IMPECCABILITY OR PECCABILITY OF CHRIST

PART THREE OF FOUR

Of course the argument is, if JESUS was really human he must then have been capable of sinning. Because we think man has a free will to sin. What one needs to know is that Jesus was not only man, but he was God.

Which is to say, even though a man, Jesus still retained all of the attributes of his divine nature (even though through the kenosis or self-emptying, he willingly did not exercise all of his divine attributes.} In humanity, Christ was totally human; in deity, Jesus was unalterably God.

Here is the point: Yet in Jesus Christ was a single, undivided personality in whom these two natures are vitally and undividedly combined. So that Jesus Christ is not God and man, but the God-man. You need to remember that Jesus was first God and thus took on human manhood.

Quote: "The second Trinitarian person {Jesus Christ} is the root and stock into which the human nature is grafted, or god in becoming man did not diminish his deity, but added a human nature to the divine nature."

So while Jesus was absolutely man, He preserved his divine attribute of holiness. And it was this holiness which contributed the strength and will power to guarantee that Christ escaped sin and could not sin.

So did Jesus have "free will" we asked? Though Christ was of both human and divine desires, he had only one determinative will. That determinative will is the eternal logos.

Even though Jesus was human, remember that he was God, and his divine side was more powerful and prevented him from sinning because "a holy will may be perfectly free, and yet determined with absolute certainty to the right."

What I am saying then: as God, Christ is absolutely going to do only good, and yet he is a moral agent making choices. He need not have the capacity to sin. His free will is free to do right all the time.

I have read that since Christ was the second Adam, that Christ must have the ability to sin. They missed the point. Adam was a perfect man when he was created. "Adam was created in holiness without inward compulsion toward sin that now characterizes his descendants. Jesus did not possess a sin nature because it was not a part of the original nature of man.

In the garden of Eden Adam did not know sin, nor did he know the consequences of sin when he was created. At the point of creation, Adam had no experience of sin. Until Satan and Eve presented him the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God added sin to Adam’s perfect nature. We thus cannot make the blunder of taking our defective lives as the standard, and regarding Christ as human only as he conforms to our failures. We can not see Jesus’ humanity as our humanity is. Christ is showing us what a perfect human life is without sin and is capable of not sinning.

It is my thinking that from these arguments for peccability of Jesus. they do not prove he could have sinned if He had wished to sin:

• that in order to have a true human nature Jesus had to be able to sin;
• that in order to be really tempted as man is tempted Jesus had to be able to sin
• that temptability necessitates susceptibility to sin
  that if Jesus were a true man he would have to be able to sin because sin is part of the human condition.
  

Drafted by Charles E. Whisnant 02 09 07 Proof Checked by Charity Whisnant