How could Jesus truly be tempted if He could not sin?
If Jesus is truly God in the flesh, how can He be tempted? Is it not written that,
“…God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone.”
(James 1:13)
The context here is that God cannot be tempted with evil desires and He does not tempt people with sinful desires. Hence James goes starts by saying,
“Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”…”
And ends by saying,
“But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed.”
(James 1:14)
So the question is if Jesus is God, He could have no evil desires and if He had no evil desires, there was no scope for Him to be tempted, so in a sense the temptations He endured in the wilderness was not real because there was a zero percent chance of Him falling for it! But the temptation had to have been real otherwise the whole episode was just one big charade.
Now Jesus was fully man and fully God, so as a man, He could have sinned but as God He could not have sinned. This still does not address the issue because if there was something about His divine nature permeating His human nature and thus preventing Him from sinning, we run into the same problem. So could Jesus sin or could Jesus not sin?
The best way to answer this question is to ask another question. Can a mother kill her infant child? Ah, you see that tension you just felt? hold on to it because that tension holds the key to understanding Jesus’ relationship with sin.
On the one hand, of course a mother can kill her child, she is bigger than the baby, stronger than the baby, the baby is defenceless and such. On the other hand, a mother cannot kill her child because why would she want to? A mother is physically able to kill her child but morally unable to.
In the same way, Jesus in His human nature is capable of sinning however because He is also God in the flesh and morality itself is an offshoot of God’s nature, He is morally unable to sin.
In conclusion, the temptations of Jesus were real because He really could have fallen for them as a human being but His very nature as God prevented Him from doing so.
