The Second Adam Crushes the Head of the Serpent FOR You

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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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

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, the 4th chapter.

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Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry, and the tempter came and said to him,

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If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread. But he answered, It is written,

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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 and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him,

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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.

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Jesus said to him, Again, it is written, 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 said to him,

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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,

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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.

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This is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus. Amen. As we embark on this

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Lenten tide, we are again thrust back to a passage that I keep referring to as the scene of the crime.

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This is the point in human history, and yes, this is human history, this is not mythology. When mankind first went toe -to -toe with Satan and lost.

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Badly. Really, really badly. Horribly badly. Worse than we care to admit.

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Badly. Now I know a thing or two about losing badly and then the denial that goes with that.

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I would remind you I root for the Los Angeles Dodgers as a baseball team, and after getting walloped in the first round of the playoffs by the

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Washington Nationals, the first stupid thing out of my mouth was, there's always next season.

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Those of you who root for the Vikings know what I'm talking about. But when it came to our defeat to the devil in the garden, it seemed like there was no next season.

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At least it seemed to be a long way off. That one sin plunged all of us into sin, condemnation, eternal death, and since that time, no man, well, except for one, has ever gone toe -to -toe with the devil and won.

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And so let's again pick through the evidence left for us at this attempted murder scene, and that's what it really was.

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Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John that the devil was a murderer from the beginning and revealing to us that what the devil was up to here was an attempted murder.

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The goal was to murder humanity made in the image of God and have God himself be the murder weapon.

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It was an exquisite plan if you think about it in terms of evil. So we're going to pick back through this and see if we can figure out exactly what went wrong and consider then the far -reaching implication that it has on all of us even to this day.

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And in order to do that, I'm just going to grab a small bit of the context from Genesis 2, verses 15 through 17, and here's what it says.

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Yahweh Elohim took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and to keep it.

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And Yahweh Elohim commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the

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Garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

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Now, it's important to note here God spoke these words to Adam. Adam then taught these words to Eve.

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And we know from the minor prophets that God himself had made a covenant with Adam and that Adam eventually broke that covenant.

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There was one commandment, Don't eat from that tree. That's it. That's the only commandment. And this was their act of worship.

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And you're going to note that Adam teaches Eve the Word of God. He's like the first pastor. He's the first one out there preaching and teaching what

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God's Word is. And it was given to him directly. And now, knowing all of that, let's consider the scene of the crime, chapter 3.

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Now, the serpent was more crafty than any of the beasts of the field that the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman,

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Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the Garden? Let me give you the Roseboro paraphrase here because the

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Roseboro paraphrase kind of fleshes out the fact that the question itself is a loaded question.

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You know what a loaded question is? It's one of these questions where there's an answer implied in the question.

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Over and again, in logic classes, the standard loaded question is,

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Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Well, if you ask a question like that, the assumption is, well, you're beating your wife.

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And so you have to say, Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down there, Tex. That's a loaded question. We need to back that up just a little bit and deal with the fact that I'm not beating my wife.

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So you get the idea. So you're going to know here, this is a loaded question. Did God really say,

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You shall not eat of any tree in the Garden? Here's my paraphrase. Is it true God's not letting you guys eat?

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Oh, we know he's this terrible, awful self -centered deity. And oh man, I'm here to rescue you.

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I'm your friend. Are you hungry? I got some food for you. That's kind of the paraphrase.

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And you're going to note here that what he's doing by asking this question is completely slandering

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God. But here's kind of the interesting psychological bit. What he's doing is he's projecting his own evil character onto God.

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This is narcissistic projection, if you would. So the woman said to the serpent, now

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I'm going to give Eve a little bit of slack here because I catechize youth. And we work through their memory work on a weekly basis.

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What's the third commandment? Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. What does this mean? It means that we should fear and love

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God so that we go to church. No, no, no, no. Fear, love, and trust in God so that we do not despise preaching in his word, but gladly hear and learn.

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As somebody who catechizes, we're always working on memory work here. So you're going to note that Eve's memory work is not quite up to snuff.

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And so she says, well, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said you should not eat of the fruit of the tree that's in the midst of the garden.

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Neither shall you touch it lest you die. Memory work is a little shoddy here, but she's in the ballpark.

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And now the serpent continues. You will not surely die. What's he tacitly saying here?

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God lied to you. You can't trust God, and you can't trust what he says to you.

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I'm your friend. I'm going to tell you the truth. God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you're going to be like God, knowing good and evil.

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See, God doesn't want you to be like him. No, no, no. He's really small -minded. He's jealous.

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He's capricious. He's threatened by you. If you achieve your full potential, oh, man, he hates that.

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So he's trying to suppress you and keep you down. And so the slander against God and this questioning and challenging of God's words openly, defiantly, aggressively lead

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Eve to do something really foolish. And I mean this, really, really, really foolish.

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So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, feelings, nothing more than feelings.

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What is she doing? She's going inside. Well, the question before her is, should

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I eat from that tree or not? That's the question. And where is she going for the answer?

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Right here. God's word comes to us from outside of us.

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God's word is not found in here. God's word is preached to us. God's word is in the

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Scriptures. God's word can be trusted. And the last place you go to determine whether or not what

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God said is true or false is in here. You're not going to find the answer in here.

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The word is outside. So she goes completely internal. And so when she saw that the tree was good for food, that it was a delight to the eyes, well, it was kind of pretty, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and she ate.

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And then she gave some to her husband who was with her. He was there the whole time. Why was he silent? What's going on here?

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Now, the Book of Concord. These are our confessions. The Book of Concord in the small cult articles, section three, article eight.

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That sounds so official, doesn't it? Luther actually addresses what went wrong here and the sin, if you would, the complete error of what is called enthusiasm.

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Enthusiasm. That's God within -ism, where you determine truth based upon feelings.

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Nothing more than feelings. It's called enthusiasm. And this is a terrible sin.

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This will get you into all kinds of trouble. Here's what Luther said. In these matters which concern the external, the spoken word, we must hold firmly to the conviction that God gives no one his spirit or grace except through or with the external word which comes before.

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Thus, we shall be protected from the enthusiasts, that is, from the spiritualists who boast that they possess the spirit without and before the word and who therefore judge, interpret, and twist scripture or the spoken word according to their pleasure.

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And that's the thing. When you use your feelings to determine what is right and wrong, your feelings stand over God's word and you've made your feelings

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God. And then he quotes, he cites somebody historically by the name of Munzer. Munzer was kind of like the first charismatic guy that crops up in the

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Lutheran Reformation. And Munzer chided Luther for not experiencing the spirit within.

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And Luther is historically quoted as saying to Munzer, Munzer, I wouldn't believe you if you had swallowed the

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Holy Spirit, feathers and all. And so it's a great little rebuke. So he says, Munzer did this and many still do it in our day who wish to distinguish sharply between the letter and the spirit.

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Yeah, yeah. By the way, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any double -edged sword.

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It's theanoustas, it is God -breathed. So there is no distinction between the letter and the spirit when it comes to the word of God.

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God's word comes to us both, right? So Munzer made that distinction without knowing what they say or preach.

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And then he says this, the papacy too is nothing but enthusiasm for the Pope boasts that all laws are in the shrine of his heart.

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And he claims that whatever he decides and commands in his churches is spirit and law, even when it is above and contrary to the scriptures of the spoken word.

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And all of this is the old devil, the old serpent who made enthusiasts out of Adam and Eve.

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And he led them from the external word of God to spiritualizing and to their own imaginations.

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And he did this through other external words. And so you see what the devil did here at the scene of the crime, rather than listening to the external word of God, do not eat of that tree, pretty simple.

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They looked for the answer in here. And as a result of it, the devil turned them into enthusiasts.

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And thus we still struggle with this today, all of us. Well, the story continues then in Genesis, when the woman saw the tree was good for food, we talked about all of that.

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She gave some also to her husband who was with her. He ate. And then the eyes of both were open, and they knew that they were naked.

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They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. After signing on the dotted line, after making the decision, they realized they'd been sold some shoddy goods.

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Even Eve herself will confess that she was deceived. This is not what they were expecting. So they heard the sound of the

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Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. The man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Yahweh Elohim among the trees of the garden.

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But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, Where are you? And he said, Well, I heard the sound of you in the garden.

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I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself. He said, Who told you you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which

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I commanded you not to eat? The man said, The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree, and I ate.

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Then Yahweh Elohim said to the woman, What is this you've done? Now note, by saying what Adam said, the woman you gave me, who's he blaming?

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God. Now the passing of the buck goes all the way up to, This is your fault, God. You made

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Eve. Yeah, right. And then the Lord said to the woman, What is this you've done? So the woman said, The serpent deceived me, and I ate.

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At least she gives an honest answer, right? So then the Lord God now starts handing out judgments.

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He says to the serpent, Because you've done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all the beasts of the field.

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On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. And verse 15, always worth noting, this is the first gospel.

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It comes while God is handing out curses to the serpent, and he says to the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring.

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In other words, the offspring of a woman. That can only be the virgin -born son of God. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.

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Then to the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing, and pain you shall bring forth. Children, your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.

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So every woman who's given birth to a child always says thanks. Eve, that's just spectacular. And of course, all the tension that exists in marriages, it's just so fun.

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It's all part of the curse as well. And then to Adam, listen to these words, Because you have listened to the voice of your wife.

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Note God makes it very clear. You didn't listen to me, you listened to her. Who was she listening to? Her feelings.

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Why was she listening to her feelings? Because the devil, well, deceived her.

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Because you've listened to the voice of your wife, and you have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it.

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Cursed is the ground because of you in pain. You shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field.

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And by the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread until you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

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So from the garden on it's hi -ho, hi -ho, it's off to work we go.

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Why? Well, this is all part of the curse. And then the text says the man called his wife's name

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Eve Chava because she was the mother of all the living, and the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin, and he clothed them.

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So notice as soon as they sinned, they realized that they were naked, and God takes their nakedness and covers it.

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That some animals had to die so that they can be clothed. And all of that is a foreshadow of Christ whose righteousness we are clothed in, whom

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God put to death for our sins so that our nakedness, sin, and shame can be covered.

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And all of that is just foundation work. We're doing a little bit of in -depth study here. Now we come to our gospel text here, and we're going to note that our epistle has already made it clear that Jesus is the second

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Adam. And so now we hear about what happened to Jesus. He's fresh out of the waters of his baptism in the

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Jordan River at the hand of John the Baptist. And when Jesus was baptized, the voice of the

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Father was heard saying, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.

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Here, Jesus has an external word from God the Father, and what do you think the devil is going to go after?

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The external word. So Jesus was led up in the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

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After fasting 40 days, 40 nights, he was hungry. I can barely make it 40 minutes. I can't imagine 40 days.

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So then the tempter came to him. Now a little bit of a note here. We all know how this usually works.

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When you think about the ultimate battle between good and evil, every good movie has this. Usually when it's the battle between good and evil, there's some kind of preparation time, getting your weapons loaded, your guns cleaned.

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Or in the case of the Rocky movies against Apollo Creed, they have that training montage where he's doing pushups with one arm.

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He's drinking raw eggs. He's running down the streets of Philadelphia with kids following behind him.

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He climbs up the stairs and does this thing, and he's ready to fight Apollo Creed. What does Jesus do in preparation for the ultimate showdown between good and evil?

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He doesn't eat for 40 days. Is Jesus physically at his fittest, his strongest?

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No, he's at his weakest. And you can see that at the end that the angels have to tend to him after this battle.

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Shows you just how weak Jesus is. Out in the wilderness, I mean, no food. He's only drinking.

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His lips are probably chapped, and this is the days before there was chapstick. My wife would never have survived these conditions.

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So Jesus is hungry. The tempter came and said to him, if you are the Son of God, look what he's attacking here, that voice from heaven.

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If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread. So note, he's basically saying, now

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Jesus, I know you heard that voice, I heard that voice, but don't you think you better check to see if that voice was telling you the truth?

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We shouldn't trust God and his word without checking to see if what he's saying is true.

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You better exercise a little good measure of doubt and check to see if what he said is what he really meant.

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And so Jesus quotes Deuteronomy and says, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

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Round one goes to Jesus. So now the devil, repulsed, realizing it's going to take a little bit of work here, he decides he's going to twist the psalm that we had in our intro today,

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Psalm 91. And if you read Psalm 91, there's nothing in there that says that if you have doubt regarding the voice of God and what

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God has said to you, you can throw yourself off a temple and the angels will catch you. That's a misuse of this text, and he omits some of it itself.

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It says, he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all of your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.

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And well, the devil omits some relevant data in quoting the scriptures, which the devil is really good at doing, twisting up God's word to make it say something it doesn't say.

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And so he says, if you are the son of God, here we go again, questioning that voice 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.

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Jesus said to him again, it's written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Round two goes to Jesus.

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So again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and said to him.

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Now note, at this point, we're not even twisting the word of God or even making any allusions to it. He just decides to go full on and see if we can get

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Jesus to join him in his rebellion. I will give you all of these if you will fall down and worship me.

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Other texts tell us that authority over these things had been given to him, and he's willing to give it to Jesus if all he has to do is bow down and worship him.

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Just break that first commandment, Jesus. And this shows you just how sick, narcissistic, and evil the devil is.

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He ain't your friend. He's not my friend. What he basically wants to do and what he's been trying to do for millennia is to depose the

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God who created him and to take his place, which all of us do, by the way, in our own sin.

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So Jesus says, you shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve. So then the devil left him, and it says angels came and were ministering to Jesus, probably due to the fact that he hasn't eaten for 40 days.

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He needs some strength. So what does it all mean? Why is it significant that Jesus was tempted by the devil and didn't fall like we have?

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Was it merely to set an example so that we can follow that example and thereby learn how to defeat the devil like Jesus did?

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Oh, please, no. That's really not it. Because if you think about it, that interpretation basically has

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Jesus sitting there going, you guys have been getting it wrong for thousands and thousands of years. Don't make me come down there and show you how to do this.

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That's not what he was doing. That's not what he was doing at all. Instead, we have to understand the significance of this in that Jesus defeated the devil for us because we cannot do this for ourselves.

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And so coming back to just some good, old -fashioned, sound doctrine, the

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Augsburg Confession, Article 2, states this, It's also taught among us that since the fall of Adam, all men who are born according to the course of nature are conceived and born in sin.

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That is a condition, my friends. That is, all men are full of evil lust and inclination from their mother's wombs, and they are unable by nature to have true fear of God and true faith in God.

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Moreover, this inborn sickness is hereditary sin and is truly sin, and it condemns to the eternal wrath of God all those who are not born again through baptism in the

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Holy Spirit. And then rejected in this connection are the Pelagians. Pelagians deny not only the doctrine of original sin, that humans are born sinful, but Pelagians also taught that Christians can achieve sinless perfection in this lifetime.

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The two seem to go hand in hand, and we'll talk about that in our Sunday school, a little bit of a deeper study on the concept.

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So we reject the Pelagians in both counts, and then others who deny that original sin is sin, for they hold that natural man is made righteous by his own powers.

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Thus disparaging the sufferings of Christ. And so you're gonna note then, we have two historical narratives.

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We have the narrative of Adam and Eve in the garden. We have the narrative of Christ going toe -to -toe with the devil, him being tempted in much a similar way that Adam and Eve were.

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And thankfully, God doesn't leave it to our imaginations to understand why this is significant.

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And this is where epistle text comes and shines for us. Because Paul in Romans 5 gives us the

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Holy Spirit -inspired interpretation of all of this and what it means and why this will then comfort us.

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It says this, Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.

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Think of it this way, is that every one of us have had contact with Adam through our parents.

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Sin is like the ultimate coronavirus, and the mortality rate is 100%.

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And we've all been infected by this disease, this evil.

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And because of this, death has spread to all men. For indeed, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law.

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Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who sinning was not like the transgression of Adam.

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And it says this, who was a type of the one who was to come. You see, Scripture is very clear.

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Adam, in him, we all fell. He is a type and shadow of Jesus Christ.

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But Jesus Christ, being the fulfillment of the type and shadow, works everything in reverse. Through the one man, we all became sinners.

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And through the one man, the second Adam, Jesus, we are made righteous. But through the one man's disobedience, we fall.

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Through the one man's obedience, we are restored. You see, the reason why it's so important that Christ defeated the devil when he was tempted is because he did that for us so that by his obedience, then we can be restored to God.

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No longer fallen, but restored, forgiven. That's the idea.

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Made righteous. So the free gift, it's not like the trespass. Salvation is a free gift.

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For if the many died through the one man's trespass, how much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of the one man,

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Jesus Christ, abounded for many? And so the free gift is not like the result of one man's sin.

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For judgment, following one trespass brought condemnation. And so you'll know, all those curses, all the pain, all the suffering, just seems to be an abundance of pain and suffering and disease and blah in this life.

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Thank you for the super abundance of blah, Adam. But note then, it says this, but the gift, the free gift, following many trespasses brought justification.

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For if because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man,

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Jesus Christ? Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification in life for all men.

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For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.

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You see, Jesus did not defeat the devil merely to give an example of how you can do it so that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

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No, he defeated the devil because you and I can't. So he did it for us. And he was obedient to God in this temptation, obedient to God in all ways.

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In fact, Jesus was tempted in every way that we are tempted and yet is without sin. This is why he has compassion on us.

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This is why he understands our weakness and can sympathize with us. And because of this then, because of his obedience,

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Christ is obedient here, Christ is obedient the next day, all the way through all of his life, all the way to his obedience in laying down his life, laying down his life so that we can be forgiven.

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He was obedient even to the point of death, even death on the cross. And because of this, we who are sinners because of Adam, now through the second

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Adam, are declared to be righteous in him. So this Lenten tide, as we again consider our own sin, consider the magnitude and the depth of it, that each and every one of us is riddled with this disease and we are all still symptomatic of it, even though we are new creations in Christ.

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And Christ has declared us to be righteous and has promised us a day is coming when we will be set free from this body of death and that we will reign with him in a world without end when he returns in glory to judge the living and the dead.

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So it is appropriate then that during our confession of sins we confess these words, we confess that we are by nature sinful and unclean.

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And our texts today help us realize that that is a true confession and that when we say those words, we're saying the same thing as the external word of God.

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And when we believe and trust that Christ has bled and died for our sins, then the old evil foe is repulsed and God in his mercy and grace declares us to be righteous, clothed with the righteousness of his

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Son. In the name of Jesus, Amen. If you would like to support the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, you can do so by sending a tax -free donation to Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744. And again that address is

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744. We thank you for your support.

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