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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.” You may be seated.
Dear Theodore and all the baptized, dear Shannon and all the confessors of Christ, grace, mercy, and peace be yours from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Jesus is in the wilderness being tempted by the devil as our example and as our helper and as our deliverer. I’d like to consider all these this morning.
First, Jesus is there as our example. He shows us how we are to fight against the world and our sinful flesh and, most especially, against our arch enemy, the devil. Jesus is there, remember, right after His baptism. Immediately, the text says, “the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness.” That immediately is the baptism that He’s given by John the Baptist in the Jordan River. And remember what happened in the baptism. The Holy Spirit descended on Jesus like a dove, and the clouds, the voice came from heaven and it said, “You are my beloved Son in whom I’m well pleased.”
We don’t want to miss this because the first thing that the devil says to Jesus is, “If you are the Son of God.” In other words, the whole context of temptation, this is helpful for us to think about as the baptized children of God: the whole context of temptation is baptism. Every temptation comes back to this. The devil wants you to doubt the words spoken in your baptism, that you are his beloved child, that your sins are forgiven, that you are delivered from sin, death, and the devil by the power of God through the word and the water. The devil wants you to doubt that, to lose confidence in that, to let go of that; and so he comes tempting Jesus also, “If you are the Son of God.”
Now, there are three things that Jesus does that I want to draw our attention to as he resists temptation. The first is to notice that he does not resist temptation in his own strength and by his own power. He does not, remember last week we had the transfiguration where Jesus radiates in glory? He doesn’t do that. The devil doesn’t come to Jesus to tempt him to turn the stones into bread, and Jesus just turns on his radiant glory to drive the devil away with the power that he has as the Son of God. No, Jesus instead resists the devil with the word of God.
It’s this key difference that we need to think about: the difference between power and authority. Jesus doesn’t use power; he doesn’t use strength. He uses the authority of God’s word to drive the devil away.
The second thing, and this has to do with the second temptation, because remember, Jesus says to the devil, “Man doesn’t live on bread alone; he lives by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.” So now the devil says, “Okay, well, I can use God’s Word too.” And this is good for us to remember: the devil can misuse God’s Word. The particular word that he tries to misuse with Jesus is Psalm 91, the verse from the psalm that we sang. I think it’s so great, just as a little aside, that on the first Sunday in Lent we don’t let the devil have Psalm 91; we’re going to sing it and we’re going to pray it. You can’t take it away.
But the devil comes, and he puts Jesus on the pinnacle, and he says, “You should jump off of here because the promise that he’ll send his angels to guard you and that you won’t dash your foot against a stone.” I think the devil, by the way, is particularly interested in that psalm because it talks about the foot of the Messiah crushing the head of the serpent. It’s a psalm on Genesis 3:15, and so I think his attention was drawn to that. But he misuses it; he misuses the text in one important way.
The devil leaves out a phrase. I don’t know if you caught it. The text says, Psalm 91, “He will guard you in all your ways,” and “He will not let you dash your foot against a stone.” That “in all your ways,” the devil just takes out; he leaves it aside. But that actually is the key to the whole Psalm because those “in all your ways,” this refers to the Lord’s gift of vocation and calling. All your ways are the ways that the Lord has set before you. In other words, Jesus understood the doctrine of vocation, and this is our spiritual warfare: to know that the Lord has promised to bless you and keep you in all your ways—in other words, in the office and the calling that He’s given you.
Now, this might not seem like spiritual warfare. When we think of spiritual warfare, we think of the unseen realm of the devil and the demons swarming around and people using spiritual powers to fight against them. Jesus says, “Look, you’re doing spiritual warfare when you stand where you’re stationed and pray and love.” Fathers, you being good fathers is fighting the devil, and you have the promise of Psalm 91. Mothers, you being good mothers to your children, husbands and wives serving one another, children honoring father and mother, workers working faithfully, students—how about this? When you are doing your homework, you’re doing spiritual warfare. When you’re studying for your test, you’re fighting against the devil. That’s Psalm 91.
Jesus knew that he did not have the office of jumping off temple towers; he had the office of being the Messiah and dying on the cross. That was his calling; that’s what the Lord had appointed for him. So, Jesus responds to the devil, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”
So, number one, Jesus uses the scripture. Number two, he understood his calling. And number three, think about this: that Jesus knew that the Lord was with him even though he had no indication of it. The devil was there in the face of Jesus for 40 days. 40 days—that’s a long time. Not a bite to eat, not a bit to drink. Jesus was hungry; he was hurt; he was in pain, and the devil was tempting him in every way to sin. If you were just to ask Jesus what he saw, I mean the things that he saw, it’s just all this trouble from the world and all this trouble from the devil. There’s not a glimpse of the glory and the kindness of God, and yet Jesus knew that the Lord was with him in spite of what he saw—in spite of this 40-day experience.
Now this is also for us. We know that the devil, like a prowling lion, is seeking whom he can devour, but we trust this: that the Lord is with us, that the Lord has not forsaken us. He’s promised, “I will not leave you or forsake you.” So he turns back the devil with this word: “You will worship the Lord your God, and him only will you serve.”
So we have Jesus as our example, but, oh dear saints, I do not want to leave you there because Jesus as our example is, in a way, wonderful; it gives us great wisdom, but it is also frightening because which of us have even begun to approach this life that Jesus has lived? Which of us have even gotten close to resisting the devil in this way?
And so the second point is that we have Jesus as our helper. That Jesus has not left us to fight against the devil or even our own sinful flesh and all the troubles of this world. He has not left us to fight this fight on our own.
Here’s how Hebrews reflects on this idea of the temptation. This is Hebrews chapter 4. It says, “Seeing then that we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession for we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace that we may find grace and mercy to help in time of need.”
I like how the King James gives it to us. This is really, this verse 15, ready for this? It says, “For we do not have a high priest which cannot be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, but was in all points tempted like we are, yet without sin.”
Now here’s the first point here with Jesus as our helper: we know that we’re tempted, that we’re troubled, that we’re afflicted, that we’re drawn towards sin. We see that in ourselves, and we think that it must mean that the Lord who sees that must also be disgusted with us. How can you be tempted to that? How can you be drawn to that? How can you even want to sin in that particular way? And we think that the Lord must look at us as we struggle here below in our temptation and must just think that he wants to cast us off. But that is not what the text says.
Your high priest, the Lord Jesus Christ, sympathizes with you in the midst of your temptation and trouble. He knows what it’s like. He knows what it’s like to be tempted. He knows what it’s like to have a heart that’s trying to be distracted and drawn away, a tension that’s trying to be put off of God’s word, a mind and a heart and a body that’s being drawn to doing the wrong thing, breaking God’s commandment. Jesus knows what that’s like, top to bottom. He understands all that you’re tempted with, and in fact, this is an incredible thing to think about. He knows even the temptations that you haven’t faced, but your neighbor has. Those temptations that you don’t even understand, Jesus does. He felt them; the devil brought them to him.
Now, here is an important thing, and this has been, I think for a couple of years trying to figure out how to teach this. I don’t know exactly how to teach it, but I’m going to try. I’m going to keep trying until we get it because this is so helpful for me because I think when it came to temptation, I had the wrong idea, and I don’t think it was just me. I think there’s a lot of Christians that have this wrong idea about what it means to be tempted and where we stand with Jesus in the midst of temptation.
Okay, so remember this: that in our hearts there’s a battlefield. Our hearts, our consciences are battlefields, and there’s a battle line drawn in the middle of the heart, and that battle line is between the flesh and the spirit. Your sinful flesh wants to sin. When the devil and the world tempt you, they find an ally in you with your sinful flesh. The devil says, “Do this,” and your sinful flesh says, “Sounds like a great idea. In fact, I was thinking about that before you even mentioned it.” You have a sinful flesh, but you also have the spirit—the Holy Spirit, who dwells in your spirit, who not only does not want to sin and is beyond temptation, but always wants to keep the law of God, to serve God and to love the neighbor in every way.
And those two—the flesh and the spirit—are at war against one another. This runs all through the Scriptures. I think the clearest place where we have this is Romans chapter 7. I’ll give you just a couple of verses. Romans 7:21 and following, Paul says, “I find a law; evil is present with me, the one who wants to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man, but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, bringing me in captivity to the law of sin, which is in my members. Oh, wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.”
So these two are fighting against each other, and we know this as Christians. We know that this is our life—the flesh and the spirit warring against one another, fighting against one another, wanting to do good, wanting to sin, wanting to serve God, wanting to reject God, wanting to love the neighbor, wanting to hurt the neighbor—back and forth, back and forth between these two things.
Now, here is the key distinction and the important part: who are you? On which side of this battle line is the I, the me? I thought, and this is what I was wrong about, I thought for so long that me, Brian Wolf Mueller, that I was the flesh part—that that’s who I was—and the spirit that dwelled in me, that that was a stranger that was just kind of visiting for a while. And so I was on the temptation side, the sin side, and the spirit and Jesus were on the holy side and the good side, so that in the midst of temptation, the Lord was looking at me like, “What are you doing?” But Paul, this is just not right. This is not what Paul says.
Paul says that me, I myself, I am the one who desires to do good. I am the one who desires to follow the law of God. Your true identity, who you really are, is not your sinful flesh. That’s been crucified, that’s being put off, and that’ll be laid in the grave when you die. That sinful flesh will be gone, and you’ll leave it behind, but you will be you. At last, you will be you. You are not your sinful flesh. You are the new creation that God has made in baptism. That’s who you are, so that you look at your own temptation to sin and your own desire to do wrong and your own inclination to break God’s law; you look at that as the strange part of you. “What is that doing here? When’s he gonna move out?”
And so you look at your sinful flesh, not from the inside, but as it were from the outside, alongside Jesus. I always thought that whenever I was even tempted, whenever that desire to do something wrong, that Jesus was looking at me and shaking his head, “No,” that this is how it is—that whenever that temptation to do something wrong, Jesus and I are both looking at it, “Ah,” and he sympathizes with you. “I’m sorry that that is still hanging around. One day soon I’ll rescue you.” How long, oh Lord? Soon, he says. That you’re fighting against the devil with Jesus at your side. You’re fighting against temptation alongside Jesus. He sympathizes with you so that he can help you.
You see? And the third point, which is even better, is that not only does Jesus fight with you; he fights for you. Jesus is your hero. Jesus is your champion. Jesus is your savior. And this is the last point and the most important point. Because if we were just to see the temptation of Jesus as an example to follow, or even as like how Jesus helps us in the midst of our trouble, we would not get the whole thing.
Because what Jesus is doing in the wilderness is he is standing where Adam and Eve and you and I fell. He is resisting the devil where Adam and Eve did not. He is standing—and I don’t know how long it was in the garden when you read Genesis 3 to try to figure out like how long Adam and Eve resisted the devil and his temptation—like, it seems like about five minutes. I don’t—that wasn’t that long. But that Jesus stood for 40 days with every single temptation, every single affliction, everything that the devil could possibly bring against everyone, every single trick that had worked against Adam and Eve and against all of humanity, including you and me, the devil brings all of his wisdom and cunning and guile and brings it all to Jesus and unloads it all on him, and he stands.
He’s tempted just like we are, but without sin. And this, dear saints, is key. One more verse: Hebrews 2, and this will help bring this home. The writer, Hebrews 2:17 says, “Therefore, in all things he had to be made like his brethren that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself has suffered, being tempted, he is able to aid those who are tempted.”
Do you see? Jesus had to be, in every way, perfect so that all of his suffering would be for you. If Jesus had committed one sin, then he would have, in one way or another, deserved the suffering of the cross; it would have been his due. If Jesus would have broken God’s law in one way, then he should have died and been buried in the tomb. But because Jesus was perfect in every way, he was the Lamb of God without any sin at all, so that all that he suffers can be not for himself, but for you—for your forgiveness, for your life, and for your salvation.
This is everything that Jesus does. It’s not for him; it’s for us. And this most especially, so that he is the perfect one who can carry your sin, so that every time you’ve been tempted, every time you’ve fallen to temptation, every time you’ve broken God’s law, every time you’ve failed to do what you ought, every time you’ve done what God has forbidden, every single moment of every single sin and every single ounce of all of the guilt that we’ve done—all of it was on Jesus, and he was suffering all of it, not for himself, but dear saints, for you, so that he can forgive you, so that he can rescue you, so that he can adopt you as his own dear child.
And this is our confidence: Jesus has shown us how to fight the devil in temptation, and he’s promised to be with us in the fight, but most especially, he’s won the battle, and he gives us the victory. He holds the field forever. God be praised, and may the Lord keep us in this confidence and in this victory.
In the name of Jesus, Amen. The peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
