It wouldn’t. And that’s the whole problem.
Here’s my logic, up front.
Adonai does things the bible itself calls abominations. Not things I’ve decided are wrong — things his own text lists as hateful to him. He does them and stays blameless, and the only reason ever given is that it doesn’t count as sin when he’s the one doing it. That isn’t a defense of his character. It’s a licence to break his own law but remain holy and righteous.
Jesus had no such licence. Whatever else he was, he was answerable. His blamelessness had to hold up; it didn’t come free with the position.
Now, I don’t actually think he could have failed, and it’s worth saying why. The bible’s own explanation for why people can’t live clean is the condition we’re born with. Remove that and you’ve removed the mechanism. Jesus is the one person the doctrine exempts from it. So on Christianity’s own account, the thing that makes the rest of us fail was not in him.
Which creates a problem, and it isn’t my problem. If he couldn’t fail, the wilderness makes no sense. You don’t tempt something with no capacity to yield. Satan spends forty days on him and the scene is written as though something is at stake.
So the doctrine needs two incompatible things at once. It needs him genuinely tested, or his blamelessness proves nothing. And it needs him exempt, or he’s a compromised offering like everybody else.
Pick either one and watch where it goes.
If he could genuinely have sinned, then he was carrying the very thing he came to die for.
Think about what the sacrifice is supposed to accomplish. The reason anybody needs it is that Adonai can’t or won’t forgive without blood. There’s something in us that makes us unacceptable to him, and the offering is what covers it. That’s the whole mechanism.
So if Jesus carried that same something, he was unacceptable on identical terms. The offering is disqualified before it’s made, and now you need somebody to atone for the atoner. Meanwhile the exemption everyone points to did nothing at all, and what’s left is a man who happened not to fail. Impressive. Not divine.
If he couldn’t, then the temptation was theater, and “sinless” describes what he was issued rather than what he did. It tells you nothing about how he lived, and it earns nothing.
Neither one gets to god, and here’s the reason.
There are three different things being called sinlessness in this religion, and only one of them belongs to god.
Exemption. Nothing you do counts as sin, whatever it is. That’s Adonai.
Achievement. You were under a standard and you met it. That’s Jesus as the gospels present him.
Equipment. You were under a standard you were never going to breach, because you were built without the part that breaches it. That’s Jesus as the doctrine’s own machinery actually makes him.
Achievement and equipment both describe somebody who is under the law. Only exemption describes somebody above it. So whichever Jesus you pick, he’s standing on the wrong side of that line.
I’ll say the rest plainly, because I’m not interested in calling these passages “difficult.” Adonai was immoral.
And here’s the part I want to be exact about: nobody actually defends the acts. Press a believer on Midian or on the lying spirit and watch what happens. They don’t argue that killing infants was kind, or that deceiving a man into his death was honest. They change the subject to who did it. He’s the creator. He’s all-knowing. He sees what we can’t. His ways are higher than ours.
Every one of those is a reason to stop evaluating. None of them is a reason to conclude he did right.
Which means they’ve already agreed with me about the conduct. They just won’t say the word. They concede, quietly, that the acts look monstrous — and then rule the word out of bounds, because the one who did them is god, and therefore his reasons must have been good even though nobody can say what they were.
That’s the whole argument in his favor. Not that the acts were moral. That we aren’t allowed to call them what they are.
The same word, doing very different work
Ask why Adonai’s conduct is holy and you get some version of this: he made life, so he can take it. He is the standard, so nothing he does can fall short of it. He isn’t under the law, he’s the source of it.
Look at what that actually says. It says nothing about his behavior. It’s a claim about his position, and it would be just as true if he’d done the opposite of everything he did. That isn’t sinlessness. It’s immunity.
Ask why Jesus was sinless and nobody reaches for any of that. They say he was tempted and didn’t give in. He was tested and came through. Hebrews 4:15 says he was tested as we are, yet without sin. 1 Peter 1:19 calls him a lamb without defect or blemish. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says god made him to be sin who knew no sin.
That’s a report card. It describes somebody who got measured and passed — measured against a standard outside himself, because measuring a thing against itself isn’t measuring anything.
Notice that nobody defends Jesus the way they defend Adonai. Nobody says the temptation didn’t matter because he was god and whatever he did would have been righteous. That answer is available. It’s the same answer used on Adonai constantly. And it never gets used on Jesus, because using it would strip his blamelessness of any meaning and there’d be nothing left to admire.
So the question in the title. If Jesus was god, what exactly was at stake out there? He could have taken every one of Satan’s offers and it would have been righteous by definition, the same way the lying spirit was righteous.
Every Christian I’ve talked to treats his sinlessness as an accomplishment — something real, that mattered, that could have gone another way. That instinct is right. And it’s fatal to the claim that he was god, because accomplishments belong to people who are being graded.
The list is in the book
I don’t need to import a standard. Proverbs 6:16–19 supplies one:
There are six things that the LORD hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that hurry to run to evil, a lying witness who testifies falsely, and one who sows discord in a family.
Hold onto four. A lying tongue. Hands that shed innocent blood. A heart that devises wicked plans. A lying witness who testifies falsely.
Now watch him do them.
Three of the four, in one scene. 1 Kings 22. Adonai wants Ahab dead at Ramoth-gilead, so he holds a meeting about how to arrange it:
And the LORD said, “Who will entice Ahab, so that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?” Then one said one thing, and another said another, until a certain spirit came forward and stood before the LORD, saying, “I will entice him.” “How?” the LORD asked him. He replied, “I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.” Then the LORD said, “You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go out and do it.”
Count them. A lying tongue — supplied. A lying witness testifying falsely — four hundred of them, deliberately. A heart that devises wicked plans — the plan is devised on the page, out loud, with volunteers. The scene isn’t describing something that happened without his knowledge. He convened it, took proposals, and approved one.
Hands that shed innocent blood. 2 Samuel 24 opens with his anger burning against Israel, and him inciting David to count the people. David counts them. Adonai sends a plague. Seventy thousand die.
The offense was his idea. And you don’t have to take my word for the innocence, because David says it at verse 17:
David spoke to the LORD when he saw the angel who was destroying the people and said, “I alone have sinned, and I alone have done wickedly, but these sheep, what have they done? Let your hand, I pray, be against me and against my father’s house.”
These sheep, what have they done? The text identifies the blood as innocent while it’s still being shed, out of the mouth of the man who actually sinned.
There’s more of it. 2 Samuel 12:14 has a newborn dying for his father’s adultery, seven days to die, while David lives another twenty years. Numbers 31 has the order to kill the male infants at Midian and keep the girls. Whatever else infants are, they’re the clearest case of innocent blood the category has.
And then the one with no excuse available. Deuteronomy 12:31, about the surrounding nations:
You must not do the same for the LORD your God, because every abhorrent thing that the LORD hates they have done for their gods. They would even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods.
Burning children is the example chosen to illustrate the worst of what he hates. Not a marginal case. The headline.
Now Ezekiel 20:25–26:
Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live. I defiled them through their very gifts, in their offering up all their firstborn, in order that I might horrify them, so that they might know that I am the LORD.
Law built to fail. The child sacrifice described as something he did to them — I defiled them. And the purpose stated outright: horror, so they’d know who he is.
The practice he names as the worst abomination the nations commit, he used as a tool.
Now put Jesus’s name in those sentences
Not god. Jesus. The man in the gospels.
Jesus convenes a meeting to arrange a man’s death and sends out a spirit to lie through four hundred mouths. Jesus talks David into the census and kills seventy thousand bystanders who had done nothing. Jesus hands down law designed to fail so that people burn their children, in order to horrify them into recognizing him.
Ask any Christian if that man is sinless and the answer arrives before the question is finished. Of course not.
That answer is the concession. Nobody needs a moment to think about it, nobody asks for context, nobody suggests his reasons might have been good even if we can’t see them. The excuse that gets deployed on Adonai’s behalf a hundred times a day is not even considered when the name changes.
And this isn’t me calling those acts wrong. The text calls them abominations. It made the list, and the one who made the list did the things on it — and remained, by his own accounting, blameless.
The same act, judged twice, and the only variable was the name attached to it.
“He was fully human and submitted voluntarily”
This is the answer everybody reaches for, so let’s do it properly.
The claim is that in becoming human the Son set his divine prerogatives down, put himself under the law, and submitted by choice. Galatians 4:4 says he was born under the law. Philippians 2:7 says he emptied himself.
That concedes my argument. It says the prerogatives had to be put down before a blameless human life was possible — that the two can’t be held at once. That’s my thesis with a doctrine label on it. If being god and being blameless went together, nothing would have needed emptying.
And voluntary submission proves the double standard rather than fixing it. If he put himself under the law, the law was above him while he was under it. But anybody who can put himself under a law can take himself back out, so nothing was ever really at risk. If nothing was at risk, the testing was theater and Hebrews 4:15 describes something that couldn’t have gone the other way.
Either the risk was real, and he was subject to a standard that could have caught him — which is not what god is — or it wasn’t, and his blamelessness proves nothing and qualifies him for nothing.
The one thing he didn’t have
Christianity teaches that people show up already broken. Psalm 51:5:
Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.
Romans 5 has sin entering through one man and spreading to everybody. Call it original sin or call it something else — the doctrine is that nobody starts clean, that this is why you can’t be righteous on your own, and that this is why a sacrifice was necessary at all.
Jesus is the exception. That exemption is what the virgin birth is for, doctrinally — the mechanism that gets him here without the inherited condition.
So look at what’s being claimed. God becomes a human being to live a human life and come out spotless. But the one thing every human being has in common — the thing that supposedly makes righteousness impossible for us, the thing the sacrifice was for — gets removed from him before the clock starts.
That isn’t living like we live. That’s a different test.
And it isn’t incidental. It’s the exact thing being atoned for. The offering was made by the only person excused from the condition the offering was supposed to address.
Straight out: a being born without the thing all humans are born with is not human in the sense the doctrine needs. If he started without our starting condition, his sinlessness doesn’t show that a human being can be sinless. It shows that something not quite human can be. Nobody was arguing about that.
So which is it? Fully human, and he inherits the condition, and the offering is compromised before it’s made. Exempt, and “he lived as we do” falls apart. Both doors are closed and one has to be walked through.
The bible uses the same words about other people
Sinlessness is supposed to be the evidence. Jesus was blameless, nobody else was, therefore divine. That only works if those words mean something exceptional when they’re applied to him.
The bible hands the same vocabulary to ordinary people.
Genesis 6:9 says Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Job 1:1 says Job was blameless and upright, one who feared god and turned away from evil. And Luke 1:6, about Zechariah and Elizabeth:
Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord.
Righteous. Blameless. The same two words, in a gospel, about a priest and his wife.
When the bible calls god righteous, Christians take it to mean perfect, without fault, without sin. When it calls Jesus blameless, they take it the same way and build his divinity on it.
So which is it? If righteous and blameless mean perfect and without sin, then Noah, Job, Zechariah and Elizabeth met the standard — and meeting it obviously isn’t proof of divinity, because nobody claims those four were god.
And if the words mean something less for human beings — a good person, a faithful person, someone doing their best — then they mean something less for Jesus, and the argument for his divinity rests on a word that was never doing the work it was assigned.
Either the standard is reachable, or the evidence is worthless.
The doctrines don’t save it
The Trinity as taught. Christ’s acts belong to the person, not to a nature acting on its own — that’s how you get to say god died on the cross. It runs both ways. If the Son is the same person as the god of 1 Kings 22, that person sent out the lying spirit. The sinlessness belongs to the person too. So the person sinned and didn’t sin.
Splitting the natures. Put the abominations in the divine nature and the sinlessness in the human one, and the sinless party is the human nature alone. Then the sacrifice is a human sacrifice, worth what any other is worth. The cross pays infinitely only because the one dying is god. You keep the sinlessness by throwing away the atonement.
Modalism — one person in three modes. That’s the worst version, not an escape. The identical person who arranged Ahab’s death later preached the Sermon on the Mount.
Impeccability — Jesus couldn’t have sinned, being god. Then the wilderness was empty, and his sinlessness is the same immunity Adonai has. Which means he could have sent the lying spirit himself and it wouldn’t have been sin. Nobody says that out loud in front of a congregation, including the people whose doctrine requires it.
One Christology survives: the one where Jesus is a created being, under god, not identical with him. That’s Arianism, and the fourth century was spent stamping it out. The other survivor is Marcion’s — two gods — condemned in the second. The positions that make the problem go away are the ones Christianity ruled out, and that isn’t a coincidence.
Adonai was immoral
I’m not leaving that as an implication.
Convening a plan to deceive a man into his own death is wrong, and his book calls a lying tongue and a heart that devises wicked plans abominations. Killing seventy thousand people who had done nothing is wrong, and his book calls hands that shed innocent blood an abomination. Using the burning of children as an instrument is wrong, and his book picks that exact practice as the example of what he hates most.
One thing stands between those acts and that verdict, and it isn’t a fact about the acts. It’s a fact about who did them.
That’s not a moral argument. It’s an exemption. And Jesus didn’t have one.
It’s worth being clear about what the defense actually claims, because it isn’t what people think it is. Nobody says the acts were good. The claim is that a good reason existed, that we don’t have access to it, and that we’re obliged to assume it was sufficient. Strip that down and it says: yes, this looks monstrous, and you may not say so.
That’s not a defense of his character. It’s a gag order on the verdict.
So:
Adonai’s acts aren’t sin only because Adonai did them.
Jesus couldn’t have done those things and stayed blameless.
Blamelessness was required of Jesus, and it had to be secured — either by his own effort or by how he was built.
Anyone whose blamelessness has to be secured is under a standard. Anyone who can’t sin no matter what he does isn’t.
Therefore Jesus is not god.
The usual escape is that act was wrong by the standard you’re using, so a different standard must apply. It doesn’t work here, because the standard being used is his.
And the men who wrote this book were already flinching. David objects to the seventy thousand in the chapter that reports them. Adonai himself, in Ezekiel, admits the statutes were not good. When the Chronicler retells the census centuries later, he can’t leave it as written — 1 Chronicles 21:1 takes the LORD out and puts Satan in as the one who incited David.
That’s a biblical author editing god out of the sentence.
They couldn’t make it come out right either. Every excuse since is the same repair job with worse materials.
I write about what’s actually in the Bible, as opposed to what people are told is in it. The free guide below covers twelve verses that are in your Bible and were never in the sermon.
There’s a novel too — The War Against the End of Days, an apocalyptic reimagining of Revelation.