John,
After listening to the short audio that Token sent out, what is really beginning to stand out to me is that Jesus truly did divest himself and take on the nature of man. If he had an inside track or a “head start”, as I think Token put it, it wouldn’t have been a test at all, and it doesn’t seem like it would have taken him 40 days to overcome anything. He had to overcome that flesh just as we do. And he now had the same means to overcome it as we do. It seems like the only “advantage” that Jesus had was that he had plenty of faith to believe that anything was possible through the life from God that he now had in that fleshly body.
I have a question: Would Jesus, the man, have been considered a sinner before he was baptized in the Jordan? When Peter, or Paul, or John said that “in him, there is no sin”, were they only referring to Jesus after the Son of God came to his earthly temple? It’s hard to think of Jesus being a sinner at any time, but then without the Spirit of God dwelling in him, wasn’t it in his nature to sin just as any other human being?
Vince
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That’s a question I asked my father many years ago. I said, “Was Jesus sinless from the time he was born in Bethlehem, or just from the time he was born again at the Jordan River?” He said, “It doesn’t matter what Jesus was or did before the Spirit came. The only thing that matters is that he was without sin from that time on because what God made him that day was what was offered to God for sin.”
jdc