Head Scratcher: Could Jesus Have Sinned?

This is one of those theological dilemmas that floats around the pews and causes a great deal of head-scratching. It’s also one of those topics on which pastors never seem to preach. The affirmation of Hebrews that Jesus was “tempted in every way as we are yet without sin” is usually offered in place of a more detailed explanation. And that’s all well and good. But if it was impossible for Christ to sin, what does it mean to say He was “tempted”? Isn’t that a bit duplicitous?

Here’s an answer that’s satisfied me: “Yes,” Jesus could have sinned, if by that we mean, “sin was a real option open to Him.” It clearly was. That is the whole point of the temptation narratives in the gospels. He was not constrained to obey the Law perfectly by some outside force. The world did not arrange itself in such a way that Christ never had occasion for stumbling. Quite the contrary. He had every opportunity of breaking His Father’s commandments.

But (and this is the crucial “but”), Jesus was and is Himself, God. Thus, it was impossible for Him to sin according to His nature, that is, it was impossible for Him to want to sin. If He had wanted to disobey God–to commit high treason against His Father–He could have. But wanting such a thing would have gone against His very nature. He would have ceased to be God before He ever committed the act. He would have broken the “Deep Magic,” as it were. And as Queen Jadis reminds Aslan (who needs no reminding), were he to break the Emperor’s Law, all of Narnia would be overturned and perish in fire and water.

So the answer is “yes,” and also “no,” depending on what you mean.

In some ways, it’s a mirror-image of another noggin-scratcher that vexes many an inquirer about Reformed theology: Do we, as fallen humans, have to sin, being subject to Adam’s fall and God’s fore-ordination? Do we have no choice in the matter?

The answer, of course, is “no,” inasmuch as no one forces us to sin. We do so willingly. The world is not arranged in such a way that we must, of external necessity, sin. God allows us (for the most part) to do what we want. The problem, as R. C. Sproul points out, “is with the ‘want to.'” Our broken natures, themselves, determine that we sin. And the blessed promise of glorification and resurrection is that someday, God will make us, like Christ, incapable of wanting to sin. 

The difference is that Christ had a perfect nature from the beginning, though that nature was really and truly human. But when most people ask, “could Jesus have sinned,” I think they imagine some external or cosmic safety net keeping the Savior not only guilt-free, but trouble-free–a “golden parachute” allowing Him to alight softly on our plane of reality while we were dropped like so many rocks.

In reality, the credit goes to His moral fortitude. He really was tempted. It really did hurt Him to say “no” to turning stones into bread. He was starving to death! If we minimize this fact, we run the risk of putting Him out of reach as our near and truly human Mediator, “who was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.”

Jesus did not “get off easy” with regard to temptation, merely because He never had it in Him. That’s a misunderstanding of how sin works. Sin doesn’t primarily appeal to some subsistent evil in us. Evil is not a thing. It is a void, a lack, or a privation. It is darkness where there should be light, cold where there should be heat, or a hole where there should be solid earth. Rather, sin primarily appeals to some good desire (like hunger), but twists its fulfillment into something against God’s design or commands. In other words, the desire to fulfill a God-given need is distinct from the desire to do so by disobeying God.

So Jesus had the opportunity to sin, and wanted the things offered by sin. But the most important thing to acknowledge is that Jesus didn’t “get off easy.” In fact, His perfect obedience in the face of temptation is evidence that He felt the prick of temptation more keenly than any human who has ever lived.

In “Mere Christianity,” C. S. Lewis (whom I quote from time to time) argues that the person who gives into temptation is a lightweight. A quitter. The man who caves to pornography after five minutes alone with his iPhone never knows how bad it would have gotten, had he held out for an hour. He gave up. Only the person who fully and finally resists temptation, and defeats it, understands how bad it gets.

Christ, says Lewis, is the ultimate “realist.” The rest of us have lived “sheltered lives,” always giving in when temptation comes our way. We don’t know its true power, just as a leader who surrenders to Hitler never knows the true power of the German army. The person who never surrenders, never yields, never allows his desire for something good to cause him to disobey God and twist nature in order to get it–that person knows the full blast of temptation, even if he never had the slightest desire to rebel against his maker. Christ was (and is) that Person.

Image: “The Temptation of Christ,” Ary Scheffer, 1854, Wikimedia Commons