Hebrews 4:15

Hebrews 4:15. For. Whatever the difficulties of our Christian life, whatever the dangers that tempt us to turn aside, whatever the dignity of our Priest, whatever the awful power of the Word of God, we have not a High Priest unable to sympathize with us in our infirmities, but on the contrary one tempted in all things like as we are (or rather in accordance with the likeness there is between us), sin apart. The infirmities of which the writer speaks are not strictly sufferings or afflictions, but the weaknesses physical, spiritual, moral whereby sin is likely to find entrance, and misery is produced hunger, poverty, reproach, the dread of sufferings, the love of rest, of friends, the difficulty of living by faith, the tendency to judge things by present results, to snatch victory in the easiest way; whatever, in short, is natural to man, and yet not itself sinful. The temptations of Christ in the wilderness, which are described as representing most of the forms in which temptation assails us; all He endured when the ‘season' came in which the tempter renewed his work, and especially in the hour and power of darkness, illustrate the meaning. All He bore and all He remembers, and so in a sense bears still (note the present perfect tense), fits Him to sympathize with like weaknesses in us. In all these temptations of His there was no sin in the origin of them in the struggle, in the results; but that fact only increases His fitness for His office and our confidence. He bore all, and yet was undefiled; and so His pity, while most tender, is in no danger of becoming weakness, which would itself create distrust even if it did not end in sin. ‘Sin apart,' therefore, is added, as much in our interest as to the honour of our Lord. The perfect sympathy of a sinful man would have given very imperfect consolation.