The Most Misunderstood Sayings of Jesus
Part 4
“The Father is Greater Than I”

If Jesus is God, then why did He say “The Father is greater than I?”

In John 14:28, Jesus said: “You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.”

Some have misunderstood this to mean that Jesus is a lesser deity than the Father, or no deity at all.

But Jesus in this verse is not speaking about His divine nature, but his human nature. Christ’s full deity is indicated in numerous other verses in John’s gospel (1:1, 8:58; 10:30; 20:28).

John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

John 8:58 “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!”

So in John 14:28 Jesus is speaking of His human position in the Incarnation. The technical term for Jesus’s dual natures is called the hypostatic union. The hypostatic union is the term used to describe how God the Son, Jesus Christ, took on a human nature, yet remained fully God at the same time.

Jesus always had been God, but at the incarnation Jesus became a human being.

John 1:14 “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

The addition of the human nature to the divine nature is Jesus, the God-man. This is the hypostatic union, Jesus Christ, one Person, fully God and fully man.

One document known as the Athanasian Creed that was written in the 4th century by an archbishop named Athanasius, was compiled to refute false teachings about the deity and humanity of Christ.
It states that Christ is “equal to the Father as touching his Godhood and inferior to the Father as touching his manhood.”

It goes on to say that “Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully man. He is simultaneously perfectly divine and perfectly human, having two complete and distinct natures at once.”

Listen carefully to the rest: “He is God from the essence of the Father, begotten before time; and he is human from the essence of his mother, born in time; completely God, completely human, with a rational soul and human flesh; equal to the Father as regards divinity, less than the Father as regards humanity.
Although he is God and human, yet Christ is not two, but one…For just as one human is both rational soul and flesh, so too the one Christ is both God and human.”

So Jesus could honestly say, from the perspective of the Incarnation, that the Father was “greater” than Him, for while Jesus was in a state of humiliation on earth, the Father was in a state of glory in heaven.
But he was in no way denying His own divinity!
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Sort of along the same vein is the next misunderstood saying of Jesus:

The question goes like this: If Jesus is God in flesh, then why did He address the Father as “My God?” in John 20:17?

The verse reads: “Jesus said to her (Mary Magdalene), ‘Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Some have misunderstood this to mean that Jesus did not view Himself as God.

So again we come to the hypostatic union, or the dual nature of Christ as both God and man. Prior to the Incarnation, Christ—the second person of the Trinity—had only a divine nature. But in the Incarnation Christ took on a human nature.
Paul writes about Jesus as God becoming human in powerful language:

Philippians 2:6-8 “…who (Jesus), being in the form (likeness) of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God,”

In other words, Jesus would not have been robbing God of any glory or honor to claim he was equal to Him. Only God can claim equality with God!

Vs.7 “…but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men.”

Literally, Jesus emptied (or, stripped) Himself of His glory by having taken on Himself the form of a slave and having been made (or, born) in the likeness of men.

The “glory” He gave up was the “glory which He had with the Father before the world was.”—John 17:5

That said, He never for a microsecond gave up His deity. He gave up the pre-incarnate glory he had in heaven with the Father before coming to earth.

And this distinction matters, because if He gave up His deity then God (the Son) ceased being God, which destroys the Trinity, which is impossible.
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And while we’re here, let’s do a little sidetrack and deal with another really unfortunate teaching floating around in some circles that, on the Cross, Jesus literally BECAME a sinner, even BECAME sin based on the following passage:

2 Cor. 5:21 “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

Now you notice the words “to be” are in italics, right? That means they were not in the original Greek text and were provided by the translators.

Some have taught that this means he literally became a sinner, became actual sin.

One widely listened to man said this: “Imagine Jesus as a sinner. On the cross He became one. He became gossip. On the tree He became a slanderer. Did he slander? No, but He became it! He became in inventor of evil. Jesus became child pornography on the tree. Jesus became full of pornography on the tree. Jesus became a thief on the tree. Jesus became addiction on the tree. Jesus became a hater of God on the tree.”

I can’t quote anymore. It only gets worse.

This is woefully terrible teaching, yet this man reaches hundreds of thousands of people around the world, and is a very popular speaker in some circles in America.

This is NOT what 2 Cor. 5:21 is saying. Again, the words “to be” are not even in the original Greek text. The true meaning is found in the NLT and some other translations.

“For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.”

On the Cross, Jesus was our sin offering, the sacrifice Lamb of God. He died in our stead. Period.

God placed the guilt of our sin onto Him as if He had done it. Then He placed His righteousness on us as if WE had done it!
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Okay, back to our text:

Vs. 8: “And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.”

Jesus appeared to the natural eye as a common man, without any particular excellence or attractiveness. Isaiah wrote, “There is nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance, nothing to attract us to him.”—53:2

To the world of His day Jesus appeared to look like any other man. He took on a human nature, but NOT a fallen nature. By the miraculous conception where the Holy Spirit conceived the divine embryo in Mary’s womb, Jesus avoided being born with Adam’s fallen nature.

So it was from the vantage point of His humanity that Christ acknowledged the Father as “my God.”

Seen in this light, the verse cannot be taken to mean that Jesus is not God.
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The next often misunderstood saying of Jesus is found in Mark 10:17-18,

“As he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.’”

Some have once again misunderstood this verse to mean that Jesus denied He was good, therefore He couldn’t have been God.

But Jesus was not disclaiming His “goodness” (which is a characteristic of God). Rather, He was asking the man to examine the implications of what he was saying. The word “good” (agathos) means intrinsically good, thoroughly, flawlessly good.

So in effect, Jesus was saying to the young man:

“Do you realize what you are saying when you call me ‘good’? To you its a nice complement. You meant by it that I’m a good, decent man, a good teacher, one that does some good things.

But I want to suggest to you that only God is thoroughly, flawlessly good. And that’s not what you meant when you called me good. But you might want to consider that I’m more than what YOU meant by good!

So Jesus puts the young rich man’s use of “good” right back at him in hopes that he will connect the dots. I’m more than what you meant by ‘good.’ God is thoroughly, flawlessly good, and that’s who I am!
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This same scenario applies to us today. We hear people all the time use certain adjectives to describe Jesus. They talk about the beauty of His life—“Oh, Jesus was a good man. He taught many good things. He did many good deeds. He was a real example of loving people and helping the poor.”

But in the same breath they will deny His divinity!

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked him, and he also asks us. Either He is ‘God manifest in the flesh,’ or He is not ‘thoroughly, flawlessly good.’