I was finding it too hard to keep my comments brief, so I will turn this into a entry. And it’s also a “Christmasy” post, since I would like to delve into the incarnation, the conception of Jesus, and the impeccability of Christ.

The early church considered the Incarnation to be one of the most important truths of our faith. Because of this, they formulated what has come to be called the Chalcedonean Creed, a statement which sets forth very what we are to believe and what we are not to believe about the Incarnation.

This creed was the fruit of a large council that took place from October 8 to November 1, 451, in the city of Chalcedon and “has been taken as the standard, orthodox definition of the biblical teaching on the person of Christ since that day by” all the major branches of Christianity.[1] There are five main truths the creed of Chalcedon summarized the biblical teaching on the Incarnation.

1. Jesus has two natures — He is God and man.
2. Each nature is full and complete — He is fully God and fully man.
3. Each nature remains distinct.
4. Christ is only one Person.
5. Things that are true of only one nature are nonetheless true of the Person of Christ.

The first truth we need to understand is that Jesus is one Person who has two natures a divine nature and a human nature. In other words, Jesus is both God and man. We will look at each nature.

Jesus is God

The Bible teaches that Jesus is not merely someone who is a lot like God, or someone who has a very close walk with God. Rather, Jesus is the Most High God Himself. Titus 2:13 says that as Christians we are “looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus.”

Jesus is man

It should be obvious that if Jesus is God, then He has always been God. There was a never a time when He became God, because God is eternal. But Jesus has not always been man.

But what exactly do we mean when we say that God the Son became man? We definitely do not mean that He turned into a man, in the sense that He stopped being God and started being man. Jesus did not give up any of His divinity in the Incarnation. Rather, as one early theologian put it, “Remaining what He was, He became what He was not.” Christ “was not now God minus some elements of His deity, but God plus all that He had made His own by taking manhood to Himself.”[2]

So what happened at the conception of Jesus?

In Mt.1:20, the angel tells Joseph “that which is conceived of the Holy Ghost.” The egg was generated to life as God the Son entered the egg under the superintending ministry of the Holy Spirit. No one has ever or ever will be conceived in this way. This is why Jesus is the counter-example!

The Bible is explicit that the Holy Spirit was the divine agent who caused Jesus conception in the womb of Mary. Jesus became a biological miracle with no fertilization. As this happened, the Holy Spirit protected his sinlessness as God the Son entered the womb and gave life to the egg of Mary.

So what’s the point of Jesus being tempted?

So the new question probably is: How could He truly be able to ’sympathize with our weaknesses’ (Hebrews 4:15)? If He could not sin, what was the point of the temptation?

The Bible clearly says that Jesus did not sin. The question is whether Jesus could have sinned. Those who hold to impeccability believe that Jesus could not have sinned. Those who hold to peccability believe that Jesus could have sinned, but did not.

Which view is correct? The clear teaching of Scripture is that Jesus was impeccable – Jesus could not have sinned. If He could have sinned, He would still be able to sin today because He retains the same essence He did while living on earth. To believe that Jesus could sin is to believe that God could sin.

Again, although Jesus is fully human, He was not born with the same sinful nature that we are born with. He certainly was tempted in the same way we are, in that temptations were put before Him by Satan, yet remained sinless because God is incapable of sinning. It is against His very nature (Matthew 4:1; Hebrews 2:18, 4:15; James 1:13). Sin is by definition a trespass of the Law. God created the Law, and the Law is by nature what God would or would not do; therefore, sin is anything that God would not do by His very nature.

Those who hold to peccability believe that if Jesus could not have sinned, He could not have truly experienced temptation, and therefore could not truly empathize with our struggles and temptations against sin. We have to remember that one does not have to experience something in order to understand it.

Though this sounds simplistic, God knows everything about everything. While God has never had the desire to sin and has definitely never sinned ” God knows and understands what sin is. God knows and understands what it is like to be tempted. Jesus can empathize with our temptations because He knows”not because He has “experienced” all the same things we have.

Closing responses to Henry Micheal’s comments

I am using Jesus here as a counter-example, an exception that disproves the rule.

Jesus was the counterexample that disproves the rule. Do you agree or disagree?

We’re getting into ‘rules’ again, which to me imposes a system of logic and reasoning that doesn’t allow exceptions. Jesus was the exception to this rule.

While we are not iherently damned to hell coming from our good and wise creator, as a result of the Fall and the resulting cultures we have a natural tendency to sin – a lot

Two things:

1) We were damned to hell from moment Adam committed the first [original] sin in our human timeline. I make this distinction about the human timeline because this was no surprise to God as He sits outside of time.

We have to remember this was not God’s plan. He created Adam and Eve to live in perfect communion with Him. But because he created human beings and not robots, He gave them the ability to choose right over wrong and they chose wrong.

What is beautiful about this is that even though God knew these things were going to happen [Adam's sin, damnation, etc.], He had a plan in place to come into a point into human history to remedy the situation. This is while the Bible says, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Christ made a way for our salvation by satisfying God’s wrath towards sin through His incarnation and subsequent sacrifice on the cross.

2) The fall did more than just give us a natural tendency to sin-we inherit a sinful nature-or total depravity. The word ‘tendency’ presupposes we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in our own power and not sin. That is what the Pharisees thought they could do by following the law. I think I remember Puritanbob saying that is your only other option if you don’t believe in total depravity. I agree with him. And the truth is, no one can follow the law perfectly. And since we can’t, we need to be absolved our responsibility to do so by someone who can fulfill it. That someone was Christ. He did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it [Matthew 5:17]

Either way, you have to deal with the question of how a fully human (and fully God) Jesus was not sinful, but the rest of humanity (save for Adam and Eve for a bit) were/are/will be. So, while there might be a work-around under the system – it just needs to be stated

In a sense, we have to accept that if God wants to work outside of a ’system,’ He can. In the conception and incarnation, we have an example of this. I hope I have tried to make an ‘official’ statement here in this post.

1. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (InterVarsity and Zondervan Publishing, 1994), p. 556.

2. J.I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1993 edition), p. 53.