In the previous article we noted that Jesus was both Son of Man and Son of God. The fact that he was born of a woman did not detract from his unity and fellowship with the Father or the love and esteem that the Father had for him. For the Son of Man was also the Son of God, or as Yahweh so beautifully expressed it, “the man that is my fellow”. This balance helps all of us to use careful and scriptural expressions about Christ in his atoning work.
This article looks at some of the key matters that arise from the Saviour of mankind being of our own nature.
TEMPTATION is a universal, human experience. It is an experience that distinguishes God from man. The apostle James says that “God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man” (1:13). In the Divine nature there is no positive response to evil, no desire for anything that is contrary to the will of God; the heart and mind are pure at their ultimate source.
The human experience is so different. “But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (James 1:14–15). However quickly sin may sometimes occur, there is nevertheless a process of lust, enticement, conception and sin. It is quite possible that this memorable statement in James has its basis in Psalm 7:14, “Behold, the wicked man conceives evil, and is pregnant with mischief, and brings forth lies” (RSV). There is within the heart and mind a process before sin is registered as sin. It is clear then that temptation of itself is not sin. Sin is when the disciple concedes to temptation and lets lust have its way. It is utterly impossible for a believer, for any human person to be unaware of temptation, to not feel the tug of enticement, to never know the force of desire or never experience the power of the pride of life. But the temptation is not sin but the beginning of a process. The truth of this is underlined when the Lord spoke of committing adultery in the heart: it was not because a man looked upon a woman and found her comely or appealing but because lust conceived and the mind indulged in unholy and sinful liberty. He was “looking upon a woman to lust after her”, and that is adultery in the heart.
It is interesting in passing to see that the passage in James is most helpful in respect to reasoning on the Trinity. The simple question, “was Jesus ever tempted?” can only have one answer and every Bible student would say, “Yes”. But as soon as that is conceded then the doctrine of the Trinity is broken for, says James, “God cannot be tempted.”
The Temptation of Christ
The expression of Hebrews 4:15, that Jesus “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” has special poignance to the Gospel records of the Temptation of Christ. It is frequently mentioned that the three main branches of human lust, “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16), are all represented in the Lord’s struggle in the wilderness. Jesus had the whole experience of temptation that is common to man. It was an experience.
Whether the temptation arose externally from another being or internally from his own mind is a matter long debated and which Brother Robert Roberts put in to the “uncertain details” category (The Christadelphian 1989). But wherever it began, the truly important fact is that in the end the temptation had to be internal or it was no temptation at all. As Brother Thomas wrote of Christ, “… ‘being found in fashion as a man’, the infirmities of human nature were thus laid upon him. He could sympathise with them experimentally; being by the feelings excited within him when enticed, well acquainted with all its weak points” (Elpis Israel p76). In the process of temptation how much can we imagine the Lord could enter into our experience? “Tempted in all points like as we”! How far did the implications of each temptation enter his conscious thought before he drove away the thought? Could the Lord with his vast Biblical knowledge give any consideration to the Scriptural quotation (Psalm 91:11–12) presented to him in such a wrested manner? What did forty days of fasting do to the power of temptation especially when the first suggestion was the miraculous conversion of stones into bread? Hunger drives men insane. How much did the Son of God partake of the mental anxiety that temptation brings to other men and women? Perhaps the fact that he was Son of God brought a grievous extra sting to the temptation—like salt on open wounds! Because his very being the Son of God meant that the spectacular opportunities presented by the Tempter were in fact feasible to him!
No doubt we vary in how far we can imagine, or allow, the Lord to explore the benefits of what was offered. It is unwise to be too dogmatic in this area as we simply do not know what drain the various temptations had upon the mind of the Lord. There are two very obvious things that we do know and they need to be emphasized, namely that it was his ready mind in the Scriptures that provided him victory over the three phases of his temptation and that the temptation was a real and powerful experience – the whole forty days of it (Mark 1:13). The ordeal was such that the Father dispatched angels to minister to him upon its conclusion, thus strengthening and encouraging His Son after such a withering trial. As Hebrews well puts it, “he suffered being tempted” (2:18).
Beware lest our comments sometimes imply that because God was his Father he therefore escaped the natural will of the flesh and that with the mere retort of Scripture he dismissed the temptation out of hand with no cost to himself. This is not the Gospel picture: “he suffered being tempted”.
Gethsemane—“Not My Will”
At the last supper the Lord said to his disciples, “Ye are they which have continued with me in my temptations.” It is quite obvious then that the temptation in the wilderness was not the only temptation the Lord underwent. Luke says that the devil “departed from him for a season” (4:13). There were times of greater temptation than others but in fact temptation for the Lord was a constant matter in his life, as it is for us.
Gethsemane means “olive-press” and certainly this event says much about the suffering of the Lord. Here the pressure was at its height just before his arrest and crucifixion. There was no light dismissal of temptation but a gruelling struggle against an inveterate foe. It was so intense that though the Lord had specifically asked for Peter, James and John to stay with him, yet in the end he was alone, bathed in sweat and tears, crying unto his God Who singularly was awake with him. The intensity is accentuated by the three-fold prayers that Jesus made in these hours of enormous pressure. The foe returned, it would not let up! There were two wills locked in mortal combat. “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” This is a very precious insight into the mind of the Lord Jesus in the peak of his struggle. It is a calmer Jesus that departs this garden than when he entered. Gethsemane was the pitch of the battle. “Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God” (Psalm 69:1–3). “Hear me, O LORD; for thy lovingkindness is good: turn unto me according to the multitude of thy tender mercies. And hide not thy face from thy servant; for I am in trouble: hear me speedily. Draw nigh unto my soul, and redeem it: deliver me because of mine enemies” (Psalm 69:16–18).
If ever there was holy ground in the matter of the temptations of the Lord, here it is in Gethsemane and the Spirit throws open these windows by which we can see the precise mind of our Lord in the time of his greatest trial.
Two Wills
There were two wills in the Garden of Eden, there were two wills in the wilderness of temptation and there are two wills here in the Garden of Gethsemane. In the Lord Jesus there was a native will that did not wish to take the path that his Father had before determined. “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matt 26:39). Jesus was not proposing a change of date or circumstance but rather that “this cup” would pass from him. We cannot doubt what the “cup” expressed; only hours before he had ‘taken the cup’ and said, “Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (v27–28). The same sense is given in Matthew 20:22–23, “Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” The cup was the cruel death of self-surrender that lay ahead of him and the prayer of Gethsemane was that Jesus might escape this by his Father arranging some other way for the salvation of man. We can see the increasing acceptance and resolution in the mind of the Lord in his second Gethsemane prayer, “O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done” (Matt 26:42).
Before Gethsemane John records words of Christ that have the exact same sense. “Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify thy name” (12:27–28). “This hour” is equivalent to Matthew’s “this cup”.
The Gospel of John has in fact several passages which make clear that our Lord had his own will, a native instinct that was not that of his Father.
“The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise” (5:19).
“I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgement is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me” (5:30).
“My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” (4:34).
“For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak” (12:49–50).
“I Come to Do Thy Will, O God.”
All these passages have their echo a thousand years before in David’s beautiful Psalm 40.
“Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire; mine ears hast thou opened: burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not required. Then said I, Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart” (v6–8).
These words are quoted in Hebrews 10:5–10 and applied to Christ. So they represent central thought in the Apostle’s comprehension of the mission of Christ. The four principal sacrifices of the Mosaic code are rejected as insufficient and not what God really wanted. What then was the desire of God? With dramatic introduction – “Then said I, Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me”!—the fundamental intention of Messiah is given, “I delight to do thy will, O my God.”
This delight to do God’s will is therefore the true sacrifice which supplants the many shadow offerings of the Law. “He taketh away the first that he may establish the second” (Heb 10:9). It is the true sacrifice and that it was a sacrifice clearly means that it was not a path the Christ would naturally wish to take. It was sacrifice. It was God’s will and not his native own. “For even Christ pleased not himself” (Rom 15:3). He was not born with a bias to righteousness, but “learned obedience by the things that he suffered” (Heb 5:8).
A Warning
There is a growing importance in this understanding. If we speak of Christ in a way that sounds as though his being the Son of God allowed him to escape the bias of the human race, then we propose a position that is very kindred to the “Clean Flesh” teaching. This theory proposed that there was no inherited proneness to sin in Adam’s descendants and most certainly not in Jesus Christ. Another theory says, well, there is an inherited bias to sin in man but not in Jesus because special factors in his inheritance prevented a will of the flesh in Jesus. The two ideas are neighbours to each other and either way they arrive at the same conclusion, that the Lord was without any natural will of his own. Such a position strips the Lord Jesus Christ of his greatest achievement, his victory over sin, and nullifies all that we have considered in the Gospel records of his Temptation and his desperate struggle in Gethsemane and upon the tree. The conqueror is stripped of his conquest! We would never wish to do this!
“My Meat is to Do the Will of Him That Sent Me”
Jesus’ obedience to the will of God was perfectly performed for all his thirty-three years, not just at the point of his death. This obedience, as we have seen, was the true sacrifice, which means that all his life was a sacrifice. “My meat”, he said early in his ministry, “is to do the will of Him that sent me.” His death would be a final statement, a conclusion, a climax of that obedience but his whole life was a living sacrifice, as ours must be too. And throughout that life of thirty-three years he was the beloved, educated, nurtured Son of the Father even though he was man, flesh and blood and keenly aware of the temptations of his nature. The Father never expresses reticence because he was man or refusal of access or denial of response (“I know that Thou hearest me always”, John 11:42). Not once in Scripture does the Father express such things. Was he not, in a sense, always “in the bosom of the Father”? (John 1:18; 3:6; 6:62; 17:5; 24, 26) No reconciliation needed there.
“Yet Without Sin”
It is time to summarise our thoughts and observations. The Lord was not “clean flesh” but tempted in all points as his brethren. This means that even his inheritance from his Father did not preclude the temptation of sin or the possibility of sin. Yet he was “without sin” despite this genuine humanity. So it is not the temptation that is counted for sin, nor obviously the nature that he bore.
He was, remarkably and thankfully, made like unto his brethren. He therefore is a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people. Our Master has been here, he knows, he understands; for “in that he himself has suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted.”
We are thankful for this.