Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We've looked at a lot of different personality characteristics of the person of Jesus, and today we're going in a slightly different direction.
Today we're considering how Jesus handled the external world and the forces that came up against him, namely in the way of temptation. So Brad and I did not plan it this way to talk about trial and testing and temptation and also doing a quick class on it. But hey, it's even more opportunity to dive a little bit deeper. Right.
So that's kind of what I want to do. I want to explore in depth how Jesus handled temptation, specifically in the famous Matthew 4 scene in the desert.
And I think there's going to be some things that we can take from that.
But here's the thing. I think when we often, like when we consider the story of Jesus up against Satan in the desert, facing temptation, I think it's very easy for us to believers to not immediately relate to Jesus in that moment. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that we maybe have a sense of separation from that story and can't relate to that particular experience of testing and temptation that Jesus faced in the desert?
Why do you think there's some separation there? I think it feels very supernatural. Yeah. We read him actually engaging with Satan as hard to put ourselves in that. There's the fasting for 40 days and 40 nights. Right. Like it feels very other.
Yeah, like, like, yeah. So it's spiritual warfare. Right? Like there's a real spiritual warfare element to it. That's another good point. Like you said, he's been fasting for 40 days up to that point.
None of us are physically capable of doing that. None of us will do that. Right. We're not going to fast for that long. Why else do you might think there might be some just experiential separation.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Not staying steadfast with the Bible on a daily basis?
[00:02:43] Speaker A: Okay, yeah. Like, like, like we don't. We're not as in touch with the word of God as Jesus is and has been up to this point in eternity past. That's a good one. Yeah.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Spiritual enemy is always due to distractions.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, definitely. How about this one? He's God.
Jesus is God. And so he's perfect, he's divine, he's sinless.
So of course he's going to, as Brad preached, pass the test. He's God. So how is this, how is he actually being quote unquote tempted here if he is God, there's separation in that.
We look at texts like 1st Peter 2, 11. 1st Peter 2 says beloved I urge you, as sojourners and exiles, to abstain from the passions of the flesh which wage war against your soul. Okay, question. Does Jesus have the kind of flesh that has passions that are waging war, at war within him?
[00:04:02] Speaker C: I would say yes.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: You would say? Yes.
Why would you say that?
[00:04:09] Speaker C: He's human on one side.
God is guiding him.
[00:04:14] Speaker A: He is part of it.
[00:04:17] Speaker C: But there are women all around me.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: So here's the thing.
Jesus was completely man, right? Completely, fully, fully and completely man. Jesus possesses.
He possesses what we would say are human passions, human desires, right? So what are some, like, human characteristics of Jesus?
Like some human things that he experienced that we all experience?
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Anger.
[00:04:56] Speaker A: Anger. Okay. Well, Jesus had righteous anger, right? So that there wasn't. He never sinned, so there's not a sinful anger.
[00:05:04] Speaker C: He wept over Lazarus.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: He wept over Lazarus. So he cried. He experienced emotions.
Hunger. Hunger. Okay, this is good. This is kind of what I'm getting at here, Christian. What do you think?
[00:05:16] Speaker D: Tiredness.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Tiredness, yes. He got tired. Yeah. So he experienced pain.
Jesus is a physical man. Okay? So when we think about this word, passions, right?
It's very similar to this word flesh, but we have this word passions, okay?
The kind of passions that Jesus possesses and the kind of passions that we possess are slightly different because Jesus was not born into sin, okay? He was born into the. Into a sinful world, but he was not born with what we would call a sinful flesh. So there's two kinds of passions. There's ordered passions and there's disordered passions.
Go back to my first question of what I just asked. Y'all have already answered some of these, but what would be some examples of ordered passions?
[00:06:36] Speaker C: Passions towards the Bible. Towards God.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: Okay, passions.
A passion for God. All right, that's good.
What else? What would be an ordered passion? Some of you guys have said these already.
Hunger, thirst, the desire to sleep and get tired.
Anything else?
Ordered passion.
[00:07:19] Speaker B: Sorrow.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: Sorrow.
That's good. Anger.
These are ordered passions.
We. These are things that everybody is born with but us, particularly not Jesus, are also born with disordered passions. What would be some disordered passions that are, as Peter talks about, at war within us, that wage war with the flesh.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: Sexual perversions.
[00:07:54] Speaker A: Sexual perversions.
We'll say sexual. Lustful.
I can spell it. Lustful disorders. What else?
I think of the misuse of everything on the left.
Yeah, yeah. So gluttony or.
[00:08:28] Speaker C: Laziness.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: Laziness. Alcohol. Laziness.
Excess pride. Yeah, that's another good one.
So here's the thing.
Jesus did not.
Jesus did not have disordered passions that were waging war within his human nature. Right.
Jesus did not struggle with these passions because, again, like we said, Jesus is not born into sin.
We are all children of Adam. We are born into sin, which means we're born with disordered passions. Jesus is born with ordered passions. Does this make sense?
This is what I'm trying to flesh out here. Brad, read this during the sermon.
This is how the book of James puts it.
Let no one say, when he is tempted. I'm being tempted by God. For God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire or his own disordered passions.
And this desire, when it is conceived, gives birth to what?
To sin. Sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth what? Death. Death.
Is this starting to make sense? Okay, so you see the categories that Scripture is making, right? Temptation is when we are lured. Lured by our own desires. And these temptations do not come from God. James is very clear about that. Because God cannot be tempted with evil and he tempts no one. Therefore, temptation in and of itself is not sin, but temptation carries with it the seed of sin.
Okay, let me say that again. Temptation in and of itself is not sin, but. But temptation carries with it the seed of sin.
Right? Here's how John Owen puts it, talking about temptation. He says temptation is like a knife that may either cut the meat or the throat of a man. It may be his food or his poison, his exercise or his destruction.
I think that's a really helpful image.
What do you think he's saying there? He's saying that temptation can only lead us down two paths, right?
Either it's a means of food, which, in other words, is like sanctification. Like we're going to overcome a particular temptation, so it's used to cut the meat, which builds and nourishes our own soul. Or temptation is going to be our poison, and when we drink of it, it ultimately leads to our ruin, to our own destruction. These are the paths of temptation. So back to what I was saying at the beginning.
Jesus is fully man.
He has a human nature. He has a flesh. But this doesn't mean that Jesus had fleshly desires like you and I have. He doesn't have disordered desires.
So he had human passions in the sense that he experienced sorrow, he experienced anger. He can experience compassion. These are all ordered passions.
But that was something that was part of his incarnation. The difference is that you And I are born with disordered passions.
So. So why am I taking pains at the outset here to make a distinction between this?
The reason is because I'm trying to draw out this separation that you and I feel from the story. Right. So even this in and of itself is like, yes, so Jesus has ordered passions. That means he can kind of just play the God card. Right? And that's kind of how he can get out of his own temptations. But that's not what we're going to see in the story. In fact, I want to argue today that because Jesus is fully man and because he has these ordered passions, that the temptations that Jesus face is actually harder for him than it would be for us with disordered passions. I think it's actually harder because here's the thing. The story of Jesus in the desert is more. It's more than just a drive by. By Satan. Okay, like, open up to the passage real quick. If you have your Bibles, open up to Matthew chapter four.
And I'm going to open up to the book of Luke as well.
Matthew 4, the beginning of chapter 4, it says Jesus was led. It says, then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. Luke 4, which also records the same account, says that Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness. And for 40 days, he was being tempted by the devil.
So in other words, what we're about to read here is the climax of temptations that Jesus has already been experiencing for the last 40 days.
In other words, Satan's about to give Jesus his best shot.
Satan's on his last leg. This is the final showdown. And like Brad was preaching today, it's not as if it. It's like, oh, who's gonna win? Like, Jesus is lord over Satan. He's going to conquer this. But Satan is also very, very clever, and he's going to throw at him some just really corruptively brilliant things. That for us, is going to be helpful as we battle and do spiritual warfare against the enemy and the things that he's going to throw at us.
So there's three temptations here.
Does someone want to read about the first temptation? This is Matthew 4:1:4. Does someone want to read that text out loud? Patrick, will you read that?
[00:15:40] Speaker D: Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
After fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, if you are the Son of God, tell These stones become bread. Jesus answered. It is written, man shall not live on bread alone, but own every word that comes from the mouth of God.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: Thank you, Patrick. That was great. So. So here's kind of the scene. Jesus is in the wilderness of Judea.
It's this rugged, arid region between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.
And as Matt pointed out, he's been fasting 40 days and 40 nights without any food. So it's logical to conclude that he's what?
[00:16:34] Speaker C: Hungry?
[00:16:35] Speaker A: He's hungry, and he's also very weak. He's very tired. Okay.
And Satan comes up to him again. This is. This is the last interaction they're going to have in the desert here. Here. And what does the text call Satan? It doesn't call him the devil straight out. What does it call him?
The tempter. The tempter. Which is another reason why Jesus. Temptation is harder than the temptations that you and I face today. Because Satan can only be at one place at one time. Satan's not God who's everywhere. Satan can only be one place at one time. So maybe some of us in the room have believed that we've had some kind of resistance from Satan in our own life. We've maybe felt some kind of opposition. It was probably, though, demonic oppression or something similar. Jesus is facing the author of temptation himself. This is the author of evil. This is the one who brought sin and death into the world, who convinced Adam and Eve to bring about all kinds of depravity and ugliness and perversion and all of this. Satan is the author of temptation. So again, this is harder.
And he approaches Jesus, and his words are very simple. He says, if you're the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.
Now we look at the word if, and a very common interpretation is, like, some people believe that what Satan's trying to do here is he's trying to get him to doubt his divine identity as the Son of God. Cause after all, he says, if you're the Son of God, right? So maybe he's trying to, like, place some doubt into Jesus, and then Jesus is gonna have to, like, struggle with that a little bit. But here's the problem. Nowhere in the Scriptures does it. Does Jesus ever wrestle with his own identity as the Son of God. He knows who his Father is. He knows his Father from eternity past, right? Like the words of the Father are in him.
A way that you can take that or translate, that is not if you're the Son of God, but since you're the Son of God. He's saying, hey, since you're the son of God, you can do this, right? You can command these stones to become bread and you can feed yourself. Because even if we look at all the other interactions with that Jesus, when Jesus encounters demonic presence in the Gospels, what do they all address him as?
They call him? They call him the Son of God, right? They say, we know you're the Son of God, we know you're of God. This is kind of like what the book of James talks about when it says even the demons believe and they shudder. Demons have good theology, okay, they have better theology than some Christians.
But so Satan isn't trying to get Jesus to question his identity.
Satan already knows that Jesus is the Son of God. He's saying, since you're the Son of God, he's saying, hey, if you're really the Son of God, this is really who you are. You can command these stones to become bread. So what he's doing is he's appealing to Jesus divine power.
He's trying to get Jesus to take a shortcut. He's saying, you know, escape the difficulties of your weak human condition and the hassles of life like eating and just make some bread.
That's the temptation. And it's the temptation that we can learn from our standpoint as well is that sometimes there are places in our own lives where it's just easy to make our own bread.
But here's the thing. Jesus is not going to do that.
He's going to take the harder way. Because if you think about it, think about the end of this whole interaction.
Jesus is still going to have to eat, right?
How is Jesus going to acquire bread after this interaction with Satan is over? What's he going to do?
He's probably going to have to work a day's labor and obtain like a quarter of a denarius is how much a loaf of bread costs in today's economy. That's about $25.
So you think inflation's bad now? It's pretty bad back then, you know, 25 bucks for some bread. What are we talking about here? But he would probably have to work like a 10 to 12 hour day, get $100 and then take that money, withdraw it from the bank, do whatever he has to do. In other words, what I'm trying to point out here is that it's going to be hard for him to get bread when he could just do it himself. Right? Because Satan's not wrong.
Jesus could command the stones to become bread. Jesus has all authority to do that.
So why resist.
Why resist this temptation to make bread? Here's the thing.
This is.
When you actually look at this, this is a temptation to lust, okay? Now we think about lust in the sexual sense. Obviously, this is not a temptation for Jesus to sexually desire anything. But lust at its core is what. What is lust at its core?
Idolatry.
It's idolatry, right? It's this.
It's this yearning desire to be satiated, to have. To have a thirst or hunger quenched. That's what lust is ultimately, at the end of the day.
So if I, as an unmarried man, lust after another woman, what am I doing? I'm feeding, I'm making bread, my own bread to desire to satisfy and satiate my own sexual desires, right? That's what. That's ultimately like the heart of adultery. That's the heart of lust. You're feeding yourself, okay? And so what Jesus is doing here is he's reminding Satan that life is not just physical, that there is a spiritual dimension to life that Satan is trying to get Jesus to be distracted from. Because look at Jesus's response to the question of bread. He says, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. So what is he saying there?
He's saying, life is not just about food. Life is not just about satisfying your own hunger. He's like, that's ultimately not what. I'm not ultimately dependent on my own stomach and my own ordered desires.
All of these need to be filled. But that's not all of life.
What is he saying? He's saying, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
My life.
I live my life. I satisfy my true hunger on the words that come from God.
That's the spiritual dimension of life.
So, like, you think about your own life for a second. Like, you think about how easy it is to make our own bread, spiritually speaking. Like, if you gossip about someone, like, if you go to a close friend and you start tearing down that other person, what are you doing there? What are you doing?
You're doing what Paul talks about in Galatians 5 when he says, don't bite or devour one another.
You notice the language. Don't feed on each other.
Don't bite.
Don't eat that person's flesh. Why? Because ultimately we're to live by every word that comes from the mouth of God. We're to feed on Christ as Christians, we're to feed on the word of Christ. We're to go to the table and be satisfied and be spiritually nourished by the words of Jesus, by the words of our Father. So we don't bite. That's why we don't gossip, because we're biting and devouring each other. We're making bread. We're making our own spiritual bread. We're making our own table. Jesus is saying, no, I live by the table that comes from the Father. Does that make sense?
That's what he's getting at here.
So this is the first temptation. And this is a temptation that you and I are going to face all the time. It's using our own power to feed ourselves.
Okay?
So the temptation is not to be needy. The temptation is not to be dependent on the Father. It's to use our own self gratification to get what we want.
Life is not just about bread alone.
Life is about living by the words of our Father because he's the one who gives life. Does that make sense? That's the first temptation. All right, let's look at the second temptation. Does someone want to read Matthew 4, 5, 7?
Just those two verses, 5 through 7.
[00:27:16] Speaker C: Then the devil taken him up into holy city and seized him on a pinnacle of the temple and said unto him, if thou be the son of God, cast thyself down. For it is written, he shall give his angels charge concerning thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up least at any time, thou dashest thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, it is written against, thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
[00:28:10] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you for reading that. So this, this is the second temptation. Satan's kind of going to flip the script here. So he's get. He's adapting to what Jesus has said. Jesus has already told him, life's not just about satisfying your physical needs. It's about being satisfied by the spiritual needs. So Satan is smart and he says, okay, life, let me flip the script here. Let's make it all about the spiritual then, right?
And so what he does is he takes.
He and Jesus supernaturally are transported to the pinnacle of the temple. And here's the thing about the temple. This is the highest point in the city of Jerusalem. Okay? It's like the southeastern point of the temple, and it's really far up. So if you fell, like, you would fall to your death, you would die.
But the reason that he takes him up to the temple is because of what the temple represents. Okay, so you think about, like Washington D.C. what does Washington D.C. as a city represent to Americans. What is Washington D.C.
it's the capital. But the capital of what?
The country. It's politics. It's all political power is Centralized in Washington, D.C. then you have New York City. Okay, what does New York represent?
Finance. It represents success. Wall Street. It's money. Okay, what about Los Angeles? What is Los Angeles?
Some would say sin.
Yeah.
It's fame, it's glory, it's glamour. Okay. The temple is like all three of those in one. Political power, wealth, fame, all in one place. And so when Jesus goes up to the top of the temple, this would be a very public thing to do. So Satan's saying, okay, well, why don't you throw yourself down the angel? It says in the scriptures that if the angels are going to catch you, everybody would see it. Right? So the temptation here, the first temptation is self gratification. The second temptation is self promotion.
Because what would happen, Jesus is still. Remember, he's still at the outset of his ministry. He hasn't started his public ministry yet. If Jesus were to throw himself off the temple and the angels were to catch him, this would confirm because it's happening at the temple, right? The place where all power and wealth and spirituality is centralized. If everybody were to see that confirmation he's the Messiah, it wouldn't have to do anything. It'd be the most public, boisterous miracle ever. You would have instant revival on the spot.
You'd have a whole swath of believers who would say, yes, it's got to be it. We believe in, because he's going to fulfill the. That this scripture that Satan's taking out of context, Psalm 91, and say he even commands the angels concerning him.
And I'm afraid to say that this is every church planter's like, dream temptation, right?
To get it, to just get a church instantly an instant swath of followers and influence and people who come with you and say, oh, yeah, this is the guy right here.
This is a major temptation for all American evangelical pastors everywhere to do the quick thing and to not to cut corners and to be gimmicky and to throw yourself off of whatever prop you want to throw yourself off of and get a following.
This isn't the way of Jesus because, like, think about it even this way for a second, like, even consider his miracles.
Jesus's miracles. Paul Miller pointed this out are.
We think about them as like, this, like these amazing acts. And of course they are, but they're not the most, like, public thing. Like, even think about, like, him feeding the 5,000 right. Like, Jesus didn't get before everybody and, you know, like, he blessed the food. But then he just told his disciples, he said, like, they were worried. They're like, what are we going to do? And he's like, here, just start passing it out, start passing it out.
And gradually, slowly, privately, people just started multiplying fish and loaves, and people just started eating. You think about the wedding at Cana, when he turns water into wine. The wedding guests, they didn't see that. They didn't even know there was a problem. They didn't know they were running out of the wine. It was only the disciples and the servants. Jesus behind the scenes, he turns the water into wine.
You think about, like, even think about the resurrection, like Jesus, the greatest miracle of all time. Okay, so you do have an earthquake, like an angel coming. There's a big earthquake. He rolls the stone away. But guess what? Jesus isn't there. He's not in the tomb.
Jesus gets up. He goes. He appears before his disciples. He's kind of like, peace be with you. They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know? But like, this is part of his person. Like, this is part of how he does things. So if Jesus were to do this big public, boisterous throwing himself off of the temple, it would be this act of vainglory, of self promotion, of cutting cord. Because here's the thing, too, about all of these temptations. When Jesus resists all of these things, he's saying no to these immediate desires and saying yes to the cross. Because every one of these temptations is going to land him on the cross. This is the way of the cross. This is why we talk so much about the J curve.
Anybody know what the J curve is? The J curve is basically that in the kingdom of God, the way up to God is down.
That in order to get more of God, in order to live the Christian life, we're going to come down and it's here where growth happens in our suffering and our sorrow and our trials in moments of pain, when we feel like forsaking everything. God meets us there and we choose him as. And then we become the greatest in the kingdom of heaven because we've become the least.
That's the Christian life.
It's the J curve. So all of these temptations is like the inverse J curve.
Satan's flipping and saying, just do it. Just don't even come down. Just go up. You're the Son of God after all.
Take the shortcut. Feed yourself. Throw yourself off from the temple. Everybody's gonna Say you're the Messiah.
It's a pretty good gig, but it's not the way of Jesus and Satan also, again, he's remember, he's giving him his best shot.
Now he's introducing scripture into the temptation as well. First temptation wasn't Jesus didn't quote the Bible. This temptation, Jesus is going to quote the Bible. So again, another insight that we can glean from us is that as Christians, it's not enough to know our Bibles.
Do we need to know the Bible? Yes. But it's not enough to just know what the words say. We have to grasp the depth of their meaning and how they actually feed our souls and lead us towards Christ and away from sin.
Because this is what all false teachers do, right?
The devil's been doing it since the beginning, twisting the scripture. Did God really say that? Did he really say, you couldn't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? I thought he said this.
Hey, Jesus, doesn't the scripture say this?
So it's not enough for us to know the words of scripture, we have to be discerning.
Because Jesus doesn't just say, hey, you're taking that out of context. He says, no, no, no, no, no. This is what the word of God actually says.
You're giving me a fabrication.
Look at his response. Look back at the text. He says, Jesus said to him, again, it is written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. I love it's so brilliant what Jesus is doing there because he's appealing to the character of God, what Jesus is. If Jesus were to throw himself off the temple, he would be testing the Lord. He would be going against his Father. He would be subverting the path that the triune God has already agreed upon for him to take.
He would be cutting corners.
This is a temptation for self promotion, self propagation, self confirmation.
It's more than just efficiency and pridefulness. Jesus doesn't want to violate the very character of his Father because that's where the temptation leads. It violates the character of the Father and the other thing too. And then we need to move on to the last temptation.
But this temptation also Jesus throwing himself off the temple doesn't require any faith doesn't require. And you think about that, you're like, well, isn't this like a leap of faith, right? Because the angels have to catch him.
The angels don't have. The angels aren't human like us. We have a will, we have a mind, we have desires. God didn't create us as you Know, wind up toys. Angels are in the counsel of God. Jesus has all authority over the angels. So if Jesus says, catch me, they're going to catch him.
Jesus is the angel of the Lord. In the Old Testament, he commanded angel armies. Okay, so if he plops himself off, there's certainty to it. It requires no faith. Does that make sense? So faith, it subverts the Father's character, and it subverts faithfulness itself.
Okay, third temptation. We're almost done. Y'all are doing great.
Matthew 4, 8, 11. Does someone want to cover that? Someone want to read that James again?
[00:40:05] Speaker B: The devil took him to a very high place, a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the.
[00:40:11] Speaker A: World and their glory.
[00:40:12] Speaker B: And he said to him, all these I will give you if you will fall down and worship me. 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. Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.
[00:40:32] Speaker A: Okay, thank you. Thank you, brother. So Jesus is now two. And. Oh, against the devil. All right, and this is the devil's last move. Okay, this is the last bit of arsenal and kind of cannon fire he has. So they go up to the top of this mountain. We don't know where it is.
It could have been any mountain. Could have been Mount Everest. Who knows?
But at the top of the mountain, you can see all the kingdoms of the world. So it's this great scene in our imaginations, right? Like, they're both up there, and there's every possible kingdom. So you have, like, at the time, you have, like, the Roman Empire is below them. You have the.
I listed these out.
The Parthian Empire, the. The Kushin Empire in India. There's the Han Dynasty, that's in China. There's the nomadic tribes, the Germanic tribes, the Mayan civilization of Mesoamerica. Every civilization and empire is below them. And Satan essentially says, hey, all of these I will give to you if you fall down and worship me.
And so here's my question. If Satan is technically correct, he's correct in the sense that they already belong to Jesus anyway, right? They already belong to him. He's incorrect in thinking that he has any kind of power or authority over them.
What's the condition here? In other words, what is Satan asking of Jesus here? He's saying, what if you fall down and worship me? But what is this temptation, really?
What's the temptation for Jesus? In this final one, we talked about lust and the desire to satisfy and satiate your thirst in the first one. The second one is self promotion. What is this? A temptation towards to have it all be over with.
Have it all be over with. Okay?
That's it. It's power. This is a temptation towards power. Okay?
And here's the thing. If Jesus had accepted this offer, not only would be he be a failure and a false messiah, engaging in literal devil worship, because that's what Satan's asking of him, he'd be abandoning the mission altogether.
And so, like, the enticing thing about this, you can kind of feel the thrust of Jesus here because at the end of this temptation, he's, like, sick of it. Like, his response is kind of repugnant. Un momento, my friend.
He's very, very tired of this because he says, be gone. Like, go away.
But the enticing thing about this temptation to power is that it takes him away from the cross, it takes him away from suffering, it takes him away from the J curve. Right? That's ultimately what it is. When you talk about, like, have it all be done with, that's really what it would be. That's would be the result of this, because Jesus would be established as a messiah king and rule over all of the nations of the world in power and in authority. Why do you think that even though Jesus had every right to do this and well, eventually. Why do you think he has to say no to this particular temptation? What do you think.
[00:44:25] Speaker C: The will of advice?
[00:44:27] Speaker A: He has to die on the cross?
Yeah. The will of the like. He has to.
This is the path.
This is what true, like, the kind of power that Satan is offering him is the power of the world. It's the way of the world. It's the path of the world.
This isn't going to be the path of Jesus.
He doesn't. He's not going to be like every other famous ruler or dictator. He's going to take a different way. What is that way?
[00:45:03] Speaker C: God's way?
[00:45:04] Speaker A: It's God's way. It's. It's the.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: You worship the Lord your God. I mean, it kind of says it in him only shall you serve.
[00:45:11] Speaker A: Right? It's that I'm not going to bow down to anybody else.
I'm going to worship God and him alone. And I know what he's been saying to me. I know the words of my Father. And that's really the core of what delivers Jesus from every single one of these temptations, is that he knows the words of his father. So in depth is that he's quoting Deuteronomy. And fun fact, every response of scripture that Jesus quotes back to the devil is from the book of Deuteronomy. So we might be sleeping on the book of Deuteronomy. Okay, it's a little bit underrated. We may need to be doing some study on the book of Deuteronomy.
But that is the pattern, that is the thrust of it. That Jesus is saying, I worship my Father alone. Not you, not power, not the kingdoms of this world.
Satan's ultimately inviting Jesus into celebrity culture, right? He's ultimately saying, like, be the ultimate celebrity. Be the ultimate celebrity pastor, right?
Take this power. Now, again, I'm not dissing. Also, there's plenty of faithful celebrity pastors, but it's this notion that, that the way down is up instead of the way up is down. I was thinking about, like, just in my own life, even the temptation to power. Like, I think when we often think about power, like, we could probably ask ourselves and be like, you know, I'm not, like, I don't want to run over people. You know, I don't have this, like, aggressive personality that, like, you know, I'm not a blowhard or whatever. But if you think about it like my temptation to power, if you're smart and you can deduce things quickly and make decisions, power is going to be a temptation for you because the world rewards those who are smart, make decisions quickly, efficiently and effectively, and promotes you and raises you up. And so I think about just in my own life, like, the temptation to power is often so subtle and so underneath. I just feel like it's something we don't talk about a lot because we just think, well, I'm not a powerful person or I'm not this aggressive kind of in your face kind of person. But I think power for all of us in whatever way we are, because we're all smart and successful in our own right. And so I just, just a food for thought there that I left out in my lesson about just power.
You're going to be tempted towards power. If you're not, you will be tomorrow. And if you don't think you're ever going to be, you're probably not in a good place. You're probably already powerful.
Jenny, go ahead. I just think, as you were speaking English, I think I. I'm tempted to think I'm not like that either. But I think the desire for control is like a massacre. The desire for power, it's a little bit more subtle because you feel more justified in it. Just fix this thing. But really, it's just like you want to have the power over that situation. Yeah.
And that's really what it is. It's like living in your own power is the opposite of trusting in and the power of God and the authority of God over your life. That he's in control and he's sovereign and he knows what he's doing. You know, our own desire for thirst, for power wants to quench that and say, no, let me control this. You can have this, but let me. Let me have this, you know?
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
[00:49:09] Speaker B: Going back to the first temptation. I remember a pastor saying this one time and. And it made me think about it that he also, Satan also was tapping into the. The senses of Jesus at that time. Like smell.
You know, like when they baked bread back then.
[00:49:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:49:31] Speaker B: Could smell it and see it, and he could taste it in his mouth. And it really was a trigger to him. Like, a lot of guys like me would. Went through other kinds of addictions. It could be when you think of places and things.
[00:49:43] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:49:44] Speaker B: I think he was. We got to be mindful of that, too, that we can allow our senses to cause us to get into some temptations and let them get further than they ought to get.
[00:49:55] Speaker A: Yeah. I really feel. That's why. I really feel like that's what's at the heart of lust. Like. Like, again, we. It's often we think of that in the context of sexual lust and sexual temptation. That's there. It's there for me. But like, even just the desire to just satisfy myself quickly and just let me just nibble on this. Let me just have a little bit of this thing.
I'm feeding myself. I'm allowing my senses to be engaged. So I think that's right on.
Hey, love you guys.
