This scripture from Isaiah 28 is not particularly pleasant, but it is still relevant. It is directed toward a nation which once claimed to be God’s people, and which continued to make that claim in Isaiah’s day. And in that sense, it is a type of the United States, which sometimes claims to be a Christian nation. Despite its overt acceptance of some very repugnant sins, America claims to be a Christian nation. Despite its rejection of the religious principles of its Christian founders, it claims to be Christian. And despite being filled with – and often converted to – all manner of world religions, it still has the audacity to make the “Christian” claim from time to time. Like Israel’s tribe of Ephraim, many of our political leaders, and even our religious leaders, are sinners of various kinds – drunks, gluttons, immoral, addicted to power and to many different vices. Jehovah, the God of Israel, told the people of Isaiah’s day that a strong enemy was coming to judge her. “Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one, which as a tempest of hail and a destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth with the hand. The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, shall be trodden under feet. They also have erred through wine, and through strong drink are out of the way; the priest and the prophet have erred through strong drink, they are swallowed up of wine, they are out of the way through strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in judgment.”
But the Lord had not forsaken His nation, and continued to send teachers and prophets to expose her sins and to call her back to righteousness. The lessons were difficult, and they were going to get a lot worse. They were not lessons for babies. “Whom shall he teach knowledge? and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts.” And as is often the case, that instruction would have to come slowly and gradually. The sudden powerful dose of the medicine they needed would kill them not cure them. “For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little: For with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this people. The word of the LORD was unto them precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little; that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.”
The solid doctrines and deep things of God usually have to be learned point by point, laying harder precepts on the top of earlier precepts. And in that light, I would like once again to go back to the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. I want to magnify His name this morning. I don’t think that we can speak too often – or too highly – of Christ. But it is not “Jesus the son of Mary” that I am interested in today; it is “the LORD Jesus, the Son of God.” I would like you to consider something which the Lord Jesus could not do. And still, this is the Jesus we need; this is the Christ who is the Lord and Saviour.
I hope that you are not unfamiliar with the $3.00 word “IMPECCABLE.”
If that is something new to you, I’d like to help you to understand its meaning and importance. Our Lord Jesus Christ was – and is – “impeccable.” This is something which is only used periodically these days, and usually under special circumstances. Some biographer might write about Princess Diana, or Jacqueline Kennedy, saying that she was an “impeccable dresser.” Someone may be described as having “impeccable taste” when in comes to art or design. Most of us hear this word “impeccable” in a context like these, and all we know is that it is something good – at least in the subjective mind of the writer. And indeed, impeccability is “very good,” but the word means far more than “good.” It comes from the Latin language where “peccare” is the word for “SIN.” The prefix “im” adds a negative to that word, so “impeccare” and “impeccable” mean “WITHOUT SIN.” “Impeccable” has come to mean “perfection,” but I’m not sure that such a thing exists in our world. In our world today, the opposite of “impeccable” is “IMPERFECT.” But actually its true antithesis or antonym is “wicked” or “SINFUL.”
When I say that Jesus was “impeccable,” I begin by saying that Jesus was absolutely and perfectly sinless.
That statement is very, very important.
“Impeccable” is not one of those semi-useless theological terms about which the average Christian thinks he doesn’t need to be concerned. This is not merely a descriptive term of the Christ whom that Christian has learned to love. This is a doctrine which resides at the core of our salvation and at the center of who our Saviour must be.
Throughout history there have been false gods who have been depicted as wretchedly sinful. The ancient Romans and Greeks seem to have loved serving imaginary gods as sinful as themselves. The obvious reason for their delight and devotion was that it gave them an excuse for their own behavior. Many people think: “Just so long as my sin isn’t so bad as to anger the gods, I shall be all right.” And the sad truth of the matter is that this is still the attitude of many professing Christians today. In contrast to these, there have been other societies which claimed to have deities that were perfect. And we stand among them – with one major difference – in our case it is the truth – not religious fiction. Christ Jesus lived and died without committing a single sin; without contemplating sin; encouraging any sin.
This is essential doctrine because if Christ were not absolutely sinless, the foundations of our faith would turn to jelly, and our entire “religion” would flop over and crush us like the flipping of an iceberg. Obviously, everyone of US are sinners. “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” “There is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.” And God has ordained that “the wages of sin is (eternal) death,” and this is a rule He will not break. But out of His magnificent Grace, the Lord has chosen to rescue the dying sinner, by supplying a substitute to die in our place. And that sacrificial Lamb was His own dear eternal son, “born of woman, made under the law, to redeem us who were under the law.” These are the rudiments of the gospel.
Christ dwelt among us as God manifest in the flesh; a true man in every sense of the word, but the God-man. And through His miraculous virgin birth, He came into this world without Adam’s sin nature. The way in which Jesus was born was not in order to make a nice, end-of-year story. It was not simply to make Him unique. The virgin birth was the only way God could provide the sinless substitute we needed for salvation. I Peter 1:19 says that Christ Jesus was the lamb of God without blemish and without spot. Hebrews 7:26 says that He was “holy, harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners.” “He did no sin, neither was guile found in this mouth.” “He was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin.” All of this is basic Bible instruction – the rudimentary elements of the Gospel.
The only way that sinners, like us, can be delivered from the penalty of our sin is to have a substitute suffer in our place. And that substitute has to be, in some particular ways, our brother. A frog, a dog, a lamb, a goat, a bullock or an elephant are not equal to our needs as sinful human beings. Only a human being could take the place of another human being in the sight of God. But the only substitute divinely acceptable would have to suffer for US, and not for HIMSELF. That is – no sinner could be an adequate substitute for another sinner. We need a perfect and sinless sacrifice, and therefore Jesus had to be perfectly sinless.
But the sinlessness of Christ is only the beginning of the doctrine of Jesus’ impeccability.
The fact is – Jesus Christ was sinless, because it was IMPOSSIBLE for Him to sin. There is the true Christian definition of “impeccability” – Christ could not possibly have sinned. It is fashionable today to teach that for our sakes Jesus DID not sin. That is true, but it is demeaning, deceitful and ultimately disastrous to stop there. Jesus DID not sin, because He COULD not sin.
God cannot do anything which is contrary to His nature. For example, Titus 1:2 says that it is impossible for God to LIE. Also, it is impossible for God to DIE – the only wise God is eternal and immortal – I Timothy 1:17. As we have recently seen in our study of Genesis, there was no death until there was sin. God cannot die because God cannot lie, or sin in any other way. There are other things which God cannot do. He cannot do them because there are contrary to His nature. For example, He cannot ever be dependent upon anything – He is independent and autonomous. He never needs anything from any of us. And God never learns things as we do. His omniscience means that He knows all things and doesn’t need any information from us or from any other source. Nothing ever surprises Him, and He doesn’t need to hear our prayers, to know what things that we need. “Line upon line and precept upon precept” does not apply to Him.
Returning to my point – God cannot sin. And Jesus Christ, the Son of God, despite being the Son of Man, could not sin. God the Father, and God the Son are as Holy as the Holy Spirit. We are commanded to exalt the Lord our God; for the Lord our God is holy. That holiness means a complete separation and segregation from any and all forms of sin and corruption. Jehovah will not allow sin in His presence. It is impossible for God to sin. Jehovah cannot contradict Himself, so among other things, some of which are not evil, He cannot sin.
Now, I don’t want to turn this message into a theological lecture any more than it has, so let me summarize: Since the Lord Jesus is God manifest in the flesh, and God cannot sin, Christ could not sin. Someone might be tempted to say, “Christ couldn’t sin even if he wanted to.” The fact is that Christ couldn’t even want to; it is an absolute impossibility. Jesus Christ was, is and shall always be the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. By that I mean that Jesus is God; He is deity. We are perfectly justified in calling Jesus by His Old Testament name – “Jehovah.” When Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, the Jews picked up stones to execute Him for blasphemy. They knew that to claim to be the Son of God was to claim deity. I make the same Biblical assumption. As I Timothy 3:16 teaches us Jesus was “God manifest in the flesh.”
Listen to the words of John 14:30 – In speaking to His disciples, Jesus said, ”Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father: for my Father is greater than I. And now I have told you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye might believe. Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me.” What do those words mean – “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me”? Among other things, they are saying that Satan hasn’t anything that he can find to use against Christ. You have all seen a common house fly land on plane of glass. How does he stay there without sliding off? As smooth as man can make a sheet of glass, it is not smooth, and the microscopic hairs on the foot of a fly have no trouble clinging to the imperceptible, but rough, texture of the glass. My Saviour hasn’t anything, even microscopically small, upon which the Wicked One could sink his claws.
Someone says, well then, the temptation that Jesus endured wasn’t genuine. Oh, yes it was – as far as it went. “He was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin.” “He was led of the Spirit into the Wilderness where he was tempted of the Devil.” “Then the Devil departed from Him for a season,” even though his attack upon Christ never ceased. But it was all futile, “For God cannot ( successfully) be tempted with evil.”
The Greek word translated “tempt” is translated seven different ways in our Bibles. Among them is – “assay,” “examine,” “prove,” and “try” as well as “tempt.” In other words, to “tempt” is talking about a test. God “tests” people, but he never tempts them into sin. He is too holy for that. James says ”Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God for God cannot be tempted with evil, Neither tempteth he any man; but every man tempted when he drawn away of his own lust and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin and sin, when it is finished bringeth forth death.” Our Lord was tested, assayed, examined, proven and tried, but could not be brought into sin, because He had no aptitude for the things of sin and Satan – sin was contrary to His holy nature.. The prince of the world had no hook in Him; he found no weakness in Him – no corrupted appetite. The mighty Lion of the Tribe of Judah walked among the people of the world. And the tiny Chihuahua dog of Satan barked, yipped, growled, enticed and even attacked. But the Lion, not only, wasn’t hurt by the attack, but he didn’t even look in the dog’s direction. Satan had and has nothing in Christ.
Please plant this thought and doctrine firmly in your mind;
It is one of our cardinal doctrines – unimpeachable, irreplaceable, and non-negotiable. Our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, could not have sinned. To allow him the possibility of sin, is to grant that He was something less than God. That may be acceptable with some, but there can be no room for that in this church.
So again, how important is this doctrine? Let me make a very poor illustration. In the 1950s the United States was working on a missile called the Redstone Rocket. During development, it failed one of its preliminary tests. In the following investigation, an engineer discovered that he had made a mistake. He immediately reported his discovery to his boss, Werner von Braun. Instead of being fired, or severely chewed out, von Braun rewarded him – because, he said, it was vital to know exactly what had gone wrong.
The degree of accuracy maintained in the space program has been illustrated by von Braun in another place. He once wrote: “The Saturn 5 rocket has 5.6 million parts. Even if we had a 99.9 percent reliability, there still would be the possibility of 5,600 defective parts. If the average automobile with its 13,000 parts were to have the same reliability, it would have a breakdown only once every 100 years.” We are well aware that those early attempts of man to push into space have failed on several occasions. Perfection was critical in the launch of the retired Space shuttle program. When a simple o-ring was defective or warn it meant the death of several people. When a few heat-reducing tiles came off a shuttle, it came close to destruction.
As important as 99.9% perfection is to the space program, that would be failure to God’s salvation program. Our absolutely holy God demands absolute holiness, and without it no man shall see God. But you and I are a hundred o-rings and a thousand tiles short of the standard which God demands. So the Lord sent His Son – His impeccable, immaculate Son – to stand in the place of the sinner. He suffered the attacks of Satan, but even more important than that, He faced the demands of God’s law. And after He proved His perfection and fitness to the task, He went to God’s altar as God’s perfect sacrifice. He bare our sins “in his own body on the tree, that we, by his stripes could be healed.” “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law being made a curse of us.” But that “us” refers only to those give evidence of that salvation through their repentance and faith in Christ.
You and I are hopeless without the Lord Jesus. We must be forgiven by God Himself – YOU must be forgiven and given a new heart in His sight. Perhaps you have been nodding your head today, indicating that you believe Jesus Christ was impeccable and absolutely sinless. That is wonderful, but if that is all you hear from me this morning, it is pointless. The real point is – do you believe and trust that the sinless Son of God died on the cross to save sinners – to save YOU personally – from your sins? Christ Jesus is the eternal and perfect Son of God – God the Son. That is fact. But if He is not also your personal Saviour, what you think or not think about Him will mean nothing.
You and I need a perfect sacrifice and Saviour. There is a perfect, sinless, impeccable Saviour in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. With Him as your Redeemer, you are acceptable before God. Without Him you will continue your life as a hell-bound sinner, eventually dying in that lost condition. The exhortation of the Word of God is that you repent of your sins before the sinless one, and you reach out to Him by faith to deliver and forgive you of those sins. Will you do that this morning? Will you put your trust in the Lord Jesus?