January 31, 2016
The Gospel According to Matthew
VI. The Temptation of Jesus
Matthew 4:1-11, Romans 5:17-19
Dr. William P. Seel
Easley Presbyterian Church
Easley, South Carolina
Right from the start, we are tempted to read our own struggles with temptation into this
story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. To mine this story of Jesus resisting temptation for
clues as to how we ourselves might resist temptation – something like “Four Keys to Beating
Temptation the Jesus Way.” We do this, in part, because we Americans are a very pragmatic
people – which means, at our worst, that we approach the Bible as if it were some divine Dear
Abby compendium of helpful advice. And partly because we are otherwise not sure what to make
of this story. On the surface, the story is crystal clear – Jesus is tempted in the wilderness, yet does
not succumb to temptation. But what does that have to do with us? What meaning are we meant
to draw from this story if not “Four Keys to Beating Temptation”?
The answer lies in understanding that there are two other Biblical stories playing in the
background as Jesus is being tempted. Knowing these two stories helps us understand what Jesus’
temptation is all about. The first of these two stories is the story of the temptation of Israel during
their forty years of wandering in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land. So far in
Matthew’s gospel we have witnessed Jesus very intentionally reenacting the story of Israel’s
deliverance from slavery in Egypt. His flight into Egypt to escape Herod’s threat mirrors Israel’s
own flight into Egypt to escape the threat of famine. Israel passes through the waters of the Red
Sea – Jesus passes through the waters of John’s baptism. Israel is led into the wilderness following
the Red Sea – Jesus is led into the wilderness following His baptism. Israel is in the wilderness
for forty years – Jesus is in the wilderness for forty days. Even the temptations faced by Jesus
match up in order and in type with the temptations faced by Israel in the wilderness. There is
really only one big difference between Israel’s wilderness temptation and Jesus’ wilderness
temptation: where Israel fails each and every test, Jesus passes each and every test. Israel
succumbs; Jesus overcomes.
The second story playing in the background of Jesus’ temptation goes back even further
into history – all the way back to the story of Adam and Eve being tempted in the Garden of Eden.
If the story of Israel’s temptation in the wilderness provides the template for the specific types and
order of Jesus’ temptation, it is this primal story of the fall of humankind into sin which truly tells
us what Jesus’ temptation is all about. In fact, even though Jesus faces three specific temptations
in the wilderness, all three have at their core the same basic theme: all three tempt Jesus to turn
away from trusting His Father. This turning away from trusting in God was the choice Adam and
Eve made in the Garden. Their choice is understood by the Bible to be the original sin, meaning
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the fundamental sin – the basic thing that has gone wrong in every human being ever since. We
all, says Scripture, recreate the choice of Adam and Eve in our own hearts; we all reenact in our
own lives their failure to align themselves with the will of God. In the wilderness, Jesus faces this
same choice which Adam and Eve faced, which we all face in our own lives. But where Adam
and Eve and you and I and everyone else all fail – Jesus does not.
These then are the two stories playing in the background as Jesus is led into the wilderness
to face temptation. With these two stories in mind, then, let us look at the three temptations of
Jesus. The first temptation arises from the fact that Jesus has been fasting for forty days in the
wilderness – He is hungry. The tempter comes along and says to Him, “If you are the Son of God,
command these stones to become loaves of bread.” Notice how subtle is the tempter’s lure. He
is not tempting Jesus with something evil, but with something which is, in and of itself, a good gift
of God – bread. Which tells us something right away about temptation in general: that temptation
rarely comes upon us in flashing neon letters announcing “Here is something really evil – do this”.
Instead temptation is often very subtle – an invitation to misuse God’s good gifts.
But back to Jesus. He is hungry and the tempter whispers to Him, in effect, “Surely God
doesn’t want His own Son to go hungry. Why not work a little magic and be filled?” Israel faced
this same temptation of hunger in Exodus 16. They were hungry – but instead of trusting God to
provide for them, they began to clamor for the bread of slavery they had left behind in Egypt. It
is, then, the temptation to seek to fill ourselves with the wrong things. To try to feed the hunger
in our souls by gorging ourselves on that which is not God – and that which therefore can never
satisfy our hunger. For it is God Himself who creates this hunger that we feel in our souls – this
yearning, this longing for something, for something more. “Restless are our hearts, O God, until
they rest in Thee,” said St. Augustine.1 We were created to hunger for God and to thirst for His
righteousness. But we, like Israel, like Adam and Eve, turn away from the One who is both the
source of our hunger and the sustenance that we crave. And instead we feed ourselves upon all
the false promises and empty calories of success and status and money and possessions and empty
entertainments and fleeting pleasures and whatever else this world promises us will fill us up. We
push away from the table of the Almighty – and we choose for ourselves a different diet.
But not Jesus. Jesus understands what we fail to grasp: that to turn away from God is the
surest path to starvation. “Man shall not live by bread alone,” He answers the tempter, “but by
every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Only God can satisfy human hunger, says Jesus.
Only God. And the temptation passes. “Restless are our hearts, O Lord, until they rest in Thee.”
The second temptation. The tempter leads Jesus up to the pinnacle of the Temple and there
says to Him, in effect: “So you like to quote Scripture. Here is a Scripture verse for you, Psalm
91: ‘He will command His angels concerning you . . . On their hands they will bear you up, lest
you strike your foot against a stone.’ So if you are the Son of God, then give it a try – throw
yourself down and see what will happen.” It is the temptation to reverse the roles of God and
humankind – to put God in service of the self, instead of the self in service to God. The temptation
to worship God on the basis of what we desire Him to do for us, give to us – rather than on the
rightful basis of the fact that He is God, our Creator and Lord, and we are His creatures. This is
the temptation of Israel in Exodus 17, where Israel says to Moses, in effect, “If the Lord doesn’t
provide some water for us soon, then we are done with Him and are going back to the gods of
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Egypt.” And it is also part of the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden – the temptation to
choose to make themselves lord and master over their own lives, out of distrust that God can be
counted on to take care of them, distrust that God really has their best interests at heart in His
dealings with them.
It is a temptation that we know. The temptation to honor God, to worship God, to bow
down before our Lord and Maker only in so far as, and only for as long as, He delivers to us the
things we have decided are necessary for our happiness. To worship God not on the basis of who
He is and who we are in relation to Him, but on the basis of the things we want from Him. For
example, we will worship God provided that He, on His part, improves our marriages, protects our
children, cures our diseases, blesses our business dealings, improves our social standing, and gives
us freedom from all stress and harm. But should God fail to provide, should God fail to pass this
test we have set up for Him – this test of whether or not He will keep up His end of the bargain we
have laid out for Him – then we’re out, we’re gone, we will bow down before Him no more.
I know a man who lost his wife at a young age to cancer, leaving him broken in heart and
overwhelmed by the task of raising their children on his own. But worst of all was what this
tragedy did to his faith in God. He had been a devoted Christian – in worship and in Sunday
School every Sunday, participating in Bible studies and prayer groups and so forth. Outwardly his
faith appeared to be built upon a solid rock of devotion to God. But it turned out that his faith had
actually been established on the sinking sand of something else altogether. His faith was based on
a deal he thought he had struck with God – a deal that said that as long as he kept up his end of the
bargain with the worship and the Sunday School and so forth, then he could count on God to
prosper his business, bless his family, and ward off all evil from their lives. And, following his
wife’s death, he could come to only one conclusion: that God had broken the deal, that God had
failed the test. It never seemed to come to him that maybe the failure lay not in God, but in that
deal he thought he had arranged with God. And slowly, with a mixture of sadness and anger, he
began walking away. “Come on, Jesus,” says the tempter, “Throw yourself down from the Temple.
Put God to the test, see if He will keep up His end of the bargain. Throw yourself down and just
see if He won’t miraculously protect you. Then you will know for sure whether or not God can
be trusted to give you what you want.”
But Jesus says no: “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’”
God does not make bargains. God does not exist to serve the whims and wishes of humankind,
humankind exists to serve the will of God. And faith is precisely that – faith. Faith is not a
precertified form of absolute, unquestionable, objectively demonstrated certainty – it is committing
ourselves to trusting in God and in His will, come what may. Faith is not a deal we strike with
God – “Give me what I ask and I will worship you.” Faith is not continually asking of God, “What
have you done for me lately?” Rather faith is to bow down our lives before Him, in all times and
in all circumstances, simply because He is God and we are His creatures. And to trust, even in the
darkest of nights, that He is with us; to trust that He is working out His purpose in and through
both the good and the bad times; to trust that He has our best interests at heart always – and that
He will, in the end, keep His promises to us and bring all things round to good for us:
Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
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the produce of the olive fail
and the field yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet will I rejoice in the Lord;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength.2
The second temptation ends. And then begins the final temptation. The tempter takes
Jesus up upon a high mountain. Below are stretched out all the kingdoms of the earth and their
glory. The tempter says to Jesus, “All these I will give to you, if you will fall down and worship
me.” It is the temptation to bow down before that which is not of God; to give over our lives to
the service of that which is not God; to violate the first and foremost commandment: “You shall
have no other gods before me.” This temptation is Israel bowing down before the Golden Calf in
Exodus 32. This is Adam and Eve choosing to decide what is right and wrong, what is good and
bad, according to their own wisdom – rejecting God’s own ordering of His creation. And it is you
and me whenever we kneel before the altar of self instead of offering ourselves – heart, mind, soul,
and body – to the will of God, to the ways of God, to the service of the glory of God. It is to
choose for ourselves some other purpose for our lives than the one He has given to us; to choose
some other judgment about what is right and wrong over the judgment He has made for us; to
serve some other vision of what makes for a good life than the way and the truth and the life He
has laid out for us. “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever,” says the
Shorter Catechism3. This third temptation is the temptation to substitute something else, anything
else – and to live as if that were our chief end. This is the temptation which sums up all the others
– to bow down our lives before that which is not God, in exchange for that which is not His
Kingdom.
Jesus says no. “Be gone, Satan!” He cries out. “For it is written, ‘You shall worship the
Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’” Jesus will not be dissuaded from following the
will of God. Jesus will not be turned aside from His obedience to God’s will. Jesus will not give
His life in service to anything less than the will of God. “You shall worship the Lord your God
and him only shall you serve.” This is the most basic, most true, and most fulfilling purpose for a
human life: to worship God and to give ourselves faithfully to Him in wholehearted service.
And with that, the tempter withdraws, the temptations are ended, and the angels descend
to minister to Jesus. Jesus has not submitted. He has not succumbed. He has not failed in any of
His temptations. And therein lies the meaning of Jesus’ temptation for us. Set against the two
stories of Israel’s failure and of Adam and Eve’s succumbing, we see the point: that where we all
sin and fall short of the glory of God, Jesus does not. That at long last, in all the long slog of sinful
human history, has come the one human being who perfectly does the will of God. At last has
come the one human being strong enough to resist the curse of our sin, our failure, our weakness,
our depravity. At long last has come the one human being who is the human being we were created
to be.
Which means that Jesus is the One who turns the tide. Jesus is the One who reverses the
flow. Jesus is the One who now changes the course of human history. For Jesus has defied the
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curse and beaten the tempter. What we have gotten wrong throughout all the centuries, Jesus has
now gotten right. Which means, simply put, that in Jesus Christ a new day is dawning. In Jesus
Christ, a new and better future has begun. In Jesus Christ, sin is no longer inescapable, salvation
no longer impossible, new life no longer unattainable. In Jesus Christ, in His victory over our
temptations, a new day is dawning for all of humankind, in which sin shall be no more. Satan shall
be no more. Death shall be no more.
And you and I are invited by Jesus to join Him in this victory over sin, death, and the devil.
To unite our weakness to His strength, our failure to His success, our despair to His gift of a new
and right and righteous way of living. To take up His offer and join Him as He sets all things right
in this world and in human hearts – as He sets right every last thing that has gone wrong because
of our disobedience, through the power of His own obedience. This is the meaning of Jesus’
temptation:
If, because of one man’s trespass [Adam], death reigned
through that one man, much more will those who receive the
abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life
through the one man Jesus Christ.
Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all, so
one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For
as by one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by
the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.
1
Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book 1, Chapter 1.
Habakkuk 3:17-19.
3
Westminster Shorter Catechism, question 1.
2