In response to another poster who said this, "He was not defiled and he was separate from sinners. Without sin and without a sin nature", you said this:
Right, so others here who say that Jesus could have potentially sinned are wrong.
Despite your "so", there is no causal connection between the two statements.
On this subject we must get past the
apparent contradiction of Scripture, which affirms all of the following:
"our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13)
"For God cannot be tempted by evil" (James 1:13)
"we have a great high priest... Jesus the Son of God... who has been tempted in every way, just as we are" (Hebrews 4:14-15)
From these, we can summarize: Jesus, Who is God, Who cannot be tempted,
was tempted. We can dispense with the idea that "because Jesus is God, He cannot be tempted" as it plainly contradicts Scripture. From the Hebrews text, we can conclude a direct and thorough likeness between the nature of the temptations Jesus faced and those we face.
We use "tempt" in concert with things like a second helping of dessert, an angry response, slight pressure on the accelerator pedal when we see a yellow light, and of course far worse. All of these things are
possible. I may
desire to jump to Mars, but it is not
possible to do so therefore I'm not tempted; "tempted" is simply the wrong concept for something that is not
possible. After Jesus had fasted for 40 days, He was
actually hungry, and feeding Himself would have been both legitimate and
possible. He
could have changed the stones into bread and eaten (you have argued for His supernatural power in other posts) yet doing so would have been a sin. Instead, He rebuked the devil with the words of Scripture, refusing the "easy way out".
Why would anyone conclude that Jesus
could not have done as the devil suggested? Scripture tells us plainly that He
was tempted. That means one of only two options: either sin was
possible, or Jesus was
not, in fact,
tempted "as we are".
Consider the implications of the second: Scripture is leading us to believe that there is a conceptual sleight-of-hand involved in the temptation, or in short, a lie. God is sidestepping with an awkward, "Well, Jesus couldn't
actually sin, of course, and 'tempted' here means something
other than what it means in
every other usage." It is nonsensical to pretend that "tempt" meant something different for Jesus than it does for us. Believing so removes all meaning from Hebrews 4:13. Let not our pietistic abhorrence at the idea of Jesus
potentially committing sin inadvertently impute
actual wrongdoing to God.
Further, if the temptation could not have resulted in sin, then there is no example for us, and one might wonder why the story was included in Scripture at all. If Jesus could not have sinned, and did not
actually overcome the genuine temptation by the power of the Holy Spirit and the word of God, then what lesson is there for us? In reality, there are two lessons from the story: the fact of Jesus'
actual overcoming of sin, and the application in His demonstration to us
how to overcome sin in our own lives.
In conclusion: the temptation was real, and Jesus
could have sinned, but He didn't, thereby overcoming sin
for real, and demonstrating that doing so
is possible. 
1
