Impeccability of Christ

The doctrine of Christ’s impeccability states that Christ lived not only a perfect and sinless life, but that He was unable to sin in any way, shape or form. This doctrine has been affirmed throughout the history of the church and is the orthodox teaching about Christ, but some question this and say Christ could have sinned.

The Bible clearly teaches the sinlessness of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 7:26; 1 John 3:5), but there is no verse that explicitly states Christ “could not have sinned.” However, there is ample theological and biblical reasons to hold to the truth of the impeccability of Christ. If Christ could have sinned while on earth, then what would stop Him from being able to sin today since He is still the God-man? This is a horrific thought. To believe that Jesus could sin is to believe that God could sin and if God could sin then that would mean His holy nature could change, and if that possibility existed the Trinity would be unraveled. But we know God does not change (Malachi 3:6). Hebrews 13:8 states that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. There is no change or possibility of change in God, because if there were then God would not be God.

Someone could try and say, “What if Jesus sinned in His human nature but remained sinless in His divine nature?” This is not possible since Christ is one person in two natures (John 1:1; Romans 1:3; 1 John 4:2). He could not have sinned in one nature and that not affect His whole person. Christ’s two natures did not operate independently of each other or at odds with one another. Christ had two natures, a human and a divine, but these were always in perfect harmony together in the one person. Whatever the Son of God does, He does within His entire divine-human person. It is also important to note that Christ’s human desire always obeyed the divine desire since Christ’s divine nature, not His human nature, is the base of His person so that He always lived in perfect holiness. Some try and argue that since Christ could experience hunger and weakness in His human nature, and not in His divine nature, they claim it follows that He also could have experienced sin in His human nature alone. But this does not work for the above reasons, nor would it make sense at face value since sin is not a necessity of humanity as originally created, but hunger and weakness are.

The truth of the Bible is that Christ is impeccable. Christ could have never sinned. There was not even the remotest possibility that Christ, the very Son of God, could have sinned since He was God from all eternity. His incarnation did not affect His inability to sin in anyway. Thus, we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15).