(Luke) 13 - Temptation of Christ — Ed Miller

And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led about by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing during those days, and when they had ended he became hungry.

And the devil said to him, If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread. And Jesus answered him, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone. And he led him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

And the devil said to him, I will give you all this domain and its glory, for it has been handed over to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. Therefore, if you worship before me, it shall all be yours.

Jesus answered and said to him, It is written, You shall worship the Lord your God and serve him only. And he led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written he will give his angels charge concerning you to guard you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.

Jesus answered and said to him, It is said, You shall not put the Lord your God to the task. And when the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time. Now, last session we gave a general overview of this temptation of our Lord in the wilderness.

Christ as the Second Adam and Substitute in Temptation

We tried to combine it with the balance of truth. In other words, Luke isn't the only one that gives us the record. Matthew also does, and Mark does a little bit. And so we pooled together all the material that had to do with the temptation.

Now if you missed that particular study, I don't like to push my own tapes, but I would suggest for background, if you missed that, to see Lillian and she'll make sure you get a tape of that, because I really do think the background of this temptation will help you as we enter into each of the individual temptations.

Having said that, I won't review that lesson now that we did last time. Last time I did make one big point out of reminding you that in the temptation, and man. In other words, he was our substitute. Just as Adam acted and represented the whole race, the Lord Jesus is now the second man.

He's called the second Adam. It's the Garden of Eden all over again. And just as Adam was tested in the garden and fell, and all humanity fell with him, our Lord Jesus in the wilderness was tested, representing man as the federal head of the whole human race, and he was victorious.

And so in his victory, the whole human race was lifted. As we all fell in Adam, we all now are victorious in the second Adam. I like to say it this way, that in Luke 4, Jesus is not so much our example in temptation as he is our substitute in temptation.

In other words, he's not teaching us how to beat up Satan. We're no match for Satan. We can't beat up Satan. I can't, and you can't, and as a body, a corporate body, we can't. Only the Lord has power over Satan.

Dependence on the Victorious Christ

He had it then, and he has it now in us. It's the same victory, but it's the Lord that has the victory. In other words, the victory he won here was in our place. He wasn't showing me how to fight Satan.

He was trying to teach me that he was victorious over Satan. Now that doesn't mean that I'll never be tempted. I will, so will you. And that doesn't mean we won't be tempted as Jesus was in this chapter.

We will, and we're going to look at how we're going to be tempted. But what it means is that the way I will have a victory is not by copying this chapter, quoting Bible verses, resisting Satan, and so on.

I will have a victory by trusting the one who was victorious. I think you're familiar with that wonderful verse in 1 John 4, 4, in the epistle of 1 John chapter 4, verse 4, it says, "...you have overcome because greater is he who is in you...".

Can you finish it? "...than he who is in the world.". And that's how you overcome. Greater is he who is in you. You overcome by the same Savior that overcame. It's not by sparring with Satan. And so, as we get ready to look at the individual temptations, I want to get before you the sense, the comprehensive view of what was really going on here.

See, we could just sort of start verse 1, alright, let's look at this temptation. Here's the first one, here's the second one, here's the third one. But I think you'd miss what Satan was trying to do and what God was trying to accomplish.

The Wilderness Temptation as Preparation for Ministry

Remember where Jesus was in relation to his ministry. He had just been baptized, and the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, had just anointed him for his mission. In other words, all of this time, for 30 years, God has been preparing him, preparing him for his ministry.

This temptation is the door of his ministry. It's the last thing that happened. And when it was finished, God said, alright, now you're ready. This was the final preparation for his ministry. And what Satan is trying to do is knock him off balance before he begins his ministry.

He's ready to start his ministry, and if Satan can get him now and knock him off balance, then he'll be able to have a victory. He wants Jesus to start on the wrong foot. Let me give a very feeble illustration of it.

I don't know if any of you golf. I golf, but I'm not a golfer. In fact, I've been sued because I hit a lady in the head with a golf ball. Which, that's a pretty good shot, if you think about it. But I wasn't, I was aiming for the green.

But anyway, one day I was golfing with a dear buddy of mine, and we were coming into the last hole, 18 holes, and we were dead even. And as we came to the last hole, we were just approaching the green.

And we were just playing for fun, but it was important that both of us won. And it was a very heated match. And as I was ready to make my nine-iron approach to the green, as I was in my stance, he said, Ed, and so I stopped and I looked at him, and he said, I was wondering, do you inhale on your backstroke?

For those who are golfers, you know what happened. I forgot how to breathe. He absolutely destroyed me, and he won the match. Psychologically, that's what he did. And I don't want to belittle what Satan was doing in this.

This is a tremendous experience. Our Lord Jesus was being tempted. But I really believe Satan was more subtle. He wasn't trying to get Jesus to commit fornication or some big sin. He was nudging Him. He was bumping Him.

He was trying to give Him a psychological, throw Him off balance, in order that when He began His ministry, He would, right at the start, start off on the wrong foot. All through His ministry, our Lord Jesus, and let me sort of give you this overview.

Christ's Passion to Do the Father's Will

All through the ministry of the Lord Jesus, He had a burning passion in His heart. I think on another occasion, I told you about the words the Lord Jesus said when He was a little baby. And they're from Hebrews chapter 10.

When He was a baby, according to the Bible, He said, I have come to do Thy will, O my God. A body Thou hast prepared for me. And just as when He was a baby, He said that, all through His life, He was consumed with that single passion.

That monomania. I must do the will of God. He came to do the will of God. Now let me just read. I've jotted down several verses from different places in the Bible, just to capture that burden. Listen to these verses.

John 5, verse 19. Jesus therefore answered and was saying to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself unless it is something He sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, these things the Son does.

Verse 30. John chapter 5, verse 30. I can do nothing on my own initiative. As I hear, my judgment is just because I do not seek my own will. I seek the will of Him who sent me. John 6, verse 38. I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of Him who sent me.

John 7, verse 16. My teaching is not mine. It is His who sent me. John 4, verse 34. My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me and to accomplish His work. I could show you verse after verse after verse that gives that direction.

You know that was the passion on His heart. John 8, verse 28. Jesus therefore said, When you lift up the Son of Man, you will know that I am He and that I did nothing on my own initiative. I speak the things as my Father taught me.

He who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone. I always do the things that are pleasing unto Him. And who can forget Gethsemane? Remember in the Garden of Gethsemane, right here in Luke 22, He withdrew from them about a stone's throw.

And He knelt down and began to pray, saying, Father, if Thou art willing to remove this cup from me, nevertheless, not what I will, but Thy will be done. And so all through His ministry, Jesus came and presented Himself in a sinless humanity in order to teach us how God intended us to live.

He was a representative man. He was man as God intended man to be. And as He came, He took that body that God had prepared for Him and He made Himself available to His Father. He lived in dependence upon His Father.

He trusted His Father for everything. He never spoke a word except it was from the Father. He never did a thing except that it was from the Father. He did always what pleased the Father. He called that His food, His drink.

I have bread to eat that you do not know of, He said. My meat is to do the will of God. It was that that this temptation is all about. He came as man and was dependent on His Father and Satan tried to bump Him, to just shake that dependence, to get Him for one time to act independently of God.

And if He had succeeded in getting Him to act independently, Satan would have had the victory. And that's what the temptation is all about, to get Jesus to do something on His own, to act by His own initiative, His own strength, His own wisdom, by His own will.

If you miss that, you miss the dynamic of the whole intention of Christ appearing on the earth as man, as God intended men to be. He came to show us how to live. Let me give a silly illustration of it.

The Christian Life as Divine Life in the Human Vessel

I have a work glove. And for many, the Christian life is something like this. There's the glove, that's me. And what I need in order to live the Christian life is instruction. And so this thumb needs to be instructed how to grip.

And this index finger needs to be instructed how to wrap around and so on. And all these digits need a Bible study. And so we take this thing to church and we learn something. And we take it to Bible study and we learn.

And we're trying to instruct the glove. And so the glove receives a commandment. Glove, pick up that Bible. Maybe it needs another Bible conference. Maybe it needs more instruction. Glove, pick up the Bible.

It can't do it any more than I as a Christian can obey any command God gives me. Ed Miller, love your wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it. Ed Miller, turn the other cheek. Go the second mile.

In everything, give thanks. Rejoice evermore. And I just lay there. And I go to this conference and that conference thinking that I need to learn something else. Our Lord Jesus came, deity, God came and did an amazing thing.

He clothed himself in humanity. And so deity was in humanity. And he taught us how to live. He was the representative man. And he became dependent on God and made himself available to God so completely that everything that was possible for the Father became possible in the Son because the Son had yielded himself to do the will of his Father.

Now what? Glove, pick up that Bible. Here's an amazing thing, watch this. Now the glove is only limited by the limitations of my hand. Whatever my hand can do, the glove can do. The power of my hand is now the power of the glove.

And this illustrates the dynamic, the reality of what the Christian life is. The Christian life is not my ability to imitate God. The Christian life is not some philosophy where we learn all the rules on how to live a life.

It's the indwelling of God. And Jesus came once, indwelt humanity so that we could see with these eyes God living in flesh. Then he went to heaven and he said, now I want to do it again. And I want to come and indwelt you by my spirit.

And I want to be like the hand in the glove. So that the only limitations on you and me in living the Christian life is the limitations that are on him. And that's what the Christian life is all about.

It's to learn how to so depend upon God and make myself available to him as he made himself available to the Father. So that the life that he lived by dependence, I now live by dependence. And it sets you free to realize it's God in you living through you.

Rather than, as I did for years, for seven years hardly, I thought God called me to serve him. And I was working my head off for God and spending my time and not getting anywhere. I had no relationship with God because I thought I was supposed to do for God.

But what a difference when I discovered by his goodness that he wanted to live through me. What a difference, God living through you or you living for God. Back to Luke chapter 4. The point of this is that our Lord Jesus, representing man in the wilderness, was now living the hand in the glove.

God was in him. And Satan did not want that to happen. And in some way in these temptations he tried to bump him. He tried to knock him. He tried to get him off balance so he would stop depending on God.

So he would lose this passion to just live in that dependence upon the Lord. Do something on your own. And that was the whole victory of the thing. Alright, let's look then at the first temptation with that as background.

The First Temptation: Doubting the Father's Love

Verse 3, And the devil said to him, If you are the son of God, tell this stone to become bread. Jesus answered him, Man shall not live by bread alone. Now let me give you a single word that I think describes the heart, the essence of each of the temptations.

And then we'll take it apart one by one. I think the first temptation can be summarized by the word doubt. And when I say first, second, third, I'm using Luke's order. Matthew gives a different order which tells us the order is not important.

But we'll follow Luke's order. The first temptation can be summarized by the word doubt. The second temptation can be summarized by the word ambition. And the third temptation can be summarized by the word presumption.

And I think if you see those three words, it'll pretty much get the heart of what's going on here. The first temptation, turn this stone into bread, had to do with Satan's attempt to get the Lord Jesus to doubt his father and to doubt his father's love.

Now, the first temptation was not really turn the stone to bread. That was the occasion for the temptation. But that wasn't the temptation. Actually, turning the stone to bread, that's not sin. There are some drives of the body that I think are inherently sinful.

The drive of the body to have an impure lust or to covet or to get even or to hate, those would be wrong. But hunger's not sin. It's not a sin to be hungry. It's not a sin to be thirsty. It's not a sin to be tired.

God gave us those drives. It's not a sin to desire sex. There's a right way to have it, but it's not wrong. Those are drives God built in. I think Jesus could have turned the sand into a turkey dinner and he wouldn't have sinned.

That wasn't the point of it. Satan didn't care about his hunger. There was no sin in turning that rock to bread. The temptation was to get Jesus to doubt. Did you notice the very first word of the temptation?

The first word in verse 3, If you are the Son of God, try to get the context now. Remember what happened just before this. Our Lord Jesus stood, numbered with transgressors, in the waters of Jordan in the baptism.

And the Bible says a voice came out of heaven. And the voice said, You are my beloved Son. In you I am well pleased. He had just heard that voice. And it was right after that that the Holy Spirit brought him into the wilderness to be tempted.

Now, see the difference between several times God broke the silence and spoke from heaven. At the baptism, when the voice came out of heaven, the Father was speaking to the Son. You are my beloved Son.

In you I am pleased. At the transfiguration in Luke 9 .35, it was almost the same, but the Father was speaking about the Son, not to the Son. This is my beloved Son. Hear Him. And He was talking to the disciples.

But this time, Jesus Himself heard the words, You are my Son, my beloved Son, and I have pleasure in you. Satan comes along and says, If you are the Son of God, are you really the Son of God? Let me put words in Satan's mouth and paraphrase to get the sense of this.

Here's what Satan was saying. He said, You've heard what you think is the Father's opinion. This is my beloved Son. I'm well pleased. Satan was trying to get Him to change that opinion. I think Satan was saying something like this, I understand, Jesus, that you heard a voice from heaven.

And that voice said that you were God's Son and that God was well pleased with you. Let me ask you this question. If you are so beloved by God, and if you are so loved by God, and if you are His Son, what in the world are you doing out here in this wilderness?

Would a loving Father cast His Son into the wilderness? And why do you have cramps in your stomach? Why are you so hungry? If He was pleased with you, wouldn't He feed you? How can you say God loves you when He's allowed this to happen in your life?

If you're really loved and you're really His beloved child, then why are you in jeopardy every day by these wild beasts? What are you doing out here in the wilderness? Why doesn't your Father give you some relief?

Why doesn't He give you some comfort? Why doesn't He feed you? Day after day after day, you have this pain, you have this hunger. You're in this wilderness, in this waste. You're lonely. You're supposed to be His beloved?

Would He treat you like this? See, that's what that was all about. Are you sure, Jesus, dead sure, that you are the Son of God? Did you really hear that voice? Are you deceived? Was that really true? Is this how love treats an offspring?

And by such spurs as that, Satan was trying to get Him to doubt His Father. It's nothing new. That's how He began in the Garden of Eden, remember. Hath God said, you shall not surely die? He loves to get us to doubt.

Oh, if He could get us to doubt the Father. If He could get us to doubt God's love. Satan was trying to destroy the ministry of the Lord Jesus before it even started. He was trying to get Him to believe that God is love and a loving God would never allow His children to suffer.

More subtle than that was this. If He could get Jesus off the road of suffering, do you realize He would have stopped right at the beginning? The road to the cross. And that's what He's saying, you're suffering, you don't need to suffer.

Act on your own. You're powerful. You could do a miracle. You can stop this suffering. Get off the road to suffering. Satan didn't want Jesus to go to the cross. He wanted Him off the road of suffering.

And right at the beginning, the way He thought He could do it, if He could get Him to have the slightest doubt about God and about God's love, it would take Him ultimately off the road of suffering. The answer the Lord Jesus gave shows His simple-hearted trust in His Holy Father God.

Man shall not live by bread alone. Matthew gives the full quote, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Jesus was not in the wilderness on His own. He didn't decide, I think I'll go out in the wilderness and fast for 40 days.

Luke 4, verse 1 says, He was led about by the Spirit into the wilderness. He was in God's will. And He knew if God brought Him into the wilderness, then God would provide for Him in the wilderness. And He just had this implicit trust in His Father God that in God's time, God would do what God wanted to do.

Satan was trying to get Jesus to believe that God wasn't enough, that He needed God plus bread. But to the Lord Jesus, of course, His Father was sufficient. I told you I thought that Satan was trying to get Jesus to act independently of God as he got Adam in the Garden of Eden to act independently of God and do something on his own.

In verse 3, He says, Tell the stones to become bread. As long as God's not in the wilderness, and without Him was nothing made that was made. He could have out of nothing, He didn't even need the stones to make bread.

He could have done it out of nothing. And we know later on that He said, Out of these stones I could bring children of Abraham. And of course you know from the Bible that for 40 years He had provided in the wilderness for three and a half million people.

He could provide. He turned the water to wine. He could provide. He multiplied loaves and bread. He could have met His own needs. But it was deeper than that. He would not act independently. He was going to trust His Father all the way.

And that was the essence of this first temptation. Now in order to make this intensely practical, and I'm going to do this with each of the temptations, let me suggest several ways Satan tempts us. The seed of the woman.

The children of Christ. The servants not above his master. How he tempts us to turn stones into bread. Let me mention five simple observations I get from this, and then we'll wrap it up. One of the things Satan did to the Lord Jesus and tries to do to us is tie in God's heart.

Circumstances Are Not the Measure of God's Love

Tie in God's love with favorable circumstances. In other words, he tries to make us think that if things are going well, then God loves us. And if things are not going well, then we have a reason to hold God's love in suspicion.

He insinuates if we're really children of God, then God is going to insulate us from some of the hard things. If He delights in us, He's going to deliver us. If we're really His children. That's the same, by the way, exactly the same temptation that was hurled at Him at the cross.

If He is the Son of God, let Him come down from the cross. He believed in God, let God deliver Him. And so if you're really a believer, then God will deliver you. Now you might think this never happens, but I'll tell you, it happens over and over again.

There's one very sad story that was very dear to us. Remember the golfing buddy I told you about? Such a dear friend of mine. He lived with us for about five years. I love that man like my own life. And he had a sister.

And his sister had rheumatoid arthritis. And to a degree, I had never seen it. I mean, her joints were just so swollen. She just lived in agony. Someone told her one day that if she were truly a child of God, God would heal her of that rheumatoid arthritis.

And so she cried out for healing, and it didn't come. And because of that, she thought she was not a child of God. If I'm a child of God, He'll heal me. I cried for healing. I didn't get it. And from that day on, we had the terrible occasion to deal with someone who thought they had committed the unpardonable sin.

I don't know if you're familiar with all that kind of thing, but she thought there was no hope for her. She couldn't be forgiven. Her swollen joints were evidence that God had rejected her. And she went into the most terrible depression.

And she had all kinds of medications and help. She went to doctors. She was put in the hospital many times. We prayed. We wept. We showed her scripture. We could not convince that dear girl that she was a child of God and you didn't measure God's love by what He mysteriously allows in your life.

I say, don't think it never happens. She finally took her life. After five attempts, she finally took her own life. So discouraged she was. Satan has tried to do that over and over again. Brothers and sisters in Christ, let me just assure you, God's blessings in your life are not an indispensable sign of God's approval.

And neither are the lack of blessings in your life an indispensable sign of His disapproval. What goes on in your life, God has such wise purposes and we can't always nail it down. But just because you may be financially pressed or have troubles or tribulation or there's sickness in your body or somebody in your family, don't conclude that God does not love you.

Don't conclude that you are not God's child. Satan, that's what he tried to do to Jesus. He tried to get Him to doubt the Father's love because things weren't going right. Don't doubt the Lord. He loves you and whatever He has allowed or engineered in your life that may be bitter or distasteful, it is not a measure of His heart for you.

And so that's one of the ways that Satan would love you to believe if the bread fails or if your strength fails or if your health fails or if finances fail or if your particular aspirations in life come crashing down, that God has forsaken you.

It's not true. Don't measure God's love by your circumstances. His purposes are bigger than any hunger I have or any hunger you might have. As you know, I have a deaf son. Profoundly deaf. And one day somebody came to my door and said, I have come to cast the demon of deafness out of your son.

I don't know how you would respond to such as that. There was no demon of deafness in my son. I don't have the full answer, but I know nothing there militated against the amazing love of God. And what was in my son was from the loving hand of his father.

We're going to have to understand it. We're not going to doubt God because something goes wrong in our life. All right, a second way Satan tempts us. He not only tempts us to measure God's love by our outward circumstances, but Satan tries to get us to fall, to turn rocks into bread by the sin of anxiety.

Anxiety as Doubt in God's Care

Think about it. The sin of anxiety. You realize all anxiety in a believer is nothing more than doubting God. If he can get you to doubt God, honestly, and I don't mean to play with this, that is more dangerous than if you fell into some gross perversion or some sin.

And we always think, oh, someone's gone off on drugs or gone off on alcohol or some addiction or something like that. It's so terrible. It's worse to doubt God. It's worse to doubt God. And if Satan can get you to doubt God, and one of the ways is anxiety, because anxiety is really saying, God has nothing to do with my present circumstances and I don't know how things are going to work out.

You're the child of God. Let me just read these verses from Matthew because there's no way I could say it better. For this reason I say to you, do not be anxious for your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, for your body, what you shall put on.

Life is more than food. The body is more than clothing. Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow, neither do they reap nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

Do not be anxious, saying, what shall we eat, what shall we drink, with what shall we clothe ourselves? All these things the Gentiles eagerly seek. Your heavenly Father knows you have need of these things.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. And so by anxiety we can violate or we can fall to this first temptation. Let me mention a couple of others and we'll be done.

Trying to Help God Independently

The third way, and this one I have to almost chew my tongue to a stump because it can be so abused, and that is we can try to act independently of God and try to help God. Now the reason I said chew my tongue to a stump is because faith is not passive.

God doesn't expect us to sit back on our duck and wait for Him to do it. He expects us to do it. But there are times, and we know in our inner heart when those are, that our reaching out to help God is really trying to rescue God because He's not coming through.

And in that case, because God wasn't coming through, we rise up sometime in the flesh in order to make things happen. I remember because I wanted so much to share the gospel, I tried to make opportunities happen.

And Lillian can testify what a tangled thicket. I got in because I tried to open my own doors and tried to use all who you know and trying to use leverage. And if we didn't have volunteers, use the old high pressure.

And if you want people to respond, I studied the principles of group dynamics because the Holy Spirit wasn't doing His job. And I thought I was going to try to help God and so on. And so another way, I can't judge you and you can't judge me when we put forth some effort, but you know in your heart what I mean when I say that's another way we can turn the rocks to bread.

The Relationship Between Physical Weakness and Spiritual Discernment

We try to do what only God can do. There's a fourth application to this. And this whole thing took place when Jesus was hungry. And I'm calling attention to the relationship between the physical and the spiritual in your life.

Don't think there's not a relationship. Satan loves to get us when we're tired and when we're weak and when we're run down. We can't blame sin for the weakness of the flesh because the flesh is always weak.

And so we can't use that. This idea that I'm irritable today. I've got a good right to be. I didn't get a good night's sleep last night. That's not an excuse for being irritable. I'm grouchy because you should see the people that I work with.

I'm impatient because of my coworkers and so on. There's a relationship between our body and our spirit. Remember in the Old Testament when Elijah was discouraged? The Lord appeared to him and did not give him a Bible verse.

He did not give him a Bible study. That poor man didn't need a Bible study. He was discouraged. God gave him a sandwich and put him to bed. And sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do get some rest.

I know I was dealing with someone it doesn't sound like good counsel but they were getting up so early for devotions it was destroying them. They were getting up 4 o 'clock in the morning and my counsel to them was hey, sleep in.

Sleep in. You need sleep more than devotions. You don't have to get up that early. And I know in my own life Lillian and I have made the decision when we're run down we've made the decision that we will not decide anything important when we're run down.

And I know I don't know how you spring hits you. Spring fever destroys me. Absolutely I'm wiped out. And I had to come to the Lord. I hope He took me seriously on this. If He ever guides me in the spring I'm not going.

I'm serious. I've already told Him that because every spring I want to leave. Every spring I want to start a new ministry. Every spring I want to move. Spring fever I could not know the voice of God in my heart from spring fever no matter what.