Imagine you are the perfect Being. Complete. Holy. All powerful. All knowing across the spectrum of time. Perfection personified within and beyond the universe.
How humbling must it have been to be born as a baby human?! To obey and submit to flawed earthly parents. To get along with imperfect, grumbling, jealous siblings. To grow up in a backwater town in a conquered nation. To talk and listen among people who for the most part just don’t get it.
To live a routine, hum-drum life as a son, a carpenter, a Jew. To be basically invisible for most of his youth, adolescence, and young adult life – among fellow humans.
And all the while, He never sinned. Although tempted just as we are on a daily, hourly, or constant basis. 40 days of incessant temptation directly from Satan. Yet never to have (even once) given in to his earthly human nature – I cannot fathom such a man!
Children learn at such an incredibly young age the tools of manipulation, behavioral modification and reinforcement, and the desire to have it my way. Me, me, me! Tantrum, fake tears, jumping up and down. All to get WHAT I WANT. This is nothing more than infantile greed, lust for things, desire for control. The Father of Lies, the Prince of the Air, the roaring lion of destruction – Satan himself – begins early to plot our downfall. Maybe even at the moment that we are conceived, Satan is assigning demons to bedevil us for our entire earthly existence.
But Jesus, receiving mega-doses of temptation, never gave in and sinned. And because of His faithfulness, He was able to present Himself as a spotless sacrifice for our sins on the Cross.
Unbelievable. Amazing. Unfathomable.
Only Jesus.
A Sinner's Diary 