Hebrews 5:8 NIV
Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered
Even though Jesus was 100% deity, He was also 100% human. In his humanity, he learned the life of obedience through the things he suffered. By saying that, I don’t mean He learned to be obedient as opposed to having lived in rebellion; I mean He learned to advance in the life of obedience. There is something unique about suffering that crowds us to God and greater levels of obedience. The word for suffering used here is the Greek word “Pascha.” It carries the idea of something afflicting happening to you. The word “passion” comes from it, and most early church fathers used the word Pascha to mean “to die.” To experience something painful in your emotions and a kind of “dying” in your human experience would best describe it.
Luke 2:52 says, And Jesus Increasing… in favor (grace) with God and men.” Jesus did not get more grace or favor because He already possessed all the grace and favor of the Father deposited in Him, but in His humanity, He learned over time to steward grace in an ever-increasing way.
This is what Paul is trying to convey through the idea that Jesus learned obedience through the things that He suffered. Besides all the obvious sufferings that He endured in His life and ministry, even before the cross. He also suffered the reality of being tempted in every way like us. All these things just crowded Jesus into an increasingly advanced and radical lifestyle of extravagant acts of obedience regardless of the cost, and the result, of course, was a greater manifestation of the extravagant grace and favor of the Father, and destruction of the enemy.
Jesus was not just an example for us; He was an example of us – the prototype of the New Creation. In this fallen world, we will experience all forms of tribulation that causes suffering, according to John 16, and even though God is never the source of temptation or man’s inhumanity to man, He doesn’t waste anything, and He uses these things the crowd us to Christ that we might advance in a lifestyle of radical obedience that releases radical expressions of grace through us that accomplishes radical destruction to the forces and kingdom of darkness. Each place of suffering is a reminder to us of our dying with Christ and a fresh opportunity to go farther into our “hiddenness” in the obedient life of Christ, experiencing His experience lived out through our existence.