Part 4: The Temptation of Jesus

Listen or read the following transcripts as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of temptation from Matthew 4:1-11.

“As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’ Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.’ Jesus answered, ‘It is written: “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”‘ Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. ‘If you are the Son of God,’ 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.” ’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is also written: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”‘ Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ‘All this I will give you,’ he said, ‘if you will bow down and worship me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Away from me, Satan! For it is written: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.” ’ Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.”

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Let us bow in prayer.

We come, Lord God, to a passage that is full of mysterious things. That your eternal Son, one with you in glory, should not only identify with us by becoming a human being but submit to temptation is beyond our farthest imaginings. Now may the word of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our Redeemer. For Jesus’ sake, amen.

There are some passages of Scripture that become more complex the more one thinks of them. You think you know them, and then you start to think about them, and you realize you don’t. There are quite a few passages like that, and they are particularly striking for those of us who have been reared in Christian homes, so the phrases trickle off our lips and we think we’ve digested all of that material.

Let me give you an example that has nothing to do with this passage just so you see what I mean. “Love the Lord your God with heart and soul and mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself.” What on earth does that mean? Love the Lord with your mind? We’re familiar with the expression, so we don’t count it strange, but what does it mean? How do you love the Lord with your mind? By thinking harder? By studying Jesus more? Is that adequate?

Then it gets more complex when you realize in the ancient world, heart doesn’t mean what it means to us. If I say, “I love you with all my heart,” both love and heart are in the realm of the emotional. In our symbolism, physiologically, the mind is about here, and the heart (the emotions) is about here, but in ancient Jewish symbolism, you have to lower them about 30 degrees. Then your mind is closer to your heart than anything.

The heart is the center of your whole personality, and your emotions are seated in your gizzard, your viscera, so that the Old English Versions have comments about your reins, le rein in French, your kidneys. You love the Lord with your kidneys, or in some versions, bowels of compassion. It sounds vaguely indecent in modern English, but it was the way the ancient physiognomy worked.

Now the text says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart (the center of your personality, centering in what you think) and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” You have a sort of A-B-A-B structure with the center of your personality in your mind, then with your soul. Then with your mind and with your strength. Love the Lord with your mind?

I’d love to tease that one out for you, but it would take us down a rabbit warren. It’s a wonderful rabbit warren, and it has taken me a long time to think that one through, and I thought I knew that passage. It has only been this year that I gave it a lot of attention and began to turn it over in my head.

One of the passages that is like that, a passage which on the face of it we all know and we all understand and if we’ve been Christians at all or have read our Bibles at all, is this passage of the temptation of Jesus. Then, when you stop to think about it, it’s not quite so clear after all. There are at least two reasons why this passage is more complex than what one first thinks.

First, what does temptation look like to the spotless Son of God? So much of what I experience by temptation is a rerun of previous temptations which have actually lapsed into sin. I have fallen in various areas, so when I am tempted by those areas again, I am tempted to do what I know I have already done and succumbed to, but Jesus has never succumbed.

What does it look like to him? Some argue the temptation cannot be all that bad for him because, after all, he’s the Son of God, but one might surely argue that temptation for someone who fights it and fights it and fights it and fights it and fights it when all the others have fallen and fights it until he has won the battle has suffered that temptation far worse than anything we faced.

But it is not intuitively obvious what temptation looks like to Jesus. The Bible insists he was tempted in all points as we are, yet, without sin. We find it very difficult to distinguish those two things because we have so often been tempted and fallen into sin.

There is a second element why this passage seems strange to us. His temptations, on the face of it, seem foreign to us. Let’s face it. I’ve never been tempted to turn stones into bread. I suffer from so much vertigo the chance of getting me to the temple top is going to be quite a task, let alone asking me to jump off. Exactly what is Jesus being tempted with? How is this, in any sense, something that applies to us?

Let us look at the text. One notes right away chapter 4, verse 1 is tied directly into the end of chapter 3. At the outset of Jesus’ public ministry, the voice from heaven speaks, “This is my Son, whom I love,” and the Spirit leads Jesus into the desert to be tempted, and the first thing the Devil says at the end of that period is, “If you are the Son, then act like one. What Son of God does not have certain prerogatives and rights?”

One also notes right away this is picking up all kinds of identification themes. We’ll pick up some of them later, but already, at the very beginning of the book, Matthew begins his account with a genealogy that places Jesus in line with Abraham and David so that Jesus is identified as the messianic King, great David’s greater son.

Already, in chapter 2, still in the account of his birth and related events, some things happen to Jesus that are kind of microcosms of what happened to Israel. Did Israel go down into Egypt and get called back out? So did Jesus go down into Egypt and get called back out. In fact, the alignments between the two come closer and closer and closer, and in every gospel, there are different ways of portraying this.

In John’s gospel, for example, one remembers in the Old Testament Israel is portrayed again and again and again as God’s vine. God plants a vineyard, and every time this analogy is drawn out, it turns out Israel is a pretty rotten vine. Isaiah 5; Psalm 80. There God says in Isaiah 5, “I will sing a song of my beloved.” He breaks out his guitar and starts to strum a little song about how God planted the vine, and he looked for the vine to bring forth fruit, and lo and behold, it only brought forth stinkers, so he dug around and planted a wall.

The second verse: “I only saw more stinkers.” Then the whole tone changes into a minor key. “Let me tell you what I’m going to do with this vine. I’m going to dig it out and chop it up.” Then, in case they don’t get it, the chorus comes back again, “Israel is the vine. Israel is the vine.” Then Jesus comes along and says, “I am the true vine.” This identification of Jesus with Israel …

So also here, as we’ll see, Israel spends 40 years in the desert. Jesus spends 40 days in the desert, a kind of microcosm of ancient Israel. One sees these things. What is one to make of them? What significance is there to this? One can’t help also but see there’s a kind of new humanity starting here.

We think of the first temptation. Adam was temped in the garden. The second Adam was tempted in the desert. The first Adam had plenty and beauty and a companion, a wife. The second Adam was in the desert in stark ugliness and want, and he was hungry and alone. The first Adam sinned and brought about our downfall. The second Adam prevailed and brought about our release. One sees this just in approaching the text right away. What, then, is meant by these temptations themselves?

1. The first temptation was to doubt God’s provision and love in the face of circumstances.

Satan often traps us by introducing a small element of doubt. The first temptation to Adam and to Eve begins, “Has God really said …?” So also here. “If you are the Son of God …” Moreover, the Devil does not usually come along and say, “Here’s a great big pile of moral manure. Wallow in it.” He, rather, presents it as something that is, at least, beneficial and, perhaps, insightful.

So also in the doctrinal realm, the obedience realm, Satan does not come to someone who is stalwart in the faith, whether Jesus Christ the Son of God or, for that matter, even a mature Christian, and say, “Here’s a great bit warp of disobedience. Do an about turn 180 degrees. You’ll be fine.”

Look at these temptations. There’s not a single temptation to commit adultery. Not a single temptation to cheat on your IRS. No temptation here whatsoever to beat up your kids. Not a single temptation to rob the city bank. In fact, on the face of it, this seems reasonable. He’s 40 days and 40 nights in the desert. He’s hungry.

You say, “Come on, Don. You’re exaggerating a bit as 40 days and 40 nights are already in the realm of the miraculous. How hungry can you really be if you’re going through a miraculous fast?” Well, I’m not sure that’s the way it worked. There were different kinds of fasts in the ancient world. Some fasts allowed you to take water but no food. Experience in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland has shown if you take water but no food you can go 41 or 42 days before you start having irreversible damage done to you.

I suspect this is simply an extremely rigorous fast that was entirely in the realm of the natural, and at the end of it, he was weak and tired and hungry but self-consciously fulfilling the old Israel typology. Israel had faced the rigors of the desert. They had murmured. They had complained. Wasn’t that the heart of so much of their problem?

They could not trust God, the God who had done all the miracles of the exodus, the God who had brought them across the Red Sea, the God who had given them water from the rock, the God who had given them manna from heaven, the God who ensured their shoes wouldn’t wear out, and the God who gave them quail, and they’re still complaining! It is as if, then, Jesus puts himself in the same sort of position (in a kind of mirror image microcosm of extreme hunger in the desert) driven there by the Spirit of God, part of God’s plan for his identification with the people of God.

Then the Devil comes to him. “If you’re the Son of God, you’ve done your 40 days now. There are some stones. Command that they become bread. You’re the agent of God in creation. I’m not suggesting you do something wicked. I’m not suggesting you make yourself a harem. I’m suggesting you feed yourself. I mean, isn’t the body the temple of the Holy Spirit? Aren’t you a human being? You have to look after your body, don’t you?”

After all, there was nothing intrinsically wicked in this invitation, was there? So today, our physical and personal discomforts are often used by the Enemy of our souls to make us, in the first instance, doubt God, doubt his love for us, doubt his care for us, and doubt his provisions. It’s relatively easy to trust God when everything is going well. Then, get a four-month backache, and if somebody tells you, “Curse God and die,” you’ll be tempted to do it.

The temptation had its own subtle points. Really, it was a plea to doubt just ever so little the Father’s love for him. Jesus had come to identify himself with human beings, and throughout all four Gospels in various ways, you get this insistence: Jesus will not do anything on his own hook apart from the express sanction of the Father.

In John’s gospel, for example, he keeps saying things like, “I say only what the Father gives me to say,” or “I do only what the Father gives me to do.” The Son will do nothing but what the Father gives him to do and he will say nothing but what the Father gives him to say. That is precisely what ensures in his state of humiliation that all he says and does is precisely what God gives him to say and do and not a whit more.

Now the question is.… Could the Lord Jesus, as a man, trust his Father sufficiently, or should he take some kind of independent action apart from the sanction of his Father to satisfy his own needs? Wasn’t the essence of his humiliation that he had temporarily relinquished this kind of …? Independence isn’t the right word, for the Godhead has always been one.

Look at Christ’s reply. He offers no argument about his sonship. None. He knows who he is. Instead, what he does immediately is appeal to Scripture precisely because what he is doing is thinking about his own taking up in himself, his own recapitulation in himself of Israel’s history. He is the new Israel. He knows that. He’s thinking this through from the perspective of the Old Testament passages that talk about that kind of thing.

What do you find in the Old Testament in Deuteronomy, chapter 8? Moses says to the people of God just before he leaves them, “Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years to humble you and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments.

He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.”

Already in Exodus, chapter 4, we find God saying, “Israel is my son. Let my son go that he may worship me.” Now God says from heaven, “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.” The Devil comes along and says, “Oh, you’re the Son?” Jesus is turning these things over in his mind, self-consciously aligning himself with Israel, being the recapitulation of the people of God so that those in him would be the new Israel.

He puts himself, he submits himself by the leading of the Spirit into this rigor, and at the end of it, does he complain, which was Israel’s great sin? Is there murmuring, which was Israel’s repeated sin? Is there want of trust? No, no, no. He responds with exactly that word from God which was given by Moses to the people a millennium and a half before, that word which the people repeatedly failed and which Jesus now obeys.

Listen. “He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” That is a wonderful passage. What it means in the context is not simply that Bible study is more important than eating.

What it means in the context is the Word of God is so important, if there is ever any sort of tension between what the Word of God demands and all the apparent demands of the immediate physical circumstances, the Word of God has to win hands down every time, and on occasion, that will demand sacrifice. That’s where your faith gets tested. Then you find out if you really do care for the Word of God or if it’s just a creedal point for you, and that, brothers, I tell you, that one we learn in our own experience.

My home church, which is not my home church in Chicago.… My home church in terms of spiritual empathy and roots and so on is a church in Cambridge, England, a Reformed Baptist church there with one of the finest expositors in Britain. Dr. Roy Clements is the pastor of that church. We were married there. I have many wonderful roots and memories in that church.

A number of years ago under Roy’s urging, an elder was added to the board of elders. This chap was a medical missionary. We’ll call him John. John was married, had two children, and had been a missionary in North Africa with the Red Sea Mission in a leprosarium. He was a medical doctor. He had been out there for quite a few years and had quite a distinguished record out there.

He then came back to Cambridge and was doing a little more advanced study in public health and had almost finished his consultancy papers. He was quiet. He was hard working. He was transparently helpful, wise, gentle, and he seemed to be especially good in counseling some people who were right on the interface between medical problems and psychological problems and spiritual problems. He had the perception and the gifts, apparently, to do a great deal of this. At the urging of Roy and the other elders, in fact, this decision was made, and he was put on the board.

He helped a lot of people. There’s no way of saying he didn’t. Then, John got into an adulterous affair. He shacked up with his nurse. Two children at home. Pre-teens. This is a good church. They tried everything wise and godly and biblical. There was counseling and confrontation and help and time and prayer and fasting. You name it. They were really trying to support the wife. They were trying to make John see the error of his ways. He resigned immediately from the eldership, and he would not repent, he would not leave the nurse, he would not go back to his wife, and eventually he was excommunicated. Not a sign of repentance anywhere.

Roy Clements was devastated. He was devastated not only because you don’t like to see that thing happen to anybody, he was devastated not only because it was an elder, but he was also devastated because it was an elder he had pushed to have appointed. Inevitably, he began to question his own ability to judge and to assess, but quite frankly, I don’t know anybody in the church who had second-guessed him.

A year or two later, we were going off to a conference to speak somewhere together. He was driving. We were heading for London. I asked him, “Roy, I don’t mean to pry unduly, but two years now since this all broke. A year since it has largely been resolved. What do you make of it at this stage? How do you look back on it and assess it? What do you think about it now?” He said, “Don, I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion the man had never, ever taken a serious decision that cost him anything.”

I said, “I beg your pardon! He was a medical missionary in North Africa! He was in a leprosarium.” He said, “I know. I know. I checked it all out. But he was brought up in a Christian home. Three considerably older sisters who doted on him. They were almost like mini-mothers. He didn’t know better. He had a gentle disposition. Everything he did was wonderful. Sort of a shiny, blue-eyed, golden-haired boy who went off to university and got involved with the right people at the right Christian union.” (That’s InterVarsity over there.)

“He eventually became president of that. Wonderful. Isn’t he a wonderful lad? Goes to medical school. Marries the right girl. Then wants to be a missionary. Praises and strokes all around. Of course, he’s being a missionary in an area that interests him (public health), and he’s good at it. Everybody thinks he’s wonderful over there, too.

Then he comes back and everybody thinks he’s wonderful here, and his career is advancing, and he’s buying a house. Everybody looks up to him, and he wants to be put on the elders’ board. Then he meets a pretty skirt, and he’s done. He does what he has always done. He does what he wants to do.”

Roy said, “I cannot find any decisive turning point in his life where he took a decision to do something he didn’t want to do simply because it was right, simply because that is what the Word of God demanded of him,” or in the terms of our text, simply because he believed man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

I’m not for a moment suggesting every person who falls into adultery falls into it that way. I’m not for a moment suggesting only non-Christians fall into adultery. I am saying, however, in some such instances, and this was one of them.… The more I’ve thought about it and the more I’ve looked at John since then, the more I am persuaded Roy was very discerning. A little belatedly but very discerning. In fact, the man simply had never closed with Christ at all in any principled way that said death to self-interest and yes to Christ. There wasn’t a sign of it anywhere.

Isn’t that the sort of thing we also worry about with respect to our children? We’re not quite sure just where our children are in their faith. How much of it is mirrored off us and how much of it brings them into the place where they’ve sensed and smelled and tasted the allurements of the world and then, for God’s sake, for his Word’s sake, self-consciously said no? When we see that pattern, then we know.

I don’t know you men very well, but I suspect in a group this size there are some of you who enjoy Fourth because it’s a comfortable, loving place. It’s a good place to be. But I tell you frankly, it doesn’t have any necessary bearing on the reality and vitality of your faith until you get into the position where you’re forced to say no to something you would really like to do, to a stance or an attitude you’d really like to take, to a moral choice where you’d really like to go one way when all of God’s Word directs you another way.

Then, because you have repented and trusted Christ, because he has poured out his free Spirit upon you, and because he has given you a new heart so that whatever of the old nature still is drawn to the dirty and the mediocre and the slovenly, there is something that says, “No, no, no. Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

It might be a choice at work. It’s so easy to slant things, to twist things just a little, to handle promotions just a little differently, or to slant a story. That’s what Jesus faced right at the beginning of his public ministry. Here he is the one who offers the archetypical right answer. “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

2. The second temptation was to twist God’s Word for personal advantage.

If the first temptation drives us to the Word, the second temptation, then, finds Satan using that Word to trip Jesus up. “Well, if Jesus is going to say you must believe the Word, I can quote the Bible, too,” the Devil says.

So we read, “Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple.” Almost certainly, this is a visionary sort of thing. You couldn’t normally climb up there. The next one is certainly visionary when, in fact, he takes Jesus to a very high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. You can’t see all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor from a mountain no matter how high it is. It’s a visionary experience. “ ‘If you are the Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down. For it is written …”

“The Bible says!” Satan quotes the Bible, too. “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.” It is just possible there was circulating in the first century a story, a rabbinic tradition, that certainly circulated a couple of centuries later because is has come down to us, that said when the Messiah came he would stand on the temple and cry, “You poor! Your salvation draws nigh,” and leap down to authenticate himself.

But, in fact, this passage makes no direct allusion to it, and the actual literary source we have for that rabbinic tradition is a couple of centuries later, so we’re not sure. On the other hand, just intrinsically, there were always people in the temple. If Jesus did this sort of thing, undoubtedly, it would be wonderfully authenticating.

After all, if Jesus knows himself to be the Messiah, could God let his Messiah die? In fact, isn’t that part of Jesus’ logic with his own disciples in Matthew, chapter 16? The storms raging, he’s asleep in the back of the boat. “Oh, you of little faith.” Of course, they have little faith. How could they possibly believe Jesus is going to drown? If he really is the Messiah, did they really think God is making a mistake with this storm?

A terrible judgment on Africa. Some of us think when Paul Henry died, son of Carl Henry, at the age of 51 of a brain tumor, it was a terrible judgment on America. That man would have been in the Senate today. He had presidential timbre. “The righteous are taken away and no one lays it to heart,” the Old Testament says.

“Oh, yes. God might take you away, but he’s not going to take me away.” That’s Jesus’ point in Matthew, chapter 16. It is impossible the Messiah is going to die by drowning. Well, then, shouldn’t he apply the same logic here? “Go ahead. Jump off the temple. Get a little bit of extra credibility. God’s not going to let you down at this point, is he? After all, there are biblical texts that talk about God’s care for you. Here’s one. ‘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.’ ”

But note, first, this is an attack on the sanity of faith. Faith is somehow transmuted into cheap presumption. There is a kind of love in some evangelical circles of quick, glib answers which talk about trusting God but have an aura of super-spirituality that attacks the sanity of faith. No one is safe in self-sought danger. We’ve seen that already from Joseph’s experience, have we not? No one is safe in any kind of moral danger. You don’t want your kids necking endlessly in the back seat of a car because you know where it’s going to end up.

You cannot sanction prayerlessness in your own life day after day after day after day and be spiritual at the end of it. I know a missionary in London’s Soho on the east end (a sleazy part of town) who openly says there are some parts where he won’t go alone. Not because he’s afraid of what people will do to him but because he’s afraid of getting trapped and doing what he shouldn’t do. This is a man who has worked there for 30 years.

Listen to Jesus’ response. “Jesus answered him, ‘It is also written: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” ’ ” In this context, Jesus is not saying, “Don’t put me to the test.” In this context, he is saying he, though the Son of God, must not put the Lord God to the test. The principle is Scripture must be compared with Scripture.

My father used to say, “A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.” You can prove anything from the Bible if you try hard enough, and postmodernists love it, but Jesus insists if all of this Word is God’s Word, then you must compare Scripture with Scripture and get the balance and proportion and the function of each part right. “So whatever this passage means from the Psalms, Satan, it is also written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”

It is an attack on the sanity of the faith. Faith, instead of becoming something that trusts God and bows before his Word and delights in his way and thought and priorities and will and power and truth, becomes a kind of privatized magical bit where you sort of leap out, take a running jump, and say, “Catch me, God.”

Note, too, Satan does use Scripture. The Bible can be distorted by misquoting, by quoting out of context, by quoting without balance. You can talk about being saved by grace until you have so much grace you have no holiness. You can talk about holiness until you have so much legalism you don’t have any grace.

I’ve heard people justify adultery on the ground that, after all, the Lord forgave the woman caught in it so we should do the same thing. After all, if adultery is also taking place when you lust in your heart and if you’ve lusted in your heart and you’re already guilty, you might as well do the act because you’re not guiltier.

You can go on and find Galatians, chapter 3, verse 28. “We’re all one in Christ Jesus (men and women, slave and free),” to justify all kinds of views of women in the home and ministry that are forbidden elsewhere in Scripture. On the other hand, you can use distinctions in roles to justify being a cheap bully in the home when God mandates to you that you love your wife as Christ loved the church, which means at very least self-sacrificially and for her good.

We remember the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians, chapter 10. “Neither let us tempt Christ as some of them also tempted God.” Let us ensure our use of Scripture is honest, humble, and teachable, that we avoid approaching God trying to show off or manipulating him or using texts to try to twist blessings from him. The idea is you shall not test the Lord your God. Do not put the Lord your God to the test. The second temptation was a temptation to twist God’s Word for personal advantage, and that one, too, still comes to us, does it not?

3. The third temptation was an explicit temptation to break the first commandment.

“The devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ‘All this I will give you,’ he said, ‘if you will bow down and worship me.’ ” That, of course, is one form of the end justifies the means.

It’s almost as if at this point Satan realizes he’s not working by the subtle approach. “Turn these stones into bread.” There’s nothing evil with that, not in itself. It’s in the context that it becomes evil. “Do something miraculous to display your greatness.” After all, there are other miraculous things Jesus does do to display his greatness. Why not this one? It’s the context that makes it evil.

Now, almost, the Devil decides to take one roll of the dice, as it were. Listen. Whatever else Satan knows of Jesus, he knows he’s the Father’s Son, that he’s slated one day to be King of Kings and Lord of Lords, so he says, “Here’s a shortcut.” It is not at all clear to me that even Satan himself understands the cross at this juncture, but he does say, “Here we go. Here’s a cross-free way. Bow to me, and it’s all yours.”

It is vital to remember the Devil cannot give what he promises. He hasn’t the right, and in the end, you lose your soul. Faust is never a good model. “Jesus said to him, ‘Away from me, Satan! For it is written: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.” ’ ” Serve him only. So often we are tempted to take the easy way, the way in which the end seems to justify the means. Jesus would not have it.

The first command is to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, the passage I quoted at the beginning. Therefore, the first sin is not to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. To put it another way, worship the Lord your God and serve him only. The sheer centrality of God. God does not exist to bless us. Not in the first instance. We exist for him. By his will we were made and for his glory. In fact, Colossians, chapter 1 says Christ is God’s agent in creation such that all things were made by him and for him.

Those are the three temptations. Observe that Christ was tempted from opposite perspectives. Poverty and hunger, on the one hand, and offered wealth and power on the other. Small wonder, then, Hebrews later comments, “He has been tempted in all points as we are; therefore, he is able to succour all those who come to the Father by him.”

Let me draw your attention to three applications from this passage in the context of the broader sweep of Scripture. First, Jesus’ temptations are, after all, of a piece with ours. He serves as a model to us as to how to withstand temptation. That’s not all he provides. He’s not just a model, but he’s not less than a model.

It’s not that I’m tempted to turn stones into bread, but I am tempted to doubt God when things are going wrong for me physically. They don’t even have to be very serious things. Just my computer crackup will do it. My power supply went out the other day with a publisher screaming at me. I have a cheap computer from Korea, a clone. I couldn’t get the part in for two and a half weeks. It’s enough to test any man’s sanctification. Or is it?

Isn’t God in charge of power supplies? Doesn’t he know the end from the beginning? Can’t I trust God with my computer? So much of our anger and our frustration, our rage at the person who cuts us off on the freeway acts as if God isn’t really ruling that day. I may not be tempted to turn stones into bread, but I’m often tempted to act as if God is not really living.

Luther faced that kind of bout. He would sometimes go for weeks and weeks in the blackest depression. One day his wife draped black crepe over the door, which at the time was a cultural sign that somebody had died.

Luther came in and said, “Oh, no. What has gone on now? Who’s dead? What further bad news do you have to add to my too many burdens?” His wife replied, “God has died.”

“What? You blaspheme?”

“No. You do. You act like it.” I’m tempted with Jesus’ first temptation sometimes. I may not be tempted to jump off too many temples, but there are times when we’re inclined to use God’s Word for personal advantage and not really submit to it. I may not be tempted to bow down to Satan in order to gain all the kingdoms of the world, but most of us have been tempted with Faustian exchanges every once in a while.

Go to dark Gethsemane,

You who feel the tempter’s pow’r;

Your Redeemer’s conflict see;

Watch with Him one bitter hour;

Turn not from His griefs away;

Learn of Jesus Christ to pray.

Follow to the judgment hall;

View the Lord of life arraigned;

O the worm-wood and the gall!

O the pangs His soul sustained!

Shun not suff’ring, shame, or loss;

Learn of Him to bear the cross.

Calv’ry’s mournful mountain climb

There’ adoring at His feet,

Mark the miracle of time,

God’s own sacrifice complete:

“It is finished!” Hear the cry;

Learn of Jesus Christ to die.

Jesus’ temptations are, after all, of a piece with ours so he serves as a model for us so we might learn how to withstand temptation.

Secondly, Jesus’ temptations are, after all, of a piece with ours so we can be assured of his help in temptation. It is not just that he’s a model and not just that he’s a Savior, which we’re getting to in a moment, but he’s a model and a Savior who has been where we have been.

Do you ever pray with your children at night? They’ve just been through a battering. They’ve been slighted at school, or your teenage daughter has been called Pimple face, which is absolutely catastrophic when you’re 13, or your boy just hasn’t made it onto the varsity team, and there’s not a thing you can do for them. You can love them and you can pray for them, and sometimes you pray, “Lord God, I bless you that you love him more than I do. I can’t be with him all the time, but you never forsake him.”

We serve a Jesus who took little children in his arms. We serve a Jesus who was tempted as we are and knows what temptation looks like, not just with a knowledge of omniscience but with a knowledge of experience, and he is the one who says, “Take up my cross. Take up your cross and follow me.”

Thirdly, Jesus’ temptations are part of his identification with us and lead to the cross. Here again, it is simply not right to take this passage out of its context and make it into a sort of independent narrative with a few little moralizing lessons. It’s embedded in the flow of the narrative that runs right through Matthew and runs through the New Testament and works out in the theology stretching both ways in the Canon.

In this context, as Jesus begins his public ministry, he stands in the line of sinners and is baptized with John. He recapitulates Israel’s experience in the desert, calls forth his disciples, and launches into his public ministry. He’s the new Israel, the true locus of the people of God. He’s the new Adam, to use Paul’s language. He starts a whole new humanity down another path, and as by one man’s sin death entered, so by one man’s obedience, death is conquered.

You have the wonderful language of Ephesians about how God, in his predestinating love, has taken Jew and Gentile alike and constituted them one new humanity, or the glorious scenes in the Apocalypse where men and women are chosen from every tongue and tribe and people and nation, one new humanity in Christ without a whiff of racism anywhere. He is the new Adam, and as Satan sinned and wrought our ruin, so Christ sins not and brings our redemption.

But this is also laying the foundation for substitution. Already, in chapter 1, this book says, “He will save his people from their sins.” By chapter 20, verse 28, Jesus himself insists he did not come to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many, but how could he do that if, in fact, he had himself succumbed to sin? He would just be paying for his own sin.

Supposing he was some sort of celestial being without any identification with us, how in any sense could that death be substituting for us? He stands where we stand. He walks where we walk. He is tempted as we are tempted, yet without sin. Hebrews understands. This passage is foundational to the cross. You cannot make sense of the substitutionary death of Christ, the just dying for the unjust, unless you understand Jesus wrestled with sin but knew no sin, wrestled with temptation but knew no sin.

This passage is bound up with his humanity, too, so that in his weakness, in his frailty, he rises from the dead as the new, glorious, resurrected Adam. One day, we, too, will not be tempted by sin. Not at all in the new heaven and the new earth, when the reign of Christ is no longer contested and there is no more death or sin or hell, for us who are the people of God. There is an old hymn by Isaac Watts.

With joy we meditate the grace

Of our high priest above;

His heart is made of tenderness,

His bowels melt with love.

Touched with a sympathy within,

He knows our feeble frame;

He knows what sore temptations mean,

For He has felt the same.

He in the days of feeble flesh

Poured out His cries and tears,

And in His measure feels afresh

What every member bears.

He’ll never quench the smoking flax,

But raise it to a flame;

The bruisËd reed He never breaks,

Nor scorns the meanest name.

Then let our humble faith address

His mercy and His power;

We shall obtain delivering grace

In the distressing hour.

I imagine in a crowd this size there are some of you who barely have a clue what I’m talking about. This might be your first men’s retreat. It might be that you don’t go to church at all and you were dragged along by someone who was trying to be a good neighbor. I want to tell you frankly, the men of Fourth and the other brothers who are here are not a bunch of religious kooks and still less, a group of holier-than-thou types.

At best, we’re poor beggars telling others where there is bread. We don’t approach you out of a position of strength. We approach you because we know we’re sinners, and we know we cannot be reconciled to God apart from this Christ who died for sinners like me. What this God demands of you, what he commands of you is that you come to an end of yourself.

You stop making excuses, and you say, “Yes, yes. I acknowledge his way is right. I am wrong. I need forgiveness. I cannot be reconciled to you by my own efforts. God have mercy on me.” You just abandon yourself to him. You trust him. You recognize if he accepts you it’s because of what Christ has done. This Christ who is your Maker yet faced temptation to identify with you, that he might die in the place of those whom he calls to himself to raise them to perfection on the last day.

You can walk away from that, but if, in your heart of hearts, the Spirit of God is tugging at you, you can’t finally walk away. The hound of heaven comes after you. You will bend the knee, and where you are right now, where you’re seated, in your heart, what you must do is cry out, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.” Won’t you?

For I tell you, so far as facing temptation is concerned, all of us … all of us … still go back to this same Savior, and our plea is always the same one: “Lord God, we ask for acceptance into your presence, not because we’re so noble or right or good, but because Jesus died for sinners.” Let us bow in prayer.

It is a wonderful thing, Lord God, to think your own dear Son, one with you before time began, your very agent in creation, should so identify with us as to be tempted along with us. Help us, Lord God, to learn from his example to hide your Word in our hearts, to keep the central things straight and worship the Lord God and him alone.

It is wonderful to remember his empathy, his sympathy. It is so reassuring to recognize he is not some cruel tyrant who is waiting to zap us when we put a foot wrong. He knows our infirmities. He remembers we are dust. But above all, Lord God, it is wonderful to remember this was the path he took so that one day he would go to the cross and there die, the just for the unjust to bring us to you.

Was ever a heart so hardened and can such ingratitude be that one for whom Jesus suffered should say, “It is nothing to me”? Grant us, we beseech you, tender hearts, a desire to please the Master, shame when we do commit sin, speed to return to him with repentance and faith when we usurp his authority yet again. Have mercy on us, and grant, therefore, our delight and our joy will be full because of our confidence in him. We ask in Jesus’ name, amen.