From The Presbyter,
Vol. 1, No. 4; March, 1879.

HEBREWS v. 15, "Yet without sin."

Our translators have put in a word in this brief text which is not expressed in the original. "Without sin," says the original language; "Yet without sin," say the translators. Now, the little word "yet" enables us to see how the translators apprehended the meaning in this instance. Evidently they viewed the circumstances of human life as eminently unfavourable to a sinless behaviour. If Jesus passed through this world like other men, meeting the same temptations, and resisting temptations with the same faculties which other men possess, then it is a miracle - our translators suggest - if He escaped contaminations. This suggestion is conveyed in the little word "yet." Tempted in all things - as we see Jesus was - without spot of sin Jesus was, and continued to be. "How marvellous!" thought our translators, that these two conditions should be combined; and so they hinged the one statement into the other by means of this particle "yet." As if they had said to themselves, "Who could have expected to find these two combined - exposure to all the evils, and trials, and bereavements that men suffer in this life, on the one hand, and perfect integrity of heart and character maintained in contact and conflict with these temptations, on the other?"

Now, we can readily enter into the feeling which our translators thus express. Are we not all conscious that the difficulties of our situation in this world render slips and falls and grievous shortcomings inevitable? How marvellous, then, is this fact which the life of Jesus discloses! For He encountered the difficulties without being betrayed into the shortcomings. He endured the trials of human life without contracting its defilements. He continued in the midst of a sinful world; but harmless, undefiled. Incessantly pressed by opposition and discouragements, and once at least solicited by all the glitter which human life could display, He remained a Nazarite whiter than snow, a man apart and separate from sinners. Now, this is a fact of imposing moral proportions, of heavenly elevation, and yet it is embodied in manhood form and consistence. Walk about this peerless monument of perfect sinlessness, and consider into what mysteries its foundations descend!

I. To be tempted like as we are - what does this import!

The temptations of human life have altered in quality since man fell. Much evil entered the world then for the first time, and came in the form of penalty for sin. Creation was made subject to vanity; a force tending to evil was put upon it; and ever since it has worn the yoke and transmitted the heavy pressure of its Maker's displeasure to the spirit of man. Much of the sorrows which we endure in life speak a penal language. "O Man, thou art an offender against thy Maker! and fools, because of their transgressions and because of their iniquities, are afflicted. Thy sorrows are a mark of thy sin and a fruit of thy sin; and can thine heart endure, or can thine hands be strong in the days that God shall deal with thee?" Such experiences as hunger, and thirst, and weariness, and homelessness, and friendlessness utter this language. Not one of these could have entered paradise. Not one of these appears in the probation of the original progenitors of the race. They could not be till they came in as penalties. And as the effects of sin, they have a peculiar aptitude to produce sin. There is a flavour of temptation in them above anything that the sight of the forbidden tree could convey. They all hold the element of judicial displeasure in solution, the poison whereof, more than the simple sense of privation, drinketh up the spirit. And we may say the same also of such trials as come on us through the sins of others. Fiery ordeals of reviling, and contradiction, and unreasonable virulence are hard to bear; and they carry a sting. They have a direct tendency to produce sin, for they are each and all the fruit of sin. They could not come on us except in a sinful world; and their effect upon the sufferer is to make him weary of well-doing.

To be tempted like as we are, involves, therefore, a scale of moral trial which only guilty beings are subject to; and which could not be applied to an unfallen and uncorrupted nature. Not as Adam was tempted in paradise, but as we are tempted in this sin-plagued world, was the Lord Jesus subjected to the ordeal of temptation. Adam could not be reached with such instruments of moral perversion as we are liable to; Adam was surrounded with the tokens of his Maker's goodwill; he could not be insulted and provoked, could not he hungry and athirst, could not feel weary and homeless. But these and many other such things have reinforced the means of temptation since his time. And, to be tempted like as we are, is to meet all these - to meet them, also, as remembrancers of sin - as painful evidences that we live in a fallen world, and are partakers of its penal sorrows, and adjudicated, therefore, under its moral guilt.

After this manner, therefore, the Lord Jesus was tempted - "Like as we are" - that is, with no advantage from His personal innocence, but as if He had been a transgressor like as we. Troubles assailed Him, which could only be the fruit of sin; and which implied, in their very approach to Him, that he was treated as a sinner, and had no privilege above the meanest and guiltiest of the race. No advantage which sin has to push its conquests among men was untried on the Man of Sorrows. His was not the probation of angels in their first estate, or of man in the hour of his primitive integrity. Temptations assailed Him which were proper to sinners only, and which affected His spirit with the sense of divine displeasure.

What a marvel, then, that the temptations of Christ passed and left Him untouched with the defilement of sin! Not one word escaped Him amid all His provocation, which implied a murmur against God or revenge against man. He never rose in impatience to throw off these trammels of a sinful world, or retreated from His task of self-sacrifice into the sanctuary of His own personal innocence. He took His sorrows as though He deserved them; and was obedient to every demand of duty, even when soul and body were trembling under the weight of mysterious sufferings. He came forth from the wilderness, where He had been forty days with the wild beasts and the tempter - yet without sin; from all the altercations and ensnaring questions of His enemies - yet without sin; from the faithlessness and heartlessness of His followers; from the unreasonable meddling of His relatives - yet without sin. And the same record, "yet without sin," awaits Him at Gethsemane and the judgment hall, and the cross and the sepulchre. After the strokes upon the cheek, and the scourging at the pillar, and the insults of His crucifiers, He abides "yet without sin." How astonishing is this moral invincibility? Can any one look on this great sight and not be melted into admiration, and reverence, and adoration.

II. Dealing with some difficulties

But here some difficulties cross our path; misconceptions arise in our minds which detract from the moral grandeur of Christ's sinlessness; or, at least, perplex to our minds the statement that He was tempted in all points like as we are. One difficulty is connected with the divine greatness of His person; another arises from the perfect purity of His human constitution.

1. Is it not true that many who read the Bible and have some notion of the life of Christ, imagine that obedience was perfectly easy to Him? They see the marvellous outline of moral perfection which the hands of the evangelists have drawn, yet they feel little stimulus from so glorious an example. And why so? Just because they misconceive the conditions under which Christ's obedience was fulfilled. When they read of insult, and contradiction, and shame, and spitting, the agony of the garden, and the awful dereliction of the cross, they have a notion, nevertheless, that all these trials were blunted by the divine resources of Jesus. Their feeling is that alleviations of unlimited force and exhaustless fulness were continually at His service; and that His deity qualified or neutralized all suffering and temptation to Him. But such a notion is incompatible with the Apostle's words. "In all points like as we are" is the measure in which Christ was tempted. And how could that be if Christ did not meet temptation in our nature, and with the faculties (possessed by every man) which that nature supplied to him! The hardships of Christ's experience, His wrestlings and agonies, made no approach to the deity of His person. In that eternal oneness which He had (and has) with the Father, He could not any more than the First Person of the Godhead be tempted of evil. Sin could make no approach to Him in that original light of divine existence, in which He is without variableness or the least shadow of turning. And it was, therefore, as a partaker of flesh and blood that Jesus, our High Priest, suffered, being tempted. Not attended with the panoply of His Divine Majesty, did He enter into the lists with the strong man armed - the Prince of this world - but in His shepherd's attire, like the stripling David with only his sling and pebbles from the brook, He went to meet the defier of the living God. And in those arms of human texture and temper alone He conquered; having the shield of faith on His arm, and the sword of the spirit - the Word of God - in His hand, and the breastplate of a righteousness which He ever loved, upon His breast. With such weapons, spiritual in nature but wielded within the range of human capacity, and energized only with strong crying and tears of His human spirit, Jesus fought His good fight, and won His victory. And it must have been so. It must have been thus that Jesus suffered and died. Admit only that He was our surety, our substitute, in His obedience, and He must, in that case, have warred with our weapons and striven with our allotted measures of strength, and triumphed in the character of a tried and tempted man. He was in all points tempted, then, as we are.
   
   Very cheering it is to consider how much all this makes in our favour, when we enter by faith into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings. For, the more clearly me see Jesus acting on the level of our responsibilities, the more sensibly can we realize the bearing of His merits on our state. He laid not hold of angels. He did not attach himself to their condition of existence. He did not harness himself to the yoke of their responsibilities. He did not enter the arena of their defeated probation. But He did all these things for men; and, as a consequence, we have a kinsman and Redeemer acting for us - one entitled and admitted by all the equities of the case to appear for us. This is the abiding anchor of our hope. This is the pin fastened for us in a sure place - the firm foundation of our faith in Christ, that He was in all points like as we are; not originally, indeed, for so considered he is God over all; but "He made Himself of no reputation, and took on Him the form of a servant, and was found in the likeness of men: and, being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross."
2. But another exception appears to lie against the statement that Christ was tempted on all points like as we are, for Christ knew no sin, and was never biassed towards evil by indwelling corruption; and therefore it may be thought that His conflict with temptation could not have resembled ours.
   
   Much has been said to reconcile these two - the fact and the doctrine; the fact that Jesus was inwardly pure, and the doctrine of our text that he suffered in His temptation in the same way that we do. Without attempting any lengthened examination of this point, suffice it to say that there is more of the apparent than of the real in this difficulty. In so far as our corrupt nature disinclines us to contend with sin, Jesus had no experience of any such guilty weakness; and, in so far as there is in believers a principle of grace, which strives against inward corruption, there is no material difference in such a conflict from that which external temptation occasions. Even corrupted nature dwelling in us is an external thing, relatively to the new man of the heart, from which all resistance to temptation and sin ever arise. The exception, therefore, we say, is more seeming than real. But, even if we allow that there is something peculiar in the form of our temptations, because they are seconded and intensified by something within ourselves, yet Jesus was like us, in so far, also, as there was something peculiar and unique in the way that His temptation assailed Him. If there be anything private, as it were, in our trials, because we are personally sinful, there was something incommunicable in Christ's trials because He was made sin; and, likely enough, these two several specialities may be much the same as to their moral effects. The one may have operated much as the other does to produce despondency and sense of overwhelming helplessness. It is the tendency, we know, of indwelling sin to instil the feeling of despair - "Wretched man, who shall deliver me!" And the same suggestion and impression of utter abandonment runs in the horror of the awful curse, "My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?" "To be made sin;" "a curse to be cast off openly and absolutely by the Holy One - the Righteous Ruler; to be left of set purpose as a prey to the misrule, the malice, and the subtlety of the man-destroyer - Oh! is it marvellous if such an experience should have tended to create despair, or have tempted the sin-bearer to renounce the conflict altogether? And, therefore, in this also, Jesus, doubtless, was tempted like as we are - that is, He was solicited, as though the case were already given against Him, not to wait upon the Lord any longer.

III. Use for improvement

Let us now endeavour to use the subject for improvement. Let all our own daily weaknesses and falls exalt the obedience of the Lord Jesus. How easily do we succumb before the many trials of life! Even those every-day annoyances - which are but as the insect bites of the moral world - how they inflame and exasperate our minds! Who that has watched for a day, or an hour, the fluctuation of his own spirit, has not seen the turbulence of passion or impatience, or annoyance, arise about matters which soon vanish like motes in the sunbeams. Yet these outbreaks all are sins; and any one of them sufficient to have stained the spotless character of the man Christ Jesus. But when, in all His life, was it ever seen that the Lord Jesus had lost control of His own spirit, or that He drew himself fretfully out of the keeping of Providence, or stretched out His hand to unwarranted liberties. When He hungered for food in the desert, we never read that He complained of God's dealings. He sat down, weary and thirsty, on the side of Jacob's well, but even the unkind refusal of the Samaritan woman, her total forgetfulness of the stranger's wants when she set down her water-pail and went away, did not evoke a murmur. Who that has tried, or observed himself in these minutiae of human life, knows not how dangerous, in a moral point of view, they are? How soon the sudden gust of passion awakes, and the hasty feeling is cherished, and the sharp word spoken! How difficult it is to keep the bridle of one's spirit in hand, and to control the unadvised speaking of the lips! But the Lord Jesus failed not in the necessary check upon His spirit. He did not cry, nor lift up, neither did any man hear His voice in the streets. He was tempted in this point of self-command, of self-control, like as we are, yet without sin.

Let us take a profit out of our sin. Let even it enhance to us the lustre of the Redeemer's righteousness. At every failure in our own tempers, our own spirits, our own patience, let us turn with penitent satisfaction to glory only in the Lord; let us forswear our own righteousnesses; let us pronounce them filthy rage. Even in the smaller and more sequestered duties of life let us confess that our iniquities, like the wind, do carry us away. And coming to the throne of grace, where we find mercy, and obtain grace to help, let us say - "See, O God, our shield; look on the face of thine Anointed. Let thy hand be on the man of thy right hand - the Son of Man whom thou madest strong for thyself, so henceforth will not we go back from Thee."

And let us also glory in the sinlessness of Christ, as He is the Lord, our righteousness. We are not merely called upon to behold in Christ a spectacle of duty which humbles us for our own shortcomings, but to embrace the glorious obedience by faith as a new thing created of God for our use and advantage. Take this sinless obedience of the Lord Jesus; and go forward to the mercy-seat with it as your offering, which Jehovah Jireh has provided. When your sins come up into remembrance before God, confess them; deplore them. But withal do not give place to them as if they were beyond remedy. Let the answer which you make to every accusation be found in the person of Christ. Tell the adversary, who stands in that heavenly presence to resist you, that, whatever you may be, Jesus, your righteousness, is yet without sin; that whatever your defilements are, He is holy, harmless, undefiled; that where you have continually fallen, He has triumphed, and that His triumph is sufficient for you, and sufficient for your recovery out of all faults which you have contracted. Such is Jesus, our High Priest. He is every way suited to us to absolve our guilt and relieve our wretchedness. He was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. And, through His sinless life and atoning death, He is able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him.

Let us glory in Christ's sinlessness as the golden crown of His priesthood. The wise man forewarns us against touching pitch, lest our hands be defiled. But the Lord Jesus had necessity laid upon Him as our priest to handle our sinful characters, and to embrace our sinful persons in the arms of His mediation. And the lustre of His priesthood consists in this - that He entered into such close relations with sinners unharmed; that He voluntarily, for sufficient cause, took so much to do with sin, and yet continued holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from all taints of the sinner's sinfulness. Under the old law there were two leading officials who had to do with sin, the lawgiver and the priest - Moses and Aaron - and by the hands of these two the Psalmist tells us that God safely led His people like a flock. Moses, the lawgiver, dealt with sin by way of repulsion and denunciation and execration only: "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things written in the book of the law to do them." But Aaron, the priest, dealt otherwise. His business with sin was to make atonement for it - to still the wrath which it wakened - to put on incense, and run in, when the plague had begun, and stand between the living and the dead, that the plague might be stayed. Every act which the priest did had sin for its object, but the purging of sin was its design; and to the perfection of such a ministry it is of necessity that the ministrator should be without sin himself. However much he may have to do about sin, he ought to have no stain of it on his priestly garments, no trace of its crimson on his hands; but "holiness to the Lord" as a diadem of gold upon his forehead. This crowning excellence of the priestly office was never found, however, but in Christ. He is the great High Priest - yea, the only abiding and unchangeable High Priest; and in the presence of God He appears for us, without spot, and blameless. After all the perilous proximity that He has had to sin; although He submitted to the imputation of it, and bare the guilt of it, and tasted of death for it, and entered under the curse for it; yet, like the sun emerging out of an eclipse, He shines with renewed effulgence in the beauties of holiness. He took our nature, yet without sin and was made under the law, and humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, yet without sin. "Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow of things in heaven and things on earth." "Having, therefore, a great High Priest, who is passed into the heavens - Jesus, the Son of God - let us hold fast our profession; let us come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time need. For we have not an High Priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but who was in all points tempted like as we are - yet without sin."