Jesus' obedience to His heavenly Father included obedience to His earthly parents (Exod. 20:12; cf. Col. 3:20). Luke balanced the former revelation of Jesus' deity with this indication of His humanity. His second reference to Mary meditating on these things continues the implication that his record of these events came from her or from someone close to her (cf. Gen. 37:11).
Normally young people who give God His proper place in their lives develop into normal adults, people whom God and other people approve (cf. Prov. 3:1-12). This was true of Jesus (cf. 1 Sam. 2:26). Jesus' mental, social, and spiritual powers developed along with His physical powers. He was fully man as well as fully God who voluntarily set aside some of His divine prerogatives temporarily in the Incarnation (Phil. 2:7). The Greek word translated "increased"or "grew"(v. 52, prokopto) literally means to make one's way forward by chopping down obstacles, a vivid description of the maturation process (cf. v. 40).
Luke's original Greek readers were familiar with the concept of gods visiting humans. This was common in their mythology. However those gods did not become humans; they remained different from mortals. Luke probably recorded so much information about Jesus' birth and early life to help them believe that Jesus became a real man at the Incarnation.
"The [Greco-Roman] biographical tradition used a combination of birth, family, and boyhood stories to give anticipations about the future life of the hero. . . . All of these components functioned also as prophecies of the character of the public career of the subject of the biography. If this was their purpose in the Greco-Roman biographies, then this is how a reader/hearer of Luke would most probably have taken the material of a similar nature in Luke 1:5-4:15.
"Virtually the totality of the material about Jesus in Luke 1:5-4:15 would have been regarded as an anticipation of his later public greatness. . . . [This material] would combine to foretell/foreshadow the type of person Jesus would be in his public ministry which began at Luke 4:16-30."115
