Written for verbal teaching to a small group.
I listened to a great series of teachings on the Temptation in preparation for this (they were by James Jordan by the way and I’m cribbing a decent chunk of this material from his teachings generally on the topic of Genesis; btw if you want to buy the teachings, you can buy a set of 20 credits for 20 dollars so that you can get 20 teachings on that site for a dollar each. I think there’s a free version also available, but I don’t have time to track it down), and I wish I could cover all of it, but it was six hours long. So I asked if I could have six weeks to do it in. They said, no it has to be one week. So settle in, we’ll be here a while.
Let me say by way of disclaimer that a lot of this thought is new to me, as I’ve just started to really settle into seeing the various themes, symbolism and typology in Scripture. So I’m still figuring this stuff out and I want you guys to join me in figuring it out. I’m hoping I can get you all to walk away with a little something that makes you say “huh!” next time you read through this passage.
Let’s pray for God to bless our time together.
We’ll be in Matthew 4 tonight and jump a little bit around in Luke 3-4 as well, which is the parallel account of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. We’re going to talk about the devil, about the nature of sin and about something else that’s key to unlocking what the heck is going on in this scene.
Because if you think about it, the temptation of Christ is rather weird in a few ways. For one thing, at least one of the things he is tempted to do is not clearly a sin. The devil asks him to make rocks into bread. Strange, certainly different than our temptations, but not clearly sin on the face of it. Then there’s the last temptation. Satan asks Jesus, whom he knows is God, to bow down and worship him. What would it even mean for God to worship the devil? How could that even be a temptation?
And why does this happen in the first place? One of the more interesting lines regarding this passage is the first verse in Matthew chapter 4.
Matthew 4:1 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd? Why would the Spirit lead him to the wilderness, for the express purpose of being tempted by the devil? What’s the purpose being fulfilled here?
In order to understand what’s going on here we need to be familiar with the concept of typology. See the Bible isn’t written as a theological treatise. We western Americans might prefer if it was, as we think the best way to understand God and what He is doing is to read it in clearly articulated abstract language. But God doesn’t communicate to us that way. More often he communicates in the language of story. Even the “teaching” passages are often commenting on the narrative and using it to support their argument. Understanding the storyline, in a literary sense, and the symbolism that the author (God) is using is key to unlocking a greater understanding of what is going on in the Word of God, and therefore how God himself thinks.
Typology is an aspect of Christian thinking in which one thing that happens or is mentioned is mirrored, usually in an inexact way, at a later time in the story. Almost like divine foreshadowing. Christ, being the center of the story, and in some mystical sense, even the Word made flesh, has a lot of types that point to him in various ways.
But there’s one that Luke goes out of his way, through a long and seemingly pointless genealogy to bring to mind. Let’s test your reading comprehension. Scan through Luke 3 and tell me, who is the son of God in that chapter?
This is bringing to mind a concept that theologically we call “federal headship”, which I find to be a basically totally useless label to explain what the heck is going on with this. You can read Romans 5 to see where Paul tries to explain it in more depth but frankly, if you’re not terribly familiar with the Bible as a whole it’s pretty hard to really see what he’s talking about.
The easier label to help you understand what’s happening is that Christ is the second Adam. What does that mean? In what sense is he the second Adam? What would it mean to be a second Adam? What does it mean to be a first Adam?
There’s other parallels between this and the garden of Eden. The only two times that a person is directly tempted by the devil are in the garden of Eden (Gen 3) and in the wilderness right here. Also interesting that the setting is typologically significant. The garden is the place designed by God for humans to thrive in. The wilderness is what the land becomes as a result of sin (Gen 3:17-18). And the curse of the ground is directly handed down to Adam as a result of his sin.
What I’m arguing here is that Christ is, in a sense, undoing that incident in the garden of Eden.
To understand what it means that Christ is the second Adam, we have to understand what it means to be “an Adam” in the first place.
Genesis 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
You see God made Adam to be a “little God”. He is meant to exercise God’s rule and authority over the creation. In a sense, he’s like Joseph, who becomes the ruler of Pharaoh’s kingdom (Gen 41:43) or Daniel, who becomes the ruler over Persia. (Dan 6) The kingdom belongs to God, but is ruled by Adam. And what is God’s kingdom? The whole of creation.
This is the fundamental human project, that we are to be God’s subordinate rulers over his creation. There’s another sense in which we are to be the priests of the creation in bringing worship back to God, but for the purposes tonight, we should focus on the aspect of being the rulers of creation.
But something goes wrong in the Garden. In the third chapter of Genesis we see that the “serpent” who is later identified as Satan, comes into the garden and starts questioning the humans as to what they will do.
There’s a heck of a lot going on in these chapters, and we could and maybe should spend a few weeks on just Genesis, but this is enough to go on for now.
Let’s ask then, what is sin, fundamentally? In one sense Eve sinned when she took a bite of the fruit in the garden, and that was the first sin. But there’s some wrinkles to that particular view of what happened. First, according to 1 Tim 2:14 and 2 Cor 11:3, Eve “fell into transgression” because she was deceived. What it also says is that Adam was not deceived.
This is why, Biblically, even though Eve was the first to transgress God’s command, Adam is the one who brings sin into the world. The point here is that Adam, in his capacity as the head of his wife, and his capacity as the ruler of all creation, chooses to submit himself to the devil.
There’s a generational component to this. The doctrine is usually called “original sin” but that doesn’t really capture the essence of what is going on here. As ruler of the creation, Adam subjecting himself to Satan, he relinquishes his authority over creation and gives it to Satan.
We see this later in the Bible when Satan is called “the ruler of this world” and his authority over the world is relevant directly in our passage tonight.
What’s more is that we learn from Hebrews 7, with the discussion of what’s called the preisthood of the order of Melchizedek, that when a child is still “in his father”, meaning that he has not yet been conceived, the act of the father’s submission means that the child submits as well.
Thus, Adam, in his choosing to follow the devil, subjected himself, all of creation (Rom 8:20), and all of us to be slaves and servants of the devil for all eternity.
Tasty pick, bonehead!
God makes this clear later in Genesis 3 when he lays down the curse on Adam:
Genesis 3:17 And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
And this is why we need a “second Adam”. We need someone who did not subject himself to the devil, even when “in Adam”. Thus, the necessity for Christ to be born of a virgin. He is not, in the male line, descended from Adam, and thus has never relinquished his authority to the devil. Thus, when God creates a man, the ruler of creation, who is created anew and not from the line of Adam, he becomes a “second Adam”, a new source of authority that can potentially overturn the devil’s authority.
But have we settled on an answer to “what is sin”? What did they do wrong? In what way was Eve deceived? The deception wasn’t really in what Satan said. Let’s look at it.
Genesis 3:4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Well, in a sense, they did not die. Clearly they went on to have kids or none of us would be here. And did they become “like God”?
Genesis 3:22 Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.
Then, no harm no foul? It’s even more convoluted than that, because the tree was meant for them to eat, right? Says so right there:
Genesis 1:29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.
The significance of the knowledge of good and evil itself is good. What does the author of Hebrews say about “knowledge of good and evil”?
Hebrews 5:14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.
In Hebrews, the knowledge of good and evil is something akin to the idea of “wisdom” and is related to the very solid food we are trying tonight to digest.
Then what exactly was wrong with what Adam and Eve did? They were supposed to eat the fruit. They did become “like God”. Wisdom is seen as a good thing in the Bible; a godly characteristic. What was the deception?
The answer is in the realm of authority. You see, what the devil does is he gives them an alternative way of interpreting the situation. He says, I know God said this, but maybe you can look at it this way instead.
Adam was not adequate to the challenge. He did not have the knowledge of good and evil. How could he possibly have discerned what the “right” thing to do in that situation was?
This is, by the way, not the only time that Adam was inadequate for a task set before him. God had previously told him to name the animals and in doing so, he felt that he had a lack. He saw all the animals being two by two and basically realized that he did not have anyone that corresponded to him. Thus, we can see then that he asked God for a helpmeet and God gave him Eve.
At this moment, when he is challenged in his role as protector of Eve and the garden, and Satan has asked him to decide something moral, he should therefore have asked God for the knowledge of Good and Evil. It’s actually the very fruit of the tree that he needed in order to understand temptation and resist it. And I think it’s likely that had he done so, God would have given him the fruit of the tree to eat. But wouldn’t he have died?
YES! He would have. God says that “on the day you eat of it you shall surely die”. But rather than die spiritually and remain dead, I think it is likely that God would have allowed him to truly die and be resurrected in glory. The glorified state of resurrected man is in fact man’s destiny. It is what we are called to in Christ. It is what happened to Christ, the second Adam, when he died.
But instead, he sinned. In what does his sin consist? It’s not that eating the fruit is inherently a bad thing. It’s a question of authority. God could have, and I think eventually would have allowed Adam to eat of the tree. The thing itself was not immoral, but the authority to declare it off-limits belonged to God. When the time was right, he would grant this glorification to Adam.
The temptation of the devil, then, consists of this. Who gets to decide? Who is in authority in your life? The devil says, not God, but *you*. YOU decide what is to be done. You make the call between God’s way and the devil’s way.
That’s the fundamental temptation of sin, and that to which we are born, thus we adapt to it like fish in water. Don’t submit to the authority of God, but be your own authority. You decide. So Satan says: God says this, I say this. What do you say?
The moment that we entertain that we have a choice to make, we have taken the authority upon ourselves. We stand in judgment over the word of God and decide whether it’s up to our standards. This is one of the bad things about some of the approaches we take to evangelism. We set out the gospel and the proofs of the gospel and appeal to man’s better judgment (as though we have better judgment) and say “How reasonable it is to be a Christian! How reasonable it is to believe in God!”
And we have a great advantage in this sort of argument because it is reasonable. Belief in God and in Christ is the most reasonable thing there is. I know, because I spent 27 years as a thoughtful atheist. I wasn’t a high school kid who was going along with atheism because it was cool. Trust me, the arguments against God do not hold water. They are smoke and mirrors.
But if a person comes to join the church because it seems pretty reasonable to believe God exists, and if they pray a prayer because it seems like a reasonable prayer to pray, and they get baptized because it sounds reasonable to them to do so, then what has changed fundamentally? Nothing! They are still their own authority. What is repentance ultimately? It’s a fundamental part of what it means to “come to Jesus”. Repentance means that we give up our own authority and submit to God’s authority. We exchange our allegiance to our own will for an allegiance to God’s will.
This is, of course, not to say that anyone does this perfectly, except Christ himself. Our old center of authority is always riding shotgun trying to wrench the wheel away from us and take us careening off the highway. But in principle, what we are doing when we say “accept Christ” is that we acknowledge that we are not the authority over our lives, but that he is our king and we, in a sense, swear fealty to him.
A man who starts doing the “Christian thing”, no matter how convincing, if his ultimate authority remains himself, then what is going to happen? There will come a moment that something comes up that doesn’t seem so reasonable to him. A trial will come into his life, or a part of scripture will seem offensive or impossible. And suddenly it’s unreasonable to continue to believe in Christ and in God. And because he never really relinquished his authority, he turns away from the church and from God.
People cannot come to Christ by their own authority. If we retain our autonomy, we have never subjected ourselves to God. If there is part of your heart here that has always retained a “right of refusal” to what God says, then I beg you to repent, because God is a gracious and forgiving God and he will welcome you into his kingdom.
And we mortify this part of ourselves, what Paul calls our flesh, increasingly as we grow with Christ, submitting to His authority as declared in His word.
Now we’re prepared to get into our passage proper.
Matthew 4:2 And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.
Understatement of the year. Note, just for fun, that this is not the only forty day fast in the Bible. Moses also fasted forty days when he received the law (Exodus 34:28) and again when he interceded for Israel (Deut 9:18). There are other forty day periods in the Bible, like Noah’s flood, (which, by the way is discussed in connection with baptism in 1 Pet 3:20-21). These hints are not by accident.
Ezekiel has already established the principle that a day for a person stands for a year for a nation. (Eze 4:6) Therefore, we can also understand all of this as a replay of Israel’s temptation in the wilderness, which is itself a replay of Adam in the garden, because you know the only other entity which is called “God’s son” in the Bible other than the two we’ve mentioned? Israel. (Hos 11:1)
Likewise we can note something even more particular about the wilderness. Jesus comes to the Jordan, then after passing through water (remember 1 Cor 10:2 says that Israel was baptized into Moses in the Red Sea), he does NOT go immediately into the land, but retreats to the wilderness. He is not only undoing the sin of Adam here, he must undo the sin of Israel as well.
He is hungry. Rather than being well-fed in a garden, he is starving in a wilderness. Adam’s sin was under the best possible circumstances, which we should remember when we are inclined to blame our circumstances for our sin. Christ’s temptation is under the worst possible circumstances.
Matthew 4:3 And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” 4 But he answered, “It is written,
“‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
This quote is from the Old Testament, but more specifically than that, from Deuteronomy 8.
Deuteronomy 8:3 And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
This was a test for Israel. God allowed them to become hungry, with the intention that he would feed them with the bread of heaven. But what was Israel’s response?
Exodus 16:2 And the whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, 3 and the people of Israel said to them, “Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
They grumbled against the authority of Moses and Aaron, and thus against God, as they were his appointed representatives. For them, they think they know what is good and this is not it. A good God would not allow them to go hungry. In fact, this God’s intention must be to let us die!
Rather than trusting in God’s provision, they grumbled and complained and therefore did not learn the lesson that Christ learned, that God’s authority is what is the ultimate provision. We plant a seed in the ground and we water it, but does that mean it must surely grow? No, God provides the growth. Every penny you’ve ever made you made by God’s gracious will. Because we cannot live by our own efforts and merely physical things. Without God’s will behind it, there is no food, no life, no creation at all.
And Christ understands this. He knows that God will not let him suffer beyond his capacity to endure (1 Cor 10:13). God may take him to the brink, but it is for his good, so that he may learn something, in this case that he lives ultimately by the will of God.
Therefore the temptation in this case is for Christ to take authority into his own hands. Creating bread, even by a miracle, is not a bad thing. He will do so twice in the feeding of the 5000 and the feeding of the 4000. The question is whether or not he trusts God to be in charge of the situation. God’s spirit led him here. If God wants him to eat, God can rain bread down from heaven. If not, then he should endure and not question the premises.
Matthew 4:5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple 6 and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,
“‘He will command his angels concerning you,’
and
“‘On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”
The devil changes tactics here and seems to realize that Christ will use scripture to defend himself against temptation and therefore uses scripture as the temptation. In this temptation he points out an opportunity to prove himself. There’s something of the supernatural here. He is taken to the temple, in Jerusalem. He is no longer physically in the wilderness, it seems. The Devil knows why he is here. He is here so that people may believe in him. What better way for people to believe in him than to do something miraculous and visible?
This is a perennial request from the atheist of this age. How many times do you hear “If God would just <fill in the blank> I would believe in Him.” The temptation here is to approach man by his own reason, to provide convincing proofs for the existence of God.
Why do you think people demand miracles and signs as proof of God’s existence? Why do you think God doesn’t usually provide them?
There are two problems with this. For one, as we have spoken about, the man’s reason cannot be appealed to, because he cannot retain his own authority. Secondly, in more than one passage God declares that there is no such thing as someone who does not believe in God. In Romans 1 it says that “though they knew God, they did not honor him and did not give him thanks, therefore their foolish hearts were darkened.” This is about pagans who have never had direct revelation. For those that grew up hearing the revelation of God and find it unconvincing, we can turn to Luke 16:
Luke 16:29 But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’ 30 And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ 31 He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”
No miracle, no proof, no amount of evidence can ever be enough. In some sense, it is unnecessary, as we already, deep inside ourselves know that there is a God to whom we owe our allegiance. In another sense it’s ineffective, as the revelation of God in His word is just as good as a direct miracle. We are puffing up our own pride by claiming that some kind of amazing miracle would change our hearts. We think so highly of our own rationality that we dare to claim that God and his creation and the fact of our own existence is not enough evidence, but just a little more would be enough.
So then how does Jesus respond?
Matthew 4:7 Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’”
This is a quote, again from Deuteronomy. This is in chapter 6:
Deuteronomy 6:16 “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah.
Massah. Ring a bell? If we were Anglican, it would, because in the Book of Common Prayer every morning you are to pray the words of Psalm 95, which end with this:
Psalm 95:8 do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
9 when your fathers put me to the test
and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
10 For forty years I loathed that generation
and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart,
and they have not known my ways.”
11 Therefore I swore in my wrath,
“They shall not enter my rest.”
This is an important moment in the history of Israel. It is a moment when they put God to the test, when they showed that they had no faith in their Lord and Deliverer, the one who had delivered them from slavery.
Exodus 17:1 All the congregation of the people of Israel moved on from the wilderness of Sin by stages, according to the commandment of the Lord, and camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. 2 Therefore the people quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” And Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?”
By the way, I don’t think its a coincidence that it was called the “wilderness of Sin”. But note the relevance of the water. The first failure was about food, the second about water. What is Christ bereft of? Food and water. Nothing in the Bible is there by chance.
They did not truly believe. They demanded proof, again rejecting the authority of God. Does Christ come to the people begging them to believe in him? No, he rejects that path. He is not in submission to people, that he must convince them to give him authority, like he’s being elected president of creation. He instead says, no it is God who gives me the authority, it is God who draws people to me, it is God who is sovereign and I will not demand proofs from him.
This is not to say that God will not sometimes give proofs, but as a personal recipient of a miracle of healing, I can tell you that the fact that my heart was convinced was not my own work. It’s interesting personally to me because I prayed for God to show himself to me and God did. My brother had a similar prayer at a dark time in his life and God did not respond. Why? Why was I blessed with a visitation from the Lord and my brother was not? There’s no doubt I was more evil man than my brother. The answer would appear to be that there was an already present willingness to believe, in which God used a display of his majesty and power to make me believe. Not to get into things we can never know for sure, but it’s possible that my moment of “faith” was really before I even prayed. Maybe I prayed in faith. Is it possible that God granted me such in order to make me willing to pray in the first place?
Hard to say. But the hidden things belong to God and the revealed things to us. We don’t know how and why people are saved in any detail, but we know that God promises that anyone who turns to him in faith and repents will be saved and made a child of God.
Matthew 4:8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”
This is probably the weirdest part of this whole story, as Jesus is God. Not only that, but he is the new Adam, and therefore the kingdoms are rightfully his. Then what is the temptation? Can’t he just take the kingdoms? What does it mean for God to worship the devil?
I think the key here is again in the place of authority. The devil knows he can never have God in subjection to him in any real sense of the word. But by worshipping the devil, he would be abrogating the very meaning of worship itself. If God can worship the devil then worship is meaningless. There is no real authority. God worships the devil, the devil worships God, we all worship each other. We are all, in a sense Gods. This is not a new thing, but it’s common in New Age, eastern, Nazi and occultist religion. The idea that we are all somehow “divine” and therefore have the prerogatives of God the Almighty, is a subtle twist on the idea that we are created in the image of God and wield his authority.
God cannot make himself subject to the devil. It is literally not possible as the devil is a created being and cannot hold creation together by his will. But he can relinquish any claim to have authority OVER the devil. In this sense the evil the devil wishes to accomplish is that Christ says “okay fine, we are all even. You’re God, I’m God, we’re all God”.
But how could it be a temptation? The kingdoms of the world were literally created by Him. How can he be tempted to get them this way? Why would he want to do this?
The only conceivable answer lies in the horror of the cross. Yes, Christ could claim his authority and take the kingdoms of the world. But he is righteous. What can a righteous king do in the face of sinners? The only righteous act a king can do with a traitor to the throne is to execute him. If Christ takes the kingdom without going through the cross, there can be no absolution and thus he is compelled to judge. He would rule over an empty planet, with every man, woman and child condemned to eternal death and judgment.
But the cross is where Christ takes on the sin of humanity and suffers the penalty for it, not just for Adam, but for the whole of the human race. He is the eternal God the Son, who is separated from the love of God the Father on the cross, bearing the curse of humanity, the curse of Israel, the curse of the creation all on his own body in order to buy it back, to redeem it from the slavery to which it was subjected by the first Adam.
It is a dark moment for Christ. Later he is tempted again. Luke mentions this is going to happen in a throw-away comment at the end of this section:
Luke 4:13 And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.
When was the opportune time?
Luke 22:40 And when he came to the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.” 41 And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw, and knelt down and prayed, 42 saying, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” 43 And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. 44 And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
I believe this is what is alluded to in Hebrews 12:
Hebrews 12:3 Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. 4 In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.
Obviously the early Christians were murdered for their faith so he is not talking about physical violence and persecution. He is talking about something where you can resist temptation so intensely that you shed blood (literally or figuratively).
It is impossible to overstate the agony, spiritual and physical, of the cross. Christ was tempted to avoid it. The temptation to avoid the cross is the greatest temptation of all time.
Matthew 4:10 Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written,
“‘You shall worship the Lord your God
and him only shall you serve.’”
Another quote, also from Deuteronomy 6:
Deuteronomy 6:12 then take care lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. 13 It is the Lord your God you shall fear. Him you shall serve and by his name you shall swear.
In this case it is the question of redemption at hand. Where does salvation come from? The Israelites had an idea:
Exodus 32:4 And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!
Who is the God that redeemed Israel? Well they were tempted to say that it was some other God, a God they created, a God they had authority over. How true it is for us today that we are tempted to create “gods” of our own creation. This could be making a god of science, a god of ideology, a god of hedonism, a god of money or of experience.
Why? Because the path to glory can be painful. We suffer greatly at times in the service of God. He does not always immediately attend to our needs. We are tempted to take the authority into our own hands. We are tempted to disbelieve unless we have God prove himself. We are tempted to take a good thing in an unrighteous manner. We are tempted to avoid suffering by taking authority unto ourselves. But this is not God’s redemptive pattern. We redeem the world around us by submitting ourselves to God.
We are perfectly happy to accept a Savior that doesn’t want anything from us in return. A gospel where everyone is saved no matter what they do or think or believe is fine with us, it makes no demands of us. But a gospel that requires faith, much less a gospel that requires repentance requires submitting to an authority outside ourselves, and that is what makes us angry. We must learn that we are not truly the final authority. Making ourselves the final authority leads only to death. This was true even for Christ. He had to wait to be given authority. In his case, being God, it would’ve been the deaths of us, but death would have come nonetheless.
We are rulers of this world, but not independent rulers. We submit to the authority of God, who will raise us up at the proper time. In the meantime, we are faithful with what we have, for he who is faithful in the small things will be faithful in the large things.
We rely on God for our necessities. We will always be tempted to take what we need by illicit means, as though God does not know what we need, but Christ himself speaks in the sermon on the mount that “God knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt 6:8). Therefore we can simply pray and ask for our daily bread, knowing that God will provide what is needed.
But our faith goes further than this. What if we obey to the point of death? Well this is what Christ did:
Philippians 2:8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
You see the glory that comes from even an unrighteous death. Furthermore Abraham recognized this even before any Bible was written:
Hebrews 11:17 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, 18 of whom it was said, “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” 19 He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.
Abraham was wise enough to know that death is not the end, that a resurrection was possible, even promised if he was to inherit the land forever. We should know this as well and therefore step out in unafraid faith, knowing that God will provide for our needs, that he needs prove himself to no one and that we worship the God of the universe only, knowing that glory will come, even through suffering.