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And Jesus answered him, “It is written, you shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve.”
You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints of God, in order to fulfill God’s will, we put our attention on the text before us and maybe see if we can take it up in three categories. First, wisdom; then, courage; and then, comfort.
For wisdom, we want to think about the text theologically and ask maybe this theological question: What is temptation to begin with, and how is it that Jesus can be tempted? We know that we are tempted when we are, as James says, led away, everyone, by our own desires. We know that temptation comes to us because we, to say it just as simply as I can, we want the wrong stuff. Our hearts are grasping and desiring for stuff that the Lord has not authorized to give to us. And this is not helped by the fact that the world and the devil come along and stoke the flames of false desire and wicked wants in our own sinful flesh, pushing us towards things that we should not do or say or think. So we experience temptation both on the inside and on the outside. The world tempts us, the devil tempts us, and our own fallen flesh tempts us.
So we have a hard time understanding how could it be that Jesus could be tempted because He, after all, was perfect in every way. He was a man just like us. He has our flesh and our blood, and yet He was without sin. He was conceived holy and pure in the womb of the Virgin Mary so that He never even sinned, not only in what He did and what He said, but even in what He thought and what He desired. Jesus never wanted even to do the wrong thing. How then could He be tempted?
I want to read you a paragraph or so from Francis Pieper, the old Lutheran dogmatician. I have to put on my smart glasses to do this. Some object that the impeccability—that means Jesus’ inability to sin—would exclude temptability. It would make of Christ’s temptation a sham battle. However, Matthew 4 and Luke 4 describe a real battle between Jesus and the devil. Moreover, the objection is invalid even under purely human circumstances. One may be very sure of gaining the final victory and yet inflict hard blows upon one’s opponent. Even so, the temptation of Christ, although the outcome was never in doubt, was a real battle in which Satan attacked the soul of Christ with the allurements and temptations in which Christ not seemingly but actually fought, and he did this by grasping and applying the word.
“It is written,” in faith, He kept the allurement which approached His soul from without from gaining a hold within. So, Jesus was tempted, and in fact, not only does the divinity of Jesus still permit Him in the miracle of the incarnation to be tempted, in my own estimation, it makes it more difficult. The picture that I was thinking of this morning was, if you can imagine this: that someone tells you to hold something—a paperweight or something like this that weighs a pound or two—and to hold it with your arm outstretched, that at first you don’t even feel it; it’s fine, it’s no problem. But the longer you hold out your arm, the heavier the weight gets and heavier and heavier and heavier until at some point someone either has to take the weight away or your arm is going to collapse. So it is with us. We should recognize that the temptations that we feel are limited by God. He’s put a throttle on what the devil can bring to us to tempt us with.
Remember how Paul says it: no temptation has overcome that is not common to mankind. In every temptation, the Lord will provide a way out. So, the Lord permits the devil and our own flesh and the world to tempt us, but not in an overwhelming way—only in a very limited way. But the Lord now hands Himself over completely to the devil’s temptation so that He experiences—it’s at the end of the text—He experiences every temptation to the uttermost. Jesus has to hold out that weight, and He never drops it, and the weight is as heavy as any weight that had ever been given so that the temptation of Jesus never has relief. He resists the devil all the way to the end, and He does this with the Lord’s Word. In fact, He does it with a page from Deuteronomy.
I was looking at how the verses that Jesus uses are all verses from Deuteronomy and all from one place in Deuteronomy. He first quotes Deuteronomy chapter 8, verse 3, and then Deuteronomy chapter 10, verse 20, and then Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 16. It’s on, you know, I mean depending on how big your print is on your Bible, it’s on one or two pages, and it seems to me like this is the page that Jesus was using and studying before He was driven out into the wilderness. I’ve got a page of the Bible, and that’s all I need to stand against the devil. Jesus does not use His divine nature to refute the devil; He uses the Scripture.
Now this is—the wisdom would tell us how the temptation works in the life of Jesus, but here is now the courage for us because Jesus has given us some tactical knowledge that we should consider here as He stands where Adam and Eve fell and uses the Bible to refute the devil. We should remember, and this, dear saints, is one of these amazing truths of the Scripture that we probably wouldn’t believe unless the Lord had written it down for us. We consider that the devil is not to be—that we are not to flee from him, that we are not to run from the devil. But in fact, the very opposite is true. St. James writes, “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” The devil runs from us.
Now this is an amazing truth. It’s kind of stunning. It’s hard for us to imagine. Why would the devil after all run from us? Doesn’t he just look at us like the, you remember that old cartoon with the two polar bears looking at an igloo and they said, “This is so tasty, it’s crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside.” Don’t you think the devil would look at us like that? It’s just like a tasty morsel, like he’s just going to devour us. He looks at us like a devouring wolf just kind of licking his chops. But that is not how the devil sees you because you, dear saints, are baptized. You are clothed with the armor of light. You are equipped with the Word of God. You are dangerous for the devil, so that if you stand by the strength of the Lord’s Word and resist him, then he runs from you.
This is what Luther was talking about. We sang it in the hymn, “One Little Word Can Fell Him.” This is one of these kind of funny, you know, there are a bunch of things at seminary that you kind of look back on and laugh, and this is one of them. It’s always a fight at seminary about what is the little word that Luther was singing about, that Luther teaches us to sing: “One little word can fell Him.” What’s the little word? And you divide up into camps. Some people say, well, I think that one little word is Jesus. That’s the word that fells the devil. Another says, no, that was when Luther was fighting with Zwingli about the Lord’s Supper, and he said, “This is my body,” and I think the one little word that fells the devil is the word “is,” in the word, “This is my body.” Another person says, well, you know, Luther was writing about the catechism and he was writing about the creed and the word of God, so it’s the creed, it’s the life and death of Jesus. No, it’s not like Luther had figured out one secret word that would send the devil packing and then he just wouldn’t tell us what it was. That’s not the point at all.
What Luther is saying is if you want to stand against the devil, what do you need to do it? Do you need armies of angels? Do you need hosts of angels? Do you need some sort of big castle to pretend? What will be the strength that we use to stand against the devil? Just a little word. One little word. You don’t even need two. One word will do it. Any word of God. You have a page from Deuteronomy; that will be just fine. One little word fells him because the devil cannot stand against the Word of God. The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, and it is the sword of the Word by which we fight against the devil and overthrow him, which means we should give attention to the Word. It also means we should memorize it.
I said that Jesus was quoting from a page of Deuteronomy, but we have no evidence that He had that page in His back pocket. He had that Word memorized. He knew the Word of God. We’ve sort of lost that discipline, I think, in the church. I mean, we make the children do their memory work and memorize the catechism, and that’s good, but every Christian should be working on memorizing more of the Word of God so that you can take it with you and you can pull it out and meditate on it at any time. And you can start with the Ten Commandments and the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer so that’s always there, and then just add more to it. When you’re in church and we’re reading through the Scriptures and you say, oh, that’s a good verse, the Word of God is near to you; it’s in your heart and on your lips, and he who confesses with the Lord and believes in His heart, he will be saved. That’s a good one. Let’s just underline that and put it on a note card and keep it with me to memorize and treasure up in our hearts so that we can bring it to bear when we’re meditating on His Word or when we’re standing in line or when we’re driving around or when the devil comes to press us hard that we have the word of the Lord at the ready.
That is our courage, that we are not afraid of the devil but we stand against him. But if we were to stop there in reflecting on this text, I think we would miss the main point because the Lord not only wants to give us wisdom and courage; He wants to especially give us comfort. And here is the main point: that when Jesus is driven out of the Jordan River from His baptism up into the wilderness, there in the sticks that are in the mountains between the Dead Sea and Jerusalem, when He’s up there in that wilderness, He’s there for you. He’s not on some sort of spiritual journey to discover Himself. He’s not on a vision quest. He’s not doing any of this because He needs it, even because He wants it. He’s doing it for you. He’s there not eating a single bite for 40 days for you. He is there experiencing—and can you imagine this—experiencing every single temptation that every single person has ever faced, temptations that you and I could not even imagine. Jesus was experiencing them so that He can be, as Hebrews teaches us, He can be a sympathetic high priest, having been tempted in every way like we are and yet without sin.
That means that Jesus knows what it’s like. He knows your struggles; He knows your sorrows; He knows your battles; He knows your temptations; He knows your affliction—all of this, He knows it all so that He can be sympathetic, so that He can sit with you, so that He can come alongside you to encourage you and to comfort you. And at last He is doing all of this so that He might stand where we fell, where Adam fell, where Eve fell, where we all fall. John Milton, you remember that guy, the poet? He wrote the big long epic poem about Paradise Lost, but then he wrote a shorter but even more beautiful poem about the temptation of Jesus called Paradise Regained, and that’s the idea. That where Adam and Eve were surrounded by trees and a garden and all this fruit that they could possibly want, but Jesus is driven out into the wilderness with nothing at all to eat. And Adam and Eve are tempted by the devil to eat the food, and they eat it, and so the devil comes to tempt Jesus, and he refuses. He stands.
Jesus stands where Adam and Eve and you and I fell, and He stands for you in your place so that in Him you also stand. The reason why these words from Moses in the book of Deuteronomy, the reason why they have power to send the devil away is because Jesus is the one who inspired them. Jesus is the one who carried your sins and your sorrows all the way to the cross to suffer there for you, and He is the one that gives you the word that’s infused with His divine life and strength to send the devil away. He is the one who washes you with His blood and who strengthens you with His Spirit and who covers you with His righteousness and who calls you with His name. Jesus stands where we fell. Jesus on the cross suffers where we should be. He’s laid in the tomb and raised from the dead so that we can be rescued from death and follow after Him, the firstfruits of the resurrection.
So, we rejoice in this text that Jesus is suffering all of this because He loves us. And He’s making a way for us through all of the temptations and troubles of this life to come to the joys of heaven.
So may God grant us wisdom and courage and most of all comfort in knowing that Jesus has stood for us.
Amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and your minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.