Our Righteous Savior

I think we often take the fact of Christ’s sinlessness for granted. We often emphasize the impeccability of Christ, which means that He could not have sinned. The Bible is clear that Jesus is God. God is perfectly holy, and “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” God cannot sin; therefore, Jesus could not have sinned.

However, in our eagerness to defend the impeccability of Christ, we must not forget that Jesus experienced temptation. (Now, His temptations differed from ours, because He didn’t have a sin nature. But consider this: He was tempted the same way that Adam and Eve were!)

Scripture even indicates that Christ had to work to resist temptation! It didn’t just “roll off His back,” so to speak! We learn this from the account of how Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness. Hebrews 4:15 says that Jesus “was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.”

But how was that possible? What miracle allowed the divine Son of God to experience temptation? The answer is, “the incarnation.” James 1:13 says, “God cannot be tempted with evil….” The preincarnate Christ was never tempted about anything. But when Jesus became a man, He opened Himself up to temptation. One reason for us to worship Jesus is the fact that he subjected himself to temptation when he became a man like us.

An even greater reason to worship Jesus is that He resisted temptation. Can I ask you an odd, hypothetical question? What would have happened if Jesus had sinned? Could you still have been saved? The answer is “no!” Now, I call that an odd, hypothetical question because it couldn’t have happened. But I ask it anyway to remind you that from a human standpoint, everything was at stake when temptation came to Jesus!

Christ had to earn righteousness as a human being to credit that righteousness to your account. Only a perfect sacrifice could atone for sin. Christ had to resist temptation — and He did.

In the famous Old Testament story, David fought Goliath as the representative for his people. According to the rules, if David wins, all of Israel wins. In the same way, Christ is our representative who defeated Satan for us both by living a perfect life and by dying on the cross for our sins.

Maybe you struggled with sin last week, and to you this morning, Satan seems undefeatable. If that is the case, then remember this: Satan has already been defeated. Jesus beat Him for you! If you are in Christ, then you have been justified! That means that not only are your sins forgiven, but when God sees you, He sees Jesus! Let’s praise God for “Jesus the Righteous.”

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Kris Schaal is the Youth & Discipleship Pastor at Northwest Valley Baptist Church, Glendale, AZ.

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Photo by Robert Nyman on Unsplash