2 Corinthians 5:21 — He [God] made Him [Jesus Christ] who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
1 John 3:5 — You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin.
1 Peter 2:21–22 — For you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps, 22 WHO COMMITTED NO SIN, NOR WAS ANY DECEIT FOUND IN HIS MOUTH;
The Scriptures could not be more emphatic concerning the fact that Jesus never sinned. The three passages above are just some of those that teach this truth. One reason for this emphasis is that His sinlessness is critical to God's plan of salvation in the Gospel. If Jesus had committed even one sin, He would have to receive the punishment it deserved (death and condemnation in hell) and He could not then offer Himself as a substitute to die for the sins of others. So we worship a Savior born of a virgin so that He would not have Adam's sin in the garden laid to His charge, and Who lived a perfect life of obedience to God's commandments on earth, in order (among other things) to be a sinless sacrifice on the cross.
We are reviewing the various messages proclaimed in the Lord's Supper as a sermon, and in this meditation we will see that the sinlessness of Christ is one of them.
We have already considered that the Lord's Supper was instituted at the time of the Passover meal, and that it was designed by Christ to take its place under the New Covenant. If we go back in the Bible to the time when the Passover was ordained by God, we see that no yeast was to be present in the households of the Jews for the duration of the feast, and that accordingly the bread that was used to celebrate the Passover had to be unleavened:
Exodus 12:14–15 — ‘Now this day will be a memorial to you, and you shall celebrate it as a feast to the LORD; throughout your generations you are to celebrate it as a permanent ordinance. 15 ‘Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, but on the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses; for whoever eats anything leavened from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel.
Partly, the eating of unleavened bread was to remind the Jews that they left Egypt in haste, so that there was no time to allow the bread to leaven (Exodus 12:33-34). However, it seems that the fermentation and disintegration that yeast causes in food also often carried with them the concepts of evil and of sinful corruption. So grain offerings that were burned in the presence of God in the Tabernacle and the Temple were never leavened. In the New Testament, Jesus warns his disciples to be on their guard against the leaven (teaching) of the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matthew 16:6). Paul talks about the need to clean old, sinful practices and attitudes out of the lives of the believers in Corinth:
1 Corinthians 5:6–8 — Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? 7 Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. 8 Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
When Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper during the Passover meal, He used the unleavened bread that was already present to represent His body that was about to be broken. So when we use unleavened bread in our celebration of the Supper, we have in our hands an emblem that our Savior was without leaven - that He had no sin. What a wonderful reminder of His perfections, which were absolutely essential if He would save His people from their sins!
It does us good as believers to meditate on Christ our Savior, and one subject that must often feature in our thoughts is His sinless perfection. It must be a good thing, then, to come to the Table and receive a visible and tangible sign of that very thing!
