ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 28 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Okay. I think I understand all of this. But let me ask one more question: Jesus did not sin. But was it possible for him to sin? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: This is one of the questions which one -- a person would rather ignore entirely than if you would ask various ministers in the Lutheran Church, you would be surprised. They won't all come down on one side. I'm not going to say it's going to come down 50/50. I had a personal experience with this particular question because the pastor where I was Vicaring in Manhattan, Kansas, was teaching that Jesus could sin. And since being a very young man of 22 years of age, I had all of the answers. And I informed other people that the pastor was wrong. And you learn very soon that there are any number of ways to handle problems. And one of them is not to -- never to reprimand a person publicly. And here we get into the question -- the word -- this is really a difficult question because of the word possible. We could take it back to Adam and phrase the question this way: For Adam was it possible to sin? Yes, it was possible for him to sin. But he didn't have to sin. How about us? Is it possible for us human beings to sin? Well, as Lutherans I think we already know the answer. We Lutherans have a phrase ***simalusta setbicacha. The word sima is the word from which we get the word simultaneously, which means at the same time we are sinner and saint. There are other denominations, the holiness denominations, that say, "Yes, we're sinner and saint. But first we're sinners and then we become saints and we don't go back to sinning anymore." And that kind of thinking is widespread, that sin is somehow past tense in our lives. Lutherans don't feel like that at all. Now comes the question of whether Christ could sin. Let's go back to Adam again. Do we sin like Adam? No, we don't sin like Adam. When Adam sinned, he went from a state of complete holiness into a condition of sin. He was a traitor. He actually crossed the boundary from one type of existence to another type of existence. And he did this of his own free will. Do we have a free will? Yes, we still have a free will. We have a free will to sin and to keep on sinning. We're not -- we have never lived in the life of complete holiness. We live in a state of sanification. But when nobody is looking, sometimes we cross back over the boundary. And then we go back as quickly as we can. That's our life, ***simausbacador, going back and forth. How about Jesus? If we go back to the presupposition that we set forth in the previous question about the sinlessness of Jesus, Jesus was not simply a man. If we say that Jesus is able to sin, we're saying this: That he is living -- he is living as if he were only a human being. But he's never only a human being. The deity, the Godness of the Trinity completely dwells in him all the time. By definition he is everything which is opposed to sin. So we want to say that Christ is not able to sin. Now, this raises up a very significant question. What about the temptations? In the gospels of Matthew and Luke, the three temptations of Jesus have a very prominent place. They -- in the Gospel of Matthew, they appear right after his baptism. Maybe this is as much about us as it is about Jesus. It says that when Jesus was baptized, the Spirit of God came upon him. And then it says the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness to be tempted of Satan. This is exactly opposed to what we understand as Christianity. Because Christianity sometimes is presented to us as a great victory over Satan in our lives. This is going to be an opportunity for all types of personal, financial and health success. That our problems will go behind us. But if the baptism of Jesus is in any way a model or paradigm of our own lives, the Christian is going to experience worse conditions after he is baptized than he does before. The Holy Spirit is going to put him in very difficult situations. The temptations for Jesus and the temptations for Christians are the same kind. In this sense they bring suffering. I know I've heard it preached many times that the whole -- I've heard it preached many times from the pulpit that the unbeliever is quaking in his boots because he fears going to hell. I wonder if preachers who say those kind of things have ever talked to a human being who is an unbeliever. The unbelievers I know are perfectly content. They have -- they seem to be incapable of thinking about the afterlife at all. You would think that some tragedies of some families would bring people to believe in God or to at least think -- at least begin thinking of religious things. But it never happens that way. I won't say it never happens. But it's very rare. What happens to the Christian is that there is an increase in holiness. But it's a kind of a negative thing. He becomes aware of who he is. The Christian is able to look at himself for what he is. And that's the worst possible thing. The unbeliever does not have that particular problem. It would be great to be an unbeliever. Because the unbeliever can engage in all kinds of behaviors. He can have all kinds of thoughts. And he's never held accountable. He never sees what he does as something which is unacceptable to God or that he has done something wrong. He understands right and wrong insofar as there are external punishments. But he is able to engage in all types of activities because he never sees himself as a saint. We Christians are saints. Our saintliness means we become more and more aware of our lack of saintliness. The temptations for Jesus were horrible because they were directed to what he was in his weakness. When Jesus was tempted, he did not address his temptations -- he did not address his temptations from the position of God. He addressed his temptations from his humiliation. Now, let's consider the temptations. The first temptation is "Turn these stones into bread." What's the temptation? The temptation was that he should use his power which he has as the Son of God. And that's what Satan said, "If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread. He would have been using the gifts which God had given him for his own advantage. He was tempted to do that. And similarly also with the second temptation of "Jump down from the temple." If he jumped down from the temple, he would not have had to go to Jerusalem. He could have jumped down from the temple and everybody would have cried, "The Messiah, the Messiah, the Messiah." He would not have had to face the cross in death. And of course the last one was Satan says that if Christ would worship Satan, he would give him all the territories of the world. That temptation goes back -- right back to the Garden of Eden. And that is when our first parents sinned. It wasn't an ordinary sin. It was a sin against the First Commandment. They had pushed God to the side. And now Satan had been enthroned as God. Satan was becoming the center of their devotion. Satan was giving them a word that they could believe. So was Christ tempted out of his -- tempted to find an easy way to go into his glory? The answer is yes. However, as God he could never desert God. He could not desert what he wasn't himself. But he pushed his Godhood aside, his deity aside, and he faced these problems, just as we do. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***