Satan tempted Jesus, yet He did not fall to those temptations. Over the next three weeks, we’ll see how His overcoming was for us.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be with you tonight as we begin our new series, The Temptations. We’ve been thinking over the last weeks about what it means to answer Jesus’s call to follow him. We’ve thought about lots of virtues that he brings out in our lives, but ultimately it’s a call simply to follow him.
As we begin this new series, we’re going to be thinking about what Jesus has done, what he came into this world to do. One perhaps somewhat curious, hard-to-get-our-minds-around moment in his ministry is the temptation in the wilderness, where the Holy Spirit leads Jesus out into the wilderness to face temptation from Satan. Yet in that, we see a part of his work that he does to gain victory for us, to give us life. So let’s go ahead and pray and then we’re going to think about that tonight. Please join me in prayer.
Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Thank you for giving us your Son, that he would live amongst us in this world, that he would overcome sin for us, that he would take on our punishment, that as we fall to temptation he triumphed over it and yet took the punishment for it. Lord, as we look to him, as we look to the love that we see that you have given us, would you encourage us and would you help us to show that love to the world? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
The temptations of Christ in the wilderness—I can remember reading about them as a little boy. They’re so striking that you’re out, that Jesus is out in the wilderness. I remember imagining this vast desert and here Jesus is encountering Satan. And what’s interesting about these temptations, they’re not just random temptations. Satan doesn’t open up a temptation book and think, “Hmm, I wonder what I will tempt Jesus with.” No, strikingly the temptations that he brings to Jesus are ones that we face every day. They’re the same sorts of temptations, in fact, three of them that appear in the wilderness for Israel when Israel itself was out in the wilderness for 40 years after leaving Egypt.
And so in these temptations we see during that 40 days that Jesus takes in the wilderness, he goes through the experience that Israel went through—God’s people who were called to show God’s love to the world. And yet where Israel failed, where Israel caved to temptation and turned away, so much like we do, Jesus did not. Because of that, as we look at this, we see Jesus experiencing, as the author of Hebrews says, everything that we’ve experienced, including temptation, because Jesus is both fully God and fully man. And yet as he experienced those temptations, he did so without sin, something that we don’t do.
There’s so much to unpack in that, but as we begin this study, I think it’s important to think about that word temptation. We think of it negatively, rightly so, but the word translated temptation here could also be translated test. We go and take a test at school, and it helps us to gather all the knowledge in our head because we try to pull together everything we’ve studied and then get it back out in the paper. And oftentimes if we’ve studied well, when we leave that test, we now know the material because we pulled it all together. And oftentimes God would provide tests for his people like that.
So what we see here is really interesting because Satan goes into this with full intent of temptation. Satan goes into these temptations desiring to completely thwart God’s plan, to blow apart this idea of the Messiah coming and rescuing his people by saying, “Sure, Jesus, you’re God, but I know I can defeat you. I can cause you to stumble like everyone else who has ever been in a human body.” What does God see? As we read these words, think about this: God sees it as a test whereby the accomplishment of Jesus is proclaimed to the world. And that because of that, we can look to our Savior and celebrate.
Let’s go ahead and turn to Matthew chapter four, where the temptation begins. Matthew writes, “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.’”
It starts with something incredibly basic. It starts with hunger. I’ve never gone through 40 days without eating. I think probably very few of us have. But probably all of us have experienced a time where we were more hungry than we wanted to be. Preparing for this message made me hungry because talking over and over again and researching on fasting and thinking about what Jesus goes through here, all of a sudden, I just found myself really wanting to eat. And you know that feeling you get in your stomach when, yes, you can hear it growling. But on top of that, it just gives that gnawing pain. You think about that; this is the situation that Jesus is in here.
Because Jesus, yes, fully God, but fully man, is experiencing exactly the sort of thing that we would going without food. He’s hungry, and Satan thinks he sees his opportunity. Here is where Jesus can be pulled off of his mission. His mission is to go out into the wilderness, experience these trials just like God’s people have done, but not cave, not fall to temptation, but to keep his eyes focused on the Father.
And Satan says, “I can pull your mind off. Hey, Jesus, Jesus, look over there. There’s, there’s all those rocks, that rock over there, that looks like a really nice loaf of bread. Can’t you smell it, Jesus? You can just smell that, that wafting smell of fresh bread. Don’t you just love fresh bread, Jesus? Tell you what, Jesus, you’ve just been baptized by John the Baptist in the River Jordan, the voice of the Father came booming down, proclaiming you’re the Son of God. Okay, so if you’re the Son of God, you could turn that loaf, that rock, I mean, you could turn it into a loaf, loaf of bread.”
Oh, that would be so satisfying. And here it is, you can imagine Satan thinks he finally has Jesus, because Jesus is experiencing that physical pain, that discomfort, he’s hungry. What Satan wants to do here is really simple. You see, it isn’t really a problem for Jesus to do miracles; Jesus would do plenty of them. It’s not even a problem for Jesus to do miracles that have something to do with food. After all, he’d feed multitudes by multiplying food.
What’s the problem here? He’s out in the wilderness focused on the Father, and focused on going through the trials that God’s people have faced so that he can represent us, that he can accomplish everything we were supposed to do. And Satan wants to pull him off of that mission, to take his eyes off of the Father, and instead think, “Hmm, that does look like a loaf of bread. I could make that delicious. I could make that the best loaf of bread ever.” What Satan wants to do is cause Jesus to enter into disobedience. And in that moment to derail everything, everything that all of history has been moving towards, when Jesus would come and achieve victory for us, that all the times that human beings just like you and me have gone through life and failed over and over again and fallen to temptation, that here’s the perfect one come to go through life without failing. And Satan thinks, I can derail this. It’s always worked before.
What Satan didn’t understand, though, was how truly perfect Jesus was. He would not cave to temptation. Jesus was entitled to turn that rock into bread. In fact, in Philippians 2, we read that he was entitled to all the glory, all the recognition, all the power, all the majesty of God, because he is God. And what did he do? What was the mission that he was on here? He had humbled himself, taking the form of a servant, taking on our human form, so that he could go through life accomplishing everything we’d failed to do. And Jesus looked to the Father. It’s the opposite of what Israel had done.
As I said, these temptations that we see here go through the very story of Israel out in the wilderness. We see that as Moses recounts in Deuteronomy chapter 8. Let’s go ahead and turn there now. Moses says to the people, this is at the end of his ministry, as he’s trying to remind them of what God has done. He says, “You shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these 40 years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know whether what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Your clothing did not wear out on you, and your foot did not swell these 40 years.”
Moses points the people to think about what’s happened. They’ve been rescued from where they were slaves in Egypt. They’ve been at the mercy of evil, wicked people, and God had rescued them. He’d split apart the sea that they would leave, that a mighty nation could not hold them back, but in fact would be drowned in the sea. And then he would appear to them by a pillar of cloud during the day, by a pillar of fire at night, so that they would constantly know God’s presence. He’d given them the law, handed it down to Moses, that Moses could represent directly to the people that God of the universe is with us.
But what did they do? They found reasons to be dissatisfied. They looked at the food that God provided them in the wilderness and said, “This doesn’t taste good enough.” They thought back, “Oh boy, remember when we were in Egypt, how great the food was, how delicious it was. I could go into town and I could buy different clothes.” They forget the fact that the clothes they wore lasted 40 years without wearing out. Can you imagine that? 40 years. They forgot it all.
It reminded me of this artist’s work that I saw a few months ago, where an artist took the worst Yelp reviews for national parks and turned them into old style looking postcards. Let’s look at a few of them. Called subpar parks. For example, for White Sands National Park, says, “Miles of white sand, one star.” Or Glacier National Park. “Oh, it’s too cold for me.” But you’d never guess that one, would you? Or for Yellowstone, “Save yourself some money, boil some water at home. I don’t need to see a geyser someplace.” One star. How’s this one for Yosemite? “Trees block view. There are too many gray rocks.” Oh, I hate it when I go out into the woods and the trees block the view. One star. Mammoth Cave: “Cold, dark, damp, and stinky.” One star. Here’s one for all of us in St. Louis: The Gateway Arch National Park, “No real point.” There is a point to that one, at least, I suppose. An arch doesn’t have a point in it.
But you look at these, and what’s the problem with all these reviews? And what’s this artist trying to remind us of? It’s the dissatisfaction we have. The irony of it isn’t that someone wrote a cranky review. But I think as we read them, what strikes us, it’s okay, maybe I’m amazed when I see the Gateway Arch or Yosemite or wherever it might be. But how often is it that I become dissatisfied with the glorious, wonderful view of who God is? That God has provided for me all my life.
We’ve been speaking out hunger. All of us, if we’re here tonight, God has been ensuring that we had food throughout our entire lives. Israelites have seen God do mighty things for them, but so have we. And just like the Israelites, we go on to the Yelp of Life and we hit that one star button. Boy, those trees block the view. Oh, it’s cold when I go look at beautiful glaciers. We find some reason to be dissatisfied. The problem with Israelites is they would be satisfied for a moment God would provide them with food or rescue from the Egyptians or this or that. But the problem is they were focusing on the thing and not the one providing it.
When we’re focused on the food, whatever that might be metaphorically in our lives, and we’re looking at it, or focused on that food, we become dissatisfied because we think, “Well, it’s not tasty enough anymore. The kitchen isn’t bringing it out fast enough. It just isn’t what I want.” But what Moses was reminding the people was, as one commentator put it, that it’s not mere food that gives us life. God is the one that gives us life. That’s what Moses is saying to those people.
And Satan is trying to take Jesus off of that focus here and say, “Jesus, think about you can provide food for yourself. You don’t need to continue this silly fast the Father has you on. Eat. Oh, smells so good. Just a little bite, you’ll feel better.” Then you can do some more fasting. You’ll be strong. That’s what we do in life. We rate that beautiful, glorious view that God has given us one star. We start to see all the flaws in it that aren’t really flaws. It’s our own hearts feeling dissatisfied.
And as we do that, then we start to say, “But I could be happy if… I wouldn’t have to worry if… I need this food. I need this job. I need this house or this car or this thing at school. I need these. I need this stuff. I need it.” And so if I cheat just this once, if I slip out of God’s plan just for a moment, and I’m a little disobedient, then everything will be set up great. And then I can be faithful to God. That’s never how it works, though.
We look at the Israelites, and if you’ve read through their story, we know that they’re unfaithful over and over and over again, even in the wilderness, even as God’s right before them, demonstrating miraculously. But here’s the thing. I don’t think any of them said, “Well, I want to be disobedient to God as much as I can in my life. I want to just be completely faithless.” No. What did they say? “I am really hungry today, and I could use a nice juicy steak like I had back in Egypt. I don’t want more manna.” Or, “I know that God’s made sure I’ve always had water, even out here in this wilderness. But I’m thirsty right now. So I’m going to complain to Moses. I’m going to complain that God’s just going to let me just thirst to death.”
You see, the Israelites’ failures were a series of one-time complaints, one-time moments of disobedience that stack up and lead them away from the mission that God had given them to be those who represent him to the world. Instead, just focus themselves on their unhappiness. Focus themselves on ultimately failing because they weren’t doing what God had called them to do. And we do the same thing. Whenever we cave into those temptations, we think, “Just this one time, I might as well go ahead and cave to this temptation because I know I’m going to eventually. I might as well just do it. And then I’ll go back.”
This summer, there was an application that came out, an app on the phone, and you could download it. And it was a contest. And this contest went something like this. You could download the app, and you put your finger on your phone, and you held it there. And there was a prize, a large prize, a large amount of money. And if you held your finger on the phone longest, you won the prize. It went on for 70 hours, people holding their finger on the phone. But at the end, there were, I believe, four people left. And it ended up being that each of them got the prize.
But imagine you’re going along, you’re at hour 15, hour 20, hour 30, hour 40, and you think, “Well, clearly, there are people more determined than I am to keep their finger on a phone. I want to go back to normal life. I’m going to let go.” And at hour 65, I bet someone had his or her thumb on the phone, just holding on and thought, “I’m going to let go eventually, I might as well let go now.” And then just a few hours later, the contest holder decided, “This has been long enough, I’m going to reward everyone who’s left.”
So often in life, we think, “I’m going to cave into temptation, I might as well just take my thumb off of that resistance button, because I’m going to do it eventually. I’m unhappy right now, I am so hungry. Might as well just do it.” Problem is, we try to seek to solve that momentary crisis, and we forget the one who solves all momentary crises and everything in life. Because it’s understandable in the case of the app, at some point, you do have to let go. And you don’t know that it’s all going to be solved. You don’t even know what the prize is going to come through.
But when we look at history, we see God’s faithfulness throughout all of time. So the Israelites need to look, and then as they did, they would have seen, “Hey, you know, this is the God that took us out of Egypt. He knows what he’s doing. We can trust him. I don’t need to let go of that button. I don’t need to take my finger off because yeah, my hand hurts. It’s hard to hold on. But God is faithful.” That’s what Jesus shows us here as he faces this temptation—that the first answer to the first temptation, so we need to focus on the provider of our needs and make sure that we’re not trying to focus on ourselves as the one who would provide.
Let’s take a look at verse four. Jesus goes back to that passage in Deuteronomy, and he actually quotes it here. He says to Satan, “It is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” We need to focus on the provider of our needs. Jesus says, “Satan, I’m hungry, but I am not going to look to myself and lose the mission that the Father has given me. I’m going to look to him.”
See, that’s what Satan loves to do to us: to cause us to turn away from God’s faithfulness for a moment to start thinking, “Yeah, but there’s too many gray rocks and trees. I can’t see anything.” So I’m going to just turn away and leave this beautiful view. And when he gets us to do that, and we start to focus on ourselves instead and think, “Well, how can I bring this about? How can I make sure that I’m not hungry any longer?” That temptation starts to get in the way of our ability to see God and his goodness.
It’s not that Jesus was immediately full when he answered Satan. No, he was still hungry. He was still feeling that awful feeling of tugging in his stomach and that pain and hearing his stomach growl, just like we would. But he looked to—Jesus looked to the Father and said, “The Father is faithful. The Father will provide.”
I can’t help but think that Jesus was reflecting back on this moment when a few chapters later in Matthew six, he’s preaching the Sermon on the Mount, and he gives this illustration. He says, “Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” Jesus knew what it was like to be in a place where provision seemed bleak, out in the wilderness with nothing to eat. But he knew what God had called him to do—the Father. He knew that, yes, he was God. Yes, he could turn that rock into bread. And yet he was on a mission to not do what he deserved but to do what would bring glory to his Father in heaven and to save his people.
He had to charge through life, doing the things that we repeatedly failed to do, as he took on our punishment on the cross. He would have accomplished what we never could. Jesus fulfilled what I can’t. Jesus fulfilled what Israel couldn’t in the wilderness. Israel failed time and again. And not just in the wilderness. Not only did they not get through that test successfully, but then because they hadn’t been preparing their hearts, they’d been focusing constantly on other things thinking, “Well, if I just worship this idol once, or I just complained to Moses yet again, if I just do these things, I’ll be okay, I’ll be happy.” They hadn’t been building up trust in the God who had rescued them. And they went and continued that pattern in the promised land of turning away and being unfaithful.
But what happens when we see that Jesus has experienced those things, too? We can’t say, “Well, if God only were actually experiencing this, if he knew what it was like to be hungry, if he knew those things that I need, want, that I don’t have, that don’t seem to be coming, the solutions that just aren’t happening. If only God knew what that was like, he’d be different. He’d have a different view.” No, we can’t say that, because Jesus does know what it’s like. He’s experienced it. Unlike anyone who trusts in Jesus, he took the punishment that we should get for the fact that we experienced those things and fall into temptation. That takes away the ultimate anxiousness, that fear, that anxiousness that Jesus talks about, that doesn’t add an hour to our life.
We allow that to keep pulling us away from the God who loves us, and focusing on how we can be our own saviors. But we can’t. So as we look at the future and we see how uncertain it ultimately is for us, that we could be filled with that horrible dread and ultimate anxiousness, and yet Jesus takes even that away because as he faced the temptations we face, he triumphed over them for us.
That brings us to a question. Where have I lost focus on God in my anxiousness over my wants and my needs? We all do it. We all think, “God, you just need to know, I want to be faithful to you. But in this moment, I have to have this. I must have it because I’m so anxious, I need relief, I need to be able to let my finger off that screen. I can’t hold on any longer. I’m so hungry.” But when we recognize those places, and we realize that what we’re doing is we’re saying every time we’re saying that, we’re saying, “I need, I need, I need.” I’m so good at falling into this, I become anxious at all kinds of things. I start worrying about stuff. And I think, “I need to do this. I need to do this. I need to fix this somehow.”
Notice what’s happening there. It’s all “I, I, I, I need to do this.” But what did Jesus do in that moment? He didn’t say, “Well, I just need to persevere a little longer, and then I will have bread.” No. What he says is, “The Father is the one who ultimately feeds me. Man does not live on bread alone, but on the word of God.” That’s what we’re called to do, too. When we get into that cycle of “I, I need, I need,” we turn to the Father who is faithful. And we see his provision. And as we do that, he clears away that anxiousness in us.
We not only see that he has been providing for us from the very moment our lives began, but because we’re looking to him, others can see that provision that we demonstrate in our lives, too. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your care, your provision. You do feed us, not just with food, but with all the different needs of life, the things we fret over, and you’ve provided, and yet, we keep worrying. Lord, I confess, we confess that we do this day in and day out, just like the Israelites. And yet, as we look to Jesus, and we see him triumph where we fail, we’re reminded that in that triumph, he gives us the victory, that you gave him the punishment that we deserved, that we might receive his righteousness, his reward. Lord, would you take away the anxiousness and fear in us and help us to see your provision instead? Would you help us not to look at beautiful views and see how we can be dissatisfied with it, but to see your glory in your goodness? And through that, Lord, would you use us that we might show that goodness to others as well? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We’re going to continue next week moving on to the second temptation that Satan gives to Jesus. He says, “Okay, Jesus, so I can’t tempt you with food. So how about this? Are you really sure the Father is going to protect you? Why don’t you throw yourself off the temple and see the Father demonstrate his love to you?” That would be wonderful, right? You’re just allowing God, a platform, the Father to show how great he is. Just test God.
We’ve probably all had those moments where we just want to test God. We just struggle to believe, struggle to remember his faithfulness. And if that’s you, I hope you’ll come back next week so we can be encouraged together as we look to Jesus in that moment.
If this message tonight has been an encouragement to you, I’d sure appreciate it if you’d like it on whatever social media platform you’re on. Perhaps you’d share it to your social media, send a link by email to somebody who could use encouragement. All of us struggle with temptation. And yet what we need to know is the one who triumphs over temptation. So if you would help by doing that, I would be so grateful.
If you have any comments or questions, you’re welcome to put them in the comments below this video. Or if it’s something you’d like to wrestle with a bit more privately, feel free to shoot me an email. I would love to hear from you and love to pray with you. If you have any prayer requests this week, once again, you can post them in the comments so we can all pray together. Or you can send it to me for a private prayer request by email with the email address you’ve seen on screen.
I thank you once again for joining me. I hope that you’ll follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube. As you do that, you can stay up to date on the different things we offer throughout the week, including our upcoming men’s Bible study once again. And I hope that you’ll come back here next Monday night at 7 p.m. for us to dig into God’s Word together.
Thank you again for joining me. Have a wonderful and blessed week.