Jesus “Gave No Heed” unto Temptations
Doctrine and Covenants 20:22
22 He suffered temptations but gave no heed unto them.
President Howard W. Hunter said:
“It is important to remember that Jesus was capable of sinning, that He could have succumbed, that the plan of life and salvation could have been foiled, but that He remained true. Had there been no possibility of His yielding to the enticement of Satan, there would have been no real test, no genuine victory in the result. If He had been stripped of the faculty to sin, He would have been stripped of His very agency. It was He who had come to safeguard and ensure the agency of man. He had to retain the capacity and ability to sin had He willed so to do. As Paul wrote, ‘Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered’ (Heb. 5:8); and He ‘was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin’ (Heb. 4:15). He was perfect and sinless, not because He had to be, but rather because He clearly and determinedly wanted to be. As the Doctrine and Covenants records, ‘He suffered temptations but gave no heed unto them’ (D&C 20:22).
“What about us? We live in a world of temptation—temptation that seems more real and oppressively rampant than any since the days of Noah. Are we remaining faithful in such a world? Every individual in this Church should ask himself, ‘Am I living so that I am keeping unspotted from the evils of the world?’”
(“The Temptations of Christ,” Ensign, Nov. 1976, 19.)
