failures, the mistakes, the inadequacies, all the places that I’m not the person I wish that I was. If I’m aware, how much more is God aware of the Holy God of the universe, aware of that. And so it’s really hard for me on bad days and even other days sometimes to really believe that God likes me.
The way that I wish he would because I don’t like myself the way I wish I would. So I go back and I look at Jesus’ ministry again and watch how positively he interacts with the people with whom we find him engaging. Watch him being this people person who genuinely enjoyed people who wanted to be with them, who wanted to go out of his way to bless them and to touch them and to laugh with them and to, and to party with them.
Even he was accused by the Pharisees of, of being a wine be and a Republican as the King James says how he was a person who liked being with people and realize that he likes us even as he loves us. One more time, the way I [00:33:00] like my grandkids. And love by grandkids that God likes us even more than that, he’s crazy about us.
He’s passionate about us. He likes us, and he loves us so much that he did all that was required so that we could spend eternity with him. Starting now, John three 16, whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life, not just when you die, but now. We are eternal. We already have eternal life.
We’re already the children of God. We’re already in the family of God, and the Father and the king of the universe likes us. Man. Now I don’t have to impress other people nearly as much as I thought I did and try to make other people like me and try to make me like me because he likes me and he loves me.
And he proved all of that to us at the cross. Someone said, Jesus, how much do you love me? And he said, this much. Stretched out his arms and died.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: You know what
Dr. Mark Turman: a gift. Yeah. Thank [00:34:00] you. Thank you for that. And thank you for this devotional. And folks, we just want to encourage you as you go through this very, very special week and through this weekend of Easter 2025, that you take some time to just spend some extra time with God, realizing not only that he loves you, but that he likes you as one theologian a long time said ago.
He looks at you, you look at him and both can be happy. Yeah. And we hope that that’s your experience and that you celebrate Jesus’s cross and resurrection and his promise coming in every good way with many others through this Easter weekend. Thank you for being a part of our conversation today, and we look forward to seeing you again on the Denon Forum podcast.
Happy Easter.
Search
