Transcript
Stephen: Why does Jesus need to be perfect?
Joel: I guess there are a number of reasons for that, but the core one is this: the Bible presents him as the sacrifice for our sins, the one who takes to himself the cost of our forgiveness. To do that, he needs to be perfect. He needs to be holy. An offering to God that is corrupted and defiled as we are by sin isn’t going to be accepted by God.
Stephen: At the beginning of three of the four Gospel accounts, you have the story of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness. The shift as you read the Gospels — and I love picking up the Gospels and reading through them — Luke 1, 2, 3, you’re getting this picture of a man who by identity is special. All over the place people are pointing to this baby, this son: he is the Christ, he is the Son of God, he is the Saviour, he is the one that we’ve hoped for.
But we can’t live our lives based on our identity. At some point we need to be tested to prove: are we actually who we say we are? And so the temptation of Christ by Satan is really important.
Joel: God doesn’t just state things; he proves them. He demonstrates that they are real. He makes us make a choice, and the temptation by Satan and the subsequent victory over him is the demonstration that Jesus is who he said he was.
It’s interesting that the New Testament begins in a similar way to the Old Testament, with a man put to the test by the ancient enemy, the chief antagonist in the Bible story, the devil himself. You have Adam in the Garden of Eden, and now the Lord Jesus in the wilderness. Adam in the garden — everything seems to be for him, God has provided all that he needs — and yet Adam fails. The Lord Jesus, on the other hand, is in a wilderness, in a barren and dry place with nothing to sustain him, and yet he succeeds. He triumphs. He doesn’t yield to the temptation.
It goes back to the point that he is unique. He’s special. That’s why we build our lives around him. That’s why we follow him. We don’t present ourselves or our churches, because we are all Adam — we’re failures. We present Jesus Christ. He’s the answer. He is the cure, and it’s because of that unique perfect character that he has. The temptation and his resistance of that temptation is the demonstration of that reality.
Stephen: He really is the Son of God. He really is the Saviour. He really is the one sent out by God to fulfil all promises. But this is the Son of God. This is God being tempted. That’s — surely that’s not a real temptation, and that’s not something to be, you know, a big deal.
Joel: Your point is that as God manifested in the flesh, he has no sin nature. There’s nothing in him that could respond to the temptation. You and I — we are sinners in our nature. Therefore at some point when we are tempted, we will yield. We’ll break, we’ll crack, we’ll give in. He didn’t do that because he couldn’t do that. There’s no sin in him. There’s nothing to respond to what the devil put before him. But that does not mean that it’s not a genuine test.
If you hang a really heavy weight on a piece of string and it breaks, that shows the string is weak. But if you take that same weight and you hang it on a steel rope and the steel rope holds it fast and doesn’t break, it doesn’t yield — that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a genuine test. It has been a true test of the strength of that steel rope. What it has revealed is that it is able to withstand the force, withstand the pressure.
I came across a really interesting C. S. Lewis quote. He said: “Bad people in one sense know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it. And Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is the only man who knows to the full what temptation means.”
The tests prove and show the true quality, the true essence, of who Christ is.
Stephen: Jesus having passed the test, or the test having proved Jesus for who he really is — what does that mean for us? What’s the hope that we pull from his perfect nature?
It means that he understands us. This is a remarkable thing, a concept utterly unique to Christianity: a God who has experienced the difficulties of the human pathway from a true human perspective. The writer to the Hebrews talks about him being a faithful and merciful high priest who understands our temptations because he also has suffered being tempted. He didn’t suffer in the sense that it was really hard for him to resist — he couldn’t yield to temptation — but he understood from the point of a human being what it means to deny oneself to do the will of God. He understands that cost for us.
And the writer to the Hebrews then goes on to explain he’s able to help those who are being tempted. That means as our Saviour it’s not just that he delivers us from sin in terms of a legal status; it means that he comes into our lives and he changes us. He helps to give us victory over sin. He changes us from the inside out because he has seen everything that will come across our path. He has experienced that. He is like us except that he is sinless and perfect.
Stephen: And the wonderful thing when you read the temptation story is that Jesus doesn’t defeat Satan by using strength that only God has. He doesn’t cast Satan down to a bottomless pit with a word. He uses the word of God. He uses Scripture in a way that we can as well. So I think that’s pretty comforting.
Joel: Two resources that he uses — the Spirit of God and the word of God — anyone who will come to God through faith in Christ, those resources are now open to them. They can use them in the battle against Satan and against sin. They can have victory against temptation, not through their own strength, for we have none, but using the same resources that he as a dependent man used while he was here on earth. We can have victory over sin. We can have victory over temptation.
So the Bible starts with Adam, a man who fails the test. The New Testament begins with Jesus, who’s different from Adam. He’s the second Adam, the one who’s going to open up a new future for mankind and create a new order of humanity. He is not merely reforming the old kind of humans; he is creating an entirely new humanity in himself.
