The natural limitations have been added to.  Sin affects the judgment.  It brings ignorance and passion, and they affect the judgment.  There results lack of care of the body, improper use of the strength, and ignorant and improper use of the bodily functions.  Then come weakness and disease and shortened life, not to speak of the misery included in these and the enjoyment missed.  In the chain of results comes the toil that is drudgery.  Not work, but excessive work, more than one should do, with less strength than one should have.  Work itself under natural conditions is always a delight.  But through sin has come strain, tugging, friction, unequal division.  The changes wrought in nature by sin call for greater effort with less return.  Toil becomes slavish and grinding.  Then poverty adds its tug.  And sorrow comes to sap the strength and take away the buoyancy.  And then man’s inhumanity to his brothers and sisters.  These are some of the limitations added by sin and ever increasing.

Our Fellow.

Now, Jesus was human; truly naturally human, God’s human, and then more because of the conditions He found.  The love act of creation brought with it self-imposed limitations to God.  And now the love act of saving brings still more.  God made man in His own image.  In His humanity Jesus was in the image of God, even as we are.  Adam was an unfallen man.  Jesus was that and more, a tested and now matured unfallen man, and by the law of growth ever growing more.  Adam was an innocent, unfallen man up to the temptation.  Jesus was a virtuous unfallen man.  The test with Him changed innocence to virtue.

In His experiences, His works, His temptations, His struggles, His victories, Jesus was clearly human.  In His ability to read men’s thoughts and know their lives without finding out by ordinary means, His knowledge ahead of coming events, His knowledge of and control over nature, He clearly was more than the human we know.  Yet until we know more than we seem to now of the proper powers of an unfallen man matured and growing in the use and control of those powers we cannot draw here any line between human and divine.  But the whole presumption is in favor of believing that in all of this Jesus was simply exercising the proper human powers which with Him were not hurt by sin but ever increasing in use.

Jesus insisted on living a simple true human life, dependent upon God and upon others.  He struck the key-note of this at the start in the wilderness.  Everything He taught He put through the test of use.  He was what He taught.  As a man He has gone through all He calls us to.  He blazed the way into every thicket and woods, and then stands ahead, softly, clearly calling, “Come along after Me.”

He was a normal man, God’s pattern unchanged.  All the powers of body and mind and spirit were developed naturally and held in poise, no lack of development, no over development of some part, no misuse of any power, nor abuse, but each part perfectly fitting in and working naturally with each other part.