If Jesus is God incarnate, why did he need to learn obedience?
This is a great question and not one I'm sure I can answer adequately but I will try. Let's look at the verse again:
Hebrews 5:8 Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered.
That immediately reminded me of this verse:
Luke 2:52 And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.
We know that Jesus was and is God, therefore He was already perfect and He didn't have anything to "learn" so to speak. Remember he was speaking with the wisdom of a scholar in theology at the Temple when He was only 12 years old! So we know that Jesus has always been God and always will be God, BUT He had never been a "man" before--by that I mean He had never been a human being before. I think it was that, that He had to learn--that and suffering as a human. He learned what it is to be human and to suffer as we do. The actual living of His life and the actual suffering, gave the Lord the experience of what He already "knew". With that experience, suffering became a reality for Him, just as it is for us.
Remember this verse?
Hebrews 4:15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.
This too is showing that Jesus went through this life to gain the experience of humans so that he could truly relate to us. It wasn't that He didn't "know" or "understand" before, but simply that He didn't have the life experience itself.
Hebrews 2:10-11 In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers.
It's not that Jesus wasn't "perfect" before, He had to be because He was and is God. But he needed to be made "like us" in order to be the "perfect" High Priest for us so that He could better relate to us. This is also referring to making Him "perfect" in a "legal" sense in the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Messiah. In order for Him to be the Messiah, He had to meet certain qualifications and those qualifications included that He had to suffer.
Now for the "obedience" part of it. Jesus did everything He did in obedience to the Father. He tells us that Himself, so we know it's true. Again however, Jesus had never been human, nor had He ever had to be obedient in spite of circumstances in His life like we do. As we said before, being God, He had the "knowledge and understanding" but He didn't have the experience. Now he has that too. As the Messiah, bringing salvation to us, He also had to teach us what to do after we were saved. He knew it would not be an easy road for us, so He not only taught us in words what we needed to do, but modeled it in His life.
So I think this is simply saying that Jesus "humanity" was completed or "perfected" by living as a human and suffering. He "learned" I think could be translated as He "experienced" instead and make more sense to us. Like that verse about Jesus "growing in wisdom and stature", it too is talking about Him growing in His experience of life, not in "what He knew and didn't know" because since He is God, He obviously already "knew" everything. The only thing He could have been said to lack was the experience of living a life as a human being.
God is just amazing!
Our God still works miracles!
