Jesus’ Thoughts

Donald Macleod offers some intriguing insights in his IVP book on the Person of Christ: In many respects, Jesus’ human knowledge was like our own, as He learned about His Father through revelation: “his own capacity for such knowledge would differ significantly from that of ordinary men. But it would not differ in kind or in principle. He knew the will of the Father because the Father revealed it to him.”

Jesus’ knowledge differed from ours because of His sinlessness and because of the “intimacy of his relationship with God. He conversed with God as his Son; and he thought as his Son. We may even say that he lived in a thought-world of pure revelation so that to an extent that we cannot fathom God disclosed himself not only to his thinking but in his thinking. In this respect, revelation, in the case of Christ, was concurrent with his own thought-processes.”

Intriguing, as I say. But I wonder. Having a human soul and mind, Jesus surely pondered, asked questions about the world and about Scripture (explicitly, Luke 2:46). Were these questions revelation? If he thought “I’m terribly hungry,” was that revelation? Perhaps we should say that every thought and word that ever came to or from Jesus was revelation, but it means that “revelation” is a much larger and richer category than we sometimes think.