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THE TERRORS OF TEMPTATION

Thank you Connie, and yes, today I begin to share with you one of Matthew’s distinctive portraits of Jesus. Yesterday, in the first of this new series, we talked about the reason for the four different, complementary accounts of the life of Jesus. There’s so much richness in the life of our Savior, no single account could begin to convey all there is to tell. As John observed at the end of his Gospel:

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written (21:25 NIV).

So God in His wisdom committed to the hands of four of His disciples the task of sharing the many parables and miracles scattered like fragrant flowers along the paths of His public life in Palestine.

So what is the distinctive view Matthew has to offer? He shows us the “royal” face of Jesus, the One who came as part of the royal line of King David. Heaven’s king came down to earth, as the King of a spiritual kingdom. And today we explore the three temptations of our King by Satan.

These temptations are a bit strange at first reading. They sound somewhat implausible. For example, we read here in Matthew 4: 5, 6:

Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. "If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down. For it is written: " 'He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands” (NIV).

Can you imagine it being any great temptation for Jesus to be dared by a fallen angel to jump off the top of the equivalent of the spire of a great European cathedral, to prove that angels would catch Him? It’s a strange story, Matthew! What’s it all about? What does it mean for us? To help us understand, we should first establish the purpose of these three great temptations.

On a warm Fall day, Jesus came down to the Jordan river just above the point where the fresh water enters the salty lifeless Sea. John the Baptist has been preaching there for some weeks. And as word filtered up the hill to Jerusalem, crowds flocked down to see him. He wore a crudely woven cloak made from coarse camel’s hair, sported a wide leather belt, and three meals a day he munched nutty wild locusts, sweetened with wild honey. Quite a character.

And the language he used to address the crowds flowed with remarkable candor. Recalling a plague of snakes God sent to the Israelite in the Sinai desert threatening their extinction, John called out to the Pharisees and Sadducees:

"You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matt 3:7, 8, NIV)

John’s sermons stood in stark contrast to the way their religious teachers talked. They used a thousand repetitious arguments. It all spelled Jewish nationalism divorced from spirituality. They were required to purchase too many sacrifices from robber barons operating with the permission of priests in the shadows of the temple. But in their hearts, many Jews hungered for spirituality and a practical relationship with God.

They were tired of being excluded from the inner temple, tired of the dry dialogue of the priests. They longed for light. They hungered for hope. These Jewish believers thirsted for a throne to which they could come and receive mercy. And the words of John gave it to them. They came by the hundreds to the cool Jordan river, and were buried through baptism, and rose to new life.

Then one morning, sweaty from a 70-some-mile walk, Jesus waded into the refreshing water and stood face to face with John. In that instant John knew the Messiah had arrived, He was face to face with a king, the royal Son of David, and the royal Son of God. We read in Matthew 3, verse 13:

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John (NIV)

These two men had been conceived about the same time, grew up in towns 100 miles apart, and both grew under the same sense of a divine mission. One was born to preach the Good News of the coming Messiah. And in the end he would die a quick, clean death under the blade of a Roman sword. The other had been born as the Messiah. He would die for the sins of the world, a slow, awful death on a Roman cross.

When Jesus stands in Jordan, John sees His divinity flash through the humanity. He recognizes that he is face to face with One he has been preaching would soon arrive! So when Jesus asks to be the next person baptized, at first John can’t bring himself to do it! Mathew’s account reads:

John tried to deter him, saying, "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me" (Matt 3:14 NIV)?

But based on the authority of the Messiah that he could not disobey, John takes hold of Jesus’ shoulders (his heart pounding stronger than he’d ever felt before) and plunges the Nazarene Carpenter into a grave of water.

And as Jesus rises out of the water, the Holy Spirit rests on His shoulder and announces to the world, God’s pleasure with His Son. Then the Spirit leads Him away from food, away from family, away from friends into the wilderness of Judea in preparation for the most intense temptations of body, soul, and spirit. Thus began 40 days of prayer and fasting. Why?

For the answer, look first at the number 40 which introduces the temptations. It’s an interesting symbolic number used often in Scripture. And it holds an important key to understand the epic that follows. We can break it down into basic numbers used symbolically in antiquity: they are 4 and 10. In the heyday of Greece, four centuries before Jesus came to earth, the numeral 10 had been widely established as a numeric symbol of “completeness.” You’ll find numerous references to this in the writings of the Geek philosophers, for example in Plato’s Republic. And “4” has long been the numeric symbol of “universality.” We still use the phrase “the four points of the compass” to mean, “everywhere.” In fact the disciple John opens a description of one of his visions with similar words:

I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth to prevent any wind from blowing on the land or on the sea or on any tree (Rev 7:1, NIV).

John uses the numeral 4, to indicate God’s action for the entire world. And the ideas of “completeness” and “world-wide” are dominant in the chapter detailing Jesus’ temptations. And the Bible has numerous illustrations of a similar use of the numeral 40, or 4 x 10.

• The first use in the Bible is in connection with Noah’s flood. It rained 40 days and nights, and as a result brought a complete and universal destruction of the wicked.
• Israel ate manna for 40 years until they arrived in Canaan, signifying complete and universal sustenance till they reached the Promised Land.
• Moses went up the mountain for 40 days and nights of fasting to receive the 10 commandments, which would provide complete and universal guidelines for the human race.
• Jonah preached that after 40 days, Nineveh would be completely, universally destroyed.
• And Moses who is a type of Jesus, spent:
40 years in Egypt, learning to be a universal king, like King Jesus,
40 years in Midian, learning to be a universal servant, like Servant Jesus, and 40 years in the wilderness learning to be a universal emancipator, like emancipator Jesus.
• And now Jesus spends 40 days and nights in prayer and fasting, signifying complete preparation to meet Satan’s universal challenges.

When baptized, Jesus threw down the gauntlet to Satan. It was as if He were saying: Satan, I’m challenging you. You won a battle in Eden with the first Adam. You’ll lose the same battle with the second Adam. I stand here precisely like the first Adam before you tempted him. I too have never sinned. And I have a sinless nature like the first Adam. And I’ll demonstrate God’s power to sustain me through all your temptations. So where Adam failed, I’ll succeed. And in my success I’ll redeem his failure and lay the foundation stone for the rebuilding of a perfect world. All that was lost in Eden will be bought back again. And it starts now!

Yes, at its heart, the purpose of the three temptations was to show Jesus victorious right from the start of His mission to win back the fallen planet. And that, my friend, includes you and me.

And as we continue our study of Jesus’ three temptations tomorrow, we’ll learn the secret of how Jesus overcame them. It’s a secret we also can use to overcome our temptations too.