Scripture
(by Dave, 15-20min)
Luke 4:1-13
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.
The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’
The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’
The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. For it is written: “ ‘He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’ Jesus answered, “It is said: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test. When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.
The drug dealer
Several years ago, I met an extraordinary Christian. He was born in a distressed, city community. His father came and went with no real attachment to his mother who raised him along with his grandmother. He went to school and quickly learned it didn’t take much to be moved on to the next class. If teachers failed too many students, they would get in trouble for too high a failure rate. It was easy for students to make it through elementary school not knowing much at all.
As the boy approached high school, it was clear that if you were not a star athlete warranting a college scholarship and then the pros, minimum-wage was all you were going to make. Not being an athlete, he dropped out of high school and took a job working on a construction site. He was treated poorly and given huge amounts of work to do with no potential to climb in the construction company beyond basic laborer. Long weeks at minimum wage produced insufficient money to pay rent and buy food so he found another way to make money. Selling drugs.
It was a hard but lucrative life. His was not the only source of drugs in the community, and it was common for one drug enterprise to have conflict with their opposition. In fact, the man describes that only two of all his male friends growing up were not in jail or dead.
But the man would never sell drugs to kids and saw to it none of his team did either. With his growing wealth, this gentleman gathered the young kids of the neighborhood to him and began to take them on adventures only his wealth could provide. He bought a bunch of motorized trail bikes and transported the boys and girls of the neighborhood to a place where they could ride out of the city. He did it every week because he loved those kids, and his heart broke that they had so little opportunity to do the fun things that other kids could do.
One day a large shipment of drugs arrived from his source. On the man’s way home from the transfer an enormous thunderstorm broke. He reports hearing the voice of God in the storm saying: “stop hurting my people.” A decision needed to be made.
You may be thinking his decision was an easy one. After hearing the voice of God, how could he decide anything else but to move on from his current profession. But the devil can easily complicate the decision-making process and that’s exactly what we see in today’s Scripture verse. Indeed, be it Jesus or us, Satan’s approach is the same.
Fully human to serve
Before his time in the desert, Jesus is baptized by John which provides the context for today’s Scripture verse. Because he knows who Jesus is, John says he should not be doing the baptizing when Jesus comes to him. It should be the other way around. Jesus denies this request saying that John must baptize him to fulfill all righteousness.
In the Old Testament, fulfilling all righteousness is to serve God’s holy purpose. Much in the baptism story suggests Jesus is to fulfill all righteousness as a human. He refuses to baptize John as the divine son of God, but instead wants to be baptized like any other human joining the crowd of other people being baptized. According to Luke, John preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus does not need to be baptized for he did not sin, yet to serve God’s purpose he insists on be treated as human. The Holy Spirit then descends on Jesus. Surely the Spirit was already with him given his remarkable performance in the temple as a boy earlier in Luke. Yet here he receives a visible sign of the Holy Spirit in much the same way as occurred with other humans at Pentecost.
If I am right in my interpretation of the word, it’s not surprising that all of Satan’s temptations use the humanity of Jesus to drive a wedge between him and God’s holy purpose. The humanity of my friend the drug dealer was likewise used to deter him from fulfilling God’s command: “Stop hurting my people”. If we look at these two people and their encounters with Satan’s temptations, perhaps we can see the same issues occurring in our lives and understand why Jesus took the time to tell his disciples about what happened in the desert.
Temptation 1: Deny God’s purpose to keep yourself alive
The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’
Prompted to fast and enter the desert by the Holy Spirit, Jesus stands before Satan starving from desperately needing food. Satan exploits his human craving for sustenance encouraging him to depart from God’s purpose and use his divine power.
The Scripture cited by Christ: “Man shall not live on bread alone” is from Deuteronomy 8:3. In chapter 8, Moses is addressing the Israeli nation just before entering the promised land. This was the second approach. The first occurred 40 years earlier when the Israeli nation rebelled against God’s command to enter the land. They were then forced by God into the desert for 40 years. The whole verse from which the citation comes reads:
He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors 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.
Even though the Israelites were fed, they had not fulfilled God’s holy purpose for their nation 40 years ago. The Scripture verse informs Satan that Jesus is aware that feeding yourself without doing what God asks is meaningless. It’s meaningless even if the food is miraculously delivered from God or if you are starving. Real meaning and living sustenance are found in every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Satan’s temptation is rebuffed, and Jesus does not use his divinity to do it. Instead, he uses the Holy Scriptures and Spirit, two instruments available to us all.
My friend had exactly this temptation as he decided what to do with his drug business. Hunger came with minimum-wage, satiety with his drug business. He thought long and hard about what to do with this new shipment of drugs. This was the life he knew, and he was good at it. If he were to walk away, there would be ramifications beyond returning to poverty and hunger. Still his grandmother was a Christian, and he was exposed to Scripture verses and her wisdom when growing up. My friend was not a stranger to God and he believed what he heard in the thunderstorm.
What would he choose now? Like his Savior before him my friend chose God’s purpose. He knew God’s command for his life and resisted the human inclination to keep the status quo which sustained him so well. The next day he drove his car to a rain drainage culvert and dumped the new shipment of drugs.
Temptation 2: no suffering required
“The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’
This temptation seems like an easy one for Jesus to resist. Because he knows Isaiah, Jesus knows his purpose and that the outcome being promised of having authority over everything is already his. Satan knows this too, so I suspect the temptation is not what it seems on its face.
In Gesthemene Jesus begs for the cup to be taken from him. He is human, and still believes there may be another way if only God will make it so. Here he stands weak, starving and alone in front of what seems unbridled power telling him none of that need happen. All the good you will do as the savior of the world you can do right now. No Gesthemene moment to occur, no suffering to follow. Perhaps that’s the real enticement; that worldly suffering can be avoided, and his purpose still fulfilled.
Again Jesus answers with Scripture. Deuteronomy 6: 13-14
Fear the LORD your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name. Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you;
Jesus knows he follows one God and there can be no other. No matter what is being promised, his devotion to God alone will enable him to fulfill his holy purpose; to fulfill all righteousness. If suffering is part of that, so be it. Once again, no divinity was used to resist. His faith, Scripture and the Holy Spirit were used to rebuff a powerful temptation to avoid suffering.
This temptation too was faced by my friend. He had a choice of who to follow. He could follow the voice of God he just heard in the thunderstorm, or he could serve the gods of this world. As it was for Jesus, the choice was complicated. He alone in the neighborhood was using his wealth to give the kids the simple pleasures wealth could bring. In the times when he was with the children, he counseled them to concentrate on school, to stay away from drugs, and to make something more of their lives than he had been able to make of his. He warned them that to do otherwise would surely get one of two outcomes, the penitentiary or the grave.
To serve only God, he would have to walk away from all the good he was doing and once again suffer a minimum wage job and poverty. Stay with the gods of this world including Satan, do good and have no personal suffering. Or follow God, do good and suffer anew. My friend chose God again, and Satan made it hard. All those who depended on his distribution were now out of business, including some of his family members. The network he had established was leaderless, and most importantly for him, the ability to finance all the things he did for the children in the neighborhood was over. He gave it all up to comply with God’s charge.
Temptation 3 – pervert the truth
The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. For it is written: “ ‘He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’ Jesus answered, “It is said: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.
This time the devil turns the table on Jesus quoting Scripture himself. Satan cites Psalm 91:9-12: “If you say, “The LORD is my refuge,” and you make the Most High your dwelling, no harm will overtake you, no disaster will come near your tent. For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.
The enticement before Christ is to throw himself off the temple as a sign of faith in God. Do it because Scripture commands it as evidence that the God you love will protect you. But that interpretation omits the context of the verse and is a perversion of the truth. The beginning of Psalm 91 reads “
Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the LORD, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”
Trust does not imply test. It is only humans, and here Satan, who translate trust into a test for tangible action within the world. The word of God, the very weapon Jesus was wielding to defeat his previous two temptations, was purposefully misinterpreted to distract him from the truth. Guided by the Spirit and armed with biblical literacy, the human Jesus recognizes the perversion and cites Deuteronomy 6:13, a verse where test and trust cannot be conflated.
Do not put the LORD your God to the test as you did at Massah.
Recollect that during the exodus the Israelis were thirsty and grumbled against God. Moses struck the rock with his staff, water poured forth and he named the location of this event Massah because the Israeli people grumbled in verse seven “is the Lord with us or not”. Instead of trusting God the Israeli people demanded proof that He was supporting them. Test replaced trust and Jesus sites Deuteronomy to definitively show the truth. People only test those in whom they don’t trust which is what the Israeli people did at Massah.
My friend had the choice of trust before him as well. If he gave up selling his drugs, could he trust God to help him in some way continue the good he was doing? As humans it is so easy to rationalize trust out of the decision. If the drug sales stop, the money stops and the good that can be done with the children will vanish. So maybe His words: “stop hurting my people” mean something else. Maybe God means the drugs should only be sold to outsiders instead of my friend’s people. If that’s so, then he could continue selling the drugs to outsiders and doing good within the neighborhood. Very tempting.
This thinking is not inspired by the Spirit or the Scriptures. It is a perversion of God’s words: “stop hurting my people” because all people are God’s. Satan perverted the Word to Jesus by substituting test for trust and my friend could easily have substituted a rationalized version of God’s command for trusting the Lord to care for him and his precious children.
Like our Lord before him, my friend chose trust. After extracting himself from the drug business, he joined up with a nonprofit organization that provides educational services to kids in the community. Through that organization, my friend now spends every day with children. He helps them in school, with their family lives, and gives them opportunities to enjoy being children in a safe environment. He is paid a salary by the organization. It doesn’t match the salary he had as a dealer, but it pays his bills. My friend rightfully attributes all of this to God.
Hope for the sinner
If you are like me, perhaps you wonder how Jesus on the brink of starvation could have resisted using his divine nature to make food. How he could’ve known what was coming on the cross and turned down an opportunity to ostensibly gain the authority to do good while escaping it all, and how his trust in God never wavered not even when enticing perversions of the truth were presented. One easy answer is that he is God. Yet believing the Lord’s divinity is what gave him the ability to resist these temptations diminishes his message of hope. He resisted these temptations as a human using faith, Scripture and the Holy Spirit alone, all of which are available to us.
The Lord’s message is we need not be the son of God to resist Satan’s temptations in this world. This is true even for the sinner. My friend who now works for the nonprofit is a testimony to a non-divine human’s ability to do this. Although he is/was not sinless before or after the thunderstorm, he resisted strong temptations from the gods of this world using nothing more than his faith in God, the Holy Spirit within, and the knowledge of Scripture his grandmother gave him.
Jesus and my friend chose to fulfill all righteousness; to serve God’s holy purpose. Each day you and I have a purpose to serve for God as well. Something good, right and necessary for the kingdom. Satan will exploit our humanity to divide us from that purpose. He will use our bodily needs tempting us with what we need or crave the most. He will offer seemingly reasonable alternatives that make life easier or permit indulgence but distract us from God’s will for today. When we turn to the word of God for direction, he will pervert God’s wisdom filling our heads with rationalizations that change the meaning into something it is not.
In passing on his story to the disciples Jesus informs us none of these temptations need succeed. For the sinner sometimes they will, but in today’s Scripture verse we are told it is not inevitable. I told you the story of my friend in this piece to help convince you of that, but I suspect you already know it’s true. Most of us have experienced a time when we have turned from temptation. The message from today gives us a reason and the means to do it again. In short, it gives us hope that our service to God can be fulfilled even in our fallen state.
For me, today’s Scripture reminds never to forget I am here to serve God’s purpose. Anything that tempts me away from what I discern that purpose should be today must be confronted with faith, Scripture and Spirit. For example, I got up yesterday and wanted to work on this sermon. Then I got an email telling me to refill a prescription I very much need. I went to log in to the pharmacy site only to realize that a couple of days ago my password managing software updated and cleared all of my passwords. Irritation swept over me as I plowed through my backup list and added the password back to the software. As I finished off that job, another email came that required a response. Then I remembered I needed to change some things on my bed because they hurt me badly last night. Away from the computer I went angry.
How can I possibly return and write something for you when my mind is irritated at the things preventing me? Jesus provides the answer. Go to the Spirit, reread the Scriptures and set about God’s purpose for you today. I hope I was successful, and you find this an uplifting message of hope that you can resist any temptation that comes your way. The big ones and even the piddly little things I just talked about that seem like nothing but can be used by Satan to drive you off of God’s path. I pray that faith, the Holy Spirit, and the word of God will sustain your resistance to this and the far greater temptations we all know are waiting for us as servants of the most high God. It’s my prayer that when today is over, you can go to sleep knowing that today you fulfilled all righteousness and that tomorrow you can do it again.
May God bless you and keep you this and every day in your faith journey.
Dave
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