The First Temptation

[HKHaugan]

Lent is all about seeing Jesus in His humanity coming to transform ours. A disciple of Jesus knows that transformation of self is an ongoing experience of letting Jesus reign within. Let's take a look briefly at the first temptation.

To really get a handle on the temptations of Jesus we have to consider the context. Jesus has submitted to His Father’s will to live in a human body. He is God the Son, a spiritual being having a human experience just like us. Unlike us Jesus never sinned. The Holy Spirit conceived him. We, however, were born in sin. As David observed, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me (Ps.51:5).”

This means to get our bearings on personal existence we have to reverse how we usually think and process ourselves. We have to think of ourselves as spiritual beings first. Jesus didn’t have to reverse His thinking. He began thinking spiritually. His life sets the stage for us to put everything in a spiritual perspective. His Baptism is the starting point because it makes a spiritual statement about our real birth, our real life, our real death and our real life after death. His being led into the wilderness was not a search for self, which is the devil’s way of getting us off track. Jesus knew who He was and what He was here to do.

His first step was to expose and take on the devil whose handiwork made a wilderness of the heart and mind amidst a sea of spiritual forces warring against God and us. John tells us “The reason the Son of God came was to destroy the devil’s work (1John3:8). He was setting a course for all of us in the unseen to discern the real wilderness in which we live, a spiritual wilderness. It is a wilderness in which the devil rules by tempting self-centered indulgence in choice and decision-making, the real nature of sin. Sin is the door ajar where the devil puts his foot of temptation to gain entrance.

Watch how he operates with Jesus. Jesus has been fasting forty days and forty nights in the wilderness (think spiritually). What is the wilderness again? You are right. It is a place of aloneness in heart and mind among others and the physical environment. It is the world, secular society, where all kinds of spirits run rampant. Hearts that live only for the moment, to satisfy physical hunger, emotional hunger, relational hunger, mind hunger. Each attract spirits of pride, fear, lust, compromise, greed and many more. They feed on the tyranny of immediacy, in the “I want it all and I want I now” atmosphere of instant gratification. There is real heart hunger, a spiritual hunger, to be right in the alone moments. This is where temptation hits us.

So what does the devil do? “Jesus,” he thinks, “is vulnerable. He is hungry, alone and in my world after 40 days and nights. I’ve got Him now.” So the devil says to Him, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Three things reveal the devil’s strategy. First, he tempts Jesus to doubt who He is by saying, “If you are the Son of God…” Second, he assumes Jesus can be tempted to give in to his physical hunger, “…tell these stones to become bread.” Third, he tempts Jesus to use His spiritual power apart from His Father.

So what does Jesus do? He counters the devil by saying that the real hunger in a human being is spiritual hunger and the only way that kind of hunger can be satisfied is with God’s Word. “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” The point here is that being right in mind and heart begins with displacing sin by God’s Word and the Spirit that comes through that Word. Jesus will later say in Matthew, “Do not worry about your life, what you eat, drink and wear…seek first the kingdom of God and His rightness and all these things will be added unto you (6:25,33).”

So after He was baptized His human life in the Spirit was called to face temptation at the deepest level in the darkest place in most deserted area of human experience, the combined mind, heart and spirit, the alone self-consciousness we all know. He did this for us, for our now and for our eternity, "And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age (Mt.28:20)."