Many people encounter a dilemma when they think of the idea of Jesus being tempted. They question whether Jesus was really tempted. Did he feel temptation the way we do? Could he have given in to temptation? Was it possible for him to sin? The Bible gives a pretty clear answer when it says, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). If Jesus could not have sinned, then he could not have been tempted. If it was impossible for him to sin, then he would not be a moral being. If he could not choose to be evil, then he had no choice but to be good. And if he did not choose to be good his goodness was pointless. Because he could be tempted, and it was possible for him to fall to temptation, he exercised his choice to do what was good and holy. If he did not have a free will to do what was evil, neither did he have the free will to do what was right and good.
Because he was then, and still is, able to choose either good or evil, and chooses each moment to do good, he is a holy God. Now, if he had chosen to sin, the world would have flown apart because God would have betrayed himself. And since God’s immutable character of holiness holds the world, and all that is, together, the world could not have continued to exist if God had violated his own laws and nature. If there are no choices for God to make then the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness were meaningless. They were a sham and only for show. Our God is a holy God, and the only way he can be holy is to be moral; the only way he can be moral is if he is capable of making moral choices.
That is why our freedom of choice is so important to God. He is willing to tolerate the sin in the world for the sake of having a moral world. He allows some not to choose him for the sake of those who will use their freedom to choose him. If he prevented anything evil from happening, and took all possibility of sin out of the world, he would have to remove our power of choice. If we had no power to choose evil, neither would we have the power to choose good. If it were not possible for us to be immoral, we would no longer be moral beings. We would no longer be good or bad, we would be robots and our choices would have no moral merit. Temptation is simply the process of being presented with a moral choice. The temptation itself is not evil. We should not feel guilty about being tempted, it is merely being confronted with a moral decision. We have not already sinned when we have been tempted, only if we finally give in to the temptation is it wrong. Don’t be afraid of temptation. It is a normal part of life for people faced with moral choices. The only people who never struggle with temptation are those who never resist temptation and simply go along with it. But you do not have to give in, for the Bible says, “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it” (1 Corinthians 10:13).
Not only are your temptations common to man, but in the person of Jesus, they are common to God as well. In the Scripture today, Jesus is faced with real temptation. He feels the full effect of it. He is presented with moral choices and makes the right choices, proving his perfect character. He was fully tempted, and yet fully righteous. He did not linger with the temptation. He did not toy with it and toss it over in his mind. He felt it, he faced it and he was finished with it. He struggled with it, but triumphed over it.
What were the temptations of Jesus? His temptations were the same temptations you and I face every day. The Bible says, “For this reason he had to be made like his brothers [and sisters] in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (Hebrews 2:17-18). He knows what temptation is like and he can help you with it because he has been there.
He was led into the desert to be tempted by the Spirit—the same Spirit that bore witness to him at his baptism. It was not against God’s will that he be tempted, it was fully within the will and plan of God that he was tempted. The Greek word for temptation here is the word peiradzo, which means “to tempt” or “to test.” This was a time of testing. The Lord placed himself in a human body, with all of its needs and passions, and allowed the devil to do his worst. We learn from Jesus’ experience not to be afraid of temptation. Times of testing are not to be feared and cannot be avoided; they are opportunities to grow. Most of the time we want to avoid problems, but it is adversities that cause us to learn and grow in our spiritual lives.
Testing is not a situation God places you in to see if you pass or fail, rather it is an opportunity he allows in order to develop a godly character in you. How you make these choices determines what kind of person you become. Character is developed by testing and being presented with difficult decisions which pull at our natural inclinations. No one ever grew through a life of uninterrupted ease. Tests do not destroy your faith, they bring out the quality of your faith. They help you to see if you have faith, and help you to grow to a new level.
The first temptation of Jesus was the temptation to turn stones into bread, or if you will: rocks into rolls. The devil said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Sounds simple enough. That shouldn’t be too much of a temptation — unless we understand what the devil was actually suggesting. First, we have to remember that Jesus has been fasting 40 days. Naturally, he is hungry. His body is famished and weak, and he is craving food.
But even though he had not eaten for a long time, hunger is not the real issue in this temptation. The devil is doing more than appealing to his natural appetites. To understand this temptation of Jesus we have to go to the story of the feeding of the 5000. Jesus has miraculously fed the multitude after they have come to hear him teach. But when he leaves them, they follow him and want more bread. They saw this miracle as a sign that he was the Messiah — the new king of Israel. Just as Moses had fed the people in the wilderness, so Jesus had fed the multitudes, but the people were not so much interested in his teaching as they were his bread. He said to them, “I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill” (John 6:26). He was instantly popular. He had met a need in their lives and they were willing to follow him to the end if he continued to meet their need for bread. Their reaction was to try to force him to be their king. He could rule their country and their lives as well... as long as he provided them with food. The devil knew what people’s reaction would be before it happened, and he was suggesting that Christ could accomplish his mission by not only feeding himself, but by continually providing for the humanitarian needs of the people he loved. If he turned the rocks of Israel into bread he would be identified with Moses and could feed the whole nation. There would be no struggle, no hostility, beating or crucifixion, only love and adoration from every sector. He would be swept into power by the masses and placed on the throne of Israel. No one would be able to resist him – not much different than the temptations politicians are faced with today.
Jesus was tempted to become involved in the relevant issues of his day like feeding the hungry. Feeding the hungry is good, but he was tempted to meet their physical and material needs rather than their spiritual needs. He was tempted to be an earthly king rather than a heavenly one. How much easier to have the masses raving about you, rather than having them raving at you and wanting to kill you. He was tempted to heal their bodies and not their souls. There was so much hunger and suffering. He was tempted to get in touch with what were the relevant and burning human issues of the day. And Jesus genuinely wanted to meet people’s present needs. It was a noble desire, but it was not his ultimate purpose. His goal was to give them spiritual food, and it would be a far more difficult task than filling their bellies. Jesus replied to Satan, “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Fill their stomachs today and they will be hungry again tomorrow, but food for the soul satisfies forever. As tempting as it was to be involved in all the contemporary issues he would not stoop to the temptation to give people bread for their stomachs alone when he had come for a much higher purpose.
Jesus’ temptation here is the temptation with which Christians are often faced. Will I do what is good, or what is best? Will I spend my life on temporary needs or eternal ones? Will I do the will of God, or the will of people? Will I please others, or will I please God? Will I meet the demands and expectations of people, or will I obey God? Will I do whatever it takes to be well-liked and with-it, or will I point people to the things of the Spirit which are the ultimate realities? Will I do the relevant thing or the right thing? Will I settle for something less than the full will of God for my life and others? Will I live out his purpose for me, or let others set the agenda for my life?
The devil was saying, “If you are the Son of God, prove that you love these people and see that they have enough to eat. Show that you are concerned about what’s happening in their lives now instead of all this talk of the kingdom of God, and as a side benefit you will be loved and accepted by them and seen as contemporary and important. If you don’t they will reject you and hang you up to dry.”
The church has been in this struggle for a number of years now since the advent of what has been called the Social Gospel. The Social Gospel says that the real job of the church is to clothe the naked, feed the hungry and free the oppressed. How else will the world know that God loves them if we do not show them? How can they listen to the Gospel when they are hungry, cold and have to worry about the rent? And there is great truth in that. The problem is when that is all we do, and we stop there. We can get so caught up in meeting the current social and material needs of people that we never get around to meeting their spiritual needs. Temporary problems consume our energies and we do not have time left for the eternal issues. The temptation for the church is to do what is popular with the world, and forget our real mission of bringing people home to God and helping them to grow in that relationship. And the church has sometimes mistakenly believed that if we make ourselves important enough to the world they will end up loving us and holding us in esteem. The truth is the world will take what it wants, as long as we will hand it out, and ignore us otherwise.
A recent article by Michael Novak in Forbes magazine says that the aim of Christianity is supposed to be “to prevent us from frittering away our days in spiritual poverty. Many churches today, of course, have given up on this aim. Under the name of the ‘social gospel,’ many churches have abandoned a sense of the transcendent in favor of social reform. Social reform is a noble purpose, but yet another welfare program does little to address the hole in America’s heart.”
Henri Nouwen is a Roman Catholic priest and intellectual who has spent many years teaching at Notre Dame, Yale and Harvard. He was at the acme of his career and the center of the intellectual world. He had written several books and was known all over the globe. He was a priest in his fifties when he asked himself the question: “Did becoming older bring me closer to Jesus?” He said that after twenty-five years in the priesthood he found himself praying poorly, living somewhat isolated from other people, and very much preoccupied with “burning issues.” He said, “Something inside was telling me that my success was putting my own soul in danger. I began to ask myself whether my lack of contemplative prayer, my loneliness, and my constantly changing involvement in what seemed most urgent were signs that the Spirit was gradually being suppressed.”
In his success he had fallen prey to three temptations: The temptation to be relevant, popular, and powerful. He began to pray for God’s direction in his life, and God led him to become the chaplain at Daybreak Community called L’Arch. Daybreak is a home for mentally handicapped adults. He writes, “So I moved from Harvard to L’Arch, from the best and the brightest, wanting to rule the world, to men and women who had few or no words and were considered, at best, marginal to the needs of our society. It was a very hard and painful move...After twenty years of being free to go where I wanted and to discuss what I chose, the small hidden life with people whose broken minds and bodies demand a strict daily routine in which words are the least requirement does not immediately appear as the solution for spiritual burnout.”
But it was here at L’Arch where God began to deal with him spiritually and free him from the temptation to always be on the cutting edge of culture. And through that experience he found a new freedom to be the man God wanted him to be. His prayer life returned, and with it a renewed awareness of the presence of God in his life.
Some of us have lived long enough, and read enough of history to realize that the burning issues of one age are the irrelevant topics of the next. We can be a part of “The Church of What’s Happening Now,” or we can be a part of the eternal Kingdom of God where the issues never change and people’s needs are always seen as the need of the human heart. Jesus said, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” We can keep people alive physically and be blind to the fact that they are dying spiritually. We can hand them bread and ignore their need for the Bread of Life. We can hand them manna from heaven or offer them the Man from heaven. We need to have our hands open wherever there is human need, but we can never forget that people are basically spiritual beings and we still live by the Word that comes from the mouth of God. We need to hear that Word and speak that Word in this materialistic age more than ever. Our primary goal must always be to meet the spiritual needs of people. We cannot ignore the pressing problems of the society and people around us, but neither can we merely minister to physical needs. We cannot feed the body while people’s souls are starving. Jesus said, “What can a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Mark 8:37). The spiritual nurturing of people was always Jesus’ primary concern and it can be no less for us.
Let’s bring it right down to where we live. We are all very busy. The question is: “What are we busy about?” If you are too busy to pray and spend a little time reading God’s Word you are too busy. We are often busy because we are trying to live up to the expectations of other people in one way or another. Our priorities are not where they should be. Are we busy with the things of ultimate importance, or the things which are passing, even though they may seem relevant to the world today? We can be busy with people in the community and miss the people in our own homes. We can be so busy with good things that we miss the best things. We can nurture our careers and fail as Christians. We can get our children overly involved in the same way we are so that there is no time to be a family. All of the organized activities and lessons in the world will not make up for a lack of time spent together. Sitting in front of the television eating dinner is not quality family time.
Henri Nouwen wrote, “Too often I looked at being relevant, popular, and powerful as ingredients of an effective ministry. The truth, however, is that these are not vocations but temptations.” Jesus’ simple question to us is, “Do you love me?”
I know what it is like to be so busy for God that there is no time to be with God. If we are not careful we will begin to define ourselves by what we do rather than who we are. Don’t let it happen to you. Don’t feed your body and forget your soul. Don’t get so busy that you starve yourself spiritually. Jesus said, “I am the living Bread that came down from heaven. If a man eats of this bread he will live forever” (John 6:51).
Rodney J. Buchanan
March 13, 2011
Amity United Methodist Church
rodbuchanan2000@yahoo.com
