THE BOY JESUS IN THE TEMPLE
LESSON FOR THE JUNIOR CLASSES
STUDY SCRIPTURE:
LUKE 2 : 41-52
Key Verse
“And He said to them, “Why is it that you were looking for Me? Did you not know that I had to be in My Father’s house?”
Luke 2: 49
INTRODUCTION
Jesus is God and He lived with his Father and the Holy Spirit in eternity, a sphere where time does not exist. Human beings live in time and we have minutes, days, weeks, and years, periods determined by time. But God has no such limitations such as time, and for God the past, the present, and the future have no influence on how He sees things. God lives outside of time.
When Jesus came to earth He humbled Himself and according to Philippians 2 He became a humble human being and did not exercise His personal divine power but did His ministry which involved teaching, doing miracles, healing the sick, acting out demons, controlling the forces of nature like the raging seas, and rising the dead through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Bible tells us Jesus lived like that to show us we should grow and mature under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to carry out the ministry God has given to each of us. The Holy Spirit has given each believer in Jesus gifts, which are supernatural abilities so that we can build up the people who believe in Jesus as their Redeemer so that they are placed in the body of Christ.
But Jesus was born in the womb of Mary due to the work of the Holy Spirit who after the Father in heaven had given Him a body transformed him and watched over Jesus as He grew up from a baby stage, into a young boy stage, into the teenager stage, into the young adult stage, and finally into the grown man stage. At every stage Jesus developed as a perfect human being without sin affecting Him.
Every year while He was growing up Jesus went with His parents Mary and Joseph to the Feast Days God had established in Jerusalem. When He was 12 years old, one year before age 13, the time when the Jews considered a boy grew up into a man, He went to the Feast in Jerusalem and after the ceremonies of worship were completed His parents left with family and friends to return home. Then some time after they discovered the boy Jesus was not in the company and in great panic they rushed back to Jerusalem to search for Him. They looked everywhere without finding Him. You can imagine how they felt for they thought they had lost the beloved Son of Son that God had put in their charge to raise Him up. Then the last place they could think of was the Temple in Jerusalem. They could not imagine the boy Jesus would be there among the top leaders, engaging them boldly in discussions. But then when they rushed there they found Jesus sitting down with the religious and senior Teachers in the Temple, sitting down with them, listening to their discussions, and asking them questions, and answering the questions they asked him. The leaders were astounded at Jesus’ questions and His answers to their questions.
Jesus was growing up and He was in contact with His Father and the Holy Spirit and His knowledge was now way above those religious leaders and teachers in the Temple.
The amazed and now happy Mary asked Jesus how He could have left the company of pilgrims and stayed with the religious leaders, leaving them worried to death thinking that they had lost Him. But Jesus asked them why they were worried for they should have known He was now at the age where He had to be taking care of His Father’s business which would involve Him checking out what was being done in the Temple and checking the level of knowledge these religious leaders and teachers had.
Jesus knew His parents though godly did not fully understand the work of God for God was working in mysterious ways in bringing Him down from heaven as a human being in order to save and redeem mankind and fulfill God’s promise in Genesis 3:15 to send a Saviour to make it possible for men to be taken out of sin.
Jesus understood the difficult position His parents were in as they raised the Son of God. So He was always respectful and was wise and caring when dealing with His parents. He knew parents had a powerful responsibility that was sometimes hard for them to carry out successfully.
But He knew He had to be in the Temple now to see what was happening there for He knew because of sin in the nation things were not running right. After this mild and respectful rebuke to His parents Jesus left the Temple and returned home with them so that they could do the job of raising Him till He was age 30 and ready to begin His ministry. We thank God for sending his Son to be our Saviour. We thank Jesus’ parents for doing a great but very difficult job to raise Jesus from the baby stage into the stage of manhood. We thank the Holy Spirit for giving Jesus power to do His ministry. We also thank God for showing us we should place ourselves under the control and the leading of the Holy Spirit, for only He would transform us into perfect persons so that the Father will have joy when Jesus prsents us believers to Him