Copyright © 2003 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
“Hey,” I said, “he also has a Ph.D. in molecular biology.” I was reading to my mother a brochure describing the qualifications of the ophthalmologist she was about to see. She had suffered a detached retina. This doctor had been recommended to do the surgery she would need. Naturally, she wanted to know all she could about the man who would be repairing her eye. And it was reassuring for her to learn that before he ever went to medical school, this eye doctor had earned another scientific degree in a difficult field. In other words, it’s nice to know your doctor is smart.
Solomon was regarded in the Old Testament as the wisest man who ever lived. Here in verse 31, Jesus recalls what I Kings chapter 10 relates. The reputation of Solomon’s intellect was so great that the “queen of the south” came to hear him and have her questions answered. She was from Sheba, what is now Yemen at the tip of the Arabian peninsula. The queen had to make a difficult land journey of over 1,500 miles to visit Solomon and learn from him. But it was worth it. I Kings 10:3 says, “Solomon answered all her questions; nothing was too hard for the king to explain to her.”
When you and I are in need of help and direction, it’s worth the trouble to seek out a person with a good measure of intelligence and wisdom. We all want the smartest doctor, the cleverest real estate agent, the most brilliant lawyer. In rough passages of life we would like to be guided by a person with brains and skill.
We sometimes call Jesus “The Great Physician,” but the power of His mind is not what we generally admire about Jesus Christ. He is appreciated for His love and gentleness in dealing with people. He is honored for the humility with which He reached across social barriers to embrace the disenfranchised and marginalized people of His time. We praise Him for His miraculous power, His ability to heal both the body and the soul. We hold up His personal holiness and moral goodness as an example to be imitated. Some may praise the Savior for the courage with which He faced humiliation, suffering, and death on the Cross.
So Jesus is regarded as patient, compassionate, humble, strong, loving. Almost any positive aspect of human personality is credited to Him. But the one facet of Jesus which has received very little recognition is His intelligence. Yes, we occasionally acknowledge Jesus as wise, but as Dallas Willard so insightfully points out, we hardly ever, and only with hesitation say the words, “Jesus is smart.”[1] Very seldom do we hail the man from Nazareth as a genius. Yet He was and is a genius of the first order.
Despite the fact that we sing the hymn “May the mind of Christ my Savior live in me from day to day,” we seldom offer any serious attention to that Mind as such, as an intellect of remarkable caliber and capability. Having the “mind of Christ” is almost always understood as a sympathetic reflection of His love or goodness. We think it means being actively concerned for others or personally holy. The truth is that when Paul says in I Corinthians 10:16 that “we have the mind of Christ,” he is speaking in a context where he is discussing the “deep things of God.” He’s referring to a wisdom that makes all other wisdoms look foolish. He means a mind that exercises perfect judgment about all aspects of human life. He’s talking about genius. In the next few weeks I propose to have us look at the various aspects of the genius of Jesus Christ our Lord.
So for two or three months I invite you to appreciate the Mind of Jesus Christ as a mind, a first-rate, capable intellect of genius caliber. As we place our lives in His hands, we have the right to do so with the utmost trust, not just in His love, but in His brilliance. Because Christ is smart, we may have utter confidence in the spiritual surgery which He performs upon our souls. He has all the intellectual qualifications to guarantee that what He designs for us will be the very best. The genius of Jesus gives you and I good reason to commit our future to Him.
To most greatly appreciate the brilliant mind of Jesus, we need to understand a bit of theology. This is partly because you may be tempted to say “ho hum” at the very mention of the thought that Jesus is a genius. “Of course He is,” you say. “He’s God, for Pete’s sake. God is omniscient, He knows everything. If Jesus is God, He knows everything. Is Jesus smart? Well, duh!”
Even Dallas Willard falls prey to the simple identification of Jesus’ genius with the fact that He is God. He calls Jesus “the smartest man who ever lived.” But the evidence for this claim is almost all based on the special knowledge Christ possessed because He is God. Willard writes,
“He knew how to transform the tissues of the human body from sickness to health and from death to life. He knew how to suspend gravity, interrupt weather patterns, and eliminate unfruitful trees without saw or axe. He only needed a word. Surely he must be amused at what Nobel prizes are awarded for today.”[2]
So Jesus is supposed to be a genius because as God He knew the physical processes behind the miracles He performed. He had perfect ophthalmological knowledge of the blind eyes he healed and detailed chemical knowledge of the water He transformed into wine. He grasped the meteorological principles behind the wind He stilled and the psychological nuances of the souls He comforted. And that’s all correct, to a degree. As the God-Man, our Lord did have access, whenever He needed it, to every bit of knowledge and intelligence residing in the mind of God.
Yet Jesus was also human. As Thomas Morris argues in a study of the Incarnation, He possesses not just the infinite, all-knowing mind of God, but a finite, limited, human mind.[3] That human mind could not possibly have contained or used all the power which belonged to the divine mind of God. As Jesus walked on earth, His human mind was not constantly thinking about each and every molecule in the oceans of the world. He didn’t lay awake at night contemplating all the stars and galaxies in their great array. As a man like other men, His human mind simply couldn’t hold all that is in God’s mind. You can see that clearly in Matthew 24:36 when Jesus tells His disciples that He doesn’t know something which God the Father knows. His human intellect is much more limited than His divine intellect.
Our problem in grasping the nature of Jesus’ human intellect is that we slip into thinking of Him as something like Clark Kent, Superman’s secret identity. As Kent goes about his business at the Daily Planet, though he is (somewhat unbelievably) disguised by his glasses and business suit, all his powers as Superman remain constantly active. His super hearing is always listening for trouble. His x-ray vision is penetrating the walls searching for crimes in progress. And he remains invulnerable. Lois Lane is always trying to trip him up and uncover his identity by tricks like breaking scissors on his hair or maybe a quick jab with a nail file to see if he bleeds. He’s Clark, but his super powers are going full blast. He never turns them off.
Jesus, on the other hand, walked this earth with his human and divine natures somewhat separated. He was God in disguise, but it was a much more thorough disguise than Superman’s. Christ always had access to His divine power and intelligence. He could call on it at any time, as He said to Peter who wanted to save Him from the Cross. But He chose not to do so. He refused to employ His divine powers all the time. Most of the time He walked our world using only human capabilities. He refused to let his divine invulnerability protect Him. Cut Him and He would bleed, as He did on the Cross. And He refused to let His knowledge as God take over His human mind. For most of His human life He chose to function with only the powers a human brain can exercise.
So as a human being Jesus had to grow up and learn in the same way any other child did. Luke chapter 2 tells us that He “grew in wisdom and stature.” As God He knew everything, but as a human being He had to learn to walk and talk and read, just the same as anyone else. Presumably He had to study Hebrew and learn to read the Scriptures like any other Jewish young man of His time.
That is why I believe the genius of Jesus is even more admirable than it first appears. It’s not just a divine genius we are admiring. It is a human intelligence equal to or better than any that has ever graced the earth. I am celebrating not just the fact that the divine mind of Jesus knows all that can be known, but that in His human mind there is a genius which spoke to all our deepest concerns. The human mind of Jesus was limited, but it was perfect. In everything He said and did, He put His intelligence to the best possible use for our sake and for our salvation. That’s cause for us to wonder and rejoice.
Maybe, though, you are not rejoicing. Maybe you are struggling with the idea of Jesus as a genius. We may admire intelligence, but we don’t always find it attractive. Imagine a perfect intellect and you start to picture a super-computer, something that calculates but doesn’t feel. You might turn there to answer difficult questions, but you would hardly love or commit your life to such a thing. Are we going to be view the mind of Jesus like that?
No, I have no such intention. As we unfold the genius of Jesus in sermons to come, we will discover that His intelligence embraces not just what’s true, but all that is good and beautiful in the lives God has given us. His genius isn’t just great knowledge. It is not just an ability to answer questions correctly. It includes things like what Daniel Goleman called “emotional intelligence.” It is also a moral brilliance which directs all that Jesus has to say about the way we live practically. It is an aesthetic comprehension which sees beauty in God’s creation and in you and me. It is a deep and abiding wisdom which understands not just science and logic, but love and justice. The genius of Jesus is not one-dimensional, not mere calculation. It is a genius for life, for everything that goes into living the lives God made us for.
One aspect of the genius of Jesus that I encourage you to appreciate this morning is that He chose to share His intelligence in community with us. He is no cold, scholarly recluse, speaking to us from an ivory tower of research. Christ worked out all that He said and taught right in the middle of human life, living and traveling with twelve other men, arguing with His opponents, and constantly surrounded by people in need. He did not send His answers down from heaven. He came down in person to live out His answers for us. It makes His genius that much more amazing.
So there should be for us no hindrance to relying on our Lord’s intelligence. Just as we rely on a brilliant doctor or a clever mechanic to keep our bodies and cars in working order, we may trust our souls to Jesus. As Dallas Willard says, “He always has the best information… on the things that matter most in human life.” Shouldn’t we then rely completely on His teaching and direction about life?
As our text shows, it is a failure of our own practical wisdom and intelligence if we forget to trust and rely on Jesus and rely on someone or something else instead. Jesus pointed out that the Queen of Sheba came to inquire of Solomon, the wisest man in the history of the Jewish people. As difficult as it was, she acknowledged her need to bow to superior wisdom. But she will rise up and judge those who ignore Jesus, He said, because Jesus is greater than Solomon. His wisdom is wiser. His answers are better. His truth is more complete. It would be foolish not to trust Him.
There’s an old joke that goes, “What do you call the person who finished at the bottom of his class in medical school?” The answer is “Doctor!” Not every physician is the best. Not every one of them is even competent. Which reminds us that there are hundreds of would-be wise-persons in the world asking us to follow them and believe their answers about life. Among our ordinary helpers and counselors we can hardly ever be assured that we have the best. We muddle along with what we can get.
In Jesus Christ, however, we have the best care there is. The most intelligent, most capaple physician of the soul is attending us. My cousin Jim and his wife have a twelve year-old son who chest is deformed. The ribs and sternum turn inward so they press on his lungs and don’t allow him to take full breaths. It used to be that severe cases like his were treated by cutting the chest open, breaking the sternum, and then wiring things into proper place to heal. But a new procedure has been developed which involves only a small incision and the insertion of a springy steel rod to expand the chest. Healing happens much faster.
So my cousin and his wife were preparing for Ben their son to have this procedure. A nurse was handing them various forms to sign. Being conscientious parents, they read them carefully. And they came across an unfamiliar name listed as the surgeon. They became anxious, fearing that some intern or something was being foisted off on them. “This isn’t who we talked to,” they said. “Who is this person named Nuss?” they asked.
The nurse smiled at them, “Do you mean Dr. Nuss, as in the Nuss Procedure?” “Ohhh…” they murmured as the light dawned. Their son was to be operated on by the man who invented this kind of operation. The surgical genius himself was based right there in Virginia where they lived. They were in the very best hands of all. Their confidence and trust rose several notches.
Jesus is a genius. In His hands we are in the best hands of all. We are trusting our lives to the One who invented human life and then lived it Himself with perfect brilliance. As we live, let us each seek to trust Him more and more, learning from Him the smarter way to live.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2003 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj