PROVERBS #3: THE SON LEARNS ABOUT PURITY

Many Christians view Jesus as some ethereal human figure who was untouched by the messy realities of everyday life because He was God in the flesh. Many will say that Jesus was truly man, but not a man like us. The error of deifying the true humanity of Jesus found its way into the early church and revealed itself in a variety of forms. They all united around the idea that the Son of God was too celestial to possess all the passions ascribed to mere mortals. Fortunately, the heros of the earthly church like Ignatius and Irenaeus, fought valiantly for the true ‘human’ humanity of Christ which, among other things, preserved the substitutionary atonement. The one who took humanity’s place on the cross must be “in all points like we.” And that includes temptation. Jesus must experience everything we experience that is not sin. Like us, Jesus must “endure to the end.” Like us Jesus must trust God. Like us Jesus must pray to access God’s will. And like us Jesus fights real temptation. May I say it? Jesus really had to resist falling into sin. That is because Jesus possessed all the human passions we have and thus could potentially yield to them. Theologian R.C. Sproul offers these poignant words,

“The best theologians, past and present, have been divided on the question of whether Jesus could have sinned. I believe that since Jesus was fully human, it was possible for him to sin. Obviously, the divine nature cannot sin. But if Christ's divine nature prevented him from sinning, in what sense did he obey the law of God as the second Adam? At his birth, Jesus' human nature was exactly the same as Adam's before the fall, with respect to his moral capabilities.” (for full article see: https://learn.ligonier.org/articles/could-jesus-have-sinned).

In other words Jesus could be tempted….. really tempted. It is not a mistake that the Father’s counsel to the Son in the Book of Proverbs begins with the lure of temptation. We must remember that as the divine Son, Jesus never endured temptation to sin until He came to earth. Dealing with the enticement to sin was totally new to Him. As God He had no temptation to sin for James 1:13 says, “God cannot be tempted by evil.” But as a true man, as Sproul says, in order to be the perfect second Adam to represent humanity, He must stand on the same ground that Adam stood. He stood in the possibility of disobeying God. That is, Jesus must experience everything we experience in order to be our substitute. And though His life was marked by genuine struggle, He overcame. So when the Father sent the Son into the world to assume “the likeness of human flesh,” it makes sense that He would warn His Son about things He would face. And first and foremost on the list was temptation. Proverbs begins with this counsel from the Father:

“My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. If they say, ‘Come with us, let us lie in wait to shed blood; let us lurk secretly for the innocent without cause; let us swallow them alive like Sheol, and whole, like those who go down to the Pit; we shall find all kinds of precious possessions, we shall fill our houses with spoil; cast in your lot among us, let us all have one purse’— my son, do not walk in the way with them, keep your foot from their path; for their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed blood. Surely, in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird; but they lie in wait for their own blood, they lurk secretly for their own lives. So are the ways of everyone who is greedy for gain; It takes away the life of its owners’ (Proverbs 1:10-19).

Jesus must learn how to resist the many temptations that would surely come. And the fact that Jesus must resist temptation in the same way we are commanded to resist it, ought to fill us with great awe. No man has ever completely resisted the temptations of the flesh. And yet here was Jesus, truly man like us in all points, overcoming temptation and enduring to the end and He did it without invoking the advantage of deity.

Just as Proverbs lists temptation as the Son’s first counsel from His Father, so when we read about His life we see the first major hurdle Jesus must face was that of temptation. This we find in Matthew 4:1-11. What is important to see in Jesus’ temptation is that He was really tempted. He did not face the devil with a secret superpower in his hip pocket that He could invoke to keep Him from sinning. Rather, He is described as a weak, weak man emaciated by a cruel environment, who must rely on faith in His father’s goodness alone in order to reject the temptation to sin. Jesus must use all the ordinary means to fight for perfection. His faith was the pure faith of a man, and His trust in the indwelling of the Spirit was the pure trust of a man. In other words, Jesus overcame by the choice of His human will as it leaned on the almighty God. No smoke and mirrors here. No mock re-enactment. This was a real temptation by a real man who endured real, agonizing, spiritual torment, and who engaged in a real spiritual battle.

For this reason we find in the opening nine chapters of Proverbs the theme of the son’s instruction about resisting sin, especially sexual sin. No less than 4 times the Father gives the warning not to yield to the sweet enticements of the immoral woman. Here are some samples:

“For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as wormwood,
Sharp as a two-edged sword” (Proverbs 5:3-4).

“Keep you from the evil woman, from the flattering tongue of a seductress.Do not lust after her beauty in your heart, nor let her allure you with her eyelids. For by means of a harlot a man is reduced to a crust of bread” (Proverbs 6:24-26).

“With her enticing speech she caused him to yield, with her flattering lips she seduced him. Immediately he went after her, as an ox goes to the slaughter, or as a fool to the correction of the stocks, till an arrow struck his liver. As a bird hastens to the snare,
He did not know it would cost his life” (Proverbs 7:21-23).

‘As for him who lacks understanding, she says to him, “Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.” But he does not know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of hell’ (Proverbs 9:16-18).

What a litany of warnings! And why so many warnings about the enticements of sexual sin? For the simple reason that sexual sin has always dominated the landscape of human history. From Lamech’s boast in Gen 4:19, to Israel’s perverse history in Judges and Kings, to the unbridled expression of sexual aberrations in the highly ‘civilized’ western world of the 20th and 21st Centuries, the human race has drowned herself in the putrid waters of sexual misconduct. Ministries go down by the hour due to sexual sin. Back alleys, and computer screens are tainted with its foul images. Without a doubt Jesus would face sexual temptation early on. The Father saw it coming and thus devoted massive amounts of space to warn His Son about the lurking danger. Naturally the Father knew that Jesus would minister to the likes of Mary Magdalene, the notorious woman who washed His feet with her tears, and the adulterous woman. Only constant vigilance by the Son of God would keep Him pure. And oh, what a victory He achieved when through all those years of living as a true man, Jesus never once dipped his feet into the rancid waters of sexual sin. He remained holy for His entire thirty three years of life. And this perfection rested on His firm belief that the Father would give Him something better than sexual pleasures, and that the pain of resisting sin would be far, far less than the pain of failing in His sacred mission to save sinners.

And so the beginning of Proverbs focuses on the Son’s training in how to resist temptation. The wonder of it all is that the Son listened and the Son overcame! And because of this every believer should now stand up and rejoice. For our righteousness lies not in our ability to resist temptation (for we all fail), but in our trusting in the Son’s victory as He resisted temptation. And when we trust Him, His perfections, and His victories in fighting sin, becomes ours. And because Christ the Son listened and overcame, so now we, His adopted sons, can read Proverbs with the assurance that when we listen to the same Father that Jesus listened to, we enter the possibility of living pure and holy lives just as He lived, but only by His power and for His glory.