Temptation of Jesus
“And the tempter came and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.’” Matthew 4:3
The greatest questions in Christendom, the ones that are never asked openly, but should be are, “Why is sin such a big deal and why can’t I sin just a little bit?” I mean, what’s the big deal? This is invariably the attitude of not only non-Christians but, sadly, many weak and feeble ones too. This is the reason why so many millions of Christian lives are spent in various stages of disarray, spiritual weakness, and tumult.
God created you, me and everything else. He is the ultimate reality. He is the Truth and the Life. Sin is, therefore, defiance of Him and the attempt to recreate reality without Him. It’s the attempt to use parts of His creation, including ourselves, in ways that violate His holy character. It is a dishonor to Him. Any sin, in whatever form, isn’t an arbitrary thing but the act of not trusting Him and, yes, even calling Him a liar.
Sin is not trusting God for our life, our future and everything else. And a so-called “little sin” that we profess doesn’t hurt anyone, is actually an open defiance of His righteous and morally beautiful order.
Little sins kill Christian growth.
This is why the Enemy comes with this temptation first. It’s easy to miss the master craftsman’s work – and make no mistake, this is the master of lies doing his thing. We speak of the GOAT in athletic fields (greatest of all time). We drop names like Ali, Jordan, Montana, Brady, and marvel at their prowess. Well, here enters the GOAT of lies, the father of them and he takes aim at the Lord Jesus Christ. Here’s the battle that must be won if the cross is going to mean anything. If Jesus falls here, alone in the wilderness, if He succumbs, then His death is just any other death and we gain, in faith, nothing. Death is the punishment of sin and since Jesus was sinless, we gain, through imputation, in faith alone, His righteousness. But not only that, He has our sin upon Him at Calvary. That’s why He dies. It’s our sin that leads Him there, so that He suffers horribly and dies for us and is driven to do this not by any earthly power, for nothing has power over Him, but because of that great love He has for us.
So, it’s instructive what the Enemy’s opening shot is here. It’s a little sin he tempts with. Satan is the greatest of all humanists. He’s man’s advocate for his destruction. He’s the voice that says, “you’re hungry…you don’t deserve to be hungry…isn’t it terrible that you’ve fallen into this plight?” Satan’s great ploy, watch for it, is that he reverses the moral poles of life and supplants God’s honor with our comfort as the highest good. That’s his great trick. He will come to us and point out a real problem but then suggest a solution that’s unbiblical in that it requires distrust in God. Satan always promises victory without Calvary; peace without righteousness. This is how he operates and he does it in a myriad of ways. Be warned.
In Genesis 18 we read about the how Sarah laughed when she heard the Lord say that He’d return next year and she’d have a son. Surely Sarah knew of the Lord’s promise that she and Abraham would have a son, so this wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. Obviously, by her response, and the fact that she said to herself, “After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?” Thus we know that she wasn’t laughing in joy, but in bitterness. The years had crept up on her and she was well past the age of motherhood.
But God had promised.
Interestingly, Abraham didn’t hear Sarah laugh. She was inside the tent and he was outside with the Lord and two angels. But God heard her just as He hears our secret things too. There are no secrets between us and the Lord. And what does the Lord do? He asks her why she laughed but also adds this: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”
Ah! This is the issue at the bottom of our little sins and we must face it in order to grow because it’s the difference between victorious faith and joy or constant defeat. You see, the Lord brings the question around to what’s really at stake, which is His honor. Can the Lord be trusted? That’s the root of faith and every soul – yours and mine – must answer. We answer it with our lives! We answer it with how we live. If we really trust the Lord, it will show in how we live. The sad reason so many Christian lives look hardly different from the worldly lives around them is that there are too many “carnal Christians” who aren’t all-in. They straddle the fence so as not to be accused of being “a Jesus freak” or a “fundamentalist”. In short, they’d rather be respected by men than glorify God. They hedge their bets.
Well, at that point, Sarah finds that one little sin leads to a bigger sin. She finds that the law of the flesh is always the same – sin begets more sin. She lies. “I did not laugh,” she says. God corrects her. “Yes, you did,” He says.
This should put to rest any deceit you and I may have fallen into about whether or not God cares about the little sins in our lives. We should pray with the Psalmist, “Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults. (Psalm 19)”. We should be mature enough to realize the stakes in this struggle between truth and lies, life and death, righteousness and sin. Creatures have no private chambers; God knows all and He will deal with our sin because at the root of it all is the issue of whether or not we trust Him. Do we see that? If not, this is why our life is at a standstill. God will often put a Christian in a holding pattern to teach them the critical lesson He wants them to learn. Even this is done in love for the child of God. He disciplines those He loves.
A thing about the tempter’s question to Jesus is that he says, “if you are the Son of God…”. What’s astonishing is the boldness of the lie that’s wrapped in the question. In Matthew 3:17, after Jesus was baptized by John, the Father spoke from heaven and said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Immediately after this Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. One assumes that this amazing proclamation from heaven is still ringing in His ears. Either way, the tempter challenges Jesus on exactly this point. “Ah, so you’re the Son of God, are you? Well, what is the Son of God doing out here all hungry and alone? Prove your bonafides!”
So we see that the root of the Enemy’s attack is always the same. He challenges God’s word. He points out a real difficulty in our lives and then uses that as a pivot point to encourage sin. Are you hungry? This is something that modern Americans, thankfully, don’t deal with much presently. But where he’s going is to say that the real Son of God shouldn’t be hungry. For us it might be, “A real believer should have a better house or a bigger paycheck. Didn’t God say He’d take care of you? Shouldn’t you have a spouse by now? You’re never going to find the ‘right person’ so why bother being so patient?”
Then the dagger thrust comes. He says, “tell these stones to turn into bread.” He always starts with a little mistrust and then brings us to outright disobedience. This is a pattern we should be savvy to, and on-guard against. All of his temptations come with bringing attention to a real need and/or desire and then turns its focus toward immediate gratification rather than God’s glory. The tempter doesn’t go all-in right away, bringing us to idolatry in one fell swoop. No, he sets the table with little sins that are based on not trusting God. The tempter always impugns God’s honor by suggesting that your current situation is unfair.
Sarah shouldn’t have laughed at God. That’s a horrible sin. The answer to these things is to take them to the Lord in prayer. When we’re low, when we’re anxious, don’t give the tempter the ground upon which to launch his assault! Pray. Pray and make no provision for the flesh. Go to other Christians and be with the people of God. If you won’t stand firm in faith, you won’t stand at all (Isaiah 7:9). The tempter is coming, this we know, and we must put on the whole armor of God and then we can stand up to the assault. It’s not our armor, but God’s.
Lastly, we do well to remember the lesson of Abraham and Lot. Lot was mentioned along with his uncle Abraham often in Genesis and he was definitely a believer. But he was lured from Mamre, where Abraham dwelled in tents, and never owned anything, to the riches of the cities of the Plains. At first Lot lived just outside of Sodom, probably trying to keep his distance from the sin. But by the time the angels came to deliver him and his family, he was firmly ensconced in the culture around him as evidenced by his actions (especially his reticence to leave and the offering of his virgin daughters to the mob). And then, even after he’s supernaturally delivered from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, he argues against God’s trustworthiness and says to the angels, “…but I cannot escape to the hills, lest the disaster overtake me and I die…” (Genesis 19:19). This was a reprehensible act of mistrust after all God had done for him and the opposite of Abraham’s faith.
You see, little sins, and a thousand daily compromises brought Lot to a place where he wasn’t evangelizing Sodom, it had evangelized him. Are we like that today in America? If it can be said about us that “he’s cool…he doesn’t take all that Jesus stuff too seriously” then we’re in terrible danger. Lot lost his wife. Both young men who were to marry his daughters thought his warning of doom was comical so they stayed and were lost in the judgment. And then he didn’t even want to go where the angels were leading him. He wanted to go his own way, walking not according to faith, but sight (it had become his pattern). In the end he ends up drunk and his daughters, having a shattered moral compass due to their father’s lack of faith, commit one of Scripture’s worst sins with him. So, yes, Lot was saved (Peter calls him righteous Lot) but as though one from a fire as the Apostle Paul describes. He escaped judgment but lost everything.
Like this, Lot is a warning to Christians who think they can “sin a little” or be friends of the world over against God.
In all, there are no small, private sins that effect no one else. That’s not the nature of sin and the tempter will always shield this from our eyes if we let him. So, let’s not be ignorant of the tempter’s schemes and instead develop the joyful disciplines in our lives of prayer, fellowship and reading the holy and life giving word.
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