Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
Two questions: (1) What was Jesus like as a teenager? (2) Could any healthy teenager today really be like Him (what we say "Christlike"), and not be a fanatic, an oddball, a misfit, a recluse, so "different" that he/she just couldn't be "human"?
Have you ever seen chickens peck one of their number that was sick, wounded, or someway "different"? Were Jesus' fellow-teens in Nazareth inclined to want to crucify Him even then? How could any teenager today follow Him truly and not end up re-"crucified"? Wouldn't be fun, would it?
Can someone invent a way to be "Christlike" and not be "despised and rejected of men" (Isa. 53:3)? Invent a Christ minus a cross? Maybe be a super-personality?
Jesus was always a young man; "we" didn't let Him grow up to what we call "maturity" before "we" had to crucify Him at the age of 33. But even so it was (we think) easier for Him to be so different at that age than say 16. A teenager "pecked" by all his/her peers is no role anyone wants.
The unimaginable becomes real when we read Psalm 119 and see it as Jesus' teenage diary in the immoral town of Nazareth (check vss. 98-102, for example!). But to see Jesus in that Psalm we need to understand one Hebrew word, Torah. Translators generally render it as "law," so we have Jesus saying all the time, "O how love I Thy law! it is My meditation all the day"--even "at midnight" and before daybreak (vss. 97, 62, 147). Kids today think of the author of Psalm 119 as a super-Legalist.
But the words translated there as law, statutes, commandments, do not mean rigid divine demands so much as divine Gospel-Good-News communications to humanity. When Psalm 119 says "O how love I Thy law" it means, "O how I love the Gospel You are always trying to teach Me!" It does not mean, "O how I love to be scared all the time!" To Jesus the Ten Commandments became ten promises because He believed the New Covenant, not the Old. And that's why He became the most joyous, loving, cool Teenager you could ever meet. He believed!
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: June 19, 2003.
Copyright © 2011 by "Dial Daily Bread."
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