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Hebrews 5:8 tells us something about Jesus’ earthly life that is often difficult for believers to comprehend. The verse states, “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.” (ESV) Since the Bible is clear that Jesus is perfectly holy and sinless, how could he learn obedience? Wasn’t He always perfectly obedient to God’s will? 

Of course, we can (and should) affirm that the perfectly righteous Savior, Jesus, always obeyed God’s commands. In his book The Man Christ Jesus, Bruce Ware helps us untangle what this passage means. 

Ware writes: 

Although Jesus was a Son, and as a Son he deserved only honor, allegiance, respect, and adoration from those with whom he dealt, he encountered from these very people much hatred and opposition. He was afflicted, scorned, ridiculed, and rejected by many people in many ways. And within this context of suffering, Jesus knew that his obedience to the Father and the Father’s will would mean only continued and intensified suffering. Yet, despite the suffering he knew he would receive, he resisted the temptation to avoid suffering and to turn away from the Father’s will and instead resolutely obeyed the Father every step of the way, no matter how hard things were. Indeed, Jesus learned to obey the Father’s every directive and command without fail or compromise (e.g., John 8: 28–29), even at great cost, even though he knew his obedience would bring to him only intensified pain, affliction, rejection, suffering, and ultimately an agonizing death from those who opposed him. (p. 63)

Later Ware continues,

In what sense, then, did Jesus learn to obey? Must it not be that Hebrews is indicating that Jesus learned to obey the Father through the whole of his life with an obedience that was rendered in increasingly difficult situations as he grew and developed? As the Son learned to obey the Father in earlier times of “lighter” divine demands upon him and consequent “lighter” suffering—lighter, that is, in comparison both to the divine demands and the suffering he would encounter in the end, as he obeyed the Father in going to the cross—these earlier experiences of faith in the Father’s provision, protection, and direction prepared him for the greater acts of obedience he would need to render as he got nearer to the time of the cross. In other words, those earlier “obediences,” we might call them, under circumstances with lighter suffering and affliction, were prescribed by the Father as the training program necessary to prepare Jesus for the later and much harder obediences that were to come. He learned to obey increasingly difficult divine demands with their accompanying increasingly difficult opposition and affliction through the whole of his life, which prepared him for the greatest of all divine demands upon him and the greatest attending suffering he would or could ever experience. In this sense, then, the difficulties and afflictions Jesus experienced through the whole of his life were planned by his Father in order to prepare Jesus for the greater—and indeed, greatest!—acts of faith he would need to render to complete the Father’s mission for his Son.” (p. 63)

Beloved child of God, don’t we learn obedience in the same way? Of course, unlike Jesus, there will be times when we fail to obey, however like our Savior, as we obey in the “lighter” trials, we are strengthened, equipped, and prepared to obey in the greater ones. As Ware observes, this means that we should not be quick to try to avoid or circumvent the trials that God has ordained for us (p. 69), nor should we take lightly the “little obediences” that God commissions as part His training for us (p. 68-69). Instead we should recognize that through the trials and the seemingly small acts of steadfast obedience, our gracious Father is often readying us to faithfully go where He leads, even on the more difficult and thorny paths. 

Writing about our holy and prefect Savior, who was fully God and fully man, Ware observes, “The life he [Jesus] lived prepared the way for the death he died. Praise be to a Savior, the only Savior of sinners, who gave himself with resolve and passion to the will of his Father, ‘learning obedience’….through the trials and testing of life that he might be able, in the end, to save all who believe and follow him” (p. 67).

Praise Him indeed! What a gracious and holy Lord we serve! May we follow His example and respond to the trials our Father has ordained for us with faithful obedience, loving resolve. and a desire to more consistently emulate our Savior.