Temptation

The Temptation of Jesus

Luke 4:1-13

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, 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 does 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, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. So 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 says: ‘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.

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In our culture we all are very familiar with temptation. Unfortunately, instead of teaching our children to resist temptation, they are taught quite early to give in to nearly every temptation. Nearly all marketing and advertising uses temptation to get us to desire the product or service being sold. A great portion of our economy is driven by temptation, much of it sinful.
It is important for Christians to understand how temptation works. Temptation is the ONLY weapon the devil can use to destroy us, but he wields this weapon skillfully and it is why he is so dangerous. The devil is a big problem, but he is not our biggest problem. Our biggest problem is that we are by nature sinful and we naturally desire only the things which will destroy us. Obviously this makes the devil’s job much easier. All he has to do is to get us to do what we want to do anyway.

I think that the danger of temptation is one of the reasons why God limited man’s life span to a maximum of 120 years after the great flood of Noah's day (see Genesis 6:3). Before the great flood people lived hundreds of years. Noah himself lived 950 years (see Genesis 9:29), but he was the last one to live anywhere near that long. When people lived that long it gave the devil more opportunities to tempt them to sin and to find their weaknesses so he could lure them away from the faith. This is one of the reasons why the world was so evil in the days of Noah, which prompted God to send the flood.

Many of the most popular preachers in America are fond of telling you how “great” it is to be a Christian, but you don't often hear them teaching about how difficult it is to fight temptation. This is completely backwards. It is much more difficult and troublesome to be a Christian than to be an unbeliever because the Christian must struggle and fight against temptation, while the unbeliever generally doesn’t care and freely gives in to temptation whenever he desires.

The way temptation works is that the devil tries to get us to want or desire that which will kill us. That is how it has worked all the way back to the garden of Eden. There Satan got Eve to desire the forbidden fruit by getting her to believe the lie that eating the fruit would make her more like God.

Satan didn't (and couldn't) force Adam and Eve to kill themselves, and he couldn’t make God condemn the people He loved, but by getting Adam and Eve to desire to eat the forbidden fruit the resulting effect was the same. Once they desired evil it didn’t matter to them that God had decreed death to all who disobeyed Him.

“Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord" Deuteronomy 8:3

The temptations of Jesus worked in the exact same way. In each case the devil tried to get Jesus to desire something sinful so that He would act on it and in so doing make himself unworthy to save us from our sin. The trick was to get Jesus to act on self interest rather than love. The first temptation was to satisfy His own hunger after 40 days of fasting. Other temptations tried to get Jesus to take the easy way out instead of having to suffer and die or to test God the Father to make Him prove that His Word was true.

We should also take notice of how Jesus resisted the temptations of the devil. Jesus did not do anything miraculous in resisting the devil. All Jesus did was to quote the Holy Scriptures and put His trust in God and His Word over and against the lies and innuendo of the devil. This also should give us comfort and confidence in our task to resist temptation. Jesus did nothing that we cannot do. It is true that we have our sinful nature working against us which really does want to sin, but we, too, can learn and quote Bible verses to resist temptation. As sinners, we are not going to be able to resist all temptation, but when we fail we can trust that Jesus will forgive us, even as we ask for strength to resist the next time we face a similar temptation. We also have to be careful to use Scripture properly because you may have noticed above that the devil quoted the Bible, too, in trying to get Jesus to sin. The verses he quoted were accurate, but out of context. God' s Word should never be used to justify disobedience against God, but the devil has been doing that since he asked Eve, “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat...?’”

Fortunately for us, Jesus loved us more than He cared about His own comfort. Jesus also trusted that God the Father’s will is always best, even if it cost Him tremendous suffering and death. That is what love does - it cares more about someone else than one’s self. Because Jesus wished to obey God the Father and save us from our sins He always resisted temptation, and though it cost Him greatly, He won for us full forgiveness and everlasting life.

The Slaughter of the Innocents

Matthew 2:13-18

When [the Magi] had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in adream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”

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This window depicts the holy family’s flight to Egypt. This happened in response to the first attempt by God’s enemies to take the life of Jesus. It is a very tragic story and it shows why all of Jerusalem was “troubled” when King Herod was upset to learn of a potential rival newborn king (see Magi). History tells us that Herod was so ruthless that he murdered his own son when he believed the young man was a threat to his rule, so the babies of Bethlehem were of no concern to him.

This was a great tragedy, but greater massacres occur every day in the United States alone, not to mention numerous other nations, when thousands of innocent babies are mercilessly slaughtered in the womb by people who view these children as some threat to livelihood or prosperity just as Herod did. All this tells us is that we live in a cold, cruel world full of sinners who need redemption from our sin.

Christians know that there are no real “innocent” people in the world. The unborn victims of abortion need a savior from inherited sin as well as their murderers. Fortunately that is where Jesus comes in. It is precisely because God loves both murder victim and murderer alike that Jesus was born to redeem sinners. When Jesus was less than two years old He had not yet accomplished all that was necessary to win our salvation, so He walked away. This is exactly the same tactic He used on other occasions when people wanted to kill Him before He had finished His work. However, when his work was done He did not walk or run away, nor did He try to save Himself in any way, but He let them torture Him, humiliate Him, and crucify Him. By suffering in this way, Jesus paid the price for sin so that all sinners may escape punishment for sin though faith in Him.

The life and death of Jesus does not excuse the wickedness of King Herod, nor of modern day abortionists and their apologists. Evil is still evil no matter how one may try to excuse it. We can take comfort, however, that just as Jesus forgave those who nailed Him to a cross and killed Him, so He will forgive my sins, no matter how wicked they may be. This is what gives Christians the courage to repent of all our sins - the assurance that God has forgiven us all our sins for the sake of Christ Jesus.

Magi

From Emmanuel

Matthew 2:1-12

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.”

When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ was to be born. “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:

“‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.’”

Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”

After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

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It is easy to get the wrong idea about the Magi who brought gifts to the infant Jesus. First, the details that Matthew gives us about the Magi only leave us wanting to know more. Who were these Magi? Where exactly in the East did they come from? How many of them were there? What was the star that they saw, and how did they know it proclaimed the birth of the Christ? Why did they give Jesus these three gifts? It seems like God’s Word leaves us with more questions than answers about the Magi. It is very tempting to speculate about the answers to these questions, and many scholars who are undisciplined in their study of Christian theology are all too eager to give in to that temptation. There seems to be no end to such speculation. Faithful Christian theologians know that God’s Word tells us ALL that we need to know for our salvation, and whatever it leaves out is not necessary for us to know (no matter how much we want to know it.)

Second, the whole world is filled with false religions which tell of demanding gods which must be appeased by gifts given by supplicants. In a strange way this enslaves the supplicants who must work hard to please a capricious god, but it also shows a weak god who may be “bought off” by the work or sacrifices of people. There are even some Christians who have this view of God, but that isn’t true Christianity. It is only pagan theology with a Christian façade. The true, Triune God (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) cannot be appeased by our gifts or good works. All things belong to Him anyway, so He is truly not impressed when we make a pretense to give Him a tiny portion of what already belongs to Him (see Hebrews 10).

Instead of requiring sacrifices and gifts from us, the True God made the sacrifices Himself and gives us the gifts. Jesus is God in the flesh and He sacrificed His life to redeem our lives from the guilt of our sin. The gift that He gives us is full forgiveness and pardon from any punishment which we deserve through our sinfulness and disobedience of God’s Law.

This is why Christians give gifts to one another at Christmas. God has already given us the greatest gift in the forgiveness we have through Christ, so we demonstrate our trust in this priceless gift by sharing what we have with others.

I don’t know who the Magi were, or how they knew about Christ, but we do know that they came to worship Christ and they were faithful to the God’s Word which told them to avoid King Herod. In this they can be great examples to us of faithfulness and worship.

A Peaceful Passing

When the time of their purification according to the Law of Moses had been completed, Joseph and Mary took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male is to be consecrated to the Lord” ), and to offer a sacrifice in keeping with what is said in the Law of the Lord: “a pair of doves or two young pigeons.”

Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts. When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the Law required, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying:

“Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”

The child’s father and mother marveled at what was said about him. Then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.” (Luke 2:22-35)

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You will sometimes hear people say, “I can die happy, now.” This is a great exaggeration. There is nothing “happy” about death, and with all due respect to Simeon, there is little that is “peaceful” about death either. Death is not “natural.” God did not create death. God created life. Death only came into the world as a result of people’s sin (see Genesis 3:19). Because of this, death is always a great tragedy, though in some cases, it is welcomed as a release from suffering (as long as the person has the assurance that the life beyond death is in Paradise, and not a greater suffering.)

Simeon, however, was given a great gift. God the Holy Spirit had revealed to him that he would not see death before he saw the Christ, the long-awaited savior of mankind. Yet what did Simeon see there at the temple in Jerusalem? Simeon saw a helpless newborn baby and a young family far from home who were struggling with cash flow problems. The baby Jesus looked and sounded and felt and smelled like any other baby His age. He couldn’t talk, He couldn’t walk, He couldn’t feed himself despite the fact that He was the almighty creator and ruler over all things visible and invisible.

It wasn’t the appearance of Jesus that made Simeon praise Him. Many other people saw Jesus with their eyes, and did not receive the great blessing that Simeon received. King Herod saw Jesus, but was unimpressed and felt disappointed. Judas saw Jesus nearly every day for about three years, and was a student of Christ’s teachings, yet, Judas did not believe and lost the salvation which was so close, yet so far away for him.

Many people view faith as a matter of feeling. We are sensual creatures and we often rely too much on what we take in with our five senses. It also wasn’t just how Simeon felt about this baby which made him identify Him as the Christ - he could have felt more strongly about someone else, and would have been wrong. Remember that Eve (Genesis 4) felt that her firstborn son was the promised Christ, but she was tragically wrong. What Simeon had, which blessed him so, was the Word of God!

Despite what Simeon saw, felt, heard, and smelled, he believed God’s word to him that this baby was the promised Christ who would redeem the world from sin. It didn’t matter to Simeon that this child had not accomplished any of this yet. All Simeon knew was that God had promised that it would happen and this baby, Jesus, would do what was necessary for our salvation. That was good enough for Simeon.

Simeon sings a prophetic song of praise to God, though he does briefly mention his experiences. He says, “my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.” Note that while he mentions what God had revealed to him, Simeon only praises God and not himself. Simeon rejoiced in his salvation, not because he was convinced by what he saw, but because he believed God’s promises to send a savior who would redeem the world from sin.

Simeon also notes that God did not do this in secret, but had “prepared [this] in the sight of all people.” This was the task that God had given the Israelites from the days of Abraham (who was actually, Israel’s Grandfather) until the fulfillment of the promise in Christ and then the spreading of the message of salvation to the Gentiles. Jesus is the “glory of Israel” because all believing Christians praise God for the Israelites who were faithful to Him and remained faithful up to Christ’s birth of the Virgin Mary. We also praise God for all those Christian Jews like St. Paul who also spread the Gospel message to the world during the first century Roman persecution (and subsequent persecutions).

Christ is a “light for revelation to the Gentiles” because before that time God’s promises of salvation were largely forgotten and unknown by the whole world except for the Israelites. Only Israel knew the true God and kept His Word in the Holy Scriptures, though as we read in the Bible even Israel forgot about God from time to time and needed some gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) reminding about who God is and what He has done for us.

I don’t know if Simeon died happy. I do know that he was at peace. He knew that God had kept His promise to send a savior to redeem the world from sin. In this respect we are no different from Simeon. Just as Simeon trusted in God’s Word more than just what his senses told him when he met the baby Jesus, so we, too, can trust in that same Word from God.