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Updated: May 10, 2025
Christ's answer has a sound of authority, even in its gentle lowliness, and it confirms the belief in His sinlessness by the absence of any reference to repentance, and by regarding His baptism, not as a token of repented transgression to be washed away, but as an act which completed the perfect circle of righteousness, which His life had hitherto drawn.
Let us be content to worship, as we look, Let us think of the tempted Christ, that our conceptions of His sinlessness may be increased. His was no untried and cloistered virtue, pure because never brought into contact with seducing evil, but a militant and victorious goodness, that was able to withstand in the evil day.
So far as we know, it is in struggle only that character is made. Even as to the actual commission of sin on Jesus' part, the assertion of the abstract necessity of his sinlessness, for the work of moral redemption, goes beyond anything which we know. The question of the sinlessness of Jesus is not an a priori question. To say that he was by conception free from sin is to beg the question.
But while His reply bears directly on the errors in the question, it has a wider significance. Either Jesus is here repudiating the notion of His own sinlessness, and acknowledging, in contradiction to every other disclosure of His self-consciousness, that He too was not through and through good, or else He is claiming to be filled with God, the source of all goodness, in a wholly unique manner.
We get a better explanation of his sinlessness, but we still get it at the expense of his humanity. In one respect the Arians had the advantage. Their created Word is easier joined with human flesh than the Divine Word with a human body and a human soul. At this point, however, Apollinarius introduced a thought of deep significance that the spirit in Christ was human spirit, although divine.
II. The Resurrection of Jesus gives the assurance that He is Judge. The bare fact that He is risen does not carry that assurance; we have to take into account that He has risen. After such a life. His Resurrection was God's setting the seal of His approval and acceptance on Christ's work; His endorsement of Christ's claims to special relations with Him; His affirmation of Christ's sinlessness.
God could not endow him with sinlessness, which is an inalienable portion of Divine perfection. But if God could not render him sinless, why did He take the trouble of creating man, whose nature was to become corrupt, and which, consequently, had to offend God? On the other side, if God Himself was not able to render human nature sinless, what right had He to punish men for not being sinless?
I entreat Thee, by Thy Most Great Name, Whom Thou hast appointed as the unerring Balance among the nations, and Thine infallible Proof unto all men, not to forsake me, nor to abandon me to my corrupt desires. Do Thou preserve me beneath the shadow of Thy Supreme Sinlessness, and enable me to magnify Thine own Self amidst the concourse of Thy creatures.
The early Christians whether Jewish or Gentile would not naturally choose to give pictorial form to their belief in their Lord's divinity by the story of an incarnation. Some would explain the story of the miraculous birth as a conclusion drawn by the Christian consciousness from the doctrine of the sinlessness of Jesus.
What a solemn attestation of universal sinfulness is in these words of Christ's, and how calmly He separates Himself by His sinlessness from us!
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