1Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming on you. 2Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. 3Your gold and your silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be for a testimony against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up your treasure in the last days. 4Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you have kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of those who reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Armies. 5You have lived in luxury on the earth, and taken your pleasure. You have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter. 6You have condemned and you have murdered the righteous one. He doesn’t resist you.
7Be patient therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. Behold, the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over it, until it receives the early and late rain. 8You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.
9Don’t grumble, brothers, against one another, so that you won’t be judged. Behold, the judge stands at the door. 10Take, brothers, for an example of suffering and of perseverance, the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. 11Behold, we call them blessed who endured. You have heard of the perseverance of Job and have seen the Lord in the outcome, and how the Lord is full of compassion and mercy.
12But above all things, my brothers, don’t swear— not by heaven, or by the earth, or by any other oath; but let your “yes” be “yes”, and your “no”, “no”, so that you don’t fall into hypocrisy.
13Is any among you suffering? Let him pray. Is any cheerful? Let him sing praises. 14Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the assembly, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; 15and the prayer of faith will heal him who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. If he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. 16Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The insistent prayer of a righteous person is powerfully effective. 17Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it didn’t rain on the earth for three years and six months. 18He prayed again, and the sky gave rain, and the earth produced its fruit.
19Brothers, if any among you wanders from the truth and someone turns him back, 20let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save a soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.
Jesus Christ was fully God and fully human and these facts raise the question of the potential for sin in the life of Jesus. Since Jesus was fully human, does that mean there was a sinful nature? The issue of the possibility of Jesus Christ yielding to temptation and sinning deals with the theological terms peccability and impeccability and come from the Latin word peccare, “to sin.” If one holds to the peccability of Jesus, then their position is that Christ could sin, but didn’t do so. If one argues for impeccability then the position is that Christ could not sin. The discussion is one regarding the phrases “able not to sin” and “not able to sin.”
In accordance with the teaching of Scripture, both views acknowledge that Christ’s temptations were real (Heb 4:15), Christ experienced struggle (Matt 26:36-46), and Christ did not sin (2 Cor 5:21; Heb 7:26; James 5:6; 1 Pet 2:22, 3:18; 1 John 3:5). Those who argue that Christ could sin contend that it is a logical deduction that if and since Christ was tempted, He could have sinned. To say that He could not sin is to say the temptations were not real and that ultimately He cannot truly sympathize with humanity. They also contend that if the possibility of sinning did not exist then Jesus did not have freedom of the will.
In response, the fact that Jesus could be and was tempted does not mean that He was susceptible to sin. By analogy, we note that just because an army can be attacked, that does not mean that the army can be conquered. Because of Christ’s unique nature (without a sinful nature), that which applies to us (temptation and susceptibility) does not necessarily apply to Christ. Christ can understand and sympathize with human suffering and temptation because although His temptations were not always exactly parallel to those that we experience, His human nature was tried. The temptations of Christ were in every way like ours except that they did not originate in Himself; He was tempted from without, not from within. Jesus Christ manifested His free will by not sinning. Although tempted like us, Jesus never sinned. Because Jesus uniquely had two natures, fully divine and fully human, those natures existed and functioned simultaneously. Had his human nature existed independently then theoretically Jesus could have sinned. However, it did not exist as such. Both the human and divine natures existed fully in Jesus from the moment of conception. Had Jesus sinned, the act would have involved both natures and Jesus would then not have been truly God. Our conclusion must be therefore that it was not possible for Jesus to sin. The temptations of Jesus were real because He did not give in to them. We must always remember that when thinking about issues such as these we are dealing with Jesus as fully God and fully human—something that never has been and never will be true of anyone else. It is also something that we are unable to fully comprehend. We must affirm the teachings of Scripture and do so knowing that our understanding of them is true but incomplete.