You plunge headfirst into a tank of ice-cold water. Disoriented, you flail underwater until you finally manage to upright yourself and open your eyes. The first thing you see is a great white shark racing toward you, fins angled back, razor-sharp teeth glimmering.
We’ve all seen enough movies to know what happens next in this scenario. But what if, when the shark clamped down its mighty jaws upon you, its teeth never even punctured your body? What if its bite never hurt you?
This scenario analogizes the 33 ½ years Jesus Christ spent on earth. John 1:14 says, “And the Word became flesh and tabernacle among us… full of grace and reality.” We know that the Word here is God Himself, who put on flesh so that He could have both the human life and divine life.
There’s a problem here, though: the flesh is full of sin. Paul laments the condition of the flesh in Romans 7:18, writing, “For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, nothing good dwells.” It’s not just sin that dwells in the flesh, but Satan himself (sin is personified in Romans 7). How could God—our holy, righteous, perfect, sinless God—become flesh just like us, and not succumb to sin?
It wasn’t for a lack of trying on Satan’s part. In Matthew 4, the Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness. After fasting for 40 days, the devil appears to tempt him three times. In his craftiness, the devil even uses God’s own declaration—that He was the beloved Son of the Father—as grounds to tempt Him, trying to test His strength and divine abilities. Each time, though, Jesus resists and rebukes Satan, until he finally leaves, defeated.
The difference between Jesus living in the flesh and the rest of the world is that Jesus was not born of a human father, but only of a human mother. His humanity is true flesh; however, His humanity is not of the male, but of the female. Without a human father, the sinfulness of our fallen nature wasn’t passed on to Him in His human birth (Rom 5:12). Our flesh is not only flesh but sinful flesh, but the flesh of Christ, having nothing to do with the male, is not sinful flesh.
It is clear that Jesus put on humanity, flesh. Outwardly, He had the likeness of a sinful man. However, He never actually experienced the sin of a sinful man. That’s because, despite being 100 percent man, Jesus was also 100 percent God, perfect and sinless in nature.
This duality explains why Jesus never succumbed to Satan’s temptations in the wilderness, but was still susceptible to temptation in the first place. It explains why, in the Garden of Gethsemane, before He was delivered up to be crucified, Jesus prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.” As a man, Jesus was horrified before the cross, but He sought His Father’s will and would carry it out at any cost.
In His divinity, God is unattainable, unapproachable and unrelatable. Ever since man fell in the Garden of Eden, our sin has placed a barrier between God and us. But in His humanity, God as Jesus Christ is absolutely approachable and relatable. Physically, people could literally approach and touch Christ in the flesh. But Jesus could also relate to their struggles. He knew the weight of temptation (Heb 4:15). He knew the sting of death. Like those sharks in the tank, sin surrounded Him.
The only difference is, He never participated in it.
As a result, when Christ died on the cross for all of humanity, He had the power and authority to put all sin to death with Him. Sin constantly surrounded Him when He lived in the flesh, and that very sin got nailed to the cross along with Him, because he never experienced it Himself. On the cross, He condemned sin in the flesh (Rom 8:3). At that moment, the veil of the temple was torn, and man once again had a means to contact God.
There’s one more attribute that Christ’s putting on of flesh gave Him: empathy. By living as a man, Christ came to know human struggle. He knew pain. He knew loss. He knew fear. He knew temptation. He knew every feeling we grapple with in our own Christian lives—our sinful Christian lives, mind you—and He had the tenderness to say, “I understand.” But as a perfect, sinless God, He also had the power to take away our sins so that we could have a union with Him once more.
We don’t serve a cold, faraway, strictly judicious God; instead, we serve a caring God who lives inside of us, understands our sinful nature and loves us enough to bear the weight of our sin, without ever experiencing it Himself.
Remember that shark tank? Jesus plunged headfirst into it so He could put the whole ocean to death on the cross with Him.
By: Bryan Rolli
- Are we waiting around for a big house in heaven? - February 10, 2017
- Living in the tension of the times - November 18, 2016
- God in the Shark Tank - October 20, 2016
Yes, we can come to Him and He relates to us. In my New Testament reading I finished the gospels last week. One phrase which stood out during this reading was the multiple times He was “moved with compassion.” Thank Him for this.