When you think of the word, ‘temptation’, what do you think of? An ice cream? Peters sold their premium ‘magnum’ type ice cream under the name of ‘heaven’. They were trading on the idea of wickedness, indulgence and being tempted. That’s why I bought Street’s Magnums instead. I resented them using sin to sell something good that God gives. I notice that Peters is no longer selling ‘Heaven’ ice creams anymore.
Perhaps when you hear the word ‘temptation’, you think of that game show that Channel 9 rescucitated a few years ago? They rebranded 'Sale of the Century' as ‘Temptation’ for a couple of seasons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temptation_(Australian_game_show). I’m glad it died, because it cheapened the idea of temptation.
Down the road from my parents there is a cake shop. The shop is called ‘Sinful Cakes’ Their advertising says, ‘Deliciously sinful cakes. Be tempted’. I hope they change their name. Cake is a good gift from God. Otherwise, perhaps their business might go the way of the ice cream and the game show.
Our society has cheapened and trivialized the idea of temptation. Temptation is an ice cream, a cake, a game. It is naughty but nice, and there is no real harm in it, anyway. But an ice cream, a cake, a game, none of these things are temptation, really. They are all part of God’s good creation.
If these companies really knew what temptation meant, they would never use it to advertise their products. Because temptation really involves ‘suffering’, ‘pain’, ‘agony’.
Why is it that when you see all those exercise machines being advertised on television, the actors are not sweating nor straining, but smiling? Because ‘pain’ and ‘agony’ and ‘suffering’ doesn’t tend to sell. But that is what temptation is: suffering, pain and agony. Unless, of course, you give in, and then it is something even worse: sin, death, and a fearful expectation of God’s anger, punishment and hell.
Temptation is the painful opportunity and the awful freedom to disobey God and sin against him. For us, temptation involves the suffering of saying no to something that part of us, our sinful nature or flesh, wants. And if the part of us that wants the sin overrules our conscience, or realizes that we won’t be caught, the result is even worse than the suffering involved in saying no.
We pick up Matthew’s account in chapter 4. So far, we’ve seen that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Son of David and Abraham. His name will be Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. Jesus is Immanuel, God with us, God become human, for us and our salvation. Gentile astrologers come from the East and give him royal gifts, gold, priestly gifts, frankinscence, and myrrh, to dull the pain. As an infant, he goes down to Egypt, so he can come up out of Egypt like Israel did. As an adult, the man Jesus stands with penitent humanity, and undergoes the ritual of water baptism. Jesus doesn’t need baptism for himself. John the Baptist tried to deter him from baptism. Yet Jesus is still baptized in water, for us. Jesus is baptized to ‘fulfill all righteousness’, not for himself, for he has no sin and no need of repentance, but for us, whom he came to save from sin. For Jesus was and always is ‘God’s only pleasing, beloved Son’. And he receives the word from heaven, ‘This is my son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased’.
And as soon as he hears that word from heaven, he is led out to be tempted. Jesus comes up out of Egypt like Israel. And Jesus goes into the desert like Israel. For forty days, one day for each year Israel wandered in the desert, Jesus Christ wandered in the wilderness. Matthew chapter 4 verse 1:
Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.
Jesus is led into the desert to the devil. But who is leading Jesus to the devil? The Spirit. God the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, is leading Jesus, the Son, the second person of the Trinity, according to the Father’s will, because Son and Spirit never do anything that God the Father doesn’t want. And Spirit leads Son by the Father’s will to Satan.
God never tempts anyone. But God leads Jesus to the tempter, Satan. God tolerates and uses Satan for God’s good purposes. Satan means it for evil. Satan means Jesus to sin. God means it for good.
Good teachers never set tests for students to fail. They only ever set exams for students who have done the work to pass.
Likewise, God means Jesus not to sin, to resist sin, to overcome the tempter. God wants and intends for Jesus to be his faithful Son in the desert, and to please God, just as he did in his life up until his baptism. Israel failed during their testing in the wilderness. Their bodies littered the desert floor. Even Moses was banned from entering the promised land because he failed the tests in the desert. But the Spirit is leading Jesus into the desert to succeed, to pass the test, and to say no to the temptation.
So why test Jesus in this way? Well, Jesus as a human, one of us, is going to condemn the tempter, temptation, and sin. Jesus is flesh and blood like us. But he strides into the desert to take on our enemy Satan, and his temptations. We should be cheering as he goes out to fight this battle which each one of us has failed.
We cheer the Aussie cricket team and Steve Smith as they win for us on the SCG. We want Leyton Hewitt, or Bernard Tomic, or Nick Kyrgios or Sam Stozer to win for us this January on the tennis court. As they walk out on court for us, they carry our hopes.
And as Jesus Christ is led into the desert, he carries your hopes and my hopes as he does battle with the tempter. The tempter has beaten each one of us. But here is our champion, one of ours, from our own flesh and blood, who is different. He is like us in every way except sin. And we cry from the sideline, ‘C’mon, Jesus. Everything I’ve got is riding on him. My very salvation is riding on Christ, to do what I couldn’t do’.
Now we all know a sportsperson or Olympian undergoes strict preparation for a tournament or competition. Special diet, practice, stamina, acclimatization, even high altitude training. Physios, doctors, coaching staff, the best that our wealthy and sports mad society can supply. And the sportsmen need to get in the right headspace. Sports psychologists and motivators will get the very best out of them. The idea is that they will be in top physical and mental condition. Not so Jesus Christ. Matthew chapter 4 verse 2:
After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. (NIV)
That’s got to be an understatement! Four hours and forty minutes and I’m hungry. Let alone forty hours, or forty days.
Not that I’ve tried, nor do I hope to try, but apparently some human bodies can cope without food for that time or longer. Not well, not without great suffering, but humans go without food for 40 days or longer.
Sadly, in Darwin right now (or at least he was on Monday last week), a 33 year old Iranian asylum seeker is staging a hunger strike. It is the man’s second hunger strike. The first one he staged was for 53 days. The 53 day hunger strike on behalf of himself and 35 other Iranian asylum seekers finished on December 21, just before Christmas just gone. He then started a second hunger strike on December 27. That was a week of eating again, before starting the second one. On Monday just past, the man was reportedly wheelchair-bound, on pain killers and antibiotics in Darwin hospital, where medical staff or monitoring the man for a cellulitis condition. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/iranian-asylum-seeker-resumes-hunger-strike-in-darwin-in-hospital-with-infected-foot-20150112-12mlkc.html.
Whatever one thinks about this hunger strike, it is clear that this man is in a pitiable bodily and emotional state. Probably he is at his physical and mental worst, not his best.
And likewise, Jesus was hungry and physically weakened when he was tested by Satan. The Spirit leads Jesus into that parlous and weakened physical state to be tested. Jesus as our representative, as sinless in our flesh, must be pushed to the very brink, must be made to be a human being on the edge, and then tested to the very uttermost.
Just like Moses fasted for 40 days at the top of Mount Sinai, to receive the law (Exodus 24:18; Deuteronomy 9:9[1]), and just like Elijah travelled 40 days and nights to go back to Sinai to seek out God (1 Kings 19), so Jesus fasted and was tested for forty days to save his people from his sins.
Test cricket is a test because it goes for 5 days. It is meant to see who can last the distance. Undoubtedly, Jesus was tested all through the 40 days. I doubt that Jesus had an easy armchair ride for the first 39 days, and then on the last day he faced the test. It was forty days and nights of testing because he was tested for that period (so Mark 1:12; Luke 4:2).
However, both Matthew and Luke record that the three particular temptations formed the apex and summit of Jesus’ temptation. At the end of the 40 days, Satan circled with three temptations. Just like a lion looks for the weakened, injured, and young prey, and will tire them out, and wait for opportune time, so Satan comes when Jesus is physically weakened, after a grueling fast in the desert. When Jesus is hungry, weakened, vulnerable, then the devil comes to him to hit him with his three best shots, so to speak.
This testing by Satan, which the Spirit led him to, was to bring Christ to mature obedience. God treated Jesus as his unique and beloved Son by putting Jesus through the uniquely difficult tests. Hebrews 5 verse 8 and 9 tells us:
Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered, and once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. (NIV)
Jesus went through suffering for our sake. He learned obedience through the suffering of temptation. And he was perfected, matured, and brought to completion by his suffering. And all this was for us, so that he could save us, who obey him as Lord.
Someone might say, ‘Well, temptation was easy for Jesus. After all, he’s God. God can’t be tempted by sin. Jesus was sinless, so temptation had no power over him. It’s only over sinners that temptation has any power. The temptations surely would have washed over him as water off a duck’s back. So Jesus doesn’t really know what it is to suffer while being tempted.'
I disagree with such thinking, even though there are true things said in the reasoning.
Yes, Jesus is fully God. And yes, God cannot be tempted by sin (James 1:13). And yes, Jesus was also sinless, even from birth. Such things are true.
But to then say that the temptation was somehow not real, or not painful, or did not involve suffering, does not fit with other things we know.
First, Jesus is also fully human. Such a person, who is both God and human, is unique. So we cannot really say from experience what must or must not be true of him. We must not make inferences based on our ignorance. We must instead listen to scripture to say what was true for Jesus.
Second, Scripture clearly says that Jesus suffered when he was tempted. Hebrews chapter 2 verse 18:
Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those being tempted. (NIV)
It is true that Jesus is sinless. Unlike me or you, that means Jesus was sinless from conception and birth. We are sinful from birth, sinful from the time our mother's conceived us (Psalm 51:4). But not Jesus. So Jesus wasn’t tempted, from the inside, so to speak. He had no sinful nature, no flesh, no internal bias to sin. But that doesn’t necessarily make Satan’s temptations any easier to deal with. I would have thought that the more pure a person’s thinking is, the more revolted they are by sinfulness. Let me do a little speculation. It is possible that being unhabituated and unspoiled by sin, Jesus found Satan’s sinful suggestions more offensive and more torturous, not less. The innocence of Jesus, it could be argued, might make the temptation to sin more painful to him.
The third consideration is this. Not succumbing to temptation actually involves greater suffering than succumbing to it. Consider two men being interrogated by torture. One gives in immediately: 'I’ll talk, I’ll talk.' The other resists the temptation and suffering to the point of death.
Who suffers more, do you think? Who learns more about temptation and the tricks of the torturer? Surely it is the one who resisted to death. The very reason the first gives in is to stop the pain. So the one who endures to the uttermost knows the most about the tempters arts and knows the most pain.
According to all our experience of being human, Jesus was at that time of his temptation weakened both physically and mentally. And so Satan, waiting for the time when his target was weakest, then unleashed all his evil cunning on tempting Jesus. And at the end of that period, Satan throws the most alluring temptations his wicked mind could conceive. And Satan tortures him with temptation until Satan has nothing left. Exhausting Satan by his temptations is something that God has not let happen to you or me, thank God. So Jesus knows what it is to suffer when being tempted, even though he never succumbed to the temptations.
Let’s now look at the three specific temptations that Satan confronts Jesus with.
And Satan’s first temptation latches onto Jesus’ extreme hunger and physical weakness. Verses 3 to 4:
3 The tempter came to him and said, "If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread." 4 Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.' " (NIV)
Israel in the desert complained about the lack of bread. For forty years God tested them, and he gave them Manna in the desert. And just like Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years without bread, having to trust God’s provision, so Jesus must trust God’s provision for 40 days without bread.
Jesus says no to the temptation not because it is wrong to eat. Jesus ate at other times. Indeed, he celebrated with tax collectors and sinners, such that the Pharisees called him a drunkard and a glutton. But the purpose of the forty days testing is to undergo the common sufferings of humanity in a broken and sin sick world. He came to bear our sin and its consequences.
Adam and Eve in the garden could eat from every tree in the garden except one. They sinfully disobeyed. And so now, sadly, disasterously, people in our world don’t have enough to eat. That’s not true of me. I am well fed. And Jesus says, ‘Woe to you who are well fed now’. Ouch.
But it is true of others. And we Christians are called to do what we can to help them. We need to share what we have with those in need. The poor you will always have with you, says Jesus. There are hungry people in our world. And we are called to do something about it. We are called to do good to all people, starting with the household of faith.
Why does Jesus go hungry? Jesus went hungry because he came to bear the consequences of sin. Lack of food is a result of sin. Not that those who are going hungry have sinned worse than us. No, unless we repent, we too will perish. But hunger and lack has entered our world because it is a sinful and broken world. So Jesus undergoes the suffering of not eating.
Jesus responds to the temptation by quoting Scripture, a great strategy. Scripture memorization is essential for the day of testing. Common experience suggests that the day will come when we can no longer open the bible. There may be no one to read to us. We may be wheeled out in front of mindless afternoon TV shows while we wait for death to come. And at that point, we need to remember scripture. Read, study and memorise as much as you can now. Get ready for the day when the bible won’t be as readily available as it is today.
Jesus has learnt from the history of Israel. God tested Israel in the desert to teach them that ‘Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God'. And just as God taught Israel this by experience in the desert, so God taught our Lord Jesus Christ this by experience in the wilderness. God would provide his needs.
The second temptation suggested to Jesus was for Jesus to place his life in mortal danger so that God must rescue him. It is a temptation to make God prove with a miraculous rescue that Jesus is indeed the Son of God.
Remember, Jesus has just heard the voice of God echo around the Jordan, ‘This is my Son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased’. God’s word should be enough. So cunningly, subtly, Satan wants Jesus to doubt that God’s word is enough. Satan wants Jesus to make God prove this sonship, by a physical demonstration, a miracle. Take a non-rope bungy jump, Jesus, because God is your safety net. Verses 5 to 6:
5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. 6 "If you are the Son of God,"8 he said, "throw yourself down. For it is written: " 'He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.' " (NIV)
Attempting to make humans doubt God’s word is an old Satanic strategy. It is as old as Adam and Eve. ‘Did God really say?’ So Satan says, ‘Are you really the Son of God?’ Go on, prove it to me. Prove it to yourself. Take a literal ‘leap of faith’. You need something more tangible, more real, than the voice from heaven you've just heard. God's word is not enough.
But this time, Satan has added a bible verse to bolster the temptation. 'God said he’d catch you, didn’t he? Just take God at his word.'
Don’t think that only God uses the bible. Satan uses and twists the bible, too, to his own destruction. There is a difference between using God’s Word, and trusting God’s word. All sorts of people use God’s word, like Satan. But not everyone who uses the Bible trusts and obeys and submits to God’s word.
Jesus is not deceived or sucked in, because Christ trusts God. And so he answers, in verse 7:
Jesus answered him, "It is also written: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.' " (NIV)
Jesus knows enough Scripture to quote a more appropriate bible verse than what Satan throws up. Handling the bible properly means choosing the right verse for the occasion. Israel tested God in the wilderness. Jesus is not going to make the same mistake.
Ironically, angels look after Jesus anyway. Look at verse 11:
Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him. (NIV)
How often is it that it is only after someone has given into a temptation to obtain something sinfully, they realise that if they had only waited on God, and persevered, and endured, the thing that they so wanted would have come to them anyway, and even better? There’s nothing wrong with being attended by angels. God will indeed give his angels the task of tending to Jesus, at the right time. But Jesus rightly rejects it when offered by Satan, because it involved putting God to the test.
Much advertising works on a simple principle. ‘Buy this, get me’. An under-dressed woman appears on an ad because sex sells. Whether it’s cars, alcohol, clothes, whatever. ‘Buy this, get me’. Or, to the women, the advertises say ‘Buy this, be like me’.
And Satan works on a similar principle. 'Worship me, get all this'. Let’s see what Satan is offering Jesus. Verses 8 and 9:
8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9 "All this I will give you," he said, "if you will bow down and worship me." (NIV)
Now, at one level, Jesus is owed all the kingdoms of the world. Jesus is maker and sustainer of every human, and therefore every Kingdom is his by right of creation and sustenance.
But what Satan offers Christ is the Crown without the Cross. The Father had predestined and purposed that Jesus would be declared and installed as Christ, yes, but the path to the Crown was only through the cross and resurrection. Satan offers an easier way, bypassing all that humiliation and suffering. Satan would tempt Jesus again when Peter rebuked Jesus at Caesarea Philippi. ‘Jesus, Stop all this talk about the Christ going up to Jerusalem and being mistreated and spat upon and crucified and on the third day rising again. You can have the crown without the cross.' That is why Jesus said to Peter, ‘Get behind me Satan’. (Matthew 16:21-26) And here Jesus rejects Satan’s temptation with an aptly chosen Scripture again. Verse 10:
Jesus said to him, "Away from me, Satan! For it is written: 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.' " (NIV)
Jesus decides, 'I will not break the first commandment. I will not worship the creature instead of the creator.'
Now brothers and sisters, first and foremost, Jesus went through all this temptation to save us. Romans 8:3-4 tells us this.
What the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us. (NIV)
We have not kept God’s law. We have succumbed to sin. The law was weakened and unable to give us life because the law only gives life to the doer. The man who does everything that the law says, that one will live. But we are sinners, and so we die.
But God sent Jesus Christ. He is like us, in that he is fully human. But he is not like us, in that Jesus never sinned. Jesus always kept God’s law. Unlike Adam, unlike you and me, Jesus obeyed God (Romans 5:19). Jesus obeyed the law’s precepts, do this and you will live. And Jesus submitted to the law’s penalty, don’t do this and you will die. Jesus took our penalty on the cross as our sin offering. He bore our condemnation so that there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. And because Jesus always obeyed the law, he rose again. Death could not hold Jesus down, he is risen. And so he fulfills the law’s promise ‘the one who does these things shall live by them’. Jesus never sinned and always obeyed God, so he rose from the dead. And he did all of this for us. He is God with us. He came to save his people from their sins. And he did it by his life, death and resurrection. So the Litany, in our Green Prayer books, and also the 1662 Prayer book, says this:
By the mystery of your holy incarnation, by your holy birth, by your circumcision and obedience to the law, by your baptism, fasting and temptation, good Lord deliver us. (AAPB, 99, the Litany)
Jesus’ temptation was for us.
But that doesn’t mean we won’t have temptation. We will. Satan, the roaring lion, is still out there. But we must remember two things.
First, we have Christ who has gone before us and endured temptation, so he can help us. Hebrews 4:15 to 16:
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize without our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. (NIV)
In temptation, flee to Jesus Christ. Call out to him, cry out to him for help. And take hold of the mercy and grace that he will surely give you.
Second, we won’t be tempted beyond what we can bear. 1 Corinthians 10:13:
No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it. (NIV)
So when the temptation comes, look for that way out. Look for the exit sign that God has provided. And understand, God your loving Father has sent the temptation so you can stand up under it. Just as the Spirit led Christ in the desert to pass the test, God is leading your through the test to pass it. Yes, our sinful nature is a traitor in our midst, yes, Satan means it for evil, but God means it for good, and God our Father is sovereign and in control in the midst of our temptation, and has given us the way out to stand firm.
Let’s pray.
[1] It is possible that Jesus drank water in the fast, as Luke emphasizes only that he ate nothing (Luke 4:2). However, that doesn’t alleviate that problem at Deuteronomy 9:9 NIV, which says that Moses did not drink nor eat on Sinai. Thus, it is possible that Jesus didn’t drink as well as refrain from eating, during his 40 day fast, to do what Moses did. McConville passes over the problem in his comments on Deuteronomy 9:9. J A Thompson softens the problem by suggesting a solemn period, not a ‘western’ ‘literalist and materialist’ explanation. While experience suggests such an extreme fast is not possible, all things are possible with an omnipotent God. Perhaps Jesus did refrain from eating, but drank water. Or perhaps Jesus neither ate nor drank, but some other principle was in operation in his body, that we don't understand, but that applies to a human, non sinful body which is at once capable of death but also has not been affected by sin, whether inherited or actual.