“And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.” Matthew 4:2
Why was Jesus born? What did He do and what was the meaning of His life?
Our answer to such questions are the most important things in life. Nothing else matters in comparison to them, in fact. Why? Because, quite simply, one’s attitude toward Jesus Christ will determine whether they will have their sins charged to His account, that is to say, paid for by Him, or if you’ll have to pay for them yourself. It’s actually that simple. This is the moral law that governs the earth. Our understanding of God will determine how we live for Him. Our lives reflect our theology.
Ah, but we live in an age that descends at breakneck speed into moral anarchy. Claiming to be men and women who believe in science, contemporary Americans profess to live by the governance of objective physical laws all while denying that there’s any such thing as a moral law. Nary a man will be foolish enough to challenge one of life’s great material laws and when he does it’s often by sheer accident. Gravity will not be bargained with, for example, so we wisely respect it. But of God’s moral law, written on the hearts of all (Romans 1:32; 2:14-15), we insist that there is no reckoning, no judgment, no price to pay. We haven’t been judged yet, right? So far, so good, we say. To this God says that because the judgment against evil hasn’t been immediately carried forth, as well it should and could be, we convince ourselves that we’re getting away with it (Ecclesiastes 8:11). This delay is, however, a great and inestimable mercy from God. This stay of execution is meant to lead us to repentance and yet, in our pride, we imbibe of the great beauties of life, of family, health, material wealth and the excellencies of nature and consider all of them our due. Indeed, in the hardened pride that sin brings, we’ve convinced ourselves that sunny days and great mountain views are due to us while denouncing anyone who mentions such things as sin, death and repentance.
This ought not to surprise us for it’s a personal application of the story told again and again in Scripture. Sinful man will take the blessings of God every day on their own terms. Sinful man wants these blessings but not the God that bestows them. They will hear gladly of joy, peace, love, and abundance while their bellies are full, but speak to them of sin and the need of grace and they will turn on you just as they did Jesus (John 6:66-67).
Thus, as we consider Jesus in the wilderness for 40 days and nights, we must note that He is the true son of God, the true Israel. This episode parallels the testing of Israel in the wilderness after they came out of Egypt through the miraculous power and miracles of God. They saw the greatest king on earth, Pharaoh, humbled by Almighty God. They saw the world’s greatest military drowned in the sea. It was God who defeated the chariots and all those mighty men, not the ragtag and undisciplined group that Israel was at the time. The saw it all. They witnessed power beyond anything ever imagined on earth and then, at the height of their triumph, with the promises of such a mighty God before them, what did they do?
They grumbled. Why? They got hungry. They were worried about the future.
This is the pattern of life. It’s a law just like the law of gravity only, since it works slow, we are loath to recognize it. But here it is again. Jesus goes to the wilderness to do for us what we can’t do for ourselves, which is to be faithful. Any hint of arrogance is stamped out, the fires of pride beat to smoldering and sinful embers, by the recognition of ourselves as grumblers. We read the Bible all wrong if we read it to find human heroes who stand on their own. The Bible is about Jesus Christ, the great hero and perfecter of our faith, the savior and guardian of our soul. He is the great lover who goes to do what His wayward children can’t do for themselves.
Let’s imagine for a moment that you have a great and sworn enemy. Perhaps this enemy has done you enormous wrong in the past. Maybe they’ve slandered you or betrayed you. The pain of this is real and they deserve your antipathy. Now, in light of this, as you hold this anguish and pain in your heart, can you imagine giving up all for them? Can you imagine walking off into the wilds for over a month, alone and hungry, all for the benefit of someone who despises you so that you might win them over? Can any person imagine willing all their property and wealth to their worst enemy, so they’d have an abundant life, and then going to the executioner’s chair for them so they wouldn’t get what they deserve?
Jesus is led to the Tempter for our sake just as later He will go to the cross, but He can’t go to the cross unless He emerges sinless from the wilderness first. We owe the penalty of death for our sin, yes; but we also owe a perfect life too. If Christ wasn’t obedient even up to the point of death, there’s no sacrifice. Understanding this aspect of Christian life, of the great moral law, as real as any physical law – and more real, frankly, in that physical laws will pass away – will transform your walk with Christ. Much cheap and lazy Christian living is because we see in our minds only one side of the transaction on the cross, that being the punishment of sin that we deserve, and omit the positive action that was the perfect obedience of Christ now credited to us through faith. When we see the beauty of it we can raise our eyes to a whole new vista, a blazingly beautiful and endless range of purple and blue mountains of grace we never fathomed in all the sin that brings us so low.
Israel grumbled about the things we grumble about. They were hungry. They were thirsty. They worried about their future and so, in complaining, they maligned the name of the great God who delivered them from slavery. Jesus now goes into the wilderness to be our new federal head. He is faithful where they weren’t. And now, here we are, you and I, saved by this unfathomable grace by the Lord who did all this for us. We were rebels. We were disobedient and hostile to God and yet He lived a perfect life for us to present to the Father and took the sin penalty we deserved upon Himself so that we would never taste judgement. How then should we live in light of so great a truth? Our full promised land in the age to come still beckons and we have these days in our own wilderness. The Tempter will swing at us with the same punches he threw at Israel and again at Jesus. Will you grumble? Will you doubt so great a sacrifice and the incomprehensible reservoir of love that inspired and powered it? Isn’t a Christian who complains against God charging Him with the very crime they commit, which is faithlessness?
Ah, so we see in this lonely verse as Jesus is isolated and suffering but still faithful, the great love that should inspire us. Biblical love is righteousness and righteousness is biblical love. Flippant sin, careless living, dishonorable dealings, anxiety, greed…they are all cast aside when we focus on that incredible act of Christ walking alone out there for our sake. We can often go no further than missing a few traffic lights before our righteousness begins to crack. We can often have no greater stress hit us than that something might happen in the future to cast us into despair. Recognizing these truths and admitting them to God and then rejoicing in the assurance of salvation through faith alone is the glorious antidote to these things. It’s the straight path between antinomianism (reckless disregard for moral law) and legalism (the prideful pretense that we can live for God on our own power).
The moral law demands perfection and he/she that fails that deserves to die and will die. This is actually more apparent than even gravity, for mankind has found ways to circumvent certain aspects of it with our planes. But no one has escaped death. No one will. This is why the Christian flees to Christ for He is our perfection, our propitiation, and there we rest in Him and live for Him. It’s like this that the Christian life is a life of love, not law because in living for Him we discover, quite amazingly, that we are fulfilling the law without trying to as God pours more and more love of His word into our hearts. To this we rejoice to know that Jesus is the end of the law for all who believe and we understand the great mystery of how love and law are reconciled. Men today speak of love but they know nothing of it. What they really speak of is actually sin, especially sexual sin. Real love, true and beautiful and resplendent, without contradiction, is loving God so that you want nothing more than to be faithful to Him. After all, love must have an object; a subjective love is nothing at all save for a demonic ruse to cover for antinomianism and sin. This is what it means when Scripture says that love is the fulfillment of the law; it’s love of God through faith in Jesus Christ. Love on man’s terms is man lying to himself about sin and rebellion. No one can truly love another unless he first loves God because godless love is self-focused and leads to ruin.
Jesus went to the wilderness because He loved us and that real love was faithful and sinless because sin destroys love. It’s this love that, based in the perfect obedience of Christ, that is our righteousness; we have none of our own. In all, Christianity reverses the great exchange of the truth for a lie that started in the Garden of Eden. In faith, we exchange the righteousness of Christ for our sin and now stand justified before God, at peace with Him, having escaped the wrath we deserved. From faith, through faith and in faith, the righteous by faith live and walk in love of God and there is no true love without this righteousness through faith.
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