Our Savior Was Tempted Exactly As We Are

Christ Triumphant - A Devotional by E.G. White

Our Savior Was Tempted Exactly As We Are

Today's Text: Let him take hold of my strength, that he may make peace with me; and he shall make peace with me. Isaiah 27:5

The Message:      Imagine, if you can, yourself in Christ's stead in the wilderness. There is no human voice you hear, but you are surrounded with demons under deceptive pretensions as angels from heaven, presenting in the most seducing attractions Satan's wily insinuations against God, as he did to our first parents. His sophistry is most deceiving and artful in undermining your confidence in God and destroying your faith and your trust. He keeps your mind on a constant strain so that he can get one clue that he can use to his own advantage to allure you into a controversy, as if reading your thoughts to which you will not give utterance, just as he did Eve.      He could not obtain from Christ one word to lead him on. The word, "It is written," was spoken from point to point as he tested Him. But only the quotation of His own words that He had inspired the holy men of old to write would come from Christ's lips... In our Lord's great scene of conflict in the wilderness, apparently under the power of Satan and his angels, was He capable, in His human nature, of yielding to these temptations? ...      As God He could not be tempted, but as a man He could be tempted, and that strongly, and could yield to the temptations. His human nature must pass through the same test and trial Adam and Eve passed through. His human nature was created; it did not even possess the angelic powers. It was human, identical with our own. He was passing over the ground where Adam fell. He was now where, if He endured the test and trial in behalf of the fallen race, He would redeem Adam's disgraceful failure and fall, in our own humanity.      A human body and a human mind were His. He was bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.... He was subject to disappointment and trial in His own home, among His own brethren. He was not surrounded, as in the heavenly courts, with pure and lovely characters. He was compassed with difficulties. He came into our world to maintain a pure, sinless character, and to refute Satan's lie that it was not possible for human beings to keep the law of God....      Through being partakers of the divine nature we may stand pure and holy and undefiled. The Godhead was not made human, and the human was not deified by the blending together of the two natures. Christ did not possess the same sinful, corrupt, fallen disloyalty we possess, for then He could not be a perfect offering.-Manuscript 94, 1893 (Manuscript Releases 6:110-112).

Commentary: My friend, when our father Adam sinned, his whole nature had changed.  Though not fully developed, his very nature had been corrupted by sin and though he had repented and was forgiven, he was still under the power of a sinful nature and it was this nature that was passed on to us through the generations.  The power to resist and overcome sin is not within the human nature, and therefore a power outside of humanity must be given to us.  That power comes from above. The Son of God took upon Himself the fallen nature of man and became as human as we are.  Though He was human in every way as we are, He was without sin.  He struggled as we do, but He never consented to sin nor was He corrupted by it.  He was fully divine and fully human and yet was without sin.  In His divinity He could not be tempted to sin, but in His humanity He could sin and as such would have forfeited His eternal existence, else the sacrifice would not have been real.  You may ask how this could be since divinity cannot die?  The answer is that His divinity was so woven together with His humanity that it could not be separated.  If our Savior, the only begotten Son of God had sinned His divinity would lay dormant in the grave along with His humanity, never to be awakened by the Father. While on this earth, the Son of Man relied wholly upon the same power that we may lay hold of.  He drew upon the power of God to overcome temptation and gained the victory over sin.  Day by day he abode in the Spirit of the Father and drew upon Him power and wisdom in His struggle against the sinful nature of man and was given the power to overcome sin in the flesh.  As the Spirit of God dwelt within the Son of Man, He overcame sin in the flesh, and as such we may lay hold of the same power through Christ, that we may also overcome sin.  As we invite the Spirit of Christ to live within us, He will come in and give us the power to resist the power of Satan and gain the victory over sin.  "Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." (James 4:4). My friend, by Christ's victory we may also gain the victory over sin.  By the indwelling of His Spirit we may receive a new life in Jesus Christ.  "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh." (Ezekiel 36:26).  That Spirit is the Spirit of Christ living within us for it says in Colossians 1:27 "To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory:".   May you draw upon the only power that can give you victory over sin today.   God bless,

Video of the Week Have You Met the God we Worship - Part 1 Part 1 of 6, Daniel Mesa and others from Pioneer Health and Missions present a response to the trinitarian symposium held in the Central California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.