Jesus: The Complete Man

© 2010 G. Wright Doyle. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 10/1/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4389-2793-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-9108-2 (e)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Scripture quotations in this publication are from the Holy Bible, New King James Version.

Copyright © 1996, Broadman & Holman Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I. A MAN IN RELATIONSHIP TO HIMSELF: SELF-CONTROL

1. Self-control In General

2. Self-control: The Tongue

II. A MAN IN RELATIONSHIP TO OTHERS: JUSTICE

3. As Son

4. As Father

5. As Husband

6. As Teacher

7. As Friend

8. As Worker

9. As Leader

10. As Citizen

III. A MAN IN RELATIONSHIP TO HIS GOD: GODLINESS

Scripture References

For Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Many people have helped with the composition and correction of the manuscript. Joshua Yang, Lillian Brubaker, Rich Thurston, Joy Ting, Janet Dusan, Sarah Cozart, Laura Philbrick, Carol Ludwig, and Rachel Sivalia read all or part of the text, proofreading and making needed corrections. Dr. Richard McClintock provided helpful advice. My thanks go to them. I take full responsibility for any remaining errors and omissions.

The author wishes to dedicate this book to the most complete man he knows, The Rev. Peter R. Doyle, Th.D., D.D., with admiration, affection, and boundless appreciation.

May this book motivate men to endeavor to be all that we ought to be.

Introduction

Why This Study?

The Need to Clarify the Description of the Ideal – what I am calling the Complete - Man

Disturbing confusion surrounds the question of What is the ideal man? today. We gain perspective by examining the views of those who have preceded us. Their example and teaching can guide us through the maze of conflicting options clamoring for our attention today. But why choose Jesus for such a study?

Jesus’ influence has spread around the world and throughout the centuries. In almost every country, men and women acknowledge him not only as the perfect pattern of human goodness but also as the only savior from sin and death, and faith in him the only avenue to eternal life with God. Through the preaching, teaching, and lives of his immediate followers, and then through the worldwide spread of Christianity in various forms, Jesus has gained more followers than any other religious or moral teacher.

Furthermore, Jesus Christ taught extensively on our subject, the ideal man.

What materials can we use to examine the life and teachings of Christ?

The wealth of books about Jesus (not to mention commentaries on the writings connected with him) is overwhelming. An entire lifetime would not suffice for the investigation of this man and his doctrines!

We shall, therefore, concentrate upon only one short book: the Gospel of John, with references to other parts of the Bible, especially the New Testament.

The Gospel of John

Scholars differ about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel; the most probable view, however, is that the book was written by John, a close friend of Jesus.

Composed within the lifetime of eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, this Gospel provides us with reliable information about Jesus and his teachings. The same applies to the rest of the New Testament, which was written while most of Jesus’ initial followers were still alive. Thus, we shall treat John’s Gospel, as well as the other documents of the New Testament, as accurate reports of the life and teachings of Christ.

Quotations are from the New King James Version of the Bible.

The choice to confine our examination mostly to the Gospel of John and part of the New Testament necessarily imposes a very strict limit upon the discussion to follow.

John’s Gospel has claimed a great deal of my attention ever since my seminary days. My Ph.D. dissertation dealt with St. Augustine’s sermons on John, I have taught Johannine theology in seminary, and I have gone through this Gospel several times in adult classes. Likewise, I have lectured on other sections of the New Testament in a variety of settings over the past four decades. I am sure, nevertheless, that errors remain in my interpretation of John, and the welcome criticism of others.

Though I have consulted the works of scholars, this book is not a scholarly work. I solicit the help of my readers to bring any errors to my attention, so that they may be corrected if there is another edition of this book. At the very least, I shall have been further instructed.

Though I hope the following pages are accurate reflections of the Gospel of John, my aim is not simply to describe Christ and his teachings, but to apply his example and doctrine to our daily life as men. Such a complex subject requires some sort of grid or lens through which we make our observations. For this study, I have chosen to discuss Christ according to the biblical categories of self-control, justice, and godliness.

The Apostle Paul taught that The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age (Titus 2:11-12). This book shall follow his three-fold division of ethics: Self-control (soberly); justice (righteously); and godliness (godly) to explore the ways in which men should seek to live. Self-control includes control of the tongue and of all other aspects of life. Under the category of Justice, we shall examine different roles that men must play, such as husband, father, son, etc. Godly means oriented towards God. We shall look at this final – but fundamental – quality of a true man in the last section of the book.

To show the uniqueness of Jesus’ moral example and ethical teaching, I have drawn some comparisons with other codes of conduct popular in his time and since, especially the example and teachings of Confucius. A full-scale treatment of Confucius and Christ is in process of composition.

I. A MAN IN RELATIONSHIP TO HIMSELF: SELF-CONTROL

1. Self-control In General

According to the New Testament, Jesus lived a life of perfect self-control. In contrast to many holy men and sages, however, he seemed to possess a freedom that defies the usual categories of self-control.

His Example

Food

Jesus began his ministry after a stupendous feat of self-control: Retiring to the wilderness, he abstained from food for forty days. Others had done this before him,¹ and many have repeated this type of fast since. What stands out, however, is his response to the temptation of Satan:

And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry. Now when the tempter came to Him, he said, If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread. But He answered and said, It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’²

Rather than using his divine power to satisfy his own physical needs, Jesus recalled God’s words to the children of Israel. Their fathers had grumbled repeatedly in the wilderness, mostly about the lack of the kind of food they liked.³ To show them his goodness and power, God had fed them with manna from heaven.⁴ In this way, he also trained them to rely on God’s creative and sustaining word to satisfy their needs, rather than upon physical nourishment.

Unlike the Israelites in the wilderness, Jesus overcame the temptation to place food above God’s word. He resisted Satan’s temptation with a quotation from Moses’ speech to the children of those Israelites who had sinned in their unbelief and left for us a model of how to overcome the urge to seek fullness of belly more than spiritual satisfaction.⁵

Jesus demonstrated his self-mastery on many other occasions. Early in his ministry, for example, he and his disciples had walked from Judea to Samaria. When they arrived outside a village called Sychar, it was noon and they were hungry. Fatigued, Jesus sat down by the well and sent his disciples into town to buy something to eat. While they were gone he had an amazing conversation with a woman from that town.⁶

When they returned with food and offered him some to eat, he responded with these words:

I have food to eat of which you do not know… My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work.⁷

Although his body craved food, Jesus’ soul derived satisfaction from ministering spiritual life to a woman in need. Rather than greedily gobbling up the food his disciples had brought, he first spoke with them about the spiritual harvest to be reaped among the Samaritans.

Jesus was not an ascetic, however. He never gave the impression that eating was sinful. The Gospels record a number of occasions when Jesus accepted invitations to dinner.⁸ In fact, he enjoyed food so much that his enemies falsely accused him of being a glutton.⁹ He miraculously fed large crowds of hungry followers at least twice,¹⁰ and provided a hearty breakfast for several hungry disciples after his resurrection.¹¹

Drink

Like all Jews except Nazirites (including his cousin and forerunner, John the Baptist), Jesus habitually drank wine with meals. We read, for example, that Jesus attended a wedding banquet and even turned water into wine when the hosts’ supply of wine ran out.¹² As a result of his practice of drinking wine on social occasions, Jewish leaders maliciously slandered him as a drunkard,¹³ a baseless charge indeed! Jesus could enjoy the fruit of the vine without abusing it.

We know that Jesus exercised total mastery over his body not only from his response to Satan in the wilderness, but also from his actions on the cross:

And they brought Him to the place Golgotha, which is translated, Place of a Skull. Then they gave Him wine mingled with myrrh to drink, but He did not take it.¹⁴

The soldiers meant to dull Jesus’ pain with this drink; he refused, choosing instead the unspeakable agonies of the cross so that he could pay fully for the sins of those who believe in him.

Later, having completely satisfied God’s righteous wrath, in order to fulfill yet another Old Testament passage about the sufferings of the Servant of God, he said,

I thirst! Now a vessel full of sour wine was sitting there; and they filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on hyssop, and put it to His mouth. So when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, It is finished! And bowing His head, He gave up His spirit.¹⁵

Such was his self-mastery that when he could have anaesthetized himself against pain, he refused, and when he had borne our sins and had only one more thing to do to fulfill all prophecies concerning his death, he had the self-possession to ask for a drink that he really did not need.

Money, Possessions

The lust for possessions has consumed many men. Greed will drive men to neglect their families, their health, their neighbors, and their God. An insatiable appetite for material wealth has fueled as many conflicts as all other motives combined. When Marx identified economics as the driving force of all human behavior, he was only partly wrong. Jesus pointed to the problem when he warned, ‘You cannot serve God and mammon.’¹⁶

How did Jesus handle the temptation to seek satisfaction, status, and security in things?

We know that he had renounced wealth as a goal because at the end of his life he was poor. The soldiers who crucified him had nothing to divide among themselves except his clothing. He had said, ‘It is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.’¹⁷ He apparently had heeded his own warning, as the following passage shows:

Then a certain scribe came and said to Him, Teacher, I will follow You wherever You go. And Jesus said to him, Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.¹⁸

Jesus’ itinerant ministry was supported by the contributions of those who had been healed or otherwise helped, including many women.¹⁹ Rather than accumulating vast wealth from his immensely popular work of healing and exorcism, Jesus saw to it that excess money be given to the poor.²⁰

We need not picture Jesus as an indigent Hindu or Buddhist monk, however. He had been a carpenter before commencing his ministry at the age of thirty; he knew how to earn his own money. He also may have owned a house.²¹ But we can see that he resisted any temptations to profit from his work, unlike many preachers since.²²

On at least one occasion, Jesus welcomed waste in worship. Although Jesus foreswore personal extravagance, he refused to rebuke his friend Mary when she poured out costly perfume upon his feet. Judas meanly observed that this money could have gone to the poor, but Jesus welcomed Mary’s expression of heartfelt worship.²³ We conclude that his own simple life and personal frugality did not flow from a narrow or stingy heart.

Anger

Anger has ruined countless men. Responding to real or imagined slights, they have launched attacks on others, sometimes with disastrous results. The wars of history more often than not run on the fuel of young men’s inflamed anger and the