Heb. 4:15
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.
But how is Christ able to identify with us in temptation? Isn’t He the God-Man? Didn’t the flaming arrows of Satan simply ricochet off of Him? How can Christ identify with my temptations and failures? He didn’t go to high school or college where there are temptations to cheat on assignments and tests. He didn’t have the Internet, where the temptation to lust is only a mouse click away. He didn’t have an earthly spouse with the temptation to be unloving toward or children with the temptation to exasperate unmercifully. How can this be?
While Christ is fully God, He is also fully man, and Scripture tells us that Christ was tempted in every area of life as we are; yet He remained without sin. And not only that, Christ’s temptations were infinitely more severe than ours will ever be. How so? Because the temptation becomes more intense and painful the longer we resist it.
Perhaps you have a take-home test for a college class. You are not allowed to use notes, and you know you haven’t studied as much as you would have liked. You begin the test and suddenly realize how unprepared you are. Immediately, you sense the temptation to cheat. You ignore the sudden temptation and continue taking the test. Yet, you become more and more frustrated as you look at the test questions with a blank stare. It’s been 30 minutes and you are still on the first page of the test. The temptation to cheat returns, yet with such a greater fierceness at 30 minutes than at 3 seconds, that you decide to open your book to find some answers.
Imagine the severity of the temptations that Jesus experienced in every area of His life, because He didn’t resist for 3 seconds or 30 minutes and then give in like we so often do, but He resisted all of them for 33 years without sinning! You might say that this all makes sense, but how is the sinless Christ able to identify with my present temptations and failures?
R. Kent Hughes illustrated it this way: If you place two pianos in the same room, and a note is struck on one piano, the same note will gently respond on the other piano. This is called “sympathetic resonance.” Christ’s instrument, his humanity, is like ours in every way, he suffered and was tempted, except that He was without sin. And when a chord is struck in the weakness of our human instrument, it resonates in His. There is no note of human experience that does not play in Christ’s as well. Any note we play resonates and rings even louder in Christ’s instrument (R. Kent Hughes, Luke: That You May Know the Truth, 86).
Christ identifies with us even in our present moments of weakness and failure, but ultimately, He can so intimately identify with us in all of our temptations, failures, and sin, because He experienced it all on the cross for us. It is there that Christ so identified with us to the point that He became what we are—He became sin, He became, as Martin Luther once wrote, the most grotesque, ugly, and hideous thing in the history of all creation—so that in Him, we could become what we are not, righteous.
It can be easy to identify with Biblical characters and emulate their actions in a story, such as Joseph, who fled from the sexual temptations of Potiphar’s wife, and to emulate such actions is a good and right thing! But what happens when you don’t flee like Joseph but fail? While we can identify with someone like Joseph, Joseph cannot identify with us! It is only Christ who is able to identify with us in our weakness, temptations, and failures.
Therefore, look to Christ when tempted. He has a human instrument just like yours that resonates when your instruments plays the notes of weakness. And because of this reality, the writer to the Hebrews tells us to that we must confidently draw near to the Lord’s throne of grace in prayer and humble dependence, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
