Posted on 07/29/2013 7:55:48 AM PDT by Gamecock
Question:
A non-Christian asked if we teach that Jesus was sinless because he did not have a human father, wasn't his human mother, Mary, sinful? Why wasn't her sin passed on to her son, Jesus?
Answer:
You ask an important question about the sinlessness and perfection of Jesus Christ.
As you suggest, if there is any way in which Christ partakes of sin, he is disqualified from being the only redeemer of God’s elect (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 21). The testimony of Scripture about this is clear. Hebrews says that Christ was tempted in all points as we are, yet without sinning (Heb. 4:15). Christ challenged his adversaries to prove that he had sinned and they could not (John 8:46). As the apostle Paul put it, “For our sake he made him [Christ] to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21, cf. 1 Pet. 2:22, 1 John 3:5). He is a high priest unlike any other who is “holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens” (Heb. 7:26). His title as the Lamb of God (John 1:29) also draws our attention to his innocence.
The early church thought deeply about this as it formulated clear statements about Jesus Christ having two natures, a divine nature and a human nature, yet being one person. Christ unites in himself uniquely and in an unrepeatable way, this union (called the hypostatic union) of the human and the divine. This is the mystery of the Incarnation that the creeds of the church confess.
The way in which God answers your question is in the mystery of the virgin birth. The Scriptures begin from, what one theologian terms, “above” (Donald Macleod). John 1 or Philippians 2 show this movement from the eternal Son of God to the incarnate Son of God. This is how the Westminster Shorter Catechism summarizes it:
Christ, the Son of God, became man, by taking to himself a true body and a reasonable soul, being conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and born of her, yet without sin. (Q. 22)
As Matthew described it, Mary was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit (1:18), and then the angel explained it to Joseph: “that which is conceived in her [Mary] is from the Holy Spirit” (1:20). The explanation to Mary herself, in response to her “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” (Luke 1:34), leaves any human agency out of the incarnation in the normal way of conception, for the angel tells Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore, the child to be born will be called ‘holy’—the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Without further description of how this would occur, the Bible testifies that the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary (the same idea as the cloud which overshadowed the Mount of Transfiguration) in such a way that she indeed became the bearer of the Holy One of God (Gal. 4:4); and her offspring, Jesus Christ, remained without sin. God does not specify in greater detail than this how the conception of Jesus by-passed Mary’s own sinfulness to preserve Christ’s sinlessness, but the rest of Scripture, as I indicated above, affirms that Christ did not inherit our sin nature. He came to be the Second Adam (Rom. 5) who could forgive sins because he himself was both the One offended and himself sinless.
The glory of the grace found in Jesus Christ is that though he was without sin, yet he had pity upon sinners so as to die in their place while we were enemies, ungodly, and sinful (Rom. 5:6, 8, 10). We need a Savior who is fully human to bear patiently with us, yet is able to atone for our sin as the final and perfect sacrifice. The sinlessness of Christ makes a passage like Isaiah 53:9–11 so marvelous in that Christ had no deceit in his mouth and by his death he made many to be accounted righteous.
I hope this is of some help.
It's OK. It's my bedtime now. Good night and God bless you.
You chose to go down the path of patronizing and belittling and yet post this response?
Wow. That’s chutzpah.
Have a good day nonetheless and God bless you.
Actually, the interesting thing is that AB plasma is the universal plasma donor. It is the blood plasma that protects the body from infections.
Don’t confuse sin with immorality. Sin is simply missing the mark of God’s Plan.
It wasn’t God’s Plan for Adam to have sinned in the Garden.
The sin is passed genetically from the male to each generation of human.
All humans has missed the mark of God’s Plan. None are qualified to provide an appropriate sacrifice for that which they denied God, our spiritual fellowship, because we are all spiritually flawed.
Only Christ Jesus, in His perfect humanity was qualified to perform that task.
The splitting of the veil in two and the Resurrection bear testimony to this success.
Please forgive the intrusion but the above stood out to me as I've commented on a few occasions that many seem far more interested in who's the interpretation is rather than what the interpretation is.Would that it was as you've expressed but the reality is that when push comes to shove,many RCs here will defer to "yoipos" as though it were a magic sword.
grace and peace to you
Posting the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed to explain away the issue of goddess worship in the Catholic Church is the equivalent of posting the Pledge of Allegiance to prove Obama isn’t a an anti-American Communist.
I coined “Yopios” years ago here and had the graphic made up for it so I tend to think more often than not its used appropriately :0)
I agree with you. I just stated in a nutshell what his “data dump” reasoning was. I didn’t agree with it. Mary, to me, comes under the “All have sinned” category and all of the examples in the Bible show mankind is not to be elevated and worshiped. Only God deserves worship. They will camouflage their worship with other words (adore,respect or other such) but it doesn’t change things.
You don't see a contradiction?
If scripture was self interpreting, or if the Holy Spirit correctly guides each individual believer to understand the correct interpretation of scripture, we wouldn't have tens of thousands of competing christian sects, each contradicting the other.
No, Yopios simply doesn't work; sola scriptura ain't scriptural.
. 2Tim 3:16,17 16 "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work."
Jesus never wrote anything, but He did build a Church. He gave it the keys to lose and bind on earth and in Heaven, and the authority to forgive sins, and promised it the Holy Spirit to lead it to all truth, and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. Yes, scripture is the heart of the Church. But rip the heart out of the body in which Christ intended it to be nurtured and taught, and that heart will not accomplish what the Lord intended of it, as the 30,000 bickering and opposing sects prove.
John 8:6 "But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger". He was literate(unlike Mohammed) and did write.
And we are worlds apart on what was meant when Jesus spoke to Peter. But your Church will interpret it to mean they have the POWER and AUTHORITY to do whatever.
D’oh! What was I thinking?!?
Could you give me the scripture chapter and verse where it records what Jesus wrote in the ground? I can’t recall it off the top of my head and I’m having a little difficulty finding it with an Internet search.
Thanks.
Yep I believe that too. Jesus had two natures. One divine, one human.
What was wrote is not recorded. That was not the issue. The issue was whether He wrote anything. Go back and see what you wrote.
You wrote "D’oh! What was I thinking?!?".
I can't help you there.
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