Though only four chapters long, the book of Jonah is filled strange and unique elements.

Whereas most prophets speak to other nations from Israel, God calls Jonah to address Nineveh from Nineveh. Prophets often resist God’s call, but Jonah actually runs away. On the boat headed for Joppa, idolatrous sailors encounter the living God and immediately begin to worship him. And then, of course, Jonah survives the sea by being swallowed by an enormous fish and living in its belly for three days.

When Jonah finally does preach to the Ninevites, they respond to his preaching with unrivaled repentance — and everyone, including the animals, takes part in mourning for sin. And though every preacher I know longs for Nineveh-like revival, Jonah is distraught at the city’s repentance and angry that God would show such wide compassion.

Finally, the book doesn’t end with a nice resolution. By the Lord’s providence, a plant grows up quickly to shade Jonah from the heat, but then, by that same providence, a worm destroys the plant. In the face of Jonah’s anger, God asks the prophet a question that is also intended for the reader: “Should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” (Jonah 4:11).

Among all these strange and unique elements, consider the book’s last phrase. Why does the story of Jonah end with the mention of “also much cattle”?

God’s Angry Prophet

To get to an answer to that question, let’s remember the near context. Chapter 4 begins with Jonah enraged with God. And here, we find out why Jonah ran away from Nineveh the first time. He tells the Lord, “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster” (Jonah 4:2). Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh because he knew the Lord’s heart to bless; he knew and believed the Lord’s own self-disclosure that he is gracious and merciful and relents from disaster (Exodus 34:6–7).

Because Jonah knew God’s character, he knew that if he went to Nineveh and preached, the Ninevites might turn from their violence — and God, being the gracious God he is, would relent. Jonah was running away from giving Nineveh an opportunity to experience the mercy of God. One of the tragic ironies of this book is that Jonah himself experiences great mercy from the Lord (who spares him from death through the great fish), and yet Jonah is angry when the Ninevites experience that same mercy.

“God is the missionary in this book, pursuing both Nineveh and his prophet with amazing grace.”

But just as God drew near to Cain when Cain was angry at him (Genesis 4:6–7), in mercy and compassion, God draws near to Jonah. Though Jonah is quick to anger, the Lord is slow to anger. He asks Jonah an important heart-revealing question: “Do you do well to be angry?” (Jonah 4:4). God is not only interested in Nineveh experiencing his mercy; he is also pursuing Jonah. God is the missionary in this book, pursuing both Nineveh and his prophet with his amazing grace.

While Jonah waits to see what God will do with Nineveh, God moves into the next stage of pursuing Jonah’s angry heart. After Jonah makes some shade for himself from the heat, the Lord appoints a plant to add extra shade. Jonah is very happy about the Lord’s kindness to him (Jonah 4:6). But when God appoints a worm to destroy the plant, and a scorching east wind to beat down on, Jonah is angry again — this time about the loss of the plant that shaded him from the heat. And now, in a very personal way, the Lord draws near to highlight his own compassion for Nineveh.

Pitying Plants and People

God’s words to Jonah follow a common form of argumentation as he moves from the lesser to the greater:

You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle? (Jonah 4:10–11)

In this question, God affirms that Jonah is right, in a way, to have pity for the plant. But Jonah neither labored for nor cultivated the plant, and he experienced its relief for only a day. If Jonah is right to have compassion on the plant, is not the Lord’s right to have compassion on a city of more than 120,000 people, along with much cattle?

Now, with the context settled, we can get back to our question: Why does the Lord mention cattle?

In one sense, the mention of cattle is simply a part of the lesser-to-greater argument. Plants are important, and Jonah is right to have pity for the plant, but people and cattle are even more important than plants. Isn’t it right for the Lord to have pity on a great city with all kinds of people and cattle?

But to me and other commentators, the mention of cattle also signals something important that we need to remember about God’s love for all creation, for all he himself has made, from plants to animals to humans.

God’s Care for All His Works

God has made humans in his image (Genesis 1:26–27), and this was the crowning act of the six days of creation. He made humans a little lower than the angels (Psalm 8:5). To save humans, the Son of God became like us in every way, except for sin (Hebrews 2:17; 4:15). We humans are of great value to God, and though we have rebelled, God has much mercy for us.

At the same time, though not in the same way, God cares about animals. He has pity and compassion on animals. Animals are his creation, and God cares about what animals experience in his world. This is one of the reasons Israel was not to muzzle the ox (Deuteronomy 25:4). This is also why Jesus teaches us not to be anxious, based on the beauty of the plants of the field and the Father’s care for birds (Matthew 6:25–34). Notice Jesus’s lesser-to-greater argument regarding our Father’s care:

Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? (Matthew 6:26)

Jesus’s logic is clear. Our Father feeds and cares for the birds of the air; they have what they need when they need it, though they do not sow, reap, or gather. The Father himself feeds them. And we are of more value than birds.

“Just because we humans are of more value than birds, plants, or cattle doesn’t mean they are of no value.”

But just because we humans are of more value than birds, plants, or cattle doesn’t mean they are of no value to our gracious and compassionate God. Cattle are of value to God, and we are to value them, as he does.

He Cares for Cattle — and Dogs

We could apply God’s surprising regard for animals in various ways, but I want to close with just one.

In 2007, I had to euthanize the first dog my wife and I owned. His name was Elliott, and he was a black-and-white English springer spaniel who went everywhere with us. We loved Elliott. I learned how to pheasant and grouse hunt with him, and we had a great bond. But in time, his body filled with cancer. When I took him to the vet to be with him in his last moments, I was not prepared for the waves of grief that would come upon me then and for weeks after we put him down. I felt silly and embarrassed telling friends about this because I would start to weep. He was just a dog, but I was grieving as if I had lost a close friend.

And that’s when Jonah 4:11 and the Lord’s pity for cattle started to help me. Yes, Elliott was a dog. But the Lord cares about dogs because he created dogs. I am right to have compassion on my dog. The Lord is right to have compassion on cattle; he made, sustains, and cares for cattle. Even more, God is right to have compassion on Nineveh, that great city. And it is absolutely amazing that the Lord would have compassion on me and you.

Growing up, our high school held a morning assembly where the senior pupils read the Scriptures to the entire school. It was on such an occasion that one of my friends stood up to read and announced solemnly, “The reading this morning is from the Gospel according to Isaiah.” My heart sank: “O Hugh, you know Isaiah’s not a Gospel; it’s a prophecy!”

Of course, I was technically right; but later I couldn’t help reflecting on my friend’s unintentional insight. He had indeed read from the gospel according to Isaiah, just as again, this Christmastime, in hundreds of thousands — indeed, millions — of churches around the world, the gospel according to Isaiah will be read, and in a multitude of concert halls where Handel’s Messiah will be performed, the words of Isaiah 9:6 will be sung:

For to us a child is born;     to us a son is given;and the government shall be upon his shoulder;     and his name shall be calledWonderful Counselor, Mighty God,     Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

To Us a Child Is Born

Isaiah may not have known the place and time of arrival, far less the specific identity of the coming Messiah; but according to John he saw Christ’s glory (John 12:37–41). And certainly Isaiah 9 is a glorious description of him.

The majestic words of Isaiah 9:6 bring a royal birth notice: “To us a child is born, to us a son is given.” On this king’s shoulders, the government will rest. But the details of the proclamation are as arresting as the later angelic announcement of Jesus’s birth to the shepherds (Luke 2:10–12). Indeed, the latter seems to echo the former. This child is born not to Mary and Joseph, although indeed they are his parents and guardians. There is something unique about him. True, he was born of Mary, but as a King who comes to rule, and as a Savior who comes to deliver, he is born to us: “To us a child is born, to us a son is given.”

But that is just the beginning of the wonders in Isaiah 9:6. They run through the four titles this child will possess: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Wonderful Counselor

The child is to be a “Wonderful Counselor.” That title is often — perhaps usually — understood to mean that the prophesied Christ will be a wonderful counselor to his people. While he is that, some interpreters (like John Owen) have seen a deeper significance in the words and applied them to what theologians have variously called the “counsel of redemption,” or the pactum salutis (the “covenant of peace”), or the “covenant of redemption” between the Father and the Son — the grand plan to redeem us. Thus, the answer to Paul’s question in Romans 11:34, “Who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” is not “nobody” but “his own dearly beloved Son”!

Yes, the Father sent the Son into the world to be our Savior — but not without or apart from the willing counsel of his Son. Is it too great a stretch to think that before Isaiah answered the heavenly question — “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” — it had already been answered by the Son, saying, “My Father, here is my counsel: Here I am! Send me”?

This “counsel of redemption” refers to God’s eternity, and we are capable of thinking of it only in time-bound terms. But marvel at this: the One who comes to be the Wonderful Counselor to us is One who has participated in the counsels of eternity. He was everlastingly the Wisdom of God, but he “became to us wisdom from God” (1 Corinthians 1:30). Since this is the case, let us never doubt this: no matter how deep our perplexity or how mysterious his providence, the counsel given to us by the One who stands in the counsels of God is perfect. For our sake, he took “the likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3) and in it “increased in wisdom . . . and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52) and also “learned obedience through what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8). No wonder the voice from heaven commends him: “This is my Son . . . listen to him!” (Luke 9:35).

If the Babe born in Bethlehem is the One by whose wisdom the world was created, and through whom and to whom providence is directed, salvation planned, redemption accomplished, and the wisdom of God displayed to principalities and powers, then two implications follow: (1) Saturate your mind and heart in the counsel he gives in his word. (2) Trust this Wonderful Counselor absolutely.

Mighty God

The Messianic Counselor is also “Mighty God.” Too many interpreters have resisted the obvious here — that the child described is clearly a divine person — and have tried to argue that Isaiah’s language is better translated as “God-like Hero.” But apart from other considerations, the same title is used of Yahweh himself in the next chapter (Isaiah 10:21).

Still, the divine Messiah is also heroic, and he does act in heroic ways. This is surely a suggestive line of thought for us today. We live in a world of idols — sports idols, pop idols, and now chiefly the idol Martin Luther said he feared more than the pope and all his cardinals: “the Great Pope Self.” In a world given over to such idolatry, young people need to divert their gaze to heroes whose faith they may follow with joy. Yes, the Lord Jesus is more than any human hero, but he is also our ultimate hero — truly a hero of a God!

In what heroic activities he engages! He is the Divine Voyager who in the incarnation traverses the vast gulf between eternity and time on his mission of salvation. He is the Divine Warrior who is attacked as an infant by Herod, that vile instrument of Satan, but who then enters the lists against his enemy in the wilderness and defeats him. He is the Divine Healer who conquers blindness, lameness, deafness, and dumbness. He is the Divine Life-Giver whose voice the dead hear and live. He is the Divine Lover who shows love to the loveless, the unlovely, and the unlovable. He is the Divine Self-Sacrificer who offers himself on the cross for our sakes. He is the Divine General who leads a host of captives as he ascends in his triumph, and who in the sheer generosity of his grace now shares the spoils of his victory with his people. This is Christ, the mighty Hero-God.

Everlasting Father

Isaiah also sees that the coming Messiah is the “Everlasting Father.” Perhaps this description makes us hesitate a little and even question how this can be an authentic prophecy of the coming Messiah. How does this fit? After all, Jesus Christ is the Son of God, not the Father.

We need have no hesitation here. In fact, Isaiah has already prepared us for what at first sight may seem to be so paradoxical. He has already told us that “to us a child is born, to us a son is given.” He sees no contradiction, no tension here. And the reason is straightforward. Neither son nor father is all the Messiah is, or only what he is. I have been a son, but I am also a father. This Son is likewise the father of all whom he brings to birth in his kingdom.

If Paul could say to the Corinthians, “I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (1 Corinthians 4:15), then surely the same may be said of the One who commissioned him. So in these titles, the Divine Messiah is viewed not only in relation to his role in the Trinity (where he is Son and not Father), but in relation to us as the Suffering Servant, of whom Isaiah later says, “He shall see his offspring” (Isaiah 53:10). We have been brought to new life through him. He is the only-begotten Son who begets us by his Spirit. We are the children who have been given to him (Hebrews 2:13).

“In Christ, we find a new father, a true father, and what is more, an everlasting father.”

At Christmastime, it may be especially important for some of us to grasp this. We traditionally think of Christmas as a family time. But by no means do all of us have good memories of Christmas at home, or of family life, or of our father. But in Christ, we find a new father, a true father, and what is more, an everlasting father. He will never cease to be that to us! If father is a term that gives us little pleasure, then let us remember Philip’s request to our Lord: “Show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Then let us embrace his words: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:8–9).

To Jesus, then, we must look to dissipate all unhappy thoughts of father; and we must keep looking, keep pressing in, until we have absorbed the constancy of the love of Jesus in whom the love of the Father for us is seen. In coming to him — as a lady once memorably told me — we discover for the first time in our lives that we are really loved.

Prince of Peace

Finally in this fourfold Name, the Messiah is called “Prince of Peace.” Here we seem to be on familiar Christmas territory. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace,” chanted the heavenly host (Luke 2:14), echoing again the words penned by Isaiah: “Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end” (Isaiah 9:7).

But Isaiah could already sense that this peace would be hard won. There would be light instead of darkness, an increase of joy, and a share in the spoils of victory only when “the yoke of . . . burden and the staff . . . and the rod of [the] oppressor” would be “broken as on the day of Midian” (Isaiah 9:4). Enough time for Isaiah to pen another forty-four chapters would pass before he would be able to peer through the mists of future history to see a clearer picture of the Messiah, and to understand that this promised child would grow to be “pierced for our transgressions . . . crushed for our iniquities,” so that “upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace” (Isaiah 53:5).

“Our shalom would be at the expense of his dispeace; our reconciliation is found only in his alienation.”

Our shalom would be at the expense of his dispeace; our reconciliation is found only in his alienation; hostilities have ceased between God and man only because he himself bore the cause of them, our sin, in his own body on the tree (1 Peter 2:24), and there became to the full “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3).

All We Will Ever Need

Let us, therefore, embrace Jesus Christ this Christmas as we find him described in these four titles. For these names represent a full salvation. In the Wonderful Counselor, there is wisdom for us in our ignorance and folly; in the Mighty God, strength for us in our sinful weakness; in the Everlasting Father, a heart standing open to welcome us home; in the Prince of Peace, a shalom that comes only through his sacrifice.

Before he came, Isaiah knew that he would be Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Now that he has come, we know where and when he came and who he really was and is. For we know that he is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). Nor is that a long-form way of saying that Jesus is eternal. Rather, it tells us that today he is exactly what he was, and everything that he was “in the days of his flesh” (Hebrews 5:7). He is still the same Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. You have no reason to mistrust him; you have every reason to believe that he is all you will ever need.

There could be no greater Christmas present than receiving him. There is no greater present you could give to him than yourself.

Christ is the heart of Christianity. It is hardly surprising, then, that from the beginning of church history his own person has been the target of foes from without and heretics from within. Early on, some attacked the doctrine of his eternal deity, others the belief that he had a real physical body, and yet others that he had a real human mind.

This last attack is particularly fascinating because it was driven by a bishop, Apollinarius (310–390), who had previously distinguished himself as a defender of the deity of Christ. Most likely, he hesitated to acknowledge Jesus’s full humanity because he feared compromising the Lord’s deity. He took John 1:14, “The Word became flesh,” to mean only that the eternal Word took a human body: he did not take a rational human soul. The incarnation thus involved a union between the Son of God and only part of human nature. Jesus did not have a human mind.

Apollinarius’s doctrine eventually was condemned as heresy, but only after a keen debate. A key figure in this debate was Gregory, bishop of Nazianzen (in what is modern-day Turkey). Gregory (329–390) famously summed up his argument in the statement, “The unassumed is the unhealed” (Letter to Cledonius the Priest Against Apollinarius). His logic was simple: a rational soul is as essential to human nature as a human body; if Christ didn’t take such a soul, he didn’t take the whole of human nature; and if he didn’t take it, he didn’t redeem it. Without a human mind, Jesus would have saved only a part of man, and not the most important part.

Side by side with Gregory in this debate stood his friend, Gregory of Nyssa (about 335–395), who also bequeathed to us a memorable image. Starting from the premise that it was not the body only, but the whole man that was lost, he proclaimed that the Good Shepherd, who came to seek and to save the lost, “carries home on his shoulders the whole sheep, not its skin only” (Against Eunomius, 2.13). Thus did the Good Shepherd make the man of God complete, redeemed in both body and soul.

Tempted Yet Triumphant

We shouldn’t overlook how tempting it is for those who are sensitive about the deity of Christ to follow the path taken by Apollinarius and to shrink from giving the humanity of our Lord its due place. Indeed, we already see the temptation confronted in the epistle to the Hebrews, where some in the early church found it hard to believe that the Son of God could sympathize with us in our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15). This is likely why the writer has to stress that Christ was “made like his brothers in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17).

“Jesus endured temptation to a degree that we shall never know because, unlike us, he never gave in.”

Before we go any further, however, we have to remind ourselves there is one exception to this: Christ was without sin. This fact is all the more remarkable when we recall that he not only shared our nature: he also shared our temptations (Hebrews 4:15). Indeed, he endured temptation to a degree that we shall never know because, unlike us, he never gave in. Though the devil pursued him relentlessly — through family, friend, and foe — Jesus would not yield, even when faced with the cursed death of the cross.

These temptations were real and protracted, sometimes cunning, sometimes violent, but from them all Christ emerges with his integrity inviolate. But the very fact that he was tempted is fatal to the idea that he had no human mind. A mere body cannot be tempted. The divine Logos cannot be tempted. Omniscience cannot be tempted. We are tempted by what we know, by what we shrink from, by what we fear, and by what we love. So it was with Jesus, as we see from his experience in Gethsemane. He knew something (but not all) of what the cup involved, he shrank from it, and he wished, as man, there could be some other way. But in the end, he prayed, “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). This was not mere submission. It was the keynote of his life.

Real Human Mind

When we turn to Jesus in the Gospel accounts, we are immediately aware that here is someone who not only lived in a human body but one who also had a real human mind. This is made plain at the beginning, when Luke tells us that Jesus grew not only in physical stature but in wisdom (Luke 2:52). God doesn’t grow in wisdom. He is eternally all-knowing, but the child Jesus was not.

His physical development was accompanied by a normal human intellectual development. His mother would have taught him what every human mother teaches her child, but she would have shared with him, too, what she had been told by the angel who had been sent to announce his birth. He learned from the Scriptures, which he clearly read for himself and which he cherished as a font of wisdom all his life. He learned by attending the synagogue, and by questioning the rabbis at the temple (Luke 2:46). He learned from his father, Joseph, to whom he was apprenticed. And he learned by observing the world around him and the ways of his own people.

Yet this human mind, acute and probing as it was, was also aware that it didn’t know everything, and couldn’t answer every question that might be put to him. The prime example of this is his confession of ignorance about the time of his own second coming (Mark 13:32). He was never ignorant of anything he ought to have known, or of anything his people needed to know. From that point of view, the Father had delivered to the Son everything that would be helpful to the “babes” (Matthew 11:25 KJV). But on such a detail as the date of the end, all that Jesus could say was that the Father had set it by his own authority (Acts 1:7).

The fact that Jesus had a real human mind and confessed himself ignorant on certain matters doesn’t mean, however, that his knowledge was never more than ordinary. He clearly had supernatural knowledge, as appears, for example, in his conversation with the woman of Samaria. He has never seen or heard of her before, yet he knows all that she ever did (John 4:29). Yet supernatural knowledge is not omniscience. It was a normal adjunct of the prophetic office, as we can see clearly in the ministries of men like Elijah and Elisha.

Deep Affections

If we see in Jesus a man possessed of a real human mind, we also see in him a deeply affectionate human being. Above all, of course, this affection is directed toward his heavenly Father, whom he now loves according to his two natures, human and divine. But alongside this affection, the Gospels highlight Jesus’s love for his fellow humans.

Perhaps the most fascinating instance of this is Jesus’s love for the rich young man who approached him to ask what he had to do to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17–23). The man went away sad, we are told, because he was unwilling to part with his possessions. We have no reason to believe that he ever chose eternal life, but we have very good reason to believe that Jesus loved him (Mark 10:21). Jesus was drawn to him, it seems, as one human to another.

It is clear, too, that Jesus loved company, and in this respect he was a marked contrast to his cousin, John the Baptist. John was a solitary who preferred life in the desert to life in the city and was happy to live on his diet of locusts and wild honey. Jesus never found fault with John’s lifestyle, nor did John with his, but they were men of different temperaments (Matthew 11:18–19). Jesus readily accepted invitations to enjoy the hospitality of others, even when they came from tax collectors and sinners.

But he also had his own circle of intimate friends. Its nucleus was the original band of twelve disciples, whom he called apostles “so that they might be with him” (Mark 3:14), but within this band there was another even more intimate circle consisting of Peter, James, and John; and even within the inner three there seems to have been one who was special: John, “the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved” (John 20:2). This also bears the mark of humanity. Some were close to him, others were even closer, and one was closest of all. But they were all his friends (John 15:14). He loved them as the Father loved him (John 15:9), and his love for them was to be the paradigm for the way they were to love one another (John 13:14, 34).

There was another group, too, to which Jesus was especially close: the Bethany household of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. Jesus, we are told explicitly, loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus; and in the sisters’ message to Jesus informing him of Lazarus’s illness, they refer to their brother as “he whom you love” (John 11:3).

There was clearly a close bond here: a bond that embraced the sisters as well as their brother, and a love so deep that when Jesus saw Mary stricken with grief, he was profoundly moved in his spirit, and wept (John 11:33–35), even though he knew that Lazarus’s illness would ultimately lead not to his death, but to the glory of God. The sight of human heartbreak convulsed his soul.

Human Emotions

Then we see, too, that Jesus experienced ordinary human emotions.

He was moved to anger, for example, by the hardness of the human heart, by the hypocrisy of the religious, and by the desecration of his Father’s house. More typically, however, the emotion we see in Jesus is compassion. He feels pity for the crowds, living aimlessly like sheep without a shepherd (Matthew 9:36), and it is pity that moves him to raise the widow’s son (Luke 7:13) and to heal the leper who approaches him imploring, “If you will, you can make me clean” (Mark 1:40).

In fact, as B.B. Warfield points out in his splendid essay “The Emotional Life of Our Lord,” compassion is the emotion most frequently attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, and it was no shallow feeling. The Greek verb used to express the Lord’s pity (splanchnizomai) is closely related to the word for the inward parts (“bowels,” in the older English versions) and underlines the fact that Jesus’s compassion was visceral. He was deeply upset, stirred to his depths, by the misery he saw around him, whether in the state of society in general or in the plight of individuals, and his distress was frequently accompanied by clear physical symptoms such as, for example, his weeping at Lazarus’s tomb and his tears over the doomed city of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41). Jesus felt, and felt deeply.

Nor is compassion something that Jesus, now that he has risen, has left behind as not fit to be taken back to heaven. After all, compassion is an emotion clearly ascribed to God himself (Psalm 103:13). Indeed, it is a key attribute in the name revealed to Moses when he hid in the cleft of the rock and the glory of God passed him by (Exodus 34:6). Pity is a part of the glory, and it is perfectly consistent, then, with the exaltation of Christ that he still sympathizes with his people in their weakness (Hebrews 4:15). He knows how they feel, he feels with them, and he feels for them, because he has stood where they stand.

Yet the fact that he can follow our experiences doesn’t mean that we can always follow his, because he has plumbed emotional depths that none of his brothers or sisters has ever known. The supreme example of this is Gethsemane. The cross had long occupied Jesus’s mind, but in Gethsemane, “Today is the day,” and the full horror of the cup he has to drink is well-nigh overwhelming. He cannot hide his anguish. “My soul,” he declares (speaking of his human soul), “is very sorrowful, even to death” (Mark 14:34); and he prays, not once but thrice. He wanted the cup removed. Could there not, he asked, be some other way?

These, as John Calvin put it, are the feelings of a condemned and ruined man (Institutes, 2.16.11), and when what he dreaded in Gethsemane became a reality on Calvary, they found expression in the dreadful cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). What did they mean? That is between himself and the Father. Only they know what our salvation cost them each. But let’s never forget that while we have all, at one time or another, cried from the depths (Psalm 130:1), we have never cried from such depths as these: the depths of the curse of the law (Galatians 3:13).

Does the Whole Sheep Matter?

Back, then, to the two Gregorys. Why was it important that the shepherd should carry the whole sheep — or, more prosaically, that the Redeemer of the human race should take to himself the whole of human nature, and not just a human body?

“The sins of the human soul need to be atoned for as well as the sins of the body.”

First, because the sins of the human soul need to be atoned for as well as the sins of the body. This becomes clear the moment we look at such a passage as Galatians 5:19–21, where Paul lists the sins of the “flesh.” It is doubtful that any of these is exclusively a sin of the body, but some — such as enmity, jealousy, envy, and fits of anger — are clearly sins of the mind; and the bearer of the sins of the world had to bear these sins of the mind as surely as he bore the sins of the body.

Second, the human mind had to consent to the sacrifice offered on Calvary. It was not merely a physical act, but a voluntary act; otherwise it would have had no moral value. The power of the cross lies not in the degree or quantity of the pain it involved, but in the fact that Christ offered himself in love. In the very act of delivering himself up, Christ loved the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, strength, and mind. Like Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, the cross was an act of worship (Genesis 22:5).

Third, the soul, no less than the body, had to bear the cost of redemption. This is the great truth highlighted by the Puritan theologians: “The suffering of his soul was the soul of sufferings” (Christ’s Famous Titles, 124). And just how real these soul-sufferings were, we have already seen. The cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” came from the depths of Immanuel’s soul.

Fourth, the soul, no less than the body, needs a full salvation. It needs renewal and cleansing as well as forgiveness. But just as the resurrection of the body presupposes our union with Christ, so does the transformation of the soul. We are sanctified in him, our souls united to his soul, and drawing on one and the same Spirit.

Full Propitiation

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the two Gregorys provide a complete understanding of the atonement. There was a tendency among the great Greek theologians to see the union of the two natures in the person of Christ as itself the defining atoning act.

But the incarnation, magnificent as it was, was not an end in itself, as the writer to the Hebrews makes clear when he tells us that Christ took flesh and blood “that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). Or, as he puts it a moment later, the reason that Christ became like his brothers and sisters in every respect was that he might make propitiation for his people’s sins. The propitiatory act was not his incarnation, but his death. He is a propitiation by his blood (Romans 3:35).