by Brandon D. Smith
When discussing Jesus’s humanity—perhaps specifically his “temptations” or human frailty—it’s natural to ask if he could have sinned during his earthly ministry. In fact, if he is truly human and “like us in every way,” as the author of Hebrews says more than once, then it must be the case that he experienced the temptation to sin just like every human. Indeed, one place where the rubber meets to road on this issue is Heb 2:18: “Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (CSB).
But I don’t think assuming that Jesus could have sinned does justice to the biblical narrative. So, here are five biblical-theological reasons to affirm Jesus’s impeccability: that he was unable to and never even desired to sin.
1. The word translated “temptation” in Hebrews 2 could also be translated as “testing.”
In the context of the Hebrews 2 passage above, the “testing” Jesus experiences is related to his suffering as a human, not related to whether or not he may have sinned and messed the whole thing up. Think of this “testing” as him demonstrating that he is who he says he is. It’s not a test that we hope he gets right; it’s a test that proves to us that we need not doubt his perfection.
In fact, in this passage and its immediate context, his “testing” is tied to his suffering and atonement, not to what’s going on in his mental faculties or his psyche. In the following chapters, this testing will be further tied to the testing (and failure) of the wilderness generation. And even if we are to take the translation as “temptation,” which is a legitimate rendering, we know that we have to define words based on their context, both within the passage itself and within the rest of the biblical storyline.
2. Jesus is never shown in Scripture to struggle with whether or not to sin.
When he is tempted in Matthew 4 by Satan, you get no hint that he is wrestling with how to respond. Rather, he quotes Scripture, refutes Satan’s every move, and tells him to go away. Hebrews 2:14-15 reminds us that he defeated Satan. Yes, Jesus feels hunger and fatigue; yes, he experiences grief and joy; yes, in the Garden of Gethsemane he feels the weight of preparing to bear God’s wrath on the cross; yes, Satan brings external temptations to him. So, he experiences temptation, but does not appear to wrestle with fallen desires like us.
So, again, never once does the Bible indicate that Jesus has any other desire or purpose than to do the Father’s will and steadfastly go to the cross. Even in the Garden of Gesthemane where some have assumed he must be experiencing doubt or resignation, he immediately submits to the Father’s will (Matt 26:39). Hebrews 12 says, “For the joy set before him he endured the cross.” In John 10, he says “nobody takes my life but I lay it down on my own accord.” He knows his purpose and has joy in it, even through his sufferings. There is no wavering.
3. The promises of God will always come to pass.
Perhaps the biggest promise from Gen 3:15 onward is that God would send a Deliverer. God, who keeps his promises and knows the beginning from the end, who created time and space itself, already knows the future. We never get any sense that we’re going to be crossing our fingers about whether or not the coming Messiah would save us. The Scriptures must be fulfilled, Jesus says in Matt 26. So for the Father to send his Son to play a game of chicken with Satan, hoping Jesus can hold off his temptations to sin long enough to save us just doesn’t fit at all with the biblical storyline. We don’t need or even expect a good moralist; we need and expect the promised Deliverer.
4. Jesus has both divine knowledge and unparalleled prophetic human knowledge.
Jesus can read minds, search hearts, and knows the genuineness of people’s faith (e.g., Matt 9:4; Mark 2:8). This means at the very least that he was more aware than any of us of the depth of human sin, corruption, and deceitfulness. If you or I are aware of and repulsed by the depth of sins within ourselves and others, how much more the Son of God? He knows better than anyone who ever lived the destruction of sin, so it’s reasonable to assume that (1) sin would be that much more repugnant to him, (2) any temptation he theoretically could have faced (though I still doubt this possibility) would have been immediately out of the question, and (3) he would already be far ahead of anyone/anything that might come to tempt him (and this seems true in all of his interactions in the Gospels).
5. Jesus is still God in the incarnation.
If all else fails, remember this. In fact, maybe we should start with this. Jesus, the divine Son, is morally perfect and unable to sin. Yes, the Bible says there are things God can’t do. For example, the Bible says that God cannot be tempted to sin (Jam 1:13) and cannot lie (Titus 1:2). So, Jesus is God (and a truly obedient human), which means he doesn’t have misguided and fallen desires like you or I. His humanity doesn’t weaken his divinity; rather, it might be better to say that his divinity sanctifies or “strengthens” his humanity. He is still that same divine person in the incarnation (John 1:1-18; Phil 2:5-11).
Summary
In summary, then, the eternal Son took on flesh and dwelt among us so that he could undo everything Adam (and we) have done. There was never any doubt. The idea that Jesus desired to sin or struggled with whether or not he should sin is simply not a biblical idea—it’s us importing our own ideas, logic, or experience onto Jesus.
Some say that for Jesus’s “temptations” to be “real,” he had to desire sin, but this is to import our own ideas onto the biblical text. We should instead recognize that Jesus endured all the frailty of humanity and died for our sins and bore the wrath of God and did it all with joy, “yet without sin” as Hebrews 4:15 tells us. “Yet without sin” is a half-sentence that carries a lot of weight.
And since he suffered to the point of death and never broke, we should be trying to suffer faithfully like him, not thinking he has to suffer like us. Yes, Jesus is truly human, but not merely human. He is the God-man, the one who is truly human and what humanity was created to be: faithful, obedient, and in alignment with God’s will.
To be truly human is to be like Jesus, not like ourselves right now. We are internally divided, fickle, and even wicked. But the good news is that God became man to do everything we couldn’t do. He is the pioneer of our faith. The true faithful human.