Here we are on the first Sunday of the Lenten Season. Lent is a 40 day period of time during which we are to prepare spiritually for the soon to arrive days in which we remember the suffering and death of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and in which we celebrate His glorious Resurrection.
Our Lenten journey to the Cross and Resurrection began on Ash Wednesday and continues today. Each of us needs to prepare for the Easter celebration by observing a period of self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s Holy Word.
Most of us have already decided what it is that we will give up for, or refrain from, during the next 40 days as our sacrifice for Lent. We do this not as a self-inflicted punishment, but rather to divert our thinking from material things to spiritual matters. During the Season of Lent, whenever we think about the item that we have chosen to give up, we are to turn our thoughts to God. But, hear me now! We must understand that Satan knows our plans and he would like nothing better than to ruin them if he can. He hates it when we concentrate on Jesus and all that He has done for us. Satan is furious when we are willing to sacrifice anything in order to show our love for Jesus.
So, as the journey begins for this Lenten Season, know full well that these next 40 days, will be a special time of temptation! Today’s Gospel lesson is all about temptation. And temptation is something we can all identify with. We all experience it from time to time in many different ways. Temptation has been with us since we were children.
There is the story of a young boy who wanted a pair of skates very badly. His parents wanted to teach him about the value of money and patience, so they told him he would have to earn and save enough to buy the skates himself. He performed small tasks around the house and was paid a small allowance. The boy began to save his money and one day his mother heard him in his room shaking his piggybank and counting his savings. Then his mother heard the familiar bells of the ice cream truck coming down their street. She waited to see what would happen. She knew her son wanted those skates, but he also loved ice cream. What would he do?
There was no sound from the boy’s room until the ice cream truck had passed their house and the bells could no longer be heard. Then, the mother heard her son’s small voice in his room pray, “Dear Jesus, don’t let the ice cream truck come down my street anymore.” Temptation for us can be a lot like that. The ice cream truck sometimes seems to come down our street with appalling regularity, bringing its huge variety of flavors and toppings right to our door.
But we are not alone. Praise God that He is a God who knows what it is like for us, in all of our humanness, to face temptation. Read again Luke 4:1-13. This Gospel reading tells us about the temptation of Jesus by Satan in the wilderness. We see that this is no simple temptation, but a series of temptations that go to the very foundations of life itself. These temptations were designed by Satan to see just what Jesus was made of. To test how strong His faith truly was. To determine if Jesus would truly be willing to follow the path that God the Father had set before Him, the path that Jesus knew led to the Cross on Calvary’s hill. Or would Jesus give in to Satan’s temptations and take the easy way out.
In each of the temptations, Satan offers Jesus an easy, less difficult, way out of the situation that He finds Himself in. Jesus has been in the wilderness for 40 days without food or drink, and to say that He was hungry would be a huge understatement. So where does Satan focus his first attack? Right where he thinks Jesus is the most vulnerable. Satan says in essence, “You’ve been out here for a long time. I know you’re hungry. You know you’re hungry. So if you are in fact the Son of God, why don’t you just turn these here stones into bread, and have something to eat? Not only that, but that way you can provide for the hunger of all of the starving people in the world. They need you. They need your power. They need your help. Just give them what they need and you will be their hero, their leader forever.”
Actually, this doesn’t sound so bad, so wrong, so diabolical. Or does it? Satan tempted Jesus to take the easy way to feed the hungry masses, to be a hero, but this easy way out is not God’s Plan. Jesus knew that if He did it that way, if He just went about turning stones into bread and focusing only on people’s physical needs, then that would be the primary, if not only, reason they would follow Him. The people would forget about their spiritual needs, which are far more important in the eternal scheme of things.
Jesus answers this Satanic temptation with a passage from Deuteronomy 8:3:
The most important food for all of us to ingest is the Word of God. But if Jesus just automatically provided for all of our physical needs, then I am willing to bet we would not study and learn the Word of God at all. I believe we would feel so secure because of our lack of physical need, that our spiritual needs would be either forgotten or ignored until it was too late. Satan was asking Jesus to remove not only our burdens, but also our desire to get to know and love Him. Satan said, “Son of God, take the easy way out!”
Do we not also, at times, ask Jesus to take the easy way out? Are we sometimes prone to ask for miracles, instead of being willing to work or try? Now, do not get me wrong. It is well and good that we ask God to provide a miracle, if it is according to His will. But many times, we demand a miracle, God’s will or not, and refuse to do anything to help ourselves or others. Then we blame God when things don’t turn out the way we want. We get the “I don’t need to help, let God or someone else do it,” attitude. Or we adopt the “I’m just going to sit around and see what God does” attitude.
There is a story about two frogs. One day these two frogs fall into a vat of cream. They both swam about for a while until they were getting tired. “We will never get out of here,” one frog said. So he stopped swimming, gave up, sank to the bottom and died. The other frog kept on thrashing his long legs around, paddling in the cream. He gradually began to feel the beginning of solid footing, so he kept kicking until he had good traction and leaped from the vat. His efforts had churned the cream into butter. One frog took the easy way out and died. The other took the more difficult road and lived.
Make no mistake about it; the road of sin is easy and wide. The road of Salvation is narrow and difficult. One leads to death and eternal torment. The other leads to everlasting life.
The second temptation we read about today has to do with power. Power is something that most humans covet very much, whether they admit it or not, whether they realize it or not. This temptation is a very dangerous one. The Devil tells Jesus, “I will give you all of the kingdoms of the world to rule over, if you will just bow down and worship me.” He is saying, “Jesus, if you will just kneel to me, I will give you the whole world to rule over. Take the easy way, Jesus. That’s all there is to it. The world has been given to me, and I will give it to you, if you will just bow down and worship me. That way you won’t have to go through that messy business with the Cross that God has waiting for you in a couple of years. You can bypass all that stuff. Come on, do it. Think of the world. No more wars among the nations. Equal distribution of wealth among the people. How good it will be.”
All of that does sound pretty good, doesn’t it? In today’s vernacular, “Not!” For you see, had Jesus taken Satan up on this offer, all of humankind would have forever lost our free will that God created and gave us. We would no longer have been free to chose to worship God or not worship God. We would no longer have been free to believe in Jesus or not believe. We would no longer be free to accept His salvation or reject it. If Jesus had bowed down to and worshipped the Devil, we would be forced to do the same!
So, once again, Jesus answers the Devil with a quote from Deuteronomy,
This brings us to the third temptation. This one is designed to short-circuit the work of faith. This one would be the easy way out for Jesus to gain followers. Satan said, “I have a great way to prove to everyone that you are who you say you are. Just get a large crowd around the Temple. Make sure the important people like the Pharisees and the Sadducees are gathered there. Then throw yourself from the highest point of the building. God has said that He would send His angels to protect you, so you will just float to the ground, unhurt in front of everyone. That will surely convince them all that you are the Son of God, as you claim to be.”
Again, this sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? There would be no reason for anyone to doubt or disbelieve in Jesus. It sure would make our job as Christians easier, you know, “Go into the world and make disciples of all peoples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you…”
Well, if that is the way God wanted His kingdom to come, He would not have had to gather the 12 disciples around Jesus, for Him to instruct and send out into the world to spread the Gospel. And He would not need us to do go out and witness either. But Praise the Lord! God wants us to be partners with Him in spreading the word of His kingdom to come. He wants humans spreading His Word to other humans, the Word proclaimed, the Word witnessed. God wants each person to believe, to trust, and to surrender to Jesus because they want to, not because they have to. God wants willing followers, not followers who have been dazzled by a few crowd-pleasing miracles.
The miracles performed by Jesus were done out of His sense of compassion for us, and as signs demonstrating where His power and authority came from. He did not do them to place people under a spell induced by some cheap magic tricks. Satan was saying to Jesus, “If you are who you say you are, the Son of God and God the Son, you’ll eliminate the necessity of faith and trust.” But God wants us to believe in His Son because we have felt His forgiveness, His power, His strength, His grace, His mercy, and His love.
So, one more time Jesus answers the Devil’s temptation with a quote from Deuteronomy 6:16,
It is at this point that the Devil flees from Jesus. But he will return later. Satan used three temptations to try to get Jesus to turn life upside down and follow the Devil’s plan, instead of following God plan. Satan wanted Jesus to take the easy way out and there are times when we want that too. But life is not easy. Living as a Christian is not easy. It is a journey that includes times of temptations and testing. Jesus was driven into the wilderness, a place that was dangerous and desolate, to face temptation by the Master Tempter himself, Satan.
In our lives too, we will at times find ourselves in the wilderness facing the Master Deceiver or one of his legion. The wilderness may be our career, our marriage, raising our family, our health, our finances, or one of countless other areas of our lives. But when we find ourselves in the wilderness place of testing, we can take solace in the knowledge that Jesus has already been there. Not only that, but the main temptation in the wilderness is that Satan wants us to believe that we are there all alone. He wants us to believe that we are totally cut off from God and His community. Indeed, many of us have the tendency to run from God and other Christians in times of trouble, when we should in fact be running toward them and Him.
We need to understand and embrace the fact that in this journey of life, we Christians are never alone. We have each other, we have Jesus Christ, and we have the Holy Spirit to guide us, to strengthen us, and to travel with us every step of the way, along the high mountaintops, and through the low valleys.
Our journey begins anew today. As we travel along, we need to believe in and trust the Truth that is Jesus Christ. For we are told in Scripture that when you have the Truth, “the Truth will indeed make you free.” When we receive Jesus and the salvation He offers us, He not only “sets” us free from our bondage to Satan and sin, Jesus “makes” us free. He kills the old spiritually bound creature that we were and recreates us as spiritually free beings. That is the free life that only Jesus can give. May we each respond in faith and trust to the One who gives us such a life. Amen!