The Person of Jesus: Who Is He?
30 min read
Jesus is not half-God and half-human, nor God wearing a human costume. He is completely and simultaneously both — and this precise truth is the foundation of everything the New Testament teaches about him.
"For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily." — Colossians 2:9
1. The Council of Chalcedon summarized what Scripture teaches.
In AD 451, church leaders concluded: Jesus Christ is one person in two natures — fully divine and fully human — united without confusion, change, division, or separation. This is not Greek philosophy imposed on the Bible. It is the best available summary of what the New Testament actually teaches.
2. Denying full divinity destroys the atonement.
If Jesus was less than fully God — a great man, an exalted angel — then his death on the cross is a noble human tragedy but not a cosmic transaction. Only a life of infinite worth is sufficient ransom for all human lives Mark 10:45.
3. Denying full humanity destroys the atonement equally.
If Jesus only appeared to be human — the early heresy of Docetism — then he did not actually suffer, die, or rise. Hebrews 2:14 is explicit: he shared flesh and blood specifically so that through death he could destroy the power of death. A phantom cannot save real people.
4. The two natures coexist, they do not alternate.
When Jesus slept in the boat Mark 4:38, he was not suspending his divinity. When he raised Lazarus John 11:43, he was not suspending his humanity. Both natures were always operative. This creates genuine mystery — how can one person be simultaneously omniscient and learning Luke 2:52? The honest answer is that we are describing someone genuinely unlike anything else in existence.
5. Both natures have enormous practical implications.
Because he is fully God: his words carry divine authority, his forgiveness is real, and union with him is union with the living God. Because he is fully human: his prayers model genuine prayer, his temptations were real, his sympathy is informed by actual experience, and his resurrection is the promise of our own.
Making Jesus more comfortably human (a great teacher) or more safely divine (a remote cosmic figure) to avoid the tension. The tension is the point.
Read Mark 4:35-5:43. Identify two moments where Jesus' humanity is evident and two where his divinity is evident. Write a paragraph on how both appear in the same narrative.
Submit your paragraph from Mark 4–5 and your journal answer on which nature you underemphasize.
A: Jesus is one person in two natures — fully divine and fully human — united without confusion, change, division, or separation.
A: Only God can accomplish what the cross required — infinite worth sufficient to atone for all of humanity.
A: Because only a real human death, burial, and resurrection could accomplish the salvation of real human beings.
Lord, I cannot fully comprehend what you are. I choose to worship rather than oversimplify. Thank you for being large enough to save and near enough to know. Amen.