There is not, and indeed there cannot be, a perfect analogy between Jesus’ life and the lives of His followers. Of course it is only proper that we yearn to be like Christ, but at certain points we have to accede to the fact that Jesus’ divinity caused Him to display an aspect of Himself to which we can only futilely aspire.
But first let us look at the many areas in Jesus’ life in which we can properly strive to be like Him. After all, we are His offspring. Jesus showed many examples of compassion, examples we should seek to emulate, namely these: 1) He forgave sinners of their sins, which, upon close inspection, were sins against Jesus’ own divine Self; 2) Jesus was not too holy to associate with the lowest of sinners and with those who had the most dreaded affliction, leprosy. In these areas we should aspire to be like Him. As Jesus did, we can in love mingle socially with unrepentant sinners while at the same time living above the sins they practice. This is called witnessing. It is also called “letting our light shine.”
In our aspiring to be like Jesus, we should not be so fastidious (“finicky”) that we cannot touch and minister to those who are afflicted with loathsome diseases. Jesus was not so aloof from those He healed. It is true that Jesus healed some without touching them, but He touched the leper; He touched others who were sick. There are unfortunates of today who are sorely in need of a modern day Florence Nightingale or a Sister Teresa to walk among them where they live and share a bit of their misery and to give them a pencil thin ray of hope in the hellholes to which they are consigned by an unfeeling fate. (No, this is not God’s doing; it is the result of sin’s blighting a world that was originally created perfect.)
On the other hand, I repeat that there are some things that our lack of divinity preclude us from doing. While we are granted the privilege of praying as Jesus did in Gethsemane, we can never be, as He was (nor should we aspire to be), burdened with 1) the sins of an entire race of people nor 2) with the awful knowledge that in a few hours the Father will abandon us to the literal hell of being cut off from all sense of His presence. Jesus had known this abiding presence all His life, even when he was an infant and unaware of it. Nevertheless it was there and it kept the infant Jesus as it keeps all who are living in this world.
It is oftentimes the unaware sense of the presence of God and His Spirit’s unseen check on the actions of wicked men that keep them from going completely mad and indulging to the full their pursuit of wickedness. When Jesus was cut off from His Father, with whom he had the closest and most intimate relationship (Jesus was God come to earth as the Son of God, which is as close a bond as we can conceptualize), it resulted in torment greater than that He endured in Gethsemane and at Calvary. It is a matter of fact that the rejection by the Father was such a horror that it killed Jesus before the cross could end His life. That is why Pilate marveled that Jesus had died sooner than one could be expected to die by crucifixion.
“Pilate was surprised to hear that he was already dead. Summoning the centurion, he asked him if Jesus had already died.” (Mark 15.44 RSV)
For an indirect confirmation that Jesus did not die entirely by the trauma of being crucified, we have these words by the commentator John Gill:
“For death, by crucifixion, was a slow lingering death; persons that were in their full strength hung a great while before they expired; and the two thieves, which were crucified with Christ, were not dead when he was…” (John Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible)
God does not need to bring us a special revelation; reason virtually shouts it at us: We cannot expect our lives to be an exact parallel of Jesus’ life. He was without doubt fully human, but He was also, without doubt, fully God. We are not.
It becomes increasingly clearer as I study the Word of God: Our individual lives are not to be exact parallels of the life of anyone who ever lived or is now living. We look at other lives that are blessed of God, living or deceased, and we are expected to use them for examples of godly living, but we are not to imitate them to the nth degree.
One prime reason is this: No human is perfect, therefore if we make our lives exact replicas of any human, we will be copying his or her defects and failures. We have already touched on why we cannot fully follow the example that Jesus set: we are not, like Him, divine. We are obviously faulty lumps of clay on whom God is working — but He has not perfected us yet. So we take the good examples from the lives of other godly men and women and we endeavor to be like Jesus in His humanity, and we keep our faith in the Almighty who will bless our efforts and bring us eventually to the perfection we seek.
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