“The Temptation of Christ”
Luke 4:1-13
2/25/07
"To err is human; to forgive is divine." "The
devil made me do it." "I'm only human." “I
couldn’t help myself.” These phrases suggest that
when temptation comes along we are merely the victims. They take
the responsibility off of ourselves and put it on someone else.
It’s always somebody else’s fault. When Adam sinned
in the garden, he blamed it on Eve and ultimately God for making Eve in
the first place; Eve in turn blamed it on the serpent. We never
want to take the responsibility for our own sinfulness. We always
end up pointing the finger at someone else, and ultimately the someone
else turns out to be God. And so Lent is a time for reflection
and meditation upon God’s words of Law, a time when we are
reminded of just whose fault it is that we're sinners and who's to
blame, and that is ourselves. But Lent is also a time for us to
reflect upon our Lord Jesus Christ who took our sin and blame upon
Himself. It's a time for repentance, when we confess our
sinfulness before God and seek His forgiveness in Christ, and then by
the power of His Spirit amend our lives.
The Gospel reading for today talks about temptation
and our Lord's victory over it. The Lord's victory reminds us of
our failure. It reminds us first of all of Adam and Eve who were
tempted by the same devil in the form of a serpent in the garden of
Eden. His tactics then were the same as they were when he tempted
Christ and the same as they are today when he tempts us. He
planted doubt in the minds of Adam and Eve about God's Word. He
said, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the
garden?'" and “You surely will not die! God knows that in
the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened and you will be like
God, knowing good and evil.” What God had told Adam and Eve
was that they were not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil, not that they weren’t allowed to eat from any tree in the
garden. But the devil enticed them to believe that God was
holding out on them, that He didn't have their best interests in mind,
that He knew that if they ate of that fruit, they wouldn’t die as
God had said but would become like Him. But they were already
created in God’s image. They already knew the difference
between good and evil. They knew it from God’s Word.
He had commanded them to tend to the garden and to be fruitful and
multiply. This was good. He had also commanded them not to
eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
To do such a thing was evil. But Adam and Eve believed the lie of
the devil who got them to doubt God’s Word, and they ate the
fruit. They failed the test, and for this they were driven out of
the garden, and eventually they died.
The temptation of Jesus not only reminds us of this
first temptation but also of the temptation of the Israelites and how
for 40 years in the wilderness they were tempted to murmur, grumble,
and complain against Moses and against God. They failed the test
too and made God angry by not believing His Word and by testing Him,
even though He provided them bread from heaven, water from a rock, and
quail for meat. Their clothes and shoes didn't even wear
out. Paul writes, "They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud
and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank
the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that
accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was
not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the
desert." God was not pleased with them because of their
unbelief. Their unbelief led them to doubt God’s Word, just
as it had led Adam and Eve to doubt His Word. It was unbelief
that eventually led Adam and Eve to take the forbidden fruit and that
led the Israelites to complain and rebel against God and Moses.
And we say to ourselves, If I had been there, I would have acted
differently.
But the temptation of Christ also reminds us of our
failure to believe God and keep His commandments. It's not the
fact that we're human that's the problem. It's the fact that
we're sinful humans. All that God has created is good. But
we along with the devil have corrupted His good creation. We have
sinned in thought, word, and deed by what we have done and by what we
have left undone. We have not loved God with our whole heart or
our neighbors as ourselves. We have failed the test and deserve
nothing but both temporal and eternal punishment. We do not have
the power to resist the temptations of the devil, the world, and our
flesh. We give into them all the time. We sin because we
are sinners, born into this world sinful and unclean, born in the
kingdom of darkness, born on the side of the devil, unable to save
ourselves.
But it is for this very reason that God became man,
so that He could save man. He became one of us. He became
the second Adam, the second Israel. He redoes Adam and
Israel. He was tempted as they and we are, but He came out
victorious. He didn’t do it to show off that He could do it
because He was God, nor did He do it to show us that we could do it
too. He did it for us. He overcame temptation for us, that
His victory over the devil might be our victory over the devil.
He is the victor over every temptation and sin which has ever or will
ever assail us, that we might participate in His victory.
He was tempted in every way just as you and I are,
yet without sin. In His temptation to turn stone into bread, He
was tempted not to trust in God to provide Him with what He needed, but
to provide it for Himself right now. The devil tempts us in the
same way, that we might not trust Him who teaches us to pray
“Give us this day our daily bread,” nor believe that He
hears us and will provide us all that we need for this body and
life. But Jesus was tempted in the same way. He was tempted
not to trust in God’s Word, but to save Himself and become a
bread king. But this isn't what He was sent to do. He
wasn’t sent to save Himself. Instead, He was to give His
body as the bread of life for the world, that whoever would eat His
flesh and drink His blood would have eternal life.
Having been unsuccessful in this temptation the
devil then proceeded with another. This time Christ was tempted
to take the easy route to obtaining the kingdoms of the earth, without
the suffering of the cross, if only He would bow down and worship the
devil; again, our Lord was tempted not to obey the Father who had sent
Him to give His life as a sacrifice for sins, but to do it another way,
the devil’s way, which is the way of glory, not the cross.
But giving into this temptation would only have made Christ a slave to
the devil, who does not own the world, but has usurped control over
it. No, the Lord would not worship the devil. God alone is
worthy of worship, and Jesus would deliver the world from Satan’s
power through the weakness of the cross.
Finally, the devil tempted Jesus to throw Himself
from the top of the temple. Here Jesus was tempted to put God to
the test, just as the Israelites had done in the wilderness, just as we
do with God when we want Him to do things our way. The temptation
here was to control God, as if He were some sort of idol. But God
will not play our games of manipulation. His will will be done,
not ours, and God’s will was for His Son to go to the
cross. Jesus did not show off His power by doing magic tricks,
but He hid His majesty behind the suffering and weakness of the cross,
where He was doing His greatest miracle of all, taking away our sins.
So how does the Lord answer these temptations of the
devil? With the Word of God. To the first where He is
tempted to turn stones into bread He answers with the words, "It is
written: 'Man does not live on bread alone.'" To the second
where He is tempted to worship the devil He answers, "It is
written: 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.'"
And to the third where He is tempted to jump off the top of the temple
He answers, "It says: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the
test.'" All three of the devil’s temptations struck at the
heart of the ten commandments: To fear, love, and trust in God
above all things. By tempting Jesus not to fear, love, and trust
in God, the devil was trying to turn Jesus from God's plan of
salvation, to cause Jesus to act against God's will and choose another
way. The devil's way was the way of glory; but the Lord's way was
the way of the cross. For this He was anointed at His Baptism as
the Messiah, the suffering servant of God, who would give His life to
save us.
It was with the Word of God as His weapon that the
Lord overcame these temptations for us. The trouble with Adam and
Eve in the garden was that they got their eyes off of God’s
Word. They began to doubt God’s Word. Once that
happened, the actual eating of the fruit was just the outward
manifestation of the lack of fear, love, and trust in God that they now
had in their hearts. Jesus, on the other hand, clung immovably to
God’s Word. He would not let the devil wrest it from
Him. Jesus kept God’s Word perfectly for us. He was
perfectly obedient to the Father, obedient even to the point of death
on the cross for us. The last temptation of Christ was to come
down from the cross. “If you are the king of the Jews, save
yourself,” they mocked. Even then, the devil was trying to
get Him to act against the Father's will. But for our sake He
would not come down. He would not save Himself; He sacrificed
Himself, so that through His death we might be saved.
This perfect obedience of Christ has now been given
to us. This is what righteousness is: perfect obedience to
God's commandments. We were created righteous in the garden, in
God's image, but then we lost that righteousness through our
disobedience. Christ regained that righteousness for us by
obeying God's Law perfectly on our behalf and by giving His life as the
sacrifice for our sins. “Just as the result of one trespass
was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of
righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. For
just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made
sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be
made righteous.” Now you receive that righteousness of
Christ as a gift of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying
God's commandments. For Christ's sake God no longer looks at you
as unrighteous people, but sees in you Christ's righteousness, His
obedience, His holiness given to you through Baptism, the washing of
regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit.
Now with the help of the Holy Spirit we are enabled
to keep God's commandments, not in order to become His people, but
because we are His people and because of the needs of our brothers and
sisters in Christ. Having been freed from the threats and
punishments of the Law, we are now free to serve one another in
love. The Spirit enables us to do this. The summary of the
commandments is to love God and love our neighbor. Now that we
have been given the Holy Spirit through Baptism, we are enabled to love
God and our neighbor as we ought to, though our obedience is still very
weak and will never be perfect, and requires daily repentance and
amendment of our behavior. But Christ’s perfect obedience
is ours, as if we had kept the Law perfectly ourselves. For
Christ's sake God does not count our weakness against us, and He
forgives the guilt of our sin.
These are the fruits of the victory of Jesus over
temptation. He overcame temptation and the devil for you, taking
your punishment for your disobedience to God's Law upon Himself on the
cross, and rising again from the dead that you might have eternal
life. This was God's plan, and nothing could keep the Lord from
accomplishing it. Though we have failed miserably at keeping
God's commandments and deserve nothing but punishment, He has made a
way for us to become the righteousness of God through the obedience of
His Son, given to us as a gift. During this season of Lent, see
yourself for who you are in and of yourself, that you are a
sinner. But then look to your Savior, Jesus Christ, because it
was for sinners such as you and me that He came. He became your
sin, that you might become the righteousness of God in Him. Amen.