When Did Jesus Know He Was God?: Daily Thoughts from Mark (Mark 12:35-37)

People sometimes ask if Jesus was aware of his own deity, and, if so, how early in his life was he aware.  Taking on human nature and being born as we are, in an infantile state but growing in understanding and awareness, would it have even been possible to have some awareness of his deity when he was a baby?  He was limiting himself from access to his deity, but could there have been still a sense of his true identity as both God and man?

Jesus is in the last week of life in Jerusalem, what we have come to term Passion Week, the week in which he suffers crucifixion.  The various factions in Israel have been looking for ways to humiliate Jesus and cause him to lose popularity with the people, but they end up being humiliated instead and Jesus’ rightful place of leadership is affirmed.  Now Jesus turns the tables.  He asks a question of the spiritual leaders, a question that affirms that he is aware of his own deity.

And as Jesus taught in the temple, he said, “How can the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David? David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared,

“‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.”’

David himself calls him Lord. So how is he his son?” And the great throng heard him gladly. (Mark 12:35-37, ESV)

Jesus asks a question of his own in public preaching that the leaders don’t have an answer to and that he doesn’t give an answer to.  How can the Messiah, the Christ, be the son of David and David’s Lord at the same time?  He is referring to Psalm 110 in which David says that Yahweh said to David’s Lord (master) that He would help David’s Lord overcome his enemies.  David has no lord other than God.  He is the king and all call him lord.  Yet in this psalm he separates Yahweh from his Lord (“Yahweh said to my Lord”).  [This is where it is helpful to our interpretation to know that our English translations often put LORD in all caps to translate God’s personal name Yahweh, and the word translated Lord is the Hebrew adonai, meaning master.]

The scribes rightly taught that the Messiah would be a descendant of David, and they believed that Psalm 110 described the Messiah, too. But that creates a problem because the offspring cannot be greater than the ancestor and yet here is David speaking of Messiah as his Lord, his master.  How can Messiah be David’s offspring and also his master?  Yet Messiah can be David’s master if he is also God.  Here this psalm describes, without going into detail, that the Messiah is both a human descendant of David and the Lord God.  Whether David understood that Messiah would be both God and man or not, as a prophet of God he spoke truly of Messiah being his own master.

The followers of Jesus recognized nearly immediately after his resurrection that Jesus was God as well as offspring of David.  There are many places in their writings where they affirm this (In John’s gospel, for example, we have John 1:1).  Jesus’ human nature was related to David and gave Jesus the legitimate right to David’s throne and, of course, enabled him to die as a sacrifice in our place.  His divine nature made his sacrifice of infinite merit so that he could die for anyone who believes.

Jesus own awareness of his deity came, if from nothing else, his awareness that he was the Messiah and from Scripture itself, as in Psalm 110, and its implications.  Jesus’ reference to himself as the Son of Man was alluding to another Old Testament Scripture, Daniel 7, in which the Messiah is shown to be God and thus one who merits worship (Daniel 7:13-14, 27).  Micah 5:2, another accepted Messianic prophecy, depicts Messiah as being from of old, from ancient days, another indication of deity.  Jesus’ own internal sense of himself would certainly be augmented by these Scriptures.