Such insight would be hard for us to comprehend in any child, but then,
the Lord was no ordinary man. Yes, He learned as we learn; He grew as we
grow; He developed as we develop, “but sooner, more fully and more perfectly
than others” because He was moved and directed from birth by nothing less
than the Divine love. And He was not regenerated; He was glorified. There’s a
big difference. (Ibid. 1438)
All this leads us finally to a most important conclusion about the
temptations that the Lord faced and how we should think of them. It’s a
popular idea among many Christians, drawn largely from the New Testament
Epistles, that Jesus was tempted just as we are, that is to say, by the lusts of the
flesh and so on. We read, for example, in Hebrews 4:15, that “we do not have a
High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points
tempted as we are, yet without sin.” Really?
It’s true, of course, that He was tempted by all the evils and falsities inherent
in His maternal heredity, but to think of Him as having any real interest in
such things seems completely inconsistent with the teachings about His inner
life. Rather what concerned Him from earliest childhood was the salvation of
the human race, the urgent, compelling need to re-order the heavens and the
hells so that we could be raised up out of such things.
What bothered Him, if we can use that word for temptations, is that
people in rejecting Him would reject the possibility of their own salvation. In
fact (and it’s a whole new subject for another day) this is what caused the Lord
His most grievous and painful temptations, not the relatively crude fallacies
and allurements of the flesh, which He clearly overcame as soon as they came
to His conscious awareness – very early on.
Of course, if we think of the Lord as having what we might call an easy
time with the things that seem to cause us the most grief, we may wonder
whether He can really understand us and help us in our struggles and pain.
But this is the critical point: these things are easy for the Lord. They were the
simplest things He had to deal with in the world and He dealt with them at a
very early age so that He could go on in His wisdom and strength to subjugate
all of the hells and liberate us all from all the compelling evils of the loves of
self and the world – if we will only turn to Him.
Yes, the Lord’s life was similar to ours. “He assumed the Human according
to His own Divine order,” being “conceived, carried in the womb, born, and
educated . . . acquiring in due course the knowledge by which He might attain
to intelligence and wisdom.” (True Christian Religion 89) But He was also very
different, being motivated from conception by an infinite, Divine love for
the salvation of the entire human race. And it is precisely that difference that
makes it possible for us to call on Him in every circumstance, no matter how
crude or overwhelming it may be to us.
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