Why Jesus’s Humanity Matters

Jesus as Fully Man

It's easy to think of Jesus becoming a man just as a matter of expediency, thinking, I need to go and die for these people, so I'll quickly stick on a human costume—as if it was a sort of divine, fancy dress type of thing.

What we see in the Christian gospel is that Jesus didn't appear as a man; Jesus didn't even beam down as a 30-year-old male and then just start his ministry. Jesus coded himself into human DNA. He was a fetus in a womb. He was a baby in arms. He was a toddler who would have stumbled around as he figured out how to walk and all the rest of it. He was a teenager; he would have gone through puberty. He was a 30-something-year-old male. So he didn't just experience a taste of humanity; he experienced the fullness of what it means to be physically human.

What God Has to Say about Our Bodies

Sam Allberry

The Bible has a lot to say about the body. Organized around three categories—creation, fall, redemption—this book by Sam Allberry provides readers with a balanced theology of the body as they seek to glorify God in everything they do.

More than that, when Jesus physically died, he was buried, and then we're told he was physically raised to life. So he continued in his resurrection life to be human, and in his ascension, he ascended to the father as a human. There is now a human male at the right hand of God, the father in heaven.

He experienced the fullness of what it means to be physically human.

So, Jesus has united himself to human nature in a way that is irreversible and permanent. He has become a man so that through his death and resurrection, we might be united to him. His becoming human was not a stunt, it was not a ploy or a gimmick. It was an extraordinary affirmation of physical human life, and actually, it was something that he was aware was going to be a permanent part of his reality.

Sam Allberry is the author of What God Has to Say about Our Bodies: How the Gospel Is Good News for Our Physical Selves.

Sam Allberry is the associate pastor at Immanuel Nashville. He is the author of various books, including What God Has to Say about Our Bodies and Is God Anti-Gay?; and the cohost of the podcast You’re Not Crazy: Gospel Sanity for Young Pastors. He is a fellow at the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics.

5 Myths about Body Image

Sam Allberry

August 03, 2021

Unrealistic standards of beauty are being pushed on us almost constantly by the media, and the cumulative effect is that it can leave us thinking about our bodies in a seriously distorted way.