GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LUKE 4:3
3 The Devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.”
In this first temptation, the Devil begins with Jesus exactly where he left off with Adam, tempting him with food.
Mark tells us that Jesus was tempted throughout the forty days, not simply at the end of it. This first temptation, about bread, seems to have been something the devil pressed more than once. I come to this conclusion because the text of Matthew and Luke are slightly different. In Matthew, the Devil talks about “these stones” (οἱ λίθοι οὗτοι), but Luke quotes the Devil as saying “this stone” (τῷ λίθῳ τούτῳ). This might be a small matter to a critic who would say that Matthew is wrong and Luke is right (or vice versa), but we need to consider two different and much better answers.
The first is that Matthew is writing to Jews who would understand “breads” in the plural. When God came to Abraham, Sarah offered to bake some “bread,” which is plural in Hebrew (‘Ugoth. Genesis 18:6), “cakes of bread.” But Luke may have wanted Theophilus to avoid being sidetracked by wondering about whether one loaf or many is meant, and to stay focused on the main point: Whether Jesus could have or should have performed a miracle, expending God’s power simply to prove a point to a liar, an unbeliever, and a fool, like the Devil.
Another possibility is that the difference between the two Gospel accounts is an example of the many temptations that come our way. Sometimes the Devil comes after me with one temptation, sometimes with a hundred all at once. Sometimes my Christian maturity deals with the hundred with a laugh and a look at the cross, and sometimes the one solitary temptation slithers up and coils around me and the old Rascal has me in his power, and nothing I can do seems to let me get away because I forget to pray and I forget that I am God’s child, and I think I’m abandoned in a wilderness of sin. But whether I’m tempted with one or a hundred, isn’t the answer the same? This is what Jesus proves to us and demonstrates for us (more about that with the next verse and the Lord’s answer).
The Devil also tempted Jesus with something else here. He slides across the Second Commandment and hisses: “If you are the Son of God….” By baiting Jesus with his title, the one the Jews would balk at and contest, he thought Jesus might perform a miracle there in the desert. Here is where many theologians slip and fail to understand what the ordinary Christian understands. Certainly Jesus could perform miracles, and in fact he made bread out of nothing at all, multiplying a couple of loaves that a little boy brought into enough to feed 5,000 men plus their wives and children. But Jesus did that to meet the needs of the people. Here, if he had made bread, he would have been obeying the command of the Devil to satisfy a need in his flesh. He would have been sinning. To make bread is no sin either for God or man. But to make anything at the command or suggestion of the Devil is certainly a sin.
When we have a need—any need at all—we look to God, not to the Devil. God has given us ordinary means to meet our needs. For those of us who do not have land to grow our grain, God gives work, and stores, and grain to buy, to bake into bread and to eat. Luther has a wonderful way of looking at the Devil’s temptation over this point. The Devil was tempting Jesus to perform a miracle to impress him or to prove a point rather than to look to God’s providence, as if the Devil wanted to say, “Yes, trust in God and bake and cook nothing; only wait patiently until a roasted fowl flies into your mouth!”
Here we need to return to the comparison between Jesus and Adam in this temptation:
a . In the temptation story in Genesis (Gen. 3:1-7), there is no indication that Adam and Eve were fasting in any way. Jesus, on the other hand, had been fasting for forty days, and he was very hungry.
b . God provided Adam and his wife richly and daily with all of the fruit they wanted growing within arm’s reach on many—perhaps all—of the trees in the Garden. They didn’t need the fruit with which they sinned; they had many other choices. Jesus could have been satisfied with any morsel of food, but had none at all.
c . When Adam and Eve sinned, they were in Paradise. Jesus was in the wilderness of Judea, a grim, unyielding place unfit for anyone to live in.
Jesus had none of the help or comforts Adam had, and yet Jesus subjected his flesh to his will and to the will of God the Father. When we are tempted and avoid sinning, we can praise God and thank him that his Holy Spirit did his work in our hearts. When we are a tempted and fall, we can praise God and thank him that his Son Jesus came into the world and did his work on the cross. Whatever the outcome of our temptations, God invites us to turn to him in humility and prayer. This is what it means to be a child of God. Do not fall for the Devil’s cruel lies—he will never be there for you; he will never help you. He will never praise you for sinning, and he will only despise you for resisting sin. God will rejoice when you turn away from sin, and God offers his forgiveness when we fall. There is no choice at all between God and the Devil. There is only God, and the way to him is through his Son, Jesus.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: http://www.wlchapel.org/worship/daily-devotion/
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota