Last week, we looked at the Messiah’s message pronounced in Isaiah 61. And today, we are considering the temptations Jesus endured as part of his preparation for his Ministry of Redemption. We look through the reading of God’s word. If you please join me in prayer. Living God, we ask that you would help us to hear your Holy word that we truly understand in Lord and understanding we would believe, and believing we would follow in all faithfulness and obedience, seeking your honor and your glory in all that we do. And this we offer and pray to you in the name of our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. Beginning in verse one. Then Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, ‘If you are the son of God, command these stones become loaves of bread. ‘ But he answered, ‘It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, ‘If you are the son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, he will command his angels concerning you, and on their hands, they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against the stone.
‘ Jesus said to him, ‘Again, it is written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. ‘ Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdom of the world in their glory. And he said to him, ‘All these I will give you if you will fall down and worship me. ‘ Then Jesus said to him, ‘Be gone, Satan, for it is written, you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve. ‘ Then the devil left him, ‘Behold, angels came and were ministering to him. ‘ The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Does it matter that Jesus was Jewish? What if he were at woman whose family moved to Palestine in order for Joseph to take a job as a head carpenter of the Nazareth cabinet shop? Would it make a difference? There are some who treat the particulars of who Jesus is as accidental or secondary to what he came to do. But it does matter because the Lord set in motion his plan of redemption in a very specific and particular way. The history is a part of the redemption.
When the Son steps into human history as the Jewish Son of Mary, it’s all part of God’s eternal decree to bring salvation to his people. This preparation of his coming, we have looked at expanding over thousands of years. Now the final preparation comes as Jesus now steps into his role of redeemer. The great confrontation with the ancient serpent comes after his baptism, and Jesus enters into a time of testing given at the hand of Satan. What was lost by Adam at the very headwaters of creation, Jesus now comes to reclaim. A new champion has arisen to vanquish sin and death once for all. And this is precisely what we need. We do not need one who can only sympathize with our dilemma. A heavenly sigh. We do not need one who can only show us what we are to do, a heavenly example. We do not need one who can sit in our corner, simply give us encouraging and inspirational advice. Us, a heavenly coach. What we need is a heavenly savior to conquer and subdue us and our enemies. We need a heavenly savior who who can stand in our earthly place and pay the penalty that we deserve.
Because Jesus conquered Satan’s temptation and crushed his dominion, we are set free and we are unable to walk in his victory. And that is really good news for us. In many ways, it’s the reverse story of the Rocky movie. Think about Rocky and all the types like that. The hero overcomes all odds and finally comes in and winning the final round. And everyone cheers and excited because he overcame and won. But rather, we have a victorious hero before he ever enters the ring. And after conquering the villain, he does enter in in order to allow himself to be beaten to death. That’s the story of the gospel. The Son of God relinquishes his glory to take on the humble state of a servant in order to free his people from their state of sin and misery. What ends in the ultimate humiliation then is death on the cross. We ask that question, how did we get here? How did all of this come to be? From the fall, humanity entered into a state or condition of sin and misery. Our catechist it tells us that mankind, by their fall, lost communion with God and are now under his wrath and curse.
And so we are made liable to all the miseries of this life, to death itself and to the pains of hell forever. But the good news is that God did not leave us to perish in this state of sin and misery. He entered into a covenant of grace to deliver his people through salvation by a redeemer. We have been looking at this covenant promise given all the way back in Genesis 3:15. One would come from the seed of the woman who had crushed the head of the serpent. This promise extended into time and history through thousands of years of God working with a preserved line, a Godly line. We saw how Abraham was called and God’s promises are given to him as he enters into this relational covenant that’s not just for Abraham, but it’s for he and all his posterity. Luke’s genealogy reminds us from Adam to Abraham, Abraham to David, from David to Joseph. In the last three weeks, we’ve looked at this great swath of redemptive history to see how God would bring forth a king from the line of David, a prophet like Moses, a priest for Israel, prophet, priest, and king, culminating in one person, Jesus Christ.
Everything in the Old Testament prepares and culminates in him. From Genesis 3 to the last chapter of the last prophet Malachi, we see sin and misery played out with God’s people everywhere. There are really no great heroes. The very best are really not that great. Everybody’s flawed, everybody’s fallible. And no victory lasts for very long. It’s like a long road trip through history and a beat-up dodge that keep breaking down all the time. You just imagine changing that flat tire one more time, pulled over on the side of the road and steam is coming up from underneath the hood. The kids are in the back screaming and yelling and fighting. And your wife’s in the front seat and tears down her face. And you look up and you see that biblical billboard of a nice new shiny Mercedes. Happy family smiling and dressed all nice. And you’re like, Lord, where is that at? When and how does this state of misery and sin come to an end? Well, the when is answered in two parts, the two advance. Seeing Jesus first and second coming. The how comes through a state of humiliation. That’s a very specific word.
A state of humiliation. Christians have spoken of the Son leaving his state of glory and exaltation and coming to us in this humble state. We It’s not that word humiliation a bit differently now, but it refers to Jesus humbling himself, taking the very form of a servant. Philippians 2, not counting equality with God, something to be grasped, emptying himself. Why is this important? Because the Lord conquers the powers of sin, Satan, and death through abject weakness and humility. The The glory culminates with Jesus laying down his life in humility to have the Father raise him again to glory and exaltation. Everything Everything that God had been doing through his people, Israel, failure upon failure, now comes together for victory in Christ. Jesus is born in a low condition, born under the law, undergoes the miseries of this life. Nobody saw this coming. It was a surprise to everyone. At the very start of Jesus’ ministry, he to be baptized by John the Baptist. We’ll look at that in greater detail in a couple of weeks, but the short answer as to why was so that he could identify with his sinful people. He takes on the sinless one, the identity of the people who need cleansed because of their defilement.
He takes on the identity of his people. Then what happens next in Matthew 3, right after Jesus comes out of the water and says, The heavens open up, and he saw the spirit of God descend upon him like a dove, and resting on him, a voice from heaven declared, ‘This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. ‘ A Trinitarian picture with the Father’s declaration that Jesus is the beloved Son. Israel, who is also described as God’s Son, we now see the true and better Son in Jesus. In verse 1 of chapter 4, Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness and tempted by the devil. Who led him? It was the Holy spirit. Who tempted him? The devil. The New Testament refers to Satan as a personal enemy. He’s not a metaphor for evil or a single name meant to speak of a collection of maleficence or personification, an actual entity. God. Now, we don’t know that much about him or other spiritual creatures, a little here, a little there, but largely gaps in our understanding. But we know enough of what the scripture gives to us. And when taken together from all the Gospels, it seems that Jesus was tempted throughout his 40 days, not just at the end.
These three may have come at the end, or they may be a summary of his temptations in total. But it was a time of testing and temptation. And Matthew goes on, after fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry. 40 days fasting, presumably sustained through this time by the Holy spirit. Forty days is certainly significant biblically. It’s filled with references to 40. Moses and Elijah both fasting for 40 days. Moses on Mount Sinai for 40 days receiving the law. Israel wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. A rabbinical tradition even said that Adam, after 40 days, was brought into the Garden of Eden. Significant. Also, the three replies of the Lord to Satan all come from the Book of Deuteronomy 6:8. There, Moses is instructing Israel. They’re about to enter into the promised land, and he is reminding them of all their failures, of not being faithful to God, even as they’re on the point of entering in to God’s promise. Where Israel failed, her redeemer succeeded. Where she fell prey to temptation, he manfully resisted to the end. And Jesus is identified as God’s beloved son. He’s the new Israel of God. Jesus’ life intentionally parallels with the Exodus from the Egypt.
With Moses, Israel crossed the sea, and Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 10 that that is a type of baptism. They cross the sea and they go then because of sin into the wilderness for 40 years. Jesus is baptized where? The Jordan River. The Jordan River is where Israel crossed into the promised land. Because of their continued rebellion and sin, they never fully entered into that promise. Now they’re poised once more. But this time through a mediator. Jesus stands at the beginning of his ministry ready to bring Israel out of exile in himself. He’s the true Israel of God. Each temptation that Jesus would face was directly in an area where Israel failed. They could not remain faithful to God. We also see that Jesus is also Until the new or the second Adam. Paul uses this expression in Romans and Corinthians. He calls Jesus the last Adam. Michael Wilcock, I’ll put this in your book, and he said, In Eden, the head of the human race was confronted by the tempter, disobeyed God’s word and set the whole of mankind off on the wrong track. Now comes the second Adam, and alone in the wilderness, he in turn confronts the tempter.
The difference is that he will win. That’s good news. The tempter came, verse 3, and said to Jesus, If you’re the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread. Later in Matthew’s gospel, we hear the echoes of Satan’s words on the lips of those passing by the cross. If you are the Son of God, come down from this cross. Those demonic words moving forward into the persecution of Jesus. This if is not expressing doubt about being God’s son, but it speaks to what it means to be God’s son. You see, Jesus is hungry and he has the supernatural ability to feed himself. So why don’t you? If you’re hungry, why don’t you just feed yourself? Figure it out. The temptation is not in the making of bread. You see, the spirit is the one who led Jesus into this time of fasting. It was God’s will for Jesus to be hungry in this preparatory moment. Therefore, Jesus, the faithful Son, will submit himself to the will of the Father and not take matters into his own hands. That’s the temptation. He answers Satan. He says, It is written, Man should not live by bread alone, by every word that comes from the mouth of God, every word, every command, the Father’s will is the Son’s priority.
He will do what God commands him to do. If God commands him a time of hunger, he will joyfully endure it and not move himself out of it. Then the devil took him to the Holy City, to Jerusalem. He put them on the pinnacle of the temple. He said, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written. He will command his angels concerning you, and on their hands, they will bear you up, lets you strike your foot against the stone. Satan is quoting from Psalm 91, showing, Hey, two people can play at the scripture game. The nature of this temptation is not so that people would see him and believe in Jesus. There’s no mention of anyone else being around at all. It is testing God’s protection for his son. One writer, he puts it well, he said, It would be to act as if God is there to serve the son rather than the reverse. Rather than trusting his safety by faith, Jesus would no longer be depending on the promise of his Father, but on the act that he forced his Father to do. I can trust you because I forced you to come and save me.
No. Jesus is trusting in the promises of the Father because those are sufficient. He says, in quotes again from Deuteronomy, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test. You see, Israel failed at this miserably, even when God was showing them and providing for them and protecting them. They challenged him, doubted his provision, demanding to see more, testing trusting God at every turn. Jesus is saying, I am not doing that. I am a faithful son. God’s promise is sufficient for me. Then the devil takes him to a very high mountain, and he showed him all the Kingdom of the world in their glory. And likely this is a vision state to be able to see all the Kingdoms of the world. Then Satan tells him very starkly, All of this I will give you if you will fall down and worship me. A question is, are these even Satan’s to give? He’s a liar, after all. But Jesus doesn’t dispute this part. So we’re not entirely sure what the relationship is between the world and the devil. We do know that the Earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. If there is anything in Satan’s control, it’s because of God’s will.
So God is the one in control, not intrinsically Satan. But whatever the case may be, Satan is offering Jesus a shortcut. He will be Jesus’ benefactor and not the Father. The path to achieve all this could happen without the cross, without suffering in death, all through false worship. But this attacks the very mission that Jesus set out to do, where the Lord had promised in Psalm 2, The Lord said to me, ‘You are my son. Today I have begotten you. Ask me and I will make the nations as your heritage, the ends of the earth as your possession. ‘ And Satan is trying to give him an easy route to that, bypassing the will of the Father. And Jesus, this time, rebukes him, Be gone, Satan, for it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him alone you shall serve. ‘ And then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him. Israel’s repeated sin of idolatry is broken by Jesus. They could never be faithful for very long. And Jesus stands at the very start of his mission as the faithful son of the Father, the faithful Israel.
Now, a question that the text doesn’t answer, but often people ask is, well, could Jesus have actually sinned. Now, there are some who think that you cannot have a real temptation without a real opportunity to sin, but the majority of Christian thinkers do not hold to this. Jesus did show his innate wholeness through temptation and struggle. But this struggle is not made less because of his inability to sin. He possessed a real human nature. He experienced real dread, a real struggle of death and temptation. Jesus had real experiences of the very things that we experienced by virtue of being human, even if he was not in the same way capable of sinning. The experience was no less real. There’s something about Jesus conquering of these temptations that we see in the Gospels linked together. Jesus makes this connection in Matthew 12. Verse 29, he speaks of how can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed, he will plunder his house. He’s speaking directly of Satan. He’s saying that his ability to come and to cast out demons and everything he’s doing is because he is the one who has bound the strong man.
That’s exactly what Jesus came to do. He came to destroy, John tells us, the works of the devil. From this point forward, Jesus now launches into Israel. What is he doing? He’s healing their diseases. He’s casting out demons. He is proclaiming the word of the Kingdom of God. Exactly what he was sent to do. Resisting the temptations of the evil one, conquering him, and then moving forward with victory upon victory upon victory over everything that stood in his path. All the promises, all the predictions, they finally see their full light in Jesus. Our sin and our misery can now come to an end because Jesus, the faithful son, has entered the ring in a state of lowness and humility He emptied himself so that we could finally be set free. He crushed the head of the serpent, even while the serpent bruised his heel. This is the one in the Book of Hebrews, speaking of Jesus, says, For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. It’s not the great heavenly sigh, it’s the great heavenly champion who’s conquered and has been victorious.
Tempted without sin. We who are in a low state of humiliation have promised exaltation before us. How can we trust that this will actually be the case? Because Jesus, the faithful son, the true Israel of God, has been victorious over Satan, sin, and death. The grave could not hold him. And by faith in his promises, this is our belief, too. This is good news for us because what do we do in our failings of temptation? We’re tempted all the time. How are we stacking up as faithful sons and daughters of God? Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 10, No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. And God is faithful. He will not let you be tempted beyond what’s your ability, but he will provide for you with a temptation, a way of escape that you can stand up under it. And that way is Jesus. It’s in his victory. It’s not in ours. It’s in the strength that he has provided because he is the one who’s crushed the evil one once and for all. He is the one who has overcome. He is the bright spot the final and complete victory.
That is so needed. What we see is this God who has entered into a specific time in history to undo everything that that have fallen apart to reclaim it is able to enter into your specific history. This is why it matters, the specificity, because you are a specific person living in a specific time. You don’t need general advice and a general savior. You need a specific one who can come to you right now where you’re at and have the threads of your history woven into the fabric of this beautiful tapestry of the salvation and redemption of Jesus. There’s nothing outside of his grasp. There’s nothing in your life that he can’t mend and fix. Because he’s a complete savior. He’s conquered all of it. We know so little, really, about Satan, and the reason is we don’t need to know anymore. We know enough. People who obsess about those type of things, they’re missing the point. He’s ineffective in the light of Jesus. He does not have total dominion over your life. He does not have victory. Jesus does. All you need to know is where to stand, who to put your faith in. It’s in Christ.
When we who live with these promises yet to be fulfilled, and there are times you doubt because you see a horizon in front of you and you We have to hold it by faith, and we really would like to see it by sight. We go back then to the faithful son who did precisely that walk of faith. He did not demand sight from the Father. He did not take his prerogative as the Son of God exaltet in glory. He emptied it and submitted himself to the path of suffering and pain before him That is, by his stripes, we are healed. It is God’s will to crush him for our iniquities. And he willingly went through that. And because of that, his promises we hold to We hold to his victory. And when we are wondering, will God come through? When I get to that point, what’s going to happen? What’s beyond this life? Will I really be raised from the dead? What’s next? And the promises are there because Jesus has won. He’s victorious. He was raised on the third day, according to the scriptures. And if maybe that’s a little too far away and you’re more like, well, I’m not really worried about getting to heaven right now.
I just wanted to need to pay my rent. I wonder about my life. I wonder about my family and what’s going to take place and the things right in front of me in the next year or two. How can I trust that God will complete his promises? Because he completed them in Jesus. And you are in him by virtue of being united to him through the Holy spirit. And the fullness and the completion of his conquest becomes ours, even in those places where God has ordained you to be hungry. I will take your hungry, Lord. If that is your will for my life, then 10,000 feasts through my own will. Take the hungry. Take what God offers you because it is the Father who has raised his son from the dead, who has broke the of Satan, sin, and death. And in him we will trust. Pray with me. Father, as we come before you this day, we say thank you. We praise you for your goodness, your Majesty, your glory. We thank you that you have exaltet our humble savior to the glory that he had before he came to us. Father, that he is at your right-hand and he is waiting for you to place all things under his feet.
And even so, we pray, Lord Jesus, come quickly. May it be. And Father, we would ask that you would help us here who struggle in the midst of our time and our place. Lord, we struggle being your faithful sons and daughters. And we pray, Father, that through Jesus, our great high priest who sympathizes with us, that his power would be manifest in our life through the power of your spirit. We pray and ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen. Please stand.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.