“For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” (Heb. 4:15)
In all of the accounts of the intense opposition from the religious and political leaders the Pharisees, scribes, Sadducees, and lawyers that Jesus responds to as recorded in the four New Testament gospels, we see what we would expect to see in the moral attributes in a person claiming to be the divine Son of God and long-awaited Messiah (Isa. 11:1-5, 35:1-8).
In His miraculous healings of the blind and the lame, of inspired preaching to hundreds and sometimes thousands of people (Matthew chapters 5-7), and in His personal interactions with His disciples and the common people, we see the traits of virtue we would expect to see actualized through Immanuel (Isa. 7:14), meaning God with us.
We see truth, honesty, kindness, tolerance, forgiveness, humility, and uncompromising courage, to name a few positive attributes that give Jesus a grade of A-plus, of perfect 100-percent test scores across-the-board within the broad array of moral concepts we can use as standards for judgment.
We can agree with Pilate the Roman governor in Jerusalem after examining Jesus: “I find in him no fault at all.” (Jn. 18:38).
But what we do not see today looking back in hindsight into first-century Jerusalem during the time of the ministry of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, is why the Passover sacrifice of Exodus 12:26-27 had no connection with the Old Testament Judaic understanding of the anticipated, coming Messiah.
How is it that nearly everyone in and around A.D. 27 in Israel were looking hopefully and expectantly for a Joshua or King David type warrior/priest as Messiah who would expel the loathsome Romans out of their country as had occurred with numerous other enemy invaders in their past national history, and fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy of 9:6-7 of God setting-up His eternal kingdom in Jerusalem?
No one expected the coming Messiah to also be the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice, offering His own body and life for mankind’s sins, according to the obscure and little understood scriptural passages of Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53.
This is where God’s ways and our ways sharply divide, differentiating the life-script for Jesus Christ as being above and beyond human literary invention.
God’s higher ways lift the biblical narrative above other contemporary worldview narratives in today’s modern marketplace of ideas.
But the one area where we canwith solid confidence through the benefit of hindsight today conclude that Jesus Christ is operating at the cutting-edge of divine perfection, is that Jesus Christ is living-out His God-composed life-script to be the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for sin to the outer limits of absolute perfection.
The life-script mission of Jesus Christ as the Passover Lamb of God would require perfect adherence without any gaps of inconsistency to the uniquely biblical, moral concept of God-sovereignty, Jesus Himself being the Second Person of the Trinity.
Self-will to go His own way apart from God the Father and the Holy Spirit is inconceivable at the high level of brilliant pure light and absolute goodness (Lk. 22:42).
This level of sacrificial love to do the optimum right thing for others would be humanly impossible for anyone other than the messianic God/man Jesus Christ to perfectly actualize.
Every positive person of faith in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, other than Jesus Christ, have God-composed life-scripts that take into account a built-in allowance for human error (Rom. 4:6-8).
All of these positive people of faith are nonetheless morally imperfect and are not perfectly virtuous.
The great men and women of faith in the Bible are morally imperfect like the rest of us in the many categories of the broad array of moral concepts, but also in their inability to perfectly follow-through within their God-composed life-scripts, without stumbling and bumbling at certain points along the way in pursuit of their divinely created callings and destinies.
The biblical narrative stories of faith can be described as God’s attempt to give us something of Himselfto enable us to experience first-hand the expression in-and-through-us of some portion of His divine character. This is actualized through the events of God-composed life-script storylines. But we can also see that this extraordinary program entails our imperfect performance.
Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, Esther and Mordecai, Ruth, Hannah, Daniel, Peter, and Paul…none of these people are morally perfect and sinless.
Their life-scripts are based upon Holy Spirit empowered grace-through-faith, and proceed according to their individually exceptional gifts and abilities, plus the creative imagination of God their Creator as life-script Writer.
These biblical life-scripts are not based upon the self-realization of autonomous individualism built upon the attempt to save ourselves through the self-performance of good-works.
Programs of self-salvation based upon self-reliance are by definition human-driven and therefore fall short of moral perfection and sinless virtue.
But the God-composed life-script for Jesus Christ the Son of God intentionally exploits and utilizes to the fullest His uniquely divine nature to the maximum extent to be able to perfectly succeed in the one area wherein God knows we will have the mostdifficulty.
This is the area that is the definition of sin and that the cross on Calvary Hill focuses upon…the area of God-sovereignty versus self-sovereignty…of following God’s leading in our lives compared instead to going our own way in shortsighted self-rulership (Isa. 53:6).
God singles-out and highlights this key element within the broad array of moral concepts, honestly and candidly revealed in the difficulty that Jesus has in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before His crucifixion.
Matthew 26:36-46 and Luke 22:39-46 record that in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of His arrest and preliminary trial that Jesus asked His disciples to “watch and pray.”
Jesus said that His soul was “exceedingly sorrowful.” The scriptures record that He received the assistance from an angel from heaven to strengthen Him, and that He went back a second time to “pray more earnestly.”
Luke 22:44 records that Jesus sweat “great drops of blood falling down to the ground,” a condition known to modern medical science called hematidrosis.[1]
The remarkable words of Jesus spoken that night: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: never the less not my will, but thine, be done” (Lk. 22:42), tells us that God has brilliantly written a life-script for Himself, for our benefit.
The life-script for the second Person of the Trinity living in a human body manages to challenge Himself in the one humanly unreachable zone of moral perfection and sinless virtue, of making perfect choices and doing the right thing every time.
Yet this humanly unreachable zone of perfection is still comprehensible within our capacity for moral reasoning, in the test-case scenario in the Garden of Gethsemane ofGod-sovereignty consistent, unified, and indivisible within GodHimself, within the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
If Jesus does not say in perfect faith without skipping a beat: “nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done,” but instead decides to go in another direction other than the cross the next day, at that precise moment in time God-sovereignty would have been split in two.
This would have introduced autonomous individual rebellion into the God-head of the Trinity, of Jesus the Son of God going His own way apart from the Father and away from His ancient destiny as the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” (Rev. 13:8).
This unprecedented development of the testing of divinely sinless unity-of-purpose consistent between God the Father, Jesus the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit, highlights God-sovereignty as the central issue in all of reality, the top-shelf “queen” of the virtues.
[1] Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 195.
The Cross in the Christian Life 