The Battle Belongs to the Lord

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel.

According to St. Matthew, the fourth chapter. Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.

But he answered, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Then the devil took him to the holy city, set him on the pinnacle of the temple, 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 hand they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.

Jesus said to him, Again it is written, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Again the devil took him to a very high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, All of these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.

And 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.

This is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus, Amen. Boy, these are great texts, I've got to tell you that. There's an interesting alternative Old Testament text, and I was tempted to throw it in.

The Devil as a Liar and Murderer from the Beginning

But I thought, you know, let's kind of let them all work together. So as we are entering this Lenten tide, and we note that, again, we need to examine our lives in light of God's commandments and His law, and see all the different ways in which we sin against God and sin against neighbor and thought, word, and deed, by the things we do and don't do.

It's here then, in the beginning of the Lenten season, where we consider the devil's great attack against us, and how he continues to attack us and to tempt us, and how he tempted our first parents, tempted Adam and Eve, and then we'll see what the solution to all of this is.

Is the solution, try harder, do gooder, well, you know, be more intentional in your... No, it's not. It's really not. It's something very different altogether. So in that regard, let me remind you what the devil was up to.

According to Christ, in the Gospel of John, chapter 8, he says these words, that the devil, that he was a liar and a murderer from the beginning. That's a reference to the book of Genesis. So we know from Christ's words in the Gospel of John, that what is happening in the book of Genesis, chapter 3, is an attempt to murder the newly created human beings who were made in the image of God.

And the devil knows full well something, and this is something we need to pay attention to, because this is really what it's all about. God means what he says, and he says what he means. And his words do something.

God never, and I mean never, lies. And so the devil, banking on this, taking one of God's great virtues, if you would, his truthfulness, decides to turn that against humanity, murder humans by having them disobey God's command, and God himself is now the murder weapon.

And in the annals of evil, I don't think you can come up with a more evil plan than this. But what is it that happened? What went wrong? The problem was that Adam and Eve listened to the voice of the serpent, listened to their feelings, rather than to the word of God.

And so as a result of this, well, we know that we've been plunged into the misery that we now experience in our life, including sickness, disease, aging, obesity, and other things like this, right? Yep, we suffer all of this as a result of our fallenness, and ultimately death, but there was this great promise in our Old Testament text.

I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. You'll note that the he being referred to is the seed of the woman, and I only know one guy who is the seed of a woman and not the seed of a man and a woman, and that's Jesus.

And so he's the one promised by God who would ultimately defeat the devil on our behalf. Pay attention to that. So now Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of Man, Son of David, Son of God, he is now been baptized by John the Baptist.

That's immediately what precedes our Gospel text today, and there's Jesus coming up out of the water, and the heavens open up, the Holy Spirit descends on him in the form of a dove, and the voice of the Father is heard from heaven saying these words, You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

And what does the devil always go after? The Word of God. With Adam and Eve, the question was, did God actually say? With Jesus, you're going to note, he's got to get after, just kind of niggle, see if he can work the angles to get Jesus to somehow not trust these words of God.

And you'll see then that the devil's temptation results in three very common ways in which we are all tempted as well, either by the devil or our own sinful flesh. And it's here we must remember these things, that Jesus is like us in every way except for without sin, and he was tempted in every way that we have been tempted and is without sin.

And as a result of this, he has great mercy on us and understands the difficulties of this life firsthand. They are not something in the abstract for him. So Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

After fasting for 40 days, 40 nights, he was hungry, and every time I read this text, I sit there and go, well of course, I don't even make it 40 minutes. You know, you just got to think this through here.

So the tempter then comes, and listen to the words, if you are the Son of God, Jesus had heard those words, you are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. And so now the devil's trying to get Christ to not trust these words.

If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread. And you're going to note that this temptation, when you kind of work it through, this is the temptation to despair and to not trust God's word and not continue to believe his words by faith because of our circumstances.

Remember, Jesus hasn't eaten for 40 days. He's hungry. And the devil's basically saying, listen, this is no way for the real Son of God to be suffering. If you really are the Son of God, well, work a miracle here, Jesus, and things will get better for you.

Let me kind of work out how this comes to us oftentimes, this temptation to despair. Well, one of the reasons or one of the ways it comes to us is through our own suffering. Maybe it's a medical ailment.

Maybe it's a chronic disease. Maybe it's persecution or things like this. And the devil comes along and says, well, doesn't Scripture say that you're the apple of God's eye? Don't you think that if you were really a Christian that you wouldn't be suffering in this way?

It's an interesting temptation. You sit there and you go, well, maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm not a Christian. You know, I remember years and years and years ago, long before I was a pastor, we were teaching a Bible study at a church in San Juan Capistrano, and one of the members of the church took ill and he was going to die.

I went to visit him in the hospital and he said to me, I really must have done something wrong to upset God this way. You know, that he's causing me to suffer. And I said, your suffering has nothing to do with God's love for you.

God loves you because he says so in his word. And Christ has bled and died for your sins. So I redirected him back to the promises that we have in Christ. And it's important for us to note this. As Christians, then, we do have promises.

And the promises have to do with the forgiveness of our sins, being reconciled to God, and Christ does this even for us when we were the enemies of God. And Scripture is very clear in Romans 8 that we have been adopted into the family of God.

We are now adopted children. And here's where we have to pay attention to one little note here. This is not like, well, the adoption papers have been filed, but they haven't been signed yet by a judge.

It's still pending. And of course, if I screw up during this inter-period, that somehow the adoption won't go through. Remember the movie Orphan Annie? Remember about Orphan Annie? Yeah, that was a big thing when I was a kid, right?

That son will come out tomorrow. You know what I'm talking about here. And it's a great three-act play, but the drama is about whether or not Annie will actually finally be adopted by Daddy Warbucks.

And of course, it has that great conclusion at the end, but the conflict is all around that. That's not our conflict, brothers and sisters. That's not our conflict. You have been baptized into Christ.

You have been buried with Him in His death and His resurrection. Your sins have been washed away. Today we will feast on His body and blood, given and shed for the forgiveness of our sins. The adoption papers have been signed.

You are the children of God. Adopted, loved, bled for, cherished in His sight. That being the case, don't let the devil somehow think that, well, maybe that's not true for you. It is true. It is absolutely true, as certain as Christ's resurrection from the grave.

So all of that being said, don't be tempted to despair. But there's another way in which we can be tempted to despair, and it goes along the lines of this. Well, if I were really a Christian, then I wouldn't be struggling with sin.

You know, how many of us can legitimately say, you know, when the devil comes a-knockin' and says things like, you know, it's just a little sin, it's just a little malice, it's just a little gossip, it's just a little coveting, it's just a little sexual immorality, it's just a little dishonoring of your parents.

We sit there and go, yeah, it's not that bad. It's not that bad, right? And then as soon as we give in to the temptation like morons, we sit there and go, yeah, sin cool, right? What happens? The devil comes flooding at us basically saying, you're going to hell.

This is no way for a Christian to behave. You're not really saved. Right? These are the temptations that we face, the temptation of despair. And note, Christ has faced this temptation. He's faced it straight on.

And unlike us, Christ never yielded to the temptation. I always loved the fact that Christ in this account quotes from the book of Deuteronomy three times. I mean, talk about biblical illiteracy. The world we live in, so many people who call themselves Christians, they've never read the Bible.

I mean, legitimately, they have no clue what it's about. And then if you ask them, have you read the book of Deuteronomy, they might even question whether or not that's a real name of a real book in the Bible.

But it really is. And that's where Christ goes. So Christ, trusting in the written word of God, says it is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

So if I'm hungry, I'm hungry. This is absolutely good, right? Salutary and fitting for the Son of God. And as they say in baseball, swing and a miss, strike one for the devil. Well, next temptation. So the devil took Jesus to the holy city, set him on the pinnacle of the temple, 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.

Here we know from our gradual that the devil is twisting Psalm 91. He omitted a little bit of a portion of the text. But all of that is to tempt Jesus into committing the sin of presumption. Let me explain how this one goes.

So you may have heard a preacher somewhere on YouTube or on the interwebs, or maybe you've even attended a church where you've heard a sermon to the effect of, well, you need to embrace your royal identity as a Christian.

Did you not know that you are a royal? That's right. You Christian women, you are princesses. And you Christian men, of course, you are handsome and strapping young princes. And as the royals of God, we have the authority as royals to decree royal proclamations, to decree and declare things like health and wealth.

And should a hurricane be headed towards Florida or Texas, we can take our Gandalf stick and whack that thing in the name of our royal decrees back into the ocean. Isn't that not exactly what Kenneth Copeland did?

COVID -19, I blow the wind of God on you. This is the sin of presumption. Totally the sin of presumption. And what the devil is tempting Christ to do is sit there and go, yeah, well, that Psalm 91 really is written about me.

I guess I can just go willy-nilly breaking the laws of gravity and not have to worry about any of the consequences. I can throw myself off of cliffs. I can go skydiving without a parachute, and God will save me.

Complete and utter presumption. And that's the temptation. How many people have fallen into this sin in our day? How many people have heard, oh, you are so special. You're hearing the voice of God. You need to open up a YouTube channel and prophesy every week and every month and tell people about their breakthroughs and their sudden leads that God's going to give them and stuff like this.

Pure, utter presumption. So Jesus said, again, it's written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. God has not promised that if you go skydiving without a parachute that he will save you. So, as they say in baseball, strike two.

See what happens. So the devil then took Jesus to a very high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he said to him, all of these I'll give you if you'll fall down and worship me.

Hey, man, serious? Now, what is this? Aside from the obvious here, the temptation to worship Satan, at the core, we need to come to grips with something here. Scripture warns us that in the last days, within the visible church, there would be taught doctrines of demons.

And that's a true thing. That people will exchange the truth of God for lies and for myths and as a result of it, they would end up, in fact, really engaging not only in apostasy, but apostasy that doesn't worship Christ, but at its core is still a worship of the devil.

This is the temptation to apostasy that we all, all experience. And so Christ points us back to true worship. True worship is with truthful words from the scriptures themselves and Jesus says to the devil, it is written, you shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.

And so, we're going to note here, Christ has succeeded where we have failed. Here the one promised by God all the way back in the Garden of Eden has come on the scene, the one who is going to crush the head of the serpent.

He is on the scene and he's doing his conquering work. Now, there's another place to go with this here. And I mentioned it at the beginning of the sermon. And that is our alternate text. The alternate text, the option for the Old Testament text that for this Sunday is 1 Samuel chapter 17, the story of David and Goliath.

You'll note, I don't normally preach on this because it doesn't really come up very often, but there it is. And it's like, ah, I've got to preach a little bit on this. We're going to note something here.

We've also, in regards to the sin of presumption, heard really bad sermons throughout our lifetime on the story of David and Goliath. And it generally goes something like this. So, what are the Goliaths in your life?

So, you read the story of David and Goliath and then you ask yourself the question, what are the Goliaths in your life? Is it a mountain of debt? Is it a bad job? Is it a broken down car or a boss who treats you poorly?

Or worse, is it misbehaved children? I had three Goliaths in my house. Well, you need to get out your five smooth stones and you need to run out into the battlefield and you need to take your sling and slay your Goliaths, right?

No. No. In this regard then, I would remind us of an interesting context here. In the chapter before this, the chapter where David and Goliath is, what happened to David is that he was anointed by the prophet Samuel to be the next king of Israel.

And we learn from that text as well as a good cross reference in Hebrews chapter 11 that David is a man of faith. He believes the words of God. And there were actual promises to those in the Mosaic Covenant in his day that David acted on in faith.

This is the reason why he was able to slay a bear or things like this. He trusted God and as a result of that, God followed through on the promises that he had made. And now David, after his anointing, is also facing a great temptation.

A champion, if you would, who's kind of a stand-in for the devil. And David's words are super important because they help us. Because I must remind you that after Jesus' baptism, he was thrown into great temptation.

After David's anointing, he also was put into great temptation. After our baptisms, we also are put into great temptations. The devil is not content to leave us alone. And so some of David's words here really are going to help us.

So it says in verse 40 of 1 Samuel 17, David took his staff in his hand. He chose five smooth stones from the brook. He put them in his shepherd's pouch. His sling was in his hand and he approached the Philistine.

And the Philistine moved forward and came near to David with a shield bearer in front of him. And when the Philistine looked and saw David, he disdained him, for he was but a youth, ruddy and handsome in appearance.

And the Philistine said to David, Am I a dog that you come at me with sticks? And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. The Philistine said to David, Come to me and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.

And then David said to the Philistine, You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin. But I come to you in the name of Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of armies, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.

This day, and these are the words, this day Yahweh will deliver you into my hand. And I will strike you down and cut off your head. And I will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.

And I would note here this imagery of the dead Philistines, their flesh being eaten by the birds is exactly the same kind of imagery that we find in the book of Revelation regarding the last battle itself.

The armies of the evil one arrayed against Christ and they all die. And there's a big feast for all the birds that day. It's interesting when you think about it. But he continues. So, let me back up. He says that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel and that all this assembly may know, and listen to the words, that they may know that Yahweh saves.

Yahweh saves. Fun little play on words in the Hebrew here. By the way, there is one word in Hebrew that actually means Yahweh saves. Do you all know that one? Yahshua. Yahweh saves. Now, David used two words.

Yahweh Yeshu. I can't even remember the ending on this one. But he uses the same Yeshu word, that opening phrase there. And so it's kind of fascinating here that in this text in the Hebrew, David says that Yahweh saves and the reader who knows who this is pointing to, Christ, the one who crushes the head of the serpent, can see at least an echo of Jesus' name here.

It is the Lord who saves. Jesus who saves. Yahweh saves. That's His name. He doesn't save with sword or spear. For the battle is the Lord's and He will give you into our hand. Listen again to the words.

The battle is the Lord's. He will give you into our hands. So brothers and sisters, listen to what I have to say here. You are not strong enough to defeat the devil. I am not strong enough to defeat the devil.

I assure you, I am not the one promised in Genesis chapter 3 verse 15. Neither are you. But Christ is the one who is promised. Jesus is the one who saves. And you'll note, He is the one who conquers the devil for us.

And so He's also, and this is important, He's also left us an example for us to follow. Because the problem is that we listen to other words. We trust other voices. We trust the voice of the devil. We trust the voice of the world.

We trust the voice of our own sinful flesh when God's word so clearly says it is written. And so we need to repent of all of the different ways in which we have cast the word of God behind us. And as a result of not listening to God's voice we have fallen into the temptations that afflict us as Christians.

But also this, let us come back to the promise of the forgiveness of our sins. Jesus is the one who's conquered the devil for us. And Jesus is the one who also promises us some amazing things. If you remember in the book of Revelation, the first few chapters have a lot of red ink in them.

I think a lot of people forget that there are red letters in other portions of the New Testament. In fact, if I were to kind of show you as a visual aid, look at all the red ink on that, right? Jesus is doing a lot of talking here.

And so Jesus is having letters written to all of these different churches. And Jesus makes promises like this, to the one who conquers, I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

The one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death. He says the one who conquers, I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except for the one who receives it.

And he goes on and says to the one who conquers, I will give him the morning star. These are the promises of Christ to his churches. But I would remind you then that we only conquer by faith. Faith in the one who has already conquered the devil.

Faith in the one who crushed the head of the serpent by going to the cross and bleeding and dying for your sins and mine. And then rising victorious from the grave on the third day. So, at the beginning of Lent, let us repent of all the different ways we have listened to voices that we ought not to listen to.

And let us come back to the voice of God found in the written text. Let us not despair of our standing before God as his baptized, forgiven, beloved children. Let us not fall into the sin of excuse me, I lost my train of thought there.

Fall into the temptation of presumption, the sin of presumption, or worse into apostasy, which really is truly the worship of the devil. Let us repent of all the different ways in which we have participated that and let us again trust in the one who has conquered for the battle truly belongs to the Lord and it is Yahweh who saves.

Not with spear or sword or javelin. He saves by his suffering, bleeding, dying son of God who is given and shed for the forgiveness of our sins so that we might have life and life abundantly and eternal.

In Jesus name, Amen.

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