There are three commands from God's Word that Jesus uses to stand up to Satan during his temptation in the wilderness. They are as follows:
1. One does not live by bread alone.
2. Worship the Lord your God, and serve only Him.
3. Do not put the Lord your God to the test.
These make sense in the context of the temptations. Jesus was famished and Satan told Him to use miraculous powers to make some bread. Satan claimed the world and the ability to give it to Jesus if Jesus just worshipped him. Satan dared Jesus to jump.
These look like three disconnected possibilities that Satan lays down to pull Jesus' faith off the rails. What is interesting is that there is no portion of this where Satan challenges Jesus as Son of God or Messiah or Son of David, no place where Satan takes a pot shot at God's plan. Nowhere does Satan say "You are NOT the GUY." Rather, his tactics are diversion, division, and challenge.
This is where we should look for Satan's temptations in our own lives. There will be very little in the way of "Jesus is wrong and I am right" in his tactics. Rather, Satan picks at the edges. Leave our belief in Jesus alone but come at us from the things of the world that will draw our eyes away from Jesus, that will send our hearts drifting.
Jesus was hungry. Satan tried to exploit that fact.
That second temptation always nags at me. Satan claims that the glory and the authority of all the kingdoms (which he offers to Jesus in exchange for worship) has been given over to Satan. My first reaction is NO, God is in control. But take a closer look at what is going on around us. The world is a pretty awful place. Sin abounds, greed abounds, exploitation abounds. What really gets to me personally is that we have the capacity, as a race, to overcome all this and yet we don't. So I can say God is in control. But when Satan says the world's been given to him, yah, from the evidence of my senses, there is truth there. Which in turn sucks me away from trusting God.
Then Satan tells Jesus to go jump off a pinnacle. Satan claims the angels will save Him, which I believe. Jesus says "Don't test the Lord", which I also believe. But if Satan had anybody else standing up there, Satan would be telling them to commit suicide. Go, jump. In the pastoral experience that I have had, someone intent on suicide is deep in darkness and depression, hope gone, no way out except this act of self-killing. But Satan uses this too, whispering that, in this darkness, "Finally, I will be with my Lord..."
Satan will pull us everywhere and anywhere to knock us off the pedestal of trusting the Lord.
This is why the temptations of Jesus are paired with our passage from Romans. The truths there ground us. The truths there are why Jesus spoke so calmly and overwhelmingly against Satan.
"If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."
"One believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved."
"The scripture says, "No one who believes in Jesus will be put to shame.""
"For, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.""
There is our center for our Lenten journey. That Jesus is Lord, that God raised Jesus, that we are saved in this truth, this love. Absorb, celebrate, internalize, reflect on, meditate on, pull it through our souls to our very heart. Looking at Satan and Jesus, the temptations of the devil were not designed to challenge the supremacy or the authority of Christ. They were more insidious. Misdirect, push the story away from the Lord, undermine our Savior.
To stand against temptation, we must have Jesus in our hearts, the knowledge of who He is and what He has done for us, how it is the truest, purest expression of God's love for us. That is our anchor, that is our center. This is the season when we double down on what that means for us.
Peace,
Pastor Peter
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