Jesus at Twelve: Wisdom, Mission, and Divine Calling

Now, one of the things that’s so fascinating about this text is this episode accentuates and emphasizes the response of the theologians of Jesus’ day to this twelve year old boy who appears in the Temple as an incredible child prodigy, having mastered so much knowledge of the Scriptures and of theology that He was confounding them both by the answers to the questions that He heard and by the questions He was posing to them. [00:05:51]

When we look at our doctrine of sin, when we look at the Biblical teaching of the fall of the human race, we realize that in that fall the effects of sin permeates the whole human person. It not only exposes the body to physical maladies, to diseases, to death, and to other infirmities, whereby the body is weakened severely by the fallen condition, but the fall also had a significant impact upon the minds of human beings. [00:06:44]

And that impact we call in theology the noetic effects of sin -- the noetic effects of sin. That’s a concept that’s usually not articulated everyday in the life of the church. But the concept comes from the Greek word, nous, which is the word in Greek for “mind.” And so “noetic” means “of or pertaining to the nous” or “of or pertaining to the human mind.” [00:07:37]

Now, we are still left after the fall with a capacity for reason. We can still, even in our sinfulness, add two and two and come to the conclusion that they mean four. Or we can still work syllogisms and other philosophical problems. Yet at the same time, each one of us is given to making mistakes in our thinking, and at times very serious and costly mistakes. [00:08:53]

Not only that, in our sinful condition we come to the text with certain biases, and the biased person can often miss the forest for the trees because his mind is held in captivity by that bias. If you were raised in a particular tradition, and went to a particular church, and were taught the doctrine of that particular church, you may have received doctrinal teaching that was incorrect, but it came to you from people you trusted, maybe from your parents, maybe from your pastor, and that’s the way you were taught to think. [00:11:26]

Now, can you imagine a human being functioning mentally without any of the noetic effects of sin? Up until this point, the world had never seen a sinless human being. So Jesus in His sinlessness in that He did not participate in original sin was not weakened by these same problems that I’ve just been talking about, so that His thinking was crystal clear. His acumen was without parallel. [00:13:03]

And as a twelve year old child, He could think more profoundly, more consistently, more acutely than the most learned theologians of His day. Now, He didn’t come there to show off. He came there to learn because that is what He had been doing for the first twelve years of His life. [00:14:26]

Yes, He was God incarnate, and yes, God is omniscient, but touching His human nature, Jesus was not given a divine brain. He was not endowed in His human nature with a divine attribute of omniscience. Now, the divine nature could communicate information to the human Jesus, and we would see from time to time Jesus astonishing people with the supernatural knowledge that was at His disposal. [00:15:14]

But the human nature did not communicate the divine attribute… excuse me… the divine nature did not communicate the divine attribute of omniscience to the human nature as some have tried to argue throughout church history. That would have been a violation of His true humanity. [00:15:55]

And so the record tells us that after three days, they found Him in the Temple in the midst of the teachers. And we read, “And all who heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers. So when they saw Him, they were amazed; and His mother said to Him, ‘Son, why have you done this to us?’” [00:18:07]

And Jesus said, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you seeking me? You should know where I was. You should know what I was doing.” “Do you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” But they didn’t understand this statement which He spoke to them. And so there’s a problem of knowledge here. Mary and Joseph didn’t know where He was or why He was doing what He was doing. [00:19:12]

Here even at age twelve in His growing awareness, in His growing self-consciousness of what His task is on this earth, at least He knows this much, that He has a job to perform for His Father, and that job has to do somehow with the Temple and the things that are being discussed there in the Temple. [00:21:14]