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THE ROBOT REDEEMER

A man has the perfect high-performance sports car. He’s got a perfect, widescreen, theater-sound plasma TV stretching from one wall to the other. He’s got the perfect country estate with five thousand square feet of elegant living at his fingertips.

Now, just one more thing: wouldn’t it be nice to also have the absolutely perfect wife? Beautiful, friendly, witty, adventuresome, sexually responsive? In the town of Stepford, if you’d like that kind of life partner, there are people who will help you get one.

That was the chilling premise of The Stepford Wives, which we understand has a voluptuous Nicole Kidman recently reprising the title role originally played so hauntingly by Katherine Ross. Walter Eberhart wanted more domestic tranquility – and boy, he finally got it. His Joanna went from a free-thinking, vibrant, alive, quirky wife with a few warts here and there to a stunning, obedient beauty who was programmed to please.

A Stepford Wife will keep your house clean; she’ll dazzle your neighbors with her beauty; she’ll make your bedroom a place of satisfying pleasure excursions. The only thing she won’t ever do is FEEL for you. She can’t. Because the Stepford Wife is a drop-dead gorgeous robot. If you stick a knife in her, she won’t bleed, but your garage door might start lurching up and down instead. She might say, “Oh baby, oh baby,” but it’s just a digital loop going round and round. Her heart’s not really in it because there’s no heart to BE in it.

Yesterday we began to study together about this almost unbelievable sin statistic. One person, named Jesus Christ of Nazareth, spent 33 years on this earth. Some of them were in a carpentry shop where a guy often hits his thumb with the hammer. Three of them were spent with twelve guys who swore colorfully at the fish they let get away. He had endless encounters with people who were greedy, stupid, or just plain out to trip Him up. And yet, in all that time, Jesus didn’t cut loose with a swear word a single time. He didn’t get wrongly angry. He didn’t lose His temper. He didn’t hate. He sometimes had no place to lay His head and no food to put in His stomach, but He didn’t steal. He was tender and forgiving with hookers, but He never lusted after them. And you know, after even a week of being around a Man like that – never mind 33 years – any realistic onlooker would begin softly humming the Hollywood theme music to The Stepford Wives under his breath. “Jesus, You’re not real” must have been a recurring theme among Jesus’ disciples, His friends, and especially His enemies.

And so we ask: COULD Jesus even sin? Was it possible for Him to swear or hate or kill or lie or commit adultery? Or was He a Stepford Savior, who robotically jerked His way through the Beatitudes and the Crucifixion weekend?

Now, theologians haven’t used the word “Stepford” in describing Jesus – not before 1975, anyway – but the expression often applied is impeccable. It suggests that not only did Christ have a perfect and sinless nature, but that He simply could not sin. It wasn’t possible.

Let me be very frank in conceding that the Body of Christ is divided on the question! Many Bible students teach exactly this: that Jesus was impeccable and incapable of sin. Others disagree and assert that although Jesus plainly DID NOT sin, He could have. As a human man, it was within the realm of possibility. I’ll also tell you that this is the position my own Adventist fellowship has taken. But I’ll confess that we can’t solve a centuries-old discussion in ten minutes here on one radio show.

Let’s prayerfully begin with the “common ground,” and the points that are plain from the Word of the Lord. Friend, Jesus Christ absolutely was not “Stepford” in the arena of feeling emotions. We’re told over and over of the love of Jesus: His empathy for us, His identification with us as a Brother. Jesus “wasn’t a bionic Savior with eyes of glass,” as great preacher Charles Bradford puts it; He wept at funerals. He did sigh in sorrow when people refused to accept salvation. He got hungry and asked for food; He fell asleep even in uncomfortable boats that were riding the waves of a storm. If you saw the recent Passion of the Christ, you know beyond any doubts that when He’s whipped, Jesus can bleed like anybody else. He can die like other mortals. So there was nothing robotic or mechanical or unfeeling about our Redeemer.

But, then, why didn’t He ever sin? If you’ve been with us so far, you do accept the plain differences between Jesus and the next 12 men walking down the Jericho road. He was divine; they weren’t. He was born of a virgin; they weren’t. He could heal; they couldn’t. He came out of the tomb; they didn’t. He went back up to heaven; they didn’t. He accepted worship and forgave sins; they couldn’t. But did the divinity of Jesus, did the fact that mathematically He was 100% man and also 100% God somehow put a Scotchgard coat of protection on Him so that He simply was not able to sin when Lucifer came after Him?

Well, the Bible verse that speaks so profoundly about sympathy also puts this question of impeccable front and center. Here it is in Hebrews 4:

“For we do NOT have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet was without sin.”

So this verse, along with the wilderness trilogy of Satan’s temptations mentioned in Matthew 4, makes it clear that Lucifer bombarded Jesus. If Christ was unable to sin, the devil either didn’t know that or chose to torment his ancient enemy anyway.

In my own faith group, theologians through the years have observed that if Jesus were simply incapable of sinning, then this desert drama recorded by Matthew was basically a farce. Nineteenth-century German theologian Philip Schaff expressed the concern well in these words:

“Had he [Christ] been endowed from the start with absolute impeccability, or with the impossibility of sinning, he could not be a true man, nor our model for imitation: his holiness, instead of being His own self-acquired act and inherent merit, would be an accidental or outward gift and His temptations an unreal show.”

An Adventist theologian of the 1950s suggested that a Jesus who simply could not sin, who was exempt from temptations, would be:

“. . . Less than a man, a kind of no-man, a shadow man, a non-entity which [one scholar] calls ‘brother to the ox.’”

Well, those are good arguments. What do Christians who hold to the impeccable nature of Jesus say in response? The common answer is that temptation does not necessarily imply susceptibility. I daresay there are certain sins right now that I could come to your house and tempt you on for the next million years, and you wouldn’t even blink at them. But I’m still tempting you. A website called “growingchristians.org” points out that a rowboat might attack a battleship – and really mean it! But that doesn’t mean the battleship is going to sink, or even be vulnerable.

Another anonymous online Bible student supports the impeccable nature of Jesus with this argument; see what you think:

“God tests for man’s good, desiring only his blessing; the Devil tests with an evil motive, desiring only man’s ruin. It has been objected that if Christ could not have yielded to temptation, then His temptation was an act of hypocrisy. This objection is merely superficial. His temptation proved His character not to Himself, but to the world. Christ’s character proved to be absolutely holy. The testing, however, in no way indicates that the conflict between Christ and Satan was not real. For example, the testing of tires by dropping an automobile from twenty feet in the air in no way indicates that the impact between the tires and the ground was not real. The test is to prove not that they can blow out but that they CANNOT blow out. The temptation of Christ was not to prove that He had the capacity to sin, but that He could not sin.”

Tomorrow we’ll think for a few moments about the wonderful news that regardless of tests or temptations, God’s Word prophetically guaranteed that Jesus would prevail over them. In our closing moment let’s prayerfully give thanks that, regardless of what position you take on this “Stepford” question, Jesus had one unique, godly advantage going for Him. He courageously says in John chapter 14:

“I will not speak with you much longer [the disciples], for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold on me.” The King James: “[He] hath nothing in Me.”

And I really like the Clear Word paraphrase of this verse. Here’s what it says:

“The devil, who thinks he’s the prince of this world, is doing all he can to get Me to sin, but he’ll not find one sinful inclination in Me that responds to his temptations.”

Tell me: does Satan ever get a foothold with you? Yes, me too. We have sinful natures and a long pattern of falling into his traps. But our Savior Jesus is a mighty battleship. We can’t solve the issue of impeccable, but it certainly turns out He was and is invincible. And His strength can be ours too.