Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded

2. The Sinlessness of the Lord Jesus

It will be for our profit to consider what sin is as God shows it to us in His Word, for if we have superficial thoughts of it we shall not appreciate the sinlessness of our Lord, nor the necessity and significance of His offering of Himself without spot to God; nor shall we feel how necessary it is for us to cleave to Him, the Holy and the True.

Three words are given in Scripture to define sin; they are brought together in Exodus 34:7, Psalm 32 and Psalm 51 — they are transgression, iniquity and sin. These words are not mere synonyms that could displace one another and nothing be lost, for each has it own terrible meaning. TRANSGRESSION is revolt from, it means a tearing of ones self away. God has declared His will for men, but they prefer their own wills, and in the pursuit of their own wills they tear themselves away from God. INIQUITY means twisted, crooked, perverse. God has laid down a road for the feet of men to tread, and that road is as straight as His everlasting sceptre, but men have made for themselves crooked ways (Isaiah 59:8); they are a crooked and perverse generation (Philippians 2:15). SIN means missing the mark. God has set up His mark, the end at which every man should aim. God Himself should be the end and aim of every man’s life, but every man has substituted self for God, and set up his own mark to displace God’s; and has missed the very mark and purpose of his existence. Along with sin in this threefold character goes GUILE; it permeates the life of every man who has not been honest before God His effort is to appear different from what he knows himself to be, to cover up and hide his sinfulness and even to imagine that be can deceive God Himself as to it. Then the New Testament gives us a striking definition of sin in 1 John 3:4 where we should read, “for sin is lawlessness,” and that covers all that sin is; it is not a mere yielding to the sudden and capricious impulses of our nature, but the determination that lies deep in a man’s will, though perhaps seldom expressed, to go his own way and be independent of God.

As we consider what sin is as it is defined for us in the Scriptures, we are conscious that we must plead guilty before God to transgression and iniquity and sin, and confess that it is not only in practice that we are sinners, but that we are sinners in our very nature that what we have done springs out of what we are, the fruit reveals the nature of the root. But we are equally conscious that in this respect our Lord stands out in complete contrast to all that we are; our minds recoil from even the suggestion that there was sin in Him; our spiritual instinct tells us that He was not as we are, that He would be of no use to us if He had been, and we find that these instincts are confirmed by the plainest possible statements in the Word of God.

The flesh and blood that He took was wholly apart from sin; His body was a holy body prepared for Him by God; as a man He was “holy, harmless and undefiled”; He was as holy in His manhood, nature and life amid the sordidness and sin of the world as He was in the beginning, when by His divine power and glory He created the heavens and the earth. This holy manhood could not have been apart from the miraculous birth. In no other way could the everlasting Word have come in flesh. Hence in announcing His birth to the Virgin-mother, the angel of the Lord declared, “That holy Thing that shall be born of thee, shall be called the Son of God.” And from the moment that the Holy Ghost came upon the most blessed of all women, and the power of the Highest overshadowed her, her Firstborn Son was wholly for God; His own words were, “Thou art He that took Me out of the womb; Thou didst make Me hope when I was upon My mother’s breasts” (Psalm 22).

Heaven and earth and even the nether regions confessed His holiness; God and men and demons bore witness to it. The Holy Ghost descended upon Him at His baptism, not as a burning flame, but as a dove, indicating surely that there was nothing in Him that was obnoxious to the holiness of God’s Spirit, but everything in absolute harmony there with Him; and the Father declared that His eye had searched, and found only that in Him that delighted Him. At the very beginning of His public service to God and men, the demons recognized Him and confessed Him as God’s holy One (Mark 1), and His Apostles, by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and in the full light of His life and death and resurrection and ascension to glory, bore witness again and again to this essential fact of our Faith: this fact apart from which our Faith is a delusion and a lie.

The Sinless Sacrifice for Sin

It stands out in the Epistles as a thing to be noted and cherished, that when the question of sin and the sufferings and death of the Lord Jesus as our substitute in regard to it arises, His sinlessness is emphasized. 2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us that God made Him to be sin for us, but adds that He “knew no sin.” 1 Peter 2:24 tells us that He “His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree,” but assures us that He “did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth” (verse 22). 1 John 3:5 tells us that He was manifested to take away our sins, and adds, “in Him was no sin.” Surely nothing could be clearer than that no sacrifice but a sinless sacrifice could meet the claims of God’s holiness against sin, and if Jesus had not been sinless He could not have stood in the sinner’s place; He would not have survived the judgment and we should have had no Saviour.

The necessity for this sinless offering was foretold in the types and shadows of the Old Testament. The passover lamb had to be “without blemish, a male of the first year” (Exodus 12); and every sacrifice that was offered to God had to be of the same unblemished sort. “If there be any blemish therein, as if it be lame, or blind, or have any ill blemish, thou shalt not sacrifice it to the Lord thy God” (Deuteronomy 15:20). “But whatsoever has a blemish, that shall ye not offer: for it shall not be acceptable for you” (Leviticus 22:20). If God could not accept the blemished sacrifice as foreshadowing the sacrifice of Christ, how abhorrent is the thought that He who was the Substance of all the shadows and the Fulfiller of all the types, had a blemish or the taint of sin in Him! And that such a thought might have no place in our minds, we are told that when the time for the offering up of the sacrifice came, He “through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God” (Hebrews 9:14). Was that offering accepted? It could not have been if it had not been a sinless offering. It was accepted. The Word of God declares that “it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins,” but that this Man’s “one offering has perfected for ever them that are sanctified.” That one offering was so free from all taint of sin, so essentially, inherently and intrinsically holy and excellent, that He having made it has sat down at the right hand of God, never to arise again for such a work; and so complete and efficacious is it, that the Holy Ghost can bear witness that God will remember no more the sins and iniquities of all those that believe, and that through it they have the title now to enter into the very presence of God (Hebrews 10).

Not Sinless Only But Wholly Good

Now absence of sin would not have been enough, and we cannot stop at the fact that there was no sin, either in the nature or acts of the Man Christ Jesus; we look for positive good, for we read, “To him that knows to do good and does it not, to him it is sin” (Jas. 4:17), and we find this positive goodness in Him at all times and in every circumstance; it was His glory. “He went about doing good, for God was with Him” (Acts 10:38), and for this He was anointed with the Holy Ghost. He was conceived by and anointed with the Holy Ghost. There is a beautiful type of this in Leviticus 2, where the unleavened cakes mingled with and anointed with oil tell of the life of Jesus, permeated and empowered by the Holy Ghost, of which the oil is a well-known type; the absence of leaven teaching that there was no evil in Him, for leaven is everywhere in Scripture a symbol of evil. But our subject is what He was more than what He did, though we cannot separate the one from the other. Where every other man transgressed and revolted from the known will of God, He could say, “I do always the things that please Him” (John 8:29). Where every other man had sinned, and missed God’s mark, He could say to His Father, “I have glorified Thee on the earth, I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do” (John 17:4); and where every other man had loved iniquity and turned out of the right way, it is said of Him. “Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity” (Hebrews 1:9). And there was no guile in Him, He was even the same that He said from the beginning (John 8:25).

The more deeply the life of Jesus is studied, the more impressive does His holy dependence upon God and His obedience to His Word and will appear, and He was obedient without murmuring, though the will of God involved Him in a life of suffering and a death of shame. His heart went with all that He did. This is beautifully set forth in Isaiah 50, where the Spirit of Christ speaks in the prophet saying, “The Lord God has given Me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: He wakeneth morning by morning, He wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned. The Lord God has opened Mine ear, and I was not rebellious, neither turned away back. I gave My back to the smiters, and My cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not My face from shame and spitting.” And in this connection I would quote a beautiful series of the Lord’s own sayings that we might contemplate them with wonder and joy.

“My meat and drink is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work” (4:34).

“I seek not Mine own will, but the will of the Father which has sent Me” (5:30).

“I came down from heaven, not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me” (6:38).

“The living Father has sent Me, and I live by the Father” (6:57).

“I and My Father are One.”

“Father, I thank Thee that Thou hast heard Me. And I knew that Thou hearest Me always” (11:41).

“The Father which sent Me, He gave Me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. And I know that His commandment is life everlasting: whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father said to Me, so I speak” (12:49-50).

“That the world may know that I love the Father: and as the Father gave Me commandment, even so I do” (14:31).

“I have kept My Father’s commandments, and abide in His love” (15:10).

“I have glorified Thee on the earth; I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do” (17:4).

“It is finished” (19:30).

I might quote many more of these sayings of His, but these are enough to prove to us that He was the blessed Man of Psalm 1, that walked not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seat of the scornful. But His delight was in the law of the Lord, and in His law did He meditate day and night. In nature and life, in thought and word and deed, in spirit, soul and body He was always and altogether the holy One of God.