SATAN'S OFFER TO HELP JESUS
And the tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." Matt. 4:3, R.S.V.
Jesus did not come into this world with a fully developed memory of His previous existence. It was not because He could recall living in the presence of His Father that He knew He was the divine Son of God. His confidence was based instead upon His Spirit-led understanding of the prophecies and sacrificial system recorded in the Old Testament. He was ready to tell the world who He was, facing scorn from even His own family and eventually experiencing a cruel death, because He was certain of what He had read.
But what if He were wrong? What if He, like so many others, had misread Scripture? Or what if even the Scriptures were unreliable? Wouldn't it be comforting to know, right in the beginning of His earthly ministry, that He really did have innate divinity within Himself? He had worked no miracles prior to this time.
How "concerned," then, that Satan should arrive on the scene at that time and propose a simple little miracle that would not only satisfy Jesus' hunger following forty days of fasting but would also give Him an opportunity to prove His divinity to Himself. The drama was intensified the more by Satan's suggestion that certainly God would not leave His Son in such a bleak situation without providing a miraculous way of escape.
Yet Jesus saw the deeper issues. He discerned that the single underlying issue in all temptation is for one to break away from utter dependency upon God and to seek to solve one's own problems. For Jesus to have worked a miracle to meet His own needs--either for food or for verification of His divinity--would not have been fundamentally different from when Adam and Eve took the fruit in order to advance their own cause. In either case, the one who was dependent upon divinity would have broken that dependent relationship. And that, in the truest sense, is a denial of faith.
This temptation that Jesus faced was, in one important way, vastly more difficult than the temptations we face, because Jesus really did have divinity within Himself, which He could have relied upon to meet His needs. By contrast, when I am tempted to rely upon myself, it is a joke, a comic illusion. Trusting my Father makes vastly more sense.
And the tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." Matt. 4:3, R.S.V.
Jesus did not come into this world with a fully developed memory of His previous existence. It was not because He could recall living in the presence of His Father that He knew He was the divine Son of God. His confidence was based instead upon His Spirit-led understanding of the prophecies and sacrificial system recorded in the Old Testament. He was ready to tell the world who He was, facing scorn from even His own family and eventually experiencing a cruel death, because He was certain of what He had read.
But what if He were wrong? What if He, like so many others, had misread Scripture? Or what if even the Scriptures were unreliable? Wouldn't it be comforting to know, right in the beginning of His earthly ministry, that He really did have innate divinity within Himself? He had worked no miracles prior to this time.
How "concerned," then, that Satan should arrive on the scene at that time and propose a simple little miracle that would not only satisfy Jesus' hunger following forty days of fasting but would also give Him an opportunity to prove His divinity to Himself. The drama was intensified the more by Satan's suggestion that certainly God would not leave His Son in such a bleak situation without providing a miraculous way of escape.
Yet Jesus saw the deeper issues. He discerned that the single underlying issue in all temptation is for one to break away from utter dependency upon God and to seek to solve one's own problems. For Jesus to have worked a miracle to meet His own needs--either for food or for verification of His divinity--would not have been fundamentally different from when Adam and Eve took the fruit in order to advance their own cause. In either case, the one who was dependent upon divinity would have broken that dependent relationship. And that, in the truest sense, is a denial of faith.
This temptation that Jesus faced was, in one important way, vastly more difficult than the temptations we face, because Jesus really did have divinity within Himself, which He could have relied upon to meet His needs. By contrast, when I am tempted to rely upon myself, it is a joke, a comic illusion. Trusting my Father makes vastly more sense.
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