Our Leader in Temptation

Introduction

Though we pray, as our Lord did, that we would not be led into temptation, we know that he told us temptations, testing of our faith and loyalty to God, is bound to come. Our natural leader in these times of temptations is Adam our first ancestor, who quickly fell into the first lie the devil enticed him and his wife with. We need another to lead us through these times of testing, and to make us able to pass the tests.

Just as a collector knows how to test new items for his collection, a teller knows how to test legal tender, and a professor knows how to test his students to see which of them have cognatively embrassed their material, God allows his image bearers to be tested. We saw last week the difference between testing and tempting, despite being translated from the same word in both Hebrew and Greek. As James tells us, God doesn’t tempt anyone, meaning he does not entice people or test them with the intention of causing them to fall, but he does test them to make known whether their faith is genuine. Examples of this exist throughout the Scriptures, from Abraham being told to sacrifice his own son, to God sending false prophets to test Israel’s faithfulness

Deuteronomy 13:1–3 ESV

“If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, ‘Let us go after other gods,’ which you have not known, ‘and let us serve them,’ you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. For the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

God’s people, being made in his image, are tested to see whether they are genuine representations of their God, or whether they are defective. While many men and women in the OT are examples of genuine followers of God, all to one degree or another fail the test. All until Christ who, just like Adam and Eve were enticed in the Garden by their own desires enflamed by Satan’s words, is tempted in the wilderness by that same serpant who tries to entice his human desires. His cold rejection of sinful urges proves him to be the perfect image of God, and the one who is perfectly qualified to both save God’s people and lead them into embracing a genuine image of God that passes even the harshest test.

The First: Tempting the Flesh

While we are told of three temptations in this narrative, it is clear that Jesus was tempted by far more. Luke 2:2 tells us that Jesus was tempted for the entire forty days of fasting, but it is perhaps here at the end, with Jesus in the torment of starvation, that the most difficult temptation are unleashed.

At the end of forty days of abstaining from food we are told that Jesus was hungry. While this would be obvious if it were us, it again emphasizes the lengths the second person of the Godhead had gone to embrace the human experience. Jesus was not simply in form of man, but embraced everything having a human body means. Every felt need that our biology produces was felt by him in full measure. With these desires comes the enticement to follow these desires rather than the truth of God’s Word.

James 1:14 ESV

But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.

Jesus, although facing temptation through the everpresent voice of Satan, is truly being tempted by the desires inherent in his human body.

The desire to eat is by no means an evil one. The desire to eat is a desire God’s has given us to normally satisfy with thanksgiving to God, our provider. But when these desires controdict God’s Word, they become a temptation to test whether we serve God or ourselves. That is the test Jesus is faced with here.

Satan’s method of temptation is familiar to us, because it begins by seeding doubt into the mind of the one being tempted. With Eve, the devil questioned whether God had actually said not to eat of the tree (notice also the similarity of the first temptation in our narrative being food related). Here, the devil questions Jesus being the Son of God. With Eve, the true temptation was to question God’s Word concerning the fruit, here the implied temptation is to not believe the voice he had heard from heaven when the Father said, “This is my Beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” This underscores all three of the temptations we see in our text, and indeed all the temptations we face. Every temptation to sin is a temptation to believe what we feel, experience, or desire instead of believing God.

This temptation manifests in the devil’s suggestion to prove that he is the son of God by using his miraculous power to satisfy his physical cravings. This would be sin for a few reasons:

It would be motivated by lack of faith in God’s Word.

It would be a lack of trusting the Father, since it was the Spirit that had driven him into the wilderness.

It could not be done with thanksgiving and to the glory of God, but rather would be a confession of distrust in God and done for self-satisfaction.

It would legitimize the grumbling of the Israelites in the wilderness.

Jesus’ refusal to follow the temptor’s suggestions, which were surely empowered by biological and psychological urges, communicated by quoting the Word of God. So we see that the reason Satan targets God’s Word is because it is the greatest weapon against giving into temptation. Specifically, Jesus quotes a passage from Israel’s time in their wilderness of testing from Deut 8:3. Reading the context helps us understand the exact nature of this temptation and how Jesus goes about challenging it,

Deuteronomy 8:2–3 ESV

And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

For Jesus to turn stones into bread, he would be failing God’s test, refusing to submit to a humbling circumstance that God has brought about to test his trust and reliance on God. It was meant, not to lead them into sin, but the opposite; to lead them away from trusting in the things in this world, even the very basic necessities, to trusting in God and his Word. If we die of starvation but full of God’s Word, we have true life.

The Second: Temptation to Tempt God

For the second temptation, the devil takes him to the pinnicle of the temple. Jesus allows Satan to take him around but draws the line at sin so that he can truly defeat Satan’s devices. We who have a sinful nature should stay as far away from temptation as possible, but Jesus follows the devil into the tempting situation to defeat it for us.

While the first sin tested Jesus’ ability to deny unruly fleshly desires, this one tests his trust in the Father in another way. While God had clearly declared that Jesus was the Son of God, nothing would win people over more than to demonstrate it in the most holy site in Israel.

This temptation is all the more insidious when the devil uses Scripture as a defense of his suggestion. This is done, once again, to counter the greatest weapon against temptation: Scripture. If the sin can be defended with Scripture, maybe Jesus will stop using Scripture to counter it.

Many have used this same tactic to justify their own sins. “Oh I know that the Bible speaks against sexual expression outside of a monogomous heterosexual marriage, I know that the Bible says I need to pay my taxes faithfully, I know that it speaks against divorce and many other things, but doesn’t the bible also say we are saved by grace and not works? Aren’t some of the commands, like mixing fabric, outdated? So how can we take the rest seriously?”

Jesus doesn’t fall for this and is not taken in by the devil’s misquoting and twisting of Scripture. He continues to quote the book of Deuteronomy and points out a sin that Israel was often guilty of: putting God to the test.

Psalm 95:9–11 ESV

when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. For forty years I loathed that generation and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways.” Therefore I swore in my wrath, “They shall not enter my rest.”

What does this mean, to put God to the test?

To needlessly challenge God to “prove” that he will do what he says. Almost like trying to call his bluff. To rely on God’s promises is not the same as testing them.

To use God’s great power as a parlour trick.

To take God’s promises out of context and lie about God by holding him to something he never promised. (Guard you in all your ways.)

The Third, Temptation to Pragmatism

Finally, the third temptation listed here and the last one Jesus experiences at this time he again follows Satan sinlessly to a high mountain. In a vision, Jesus sees all the glory of all the world in a moment, consenting to have satan show him this.

Here, Satan is both tempting human ego and pragmatism. In the first he tempted with the desires of the flesh, in the second and third he tempts both with the desires of the eyes and the pride of life. Here the desire of the eyes is displayed in the power and adoration of the kingdoms of the earth, and the pride of life would be to embrace this power without the humiliation and suffering that is necessary to be given it by God. Pragmatism and convenience is in this temptation. It would be much easier to accept the authority of the worldly powers from Satans hand willingly rather than prying them from him at the cross. Satan, who is called the god of this world, had power over the nations he decieved. It is this power that Jesus would force from him so that after his resurrection he would say, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” (Matt 28:18).

How deadly, how subtle, how easily excused is the temptation of convenience and pragmatism. It makes satanic worship look like God’s work and selfish ambition look like another way to the glory of God. In taking this offer, Jesus would indeed accomplish his goal of gaining all authority on the earth, but in doing so he would remove himself from the authority of the Father and make Satan his Lord and god. This is essentially the same temptation given to Eve all those years before, that should become a god with all the authority that entailed if she would listen to the words of the Devil rather than the Word of God.

Jesus response this time much more ardently to Satan’s blasphamy in this final test. The very suggestion that he would pay homage to the temptor rather than the Father invokes a violent reaction and once again Jesus quotes the Torah, specifically the first commandment that only God may be worshipped and served. What good would obtaining this authority in an easier way be if in the end Satan would still be falsely served, as he has been by sinful man since the fall.

Unfortunately, many Christians and unbelievers alike have let demonic pragmatism ruin otherwise good deeds. The poet TS Eliot is quoted as saying, “most evil in the world is done by people with good intentions.” While Vladimir Lenin was convinced that the Red Revolution and subsequent communist regime would make Russia a better place for all, evil and murderous deeds brought about a policy of suffering and control. The British Empire legalized the Afro-American slave trade in an attempt to save their economy during their hostilities with France, an action intended to protect their people while in the end abusing and killing many others.

This is just as true in the church as in the world. Both Catholics and Protestants have killed each other thinking they were doing the Kingdom of God a service. Many theology schools over the last 150 years disregarded orthodox teachings of Scripture in order to attract a rapidly more skeptical audience. Today, Churches have disregarded church discipline or teaching on biblical ethics, especially on sexuality, in order to attract more people. Others seek to evangelize while taking out the more offensive or unattractive parts of the Gospel, such as the call to repent, believe in Jesus alone for salvation, or discipleship being a total-life commitment to Christ. On the other hand, other churches have stopped evangelizing or showing love to those in the world as a way to avoid conflict or feel justified in conflict. All of these and many more are ways that compromises have been made for the sake of pragmatism or convenience and in accepting those they have unknowingly taken the forbidden fruit and bowed to the temptor; they have failed the test.

This test is failed when we, like Saul, stop seeing the glory of God as the end goal. Saul thought sacrifices were good and so he disobeyed God by not killing the livestock of the Amalekites, but keeping them alive to sacrifice them to God (1 Samuel 15). The prophet Samuel’s response (vs 22), “Has the LORD as great a delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the far of rams.” How loved do you feel if your loved one gives you something really nice for your birthday, but never listens to you or takes anything you say seriously? So God is not impressed by what we do for him if in doing it we ignore his Word. God is not impressed by evangelism that is not both loving and truthful, God is not impressed by worship that caters to the flesh rather than conforming to his Word, God is not impressed with a hypocritical lifestyle that is offset by supposed good works, God is not impressed with the number of people you lead to the Lord through a gimmick event at church, God is not impressed with how many more people take you seriously when you share the Gospel when you stopped insisting that the Bible is without error. If it compromises the Word of God, it is not done for the Glory of God.

Conclusion