Objection: If Jesus Never Got Sick Before His Atonement, He Did Not Fully Participate in Our Human Experience

The objector speculates that part of His being fully human would be to have colds, maybe chicken pox, bruises from His carpentry, pimples, and so on.  Because we’ve all had to deal with some of these things, the objector concludes that Jesus wasn’t really one of us, fully participating in life as a human, if He never had to deal with those things.  Thus, His bearing of “our sicknesses” and “our pains” in Isaiah could be construed to be just part of His normal human life and not part of His atonement.

There are at least 4 problems with this line of reasoning.

First, one could take this same argument and prove that Jesus never fully participated in our human experience because He never sinned!  We’ve all sinned, so if He didn’t experience that, was He not fully human?  Actually, if He HAD ever sinned, He would have been a fallen Second Adam just as Adam was the fallen First Adam, and He would have lost His right to be the spotless Lamb of God whose sinless blood would atone for the sins of the world.  He did not fail to be fully human just because He never experienced the humiliation of being caught sinning.  I don’t believe for a minute that we can say that He did not fully participate in our human experience just because He never got drunk, slept with prostitutes or cursed at aggressive chariot drivers who almost ran Him over.

Second, He did not bear “His sicknesses” and “His pains” – He bore (as our substitute) “OUR sicknesses” and “OUR pains” – which could not refer to anything before His atonement.

Third, He BORE sickness and pain.  The same Hebrew word is used of His bearing the SINS of many in Isaiah 53.  This would preclude Isaiah’s statement from being about any sickness or pain that He had experienced.

Fourth, physical death came because of sin (Genesis 3:19).  Jesus never sinned.  If He had never taken on OUR sins, His body would never have been subject to death, or even sickness, which can cause death.  He would have lived forever.  Because of His righteousness, He would have continued like Adam in the garden before he fell, never being sick.  Sickness is a result of the fall and it is legally a curse for sinning, as shown by the Old Testament “curse” Scriptures.  Because Jesus never sinned, the curse causeless would not have fallen on Him (Proverbs 26:2) before He was punished for our sins.