DESERT DEVELOPMENT

Intro — This is the first Sunday of Lent, the forty days before Resurrection Sunday. The sermon messages that we commonly hear at this time of the year lead us to that pivotal moment in Christian history. It has been preached for 2000 years and, strangely enough, believers are not tired of hearing it yet. If you come across a church or a preacher who is, seemingly, tired of preaching Jesus you should remove yourself from his presence as soon as you possibly can. You should run, not walk, to the nearest exit. I can guarantee you this. If you leave here on a Sunday and someone asks what I preached about but you feel asleep and didn’t catch the sermon, if you tell them “He preached about Jesus,” you are going to be close to my subject.

I. Trust God vv. 1-4

The traditional location of this occurrence is said to have happened in the hills near Jericho, northwest of the Dead Sea. In particular, on a hill called Quarantania; full of holes and caves where someone could have usually used for shelter. We should also pay attention to the fact that this encounter was at the end of a forty day fast. This number is not arbitrary, while we may not understand all of the implications associated with 40 days we see it repeatedly in Scripture. It rained 40 days during the Flood, Moses was on Mt. Sinai for 40 days, the 12 spies did reconnaissance on the Promise Land for 40 days, which led to 40 years of wandering.

Let us also consider the confrontation. Nowhere in the Scriptures do we find the devil or his demons appearing in a bodily form. God has these deep encounters with His servants, it seems, when they are in the deepest spiritual state. By the river Chebar, in Babylon, Ezekiel was allowed to see the sins that were occurring in a hidden place in the temple in Jerusalem, Daniel was in the Spirit when the angel delivered and answer to his three week old prayer, Isaiah had a vision and was allowed to be in the very throne room of God, Paul states in 2 Corinthian 12 that he could not tell whether he was in or out of his very body, John said, before receiving the testimony of Jesus the Christ, “ I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.”

Jesus did not simply decide to go on a “walk about,” as the Australian Aborigines declare. The Bible says that He was full of the Spirit and was led to the desert after His ministry was commissioned at the Jordan river following His baptism. This seems to indicate to me that the devil becomes more concerned with our plans as we become more concerned with God’s plan. This also should lead you to make a note that you being a Spirit-filled believer doesn’t cause the devil to shake in his boots one bit. As a mater of fact the exact opposite seems to be true and it stands to reason. When you are in war, you kill Privates but you capture Generals. Therefore, if your plan is to do big things for God, plan on big hits from the devil.

II. Maintain Fellowship vv. 5-8

Jesus is informing Satan that He is going to keep the proper attitude toward God. Jesus is informing Satan that Moses tried to tell the Israelites in chapters 6 and 8 of Deuteronomy, that they had to be careful once that entered the Promise Land. Moses told them to always remember what God had done for them. Otherwise, they would begin to think that they had accomplished all of that without His help. We can indeed develop the attitude where we think we hit a triple when, the truth is we were born on 3rd base.

The devil told Jesus that if He would worship him, He would receive all of the kingdoms of the world. The Greek word, proskyneses, in the passage for worship means, “bend the knee to.” The devil is saying, bow down to me. The problem with that is if Jesus had bowed to Satan, He would also have had to depend on Satan. This is the problem with many people today, Christian and non-Christian. We will accept the Lord’s Blessing or the devils wages as long as we are getting ahead.

III. Fight a Good Fight v.13

Luke does for us in his recording what we do not see elsewhere. Luke does not simply say that the devil left Jesus alone, but rather, he left Him, “for a season.” In 1944, Lt. Hiroo Onoda was sent, by the Japanese, to a remote Island in the Philippines called Lubang. He was given orders to continue fighting at all costs and to never surrender. No one came to get him and the 3 other soldiers on his team.