The Lord learned more about who he was little by little, just like you can

Life provides each person with time and experience to discover their strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to develop beyond the identity they inherited from their parents, ideally toward the potential that God sees in them. The Lord’s life is the ideal example of how to discover and develop your potential, but this lesson is lost when we assume that Jesus knew exactly who he was from the moment of his birth.

Christians assume that Jesus had greater certainty about his identity earlier than he did. The truth is that the Lord did not fully resolve who he was until the moment he said: “it is finished” and died.⁸ Until he completed everything the Messiah was meant to do, he could not with perfect certainty know that he was the one who would do it. The uncertainty stretching across his entire life formed a significant part of the difficulty of it. Every trial he faced, from the loneliness of his daily existence to the brutal crucible he endured in the end was salted by the ever-present possibility that he was not the Christ. Even as his confidence in his identity increased, Jesus understood, from the end to the beginning, that his being the Messiah was not guaranteed by anything but his willingness to actually do the things the Messiah would do. A review of the evidence provided for who he was helps temper the assumption that he would have had high confidence in who he was.

Joseph was reported as having had three dreams about Jesus. The first pronounced that Jesus had been “conceived...of the Holy Ghost” with the purpose of “sav[ing] his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:20-21) The subsequent dreams concerned the danger posed by Herod, who would attempt to kill their son, warned him to flee with his family, and announced when it was safe to return (see Matthew 2:13, 19-21). The weight of the content of these dreams and their implications would have been considerable evidence of the importance of the baby concerned. However, these need to be weighed against the fact that they came through the low-confidence channel of dreams, and hardly contained enough information to substantiate the common assumption of how Joseph and Mary saw their son, let alone how he saw himself.

Mary had additional witnesses of who Jesus was. She was visited by Gabriel, who told her she would miraculously become pregnant and that her son would be the promised Messiah.⁹ Her cousin Elizabeth provided an additional witness when she proclaimed by the Holy Ghost:

42 ...Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
43 And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
44 For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.
45 And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord. (Luke 1)

Shortly after the child’s birth, Mary was visited by shepherds who told her that an angel had appeared to them and announced that “a Savior, which is Christ the Lord” had been born (Luke 2:11). Foreign wise men visited the child, “fell down, and worshipped him,” and gave him expensive gifts. (Matthew 2:11) When Joseph and Mary presented the infant in the temple, they were met by a pair of holy individuals who were inspired to prophesy over the baby. Anna, a prophetess, “gave thanks...unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem.” (Luke 2:38) Simeon, a man whom God had promised would not die before seeing the Christ (see Luke 2:26), proclaimed:

30 For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
31 Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; 32 A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.
33 And Joseph and his mother marvelled at those things which were spoken of him.
34 And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against;
35 (Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed. (Luke 2)

As impressive as these events were, they did not reveal anything close to the scope of what we know in retrospect about the mission and works of the Lord, but rather echoed the limited expectations held by the Jews for the Messiah to be a temporal deliverer in the style of King David.¹⁰ It is easy for us to interpret Mary’s experiences through a lens of historical certainty and clarity that she did not possess.¹¹ She knew that her son was meant to be the Messiah, but she did not understand what that entailed,³⁴³ and we do not know how confident she was in her expectations. Her life would have featured changes to her interpretation of her revelations about and observations of her son, along with ebbs and flows of confidence in it. Far from a view that incrementally increased in detail and confidence, her doubt in his identity probably crescendoed at his death, where the bitterness of losing her only³⁴⁴ son would have been mixed with the possibility that they had both been incredibly incorrect about who he was.

Jesus had many exceptional experiences, but were any of them sufficient to remove all doubt from his mind about who he was, what he had to do, and what it would be like?

Satan’s temptation of the Lord in the wilderness centered around one question: “ if thou be the son of God...” (see Matthew 4:3 and Matthew 4:6). If he knew beyond doubt that he was the son of God at this point, why would this be any kind of temptation? Interestingly, the question would be posed again at the end of his life as mockers at the cross jeered: “ If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.” (Matthew 27:40)

None of us will face a life as difficult or a mission as exceptional as the Lord’s, but all of us will face situations where we are unsure of what the Lord has planned for us and whether we will be able to measure up to it. A more accurate understanding of the Lord’s own process of incrementally discovering his identity and mission can provide us with context, strength, and an example of how to operate in full trust in God, even when we don’t yet know the full picture.