God’s second Man had a tripartite human nature.

Luke 23:46

“And when Jesus had cried out with a loud voice, He said, “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.” And having said thus, He gave up the ghost.”

Matthew 26:38

“Then He said unto them, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death; tarry ye here and watch with Me.”

Matthew 26:12

“For in that she hath poured this ointment on My body, she did it for My burial.”

God’s second Man had a spirit. It was ever open Godward and heavenward. He loved His Father and delighted in His Father’s world, word, and will. Communion with His Father was His supreme delight, and He ever lived in the consciousness of the Father’s presence (John 8:29) and in the joy of the Father’s smile (Matthew 17:5). In Jesus, the human spirit was always in perfect adjustment with the Spirit of God and was dominant over both His soul and body.

God’s second Man had a soul. The last Adam thought, loved, and willed as the first Adam had done. His familiarity with the Holy Scripture shows how He must have read and pondered the sacred writings. His parables, taken largely from nature or the events of human life, reveal the mold that shaped His thought life. He loved people and enjoyed fellowship with them. He was capable of intense sympathy and sorrow, great indignation and anger, deep joy and gladness, exquisite appreciation, and gratitude. Jesus had a soul that manifested a mighty capacity to think, love, and will.

God’s second Man had a body. He was made “in the likeness of sinful flesh.” The Samaritan woman knew Him to be a Jew. Mary Magdalene thought Him to be a gardener. Those who saw and heard Him in the synagogue at Nazareth while wondering at His gracious words still took Him to be only Joseph’s son. He ate, slept, walked, worked, and lived as other men did. While in His countenance, conversation, and character, there must have been that which His sinlessness and holiness produced, which made Him different from all other men, yet in His physical form, there was nothing that differentiated Him.

God’s second Man was not only human, but He was subject to all humanity’s sinless infirmities and limitations. Jesus hungered, thirsted, slept, wept, wearied, mourned, suffered, and died. “There is not a note in the great organ of our humanity which, when touched, does not find a sympathetic vibration in the might, range, and scope of our Lord’s being, saving, of course, the jarring discord of sin.”

Hebrews 2:10-11

^10 “For it became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings. ¹¹ For both He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of One, for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren.”

Lastly, God’s second Man was tempted from without by Satan to doubt, disobedience, and disloyalty.

When Satan said “I will” to God, setting his creaturely will in opposition to that of his Creator, he broke the unwritten law that in God’s universe, there can be but one will and that the will of the Maker of all things. Lawlessness then became a fact in the celestial realm. It entered the world and began coursing through the veins of human life when God’s first man broke God’s law and disobeyed God’s command.

From that day on down through the centuries, until the angels sang over the manger cradle in Bethlehem, there had never lived a man who had been perfectly obedient to God, who had fully kept God’s law. Men had turned to their own way and done what was right in their own sight. Even among those who, through faith, followed the Lord, there was not one who lived only and wholly in the will of God.

But through the incarnation, there entered into human life a second Man in whom mankind was again to be put to the test, a last Adam in whom the human race had its only and final hope of restoration to God.

The first man, Adam, and the whole race latent in him had gone down into ruin and rejection through disobedience. Now God had sent forth a second Man, a last Adam, who might lift the race into restoration and reconciliation upon the one condition of obedience. 

It must, however, be obedience from the beginning to the end of life; obedience at all times, in all things, under all circumstances, to all limits, despite all consequences; obedience, too, not merely in the letter but in the spirit; obedience to the whole will of God as the unalterable rule of life; such obedience as made the will of God the center of His life, the circumference, and all in between. 

The ruling passion of His whole being must be “God’s will — Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.”

Romans 5:19

For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of One shall many be made righteous.

Would the Son of Man be able to qualify for Saviorhood under such a condition? Would He choose in all things to will Godward?

Source: “Life on the Highest Plane” by Ruth Paxson

Lord Jesus, thank You. You not only qualified as the God-man, but You qualified to become our divine-human Mediator as well as the Last Adam. Now we thank You for being willing to be tested to become our final hope of restoration to God.