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Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, the question is often asked, it’s often asked to me. Why in the world did the Lord build that tree in the first place? What is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil doing in the midst of the garden?
Well, remember, and there’s a bit of a mystery here, remember that the Lord always desires to be worshiped by faith. In other words, the Lord Jesus always desires that we would trust His Word, even if we don’t see it. In fact, that’s what we are called to do in the church, to come into this place and to believe the promises that God gives us in spite of what we see.
You see yourself, and you see your life, and you see your troubles, and you see sin, and yet we are called to believe what the Lord says, that we are forgiven of all of our sins. You see dying all around you, in your own body, in your own family, in the world. We see people dying, and yet we are invited into this place to believe what the Lord Jesus says: all who believe in me will never perish, but will have eternal life. In fact, these two things, faith and sight, are contrasted with one another. We walk by faith, says St. Paul, and not by sight.
So we now come to church and see sin and death all around us, and we by faith trust in the promise of Jesus of righteousness and life. But how could Adam and Eve worship by faith? Everything around them was not dying; everything around them was alive. There was no sin around them; everything around them was good. In other words, if the Lord was going to invite Adam and Eve to worship Him by faith, He had to give them a promise of something they couldn’t see.
So the Lord built a tree so that Adam and Eve could go there and worship, so that they could go and believe that on the day that they eat of it surely they will die. They were to believe it without ever seeing it. They were to know the truth of God’s Word without having ever to experience it. They were to go to that tree and trust the Lord’s Word. So Luther says, this is quite nice, that that tree was the first chapel. That tree was the first sanctuary. That tree is where Adam and Eve would go to worship the Lord by faith and not by sight.
But the devil comes along to tempt them. There’s a kind of a four phases of temptation. He tempts them to question the Lord’s Word. The devil comes along and says that God is lying. The devil comes along and questions God’s motive and adds his own lie to it, and Adam and Eve believed it; they took the fruit and they ate it and they plunged themselves and the garden and the animals and the universe all into sin.
The reason why you are sick is because Adam and Eve ate in the garden. The reason why you are dying is because Adam and Eve took the fruit. The reason why you’re sinful is because of what happened at that moment. Luella, who you’ll meet in heaven, loved to say to me when I would visit her, she’d say, “Pastor, it’s all Adam and Eve’s fault.” “How are you feeling, Luella?” “It’s all Adam and Eve’s fault.” She asked me, “Do you think I’m going to chew them out when I get to the resurrection?” And I said, “No, I don’t think so,” but she wanted to.
That garden is where it all started. But fast forward to Jesus. Not in the garden, but in the wilderness. Not under a tree, but sitting there with rocks and stones in the Judean wilderness. And the devil comes again to tempt Jesus, as the devil comes to all of us. But now the stakes are higher. Remember how it said in the epistle text that through one man came death. We have to know that all of us were there in the garden when Adam and Eve fell. All of us are affected by their sin. All of us are affected by their death. But we were all also together with Jesus in the wilderness.
And just as Adam’s fall brought death to all, so now our future and our life stands on the contest in the wilderness. Now we should be clear about this, because oftentimes it’s tempting to preach the temptation of Jesus in the garden as an example. We say, well, look at how Jesus resisted the devil, so we should employ the same strategies. We should see His techniques and His tactics so we can be able to push the devil back when he also comes to tempt us. And that’s actually fine. I mean, it’s pretty good. It is amazing to us that Jesus, instead of just sort of blasting the devil away with like a ray gun or shooting fire out of His eyes or calling a bear to run him off or using… I mean, maybe He could have been transfigured then and driven the devil away, but instead of doing that, Jesus fights off the devil not with His divine power, but with the Word of God, and that gives us hope that when the devil comes to tempt us, we also are fighting him off with none other than the Lord’s Word.
But more is at stake. If the devil is successful in tempting Jesus, if the devil is successful in getting Jesus to sin in the wilderness, then we are doomed. It would be a double fall, a double defeat, and there would be no hope for us. So a lot’s riding on this temptation, and we want to pay attention to it.
Now the first thing that we should notice is that this threefold temptation of Jesus is really a singular temptation of Jesus. Remember what happened right before the temptation of Jesus is that He was down there in the Jordan River being baptized, and when Jesus came up out of the water, God the Father spoke from heaven and He said, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” Now listen to what the devil says when he tempts Jesus. The tempter came and said to Him, “If you are the Son of God.” Again, that was in v. 3, and again in v. 6. “If you are the Son of God.”
The devil, in other words, comes to tempt Jesus to doubt the promise of God that was spoken in His baptism. God the Father said, “This is My beloved Son,” and the devil comes along and says, “If it’s true.”
Now I want you to know, dear saints, that this is how the devil is always tempting you. In fact, you can boil every single temptation that comes to you as a temptation to reject the promise that God spoke in your baptism. Every temptation is a temptation to throw off the promise that God gave to you in the blessing of the water and the Word, to doubt that you’re God’s child, to doubt that your sins are forgiven, to doubt that God loves you, to doubt that you’re the temple of the Holy Spirit, to doubt that you’re destined for the resurrection of the flesh and the life everlasting. He comes to undo the gift of baptism.
There’s an old church father, Tertullian, who wrote this little thing on baptism. And he says that all of us are like little fish who were following around our big fish Jesus, and the devil knows how to destroy fish. He takes them out of the water. So the devil is always trying to throw you out of the blessing of your baptism, throw you out of the waters of God’s promise, throw you out of the waters of the Lord’s lavishness in His blood and in His sacrifice.
The first temptation comes to Jesus: the devil says, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” And here is the temptation to use His power to serve Himself. Here is the temptation to give up this suffering, to give up His hunger, and to simply have a bite to eat and satisfy it. And we say, what would be wrong with that? What would be wrong if Jesus took a rock and turned it into a loaf of bread? Maybe if He didn’t want to be lavish, He could turn it into like a little piece of pita bread or something, you know, nothing fancy, just a bite; nobody will even know the difference. What’s the harm in doing it?
But Jesus did not come to serve Himself. He did not come to satisfy Himself. He did not come to protect Himself. None of the miracles of Jesus are to serve His own benefit, but to serve you. And here it stands that Jesus is not there to feed Himself. If the 5,000 people are hungry in the wilderness, He has no problem using His power to feed them, but when He’s hungry, He simply won’t do it. That’s not why He came. So He says, “Men shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
So the devil takes Jesus to Jerusalem, and he takes Him to the pinnacle of the temple, and he puts Him on top of the pinnacle. It was a pretty fancy place, and the devil says to Jesus, “If you’re the Son of God, throw yourself down off the temple.” And then the devil quotes the scripture. He quotes the introit that we had earlier. It’s really something we have to kind of pay a little bit of attention to because the devil is now going to use the scripture to tempt Jesus, but he manipulates it and he changes it. He leaves a little thing out. “Throw yourself down. It’s written, he will command his angels concerning you, and on their hands, they will bear you up lest you strike your foot against a stone.” But the devil leaves out this little phrase that we sang together: “in all your ways.”
In other words, the devil was tempting Jesus to leave His vocation, to leave His calling, to put God to the test, to say that He was going to throw Himself off because surely the angels would catch Him because God had made the promise. And this is the temptation that the devil brings to us, to trust in God where He has not given His promise.
Now we should be very keenly aware of this danger. I have found that there’s probably two or three reasons why people leave the church. One of them is because they were wounded or hurt or somehow violated or offended by someone in the church and they were just running away afraid. The other is that they had particular things that they wanted to do, normally this is kind of sixth commandment stuff, and they were tired of the Lord telling them not to. But the third reason that I’ve seen people leave the church is because they are disappointed in God because God did not keep a promise that they thought He made.
In other words, the devil tries to set us up with false promises, with false expectations, and then we stand disappointed with God. This is really what’s, I mean, a great danger of the prosperity gospel, where they say that God has promised us wealth and abundance and a good life and that nothing will go wrong with us. And then when things start to go wrong, we say, “Where is God? Why has He forgotten me? Why has He neglected me? Why are things going so poorly in my life?”
I was at the chapel with the kids at Concordia University this last week, and I asked them to write their questions for me on a note card, and four or five of the questions all had to do with this theme: “Why are things so bad? Why is there so much suffering? Why is there so much suffering in my life? How can God possibly be good when I’m going through all of these things?”
Now this is how the devil does it. He tries to set us up as if the Lord has promised to give us a good life, and then when things don’t go like we expected, well it must be God’s fault. Dear saints, God cannot be blamed for not keeping a promise that He never gave. God is not at fault for being a liar when He never said that things were going to be great. In fact, Jesus says this: “In this world you will have tribulation.” His promise is not that things are going to go great. His promise is that you’re going to be persecuted. His promise is that you’re going to be despised. His promise is that you’re going to be afflicted. The suffering that we have in this life is God keeping His promise, not breaking it.
But the devil comes along and he tempts Jesus in the same way; he gives Him a false promise. But Jesus answers and He says, “Again it is written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”
So the devil comes to Jesus a third time. He takes Him up to some high mountain, and he shows Him as if in a vision all the kingdoms of the world and he says, “All of these I will give to you if you will fall down and worship me.” Now I have to tell you that this is a peculiar temptation and it’s strange to me because it seems so obviously ridiculous. I mean, number one, this all belongs to Jesus already. He is King of kings and Lord of lords. He’s the Creator of heaven and earth. All of these things belong to Jesus.
But this must have been a true temptation. I mean, it must have been a true temptation for Jesus to actually fall down and worship the devil and receive from him all the kingdoms of the world. And I think the temptation is probably here, that if Jesus were to fall down and worship the devil there, He could avoid all the trouble of the cross. The devil could say, “If you’ll fall down and worship me here, then you won’t have to stumble under the weight of the cross. If you fall down and worship me here, you won’t have to be stripped and abused and beaten and neglected. If you’ll just fall down and worship me here, we can avoid all of the suffering, all of the agony, all of the trouble, all of the embarrassment, all of the affliction, all of the darkness, all of the writhing under the wrath of God, all of that we can just skip right here; I’ll just step down and you can have it all, all the worlds and all the people in it.”
But Jesus says, “No, I came precisely for this, to suffer and die, to win for myself a people holy and righteous.” So, He says to the devil, “You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve.” And the devil leaves.
Dear saints, that little line in verse 11 should be our great triumph. The devil left. Jesus prevailed. Where Adam and Eve fell, Jesus stood. Where Adam and Eve collapsed under the weight of the demonic affliction, Jesus stood up under it. And He stood there not only as our example, but chiefly as our Savior, as our Champion, guardian, and as our Lord who defeats the devil. This was the promise that God gave to Adam and Eve in the garden: the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent, and He here in the garden begins that crushing work which ends on the cross and in the tomb.
The devil has been destroyed. Your grave has been destroyed. Your sin has been forgiven. One little word fells the devil, and that word is Jesus, the one who stood, the one who stands, the one who is the victor for you. May God grant us this joy of knowing that where Adam and Eve fell, Jesus stood and that He gives to us that victory.
Amen. And the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.