Jesus in the Wilderness | Matthew 4:1-11

Hi everyone, my name is Bianca. I'm going to read Matthew 4 verse 1 to 11 for you and I'll give you a minute to look that up.

Matthew 4:1–11

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert, to be tempted by the devil.

After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.

The tempter came to him and said, If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.

Jesus answered, It is written, Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple.

If you are the Son of God, he said, throw yourself down, for it is written, He will command His angels concerning you,

and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.

Jesus answered him, It is also written, Do not put the Lord your God to the test.

Again the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour.

All this I will give you, he said, if you will bow down and worship me.

Jesus said to him, Away from me Satan, for it is written, Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.

Then the devil left him and angels came and attended him.

Thank you Bianca.

Good morning again church, it's great to be together.

These are the words of God that we have indeed heard read before us this morning.

And if you have your Bible with you, let me just say we're going to be in our text quite a bit this morning as per usual.

But let's go to the author of these words and ask for his help in understanding what he has given to us this morning.

Would you please pray with me?

Father we are indeed in awe of the work that has been done on this earth in our Lord Jesus Christ.

We thank you Father that we as your creatures, as your image bearers, as your people,

we don't have to guess or wonder about your justice, your holiness and your love.

But we have indeed been told about it from the evangelists.

Father as we come to these words of eternal life this morning,

would you please help us to understand them by the work of your spirit among us?

And we ask for this in the precious name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

So for the past couple of weeks we've been focusing on the ministry of the rugged mountain preacher, John,

who in the wilderness of Judea was seen by Matthew as Isaiah's prophesied forerunner of Yahweh himself, Matthew 3.3.

And it was to this John the Baptist that the task was given of getting Israel ready to meet her Messiah,

who as we saw was bringing in the kingdom of heaven.

And John prepared Israel for all of this by preaching that all those who turn to God would be purified before God,

because they would be baptized, not with water like he was doing, but with the very spirit of God.

And it was in the midst of all of this that we were introduced to the man Jesus,

who came to John to be baptized from Galilee.

Now as we saw last week, as soon as he being Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water,

and at that moment heaven was opened and he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove and the lighting on him.

But not only that, which is incredible in itself, we also saw a voice from heaven,

which said, this is my son whom I love, with him I'm well pleased.

All this to say what we witnessed at the end of chapter 3 last week was a very public coronation of Israel's long-awaited king.

Not with a prophet announcing Jesus to Israel, mind you, but God himself,

gave Jesus the Holy Spirit for his ministry and mission in bringing in the kingdom of heaven on this earth.

And that leads us to the text that we have before us this morning.

So if you have your Bibles open, we're looking at chapter 4, verse 1,

and we read, then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

Okay, wow, it really is, as God said through Isaiah all those years ago,

for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither your ways, my ways.

I mean, think about it. Israel had been waiting for her Messiah for hundreds and hundreds of years,

and he'd been talked about by all the prophets who said that he was going to come and rule and reign

from his father's throne, from King David's throne.

I mean, we've even seen Israel's greatest prophet, John, preach that the Messiah was going to come to Israel

and start sifting the wheat from the chaff with his winnowing fork.

What do we have here, church? God announces Israel's Messiah.

He gives him the Holy Spirit, but then the Holy Spirit doesn't lead Jesus into Jerusalem to conquer Rome.

No, just the opposite. He leads Jesus straight out into the wilderness.

Not to gather an army, not to build a fort, not even to go and make weapons, but to do what?

What's in our text this morning? To go and be tempted by the devil.

Now, if you were here this morning and scratching your head and wondering what on earth is going on here,

let me assure you that you're not alone. In fact, let's remember who Matthew was primarily writing to.

He was writing to Jewish Christians to affirm and build their faith in Jesus and to the Jews to prove that their Messiah had indeed come.

So let me assure you here, the original audience would have been scratching their heads as well.

So we have to stand back and have a look and have a think at what Matthew is showing us here.

And so first, I think something needs to be said about this word that lies under our English translation for temptation.

And that's that it can also be translated as testing.

But in saying that, I think both ways of understanding it are on view here.

As God is testing the Messiah of Israel as he did their patriarch Abraham, though as we will see,

because the devil is involved in all of this, he works a totally different angle.

And that is to tempt the Messiah to reject God and follow him.

As the great theologian reformer once said all those years ago, God tests for edification.

The devil tempts for destruction.

Second thing that I want us to have a think about here is the context that the Holy Spirit leads Jesus into.

That's the wilderness for 40 days.

Now, we know already by looking in our series that John primarily ministered in the wilderness.

That's where we saw him preaching to Israel.

But if we think about the whole Council of Scripture and in particularly the history of Israel here,

the wilderness is more than just a place that we were introduced to in the book of Matthew.

Now, the wilderness is where a certain Jewish nation spent 40 years wandering around after they too came up out of the waters,

not of the Jordan, but of the Red Sea.

You see, none of this would have been lost on Matthew's original Jewish audience

because they were a people that had come from a nation who had been rescued from Egypt,

who had come out of the Red Sea, through the Red Sea, and were taken into the wilderness for 40 years.

But as we know from reading the first five books of the Bible,

when the people were tested, they crumbled under the weight of that testing and ultimately rejected Yahweh as their God.

Let's keep that in mind as we work through our text this morning.

Just one other thing that I want us to have a little bit of a think about here,

and that's who the devil is and why he's even involved.

Well, the first thing that I want to point out is that this isn't the first time that we've been introduced to the devil either.

No, in fact, we were introduced to him in the opening scenes of human history in Genesis 3,

where this same devil or Satan, as he's sometimes called,

tempted our first parents into doubting God's Word so that they would ultimately reject him.

And they did, which plunged the human race into spiritual darkness and death.

And it's from that moment on that all creation has been darkened with sin and under the rule of the Prince of this world, as he's called.

That's right. There's a spiritual realm with created beings and forces that are out there, not for humanity's good.

We had a bit of a look at that when we were going through our Ephesians series.

All this to say the devil with his minions or demons, as they're called, they're not only an enemy of God,

they're also an ancient enemy of the human race, which is continually out to turn God's image bearers against him

so that we will doubt our good creator and curse him and die.

We see this all throughout the Bible, this Satan rising up against God's people to snuff them out and destroy them,

either individually, like in the case of Adam, or corporately with the people of God in Israel,

so that there will be no light in the world to draw the nations to God, which we'll explore a bit more in Matthew five.

All that to say, what we're seeing here in our text before us this morning is Jesus, the second Adam who represents all humanity,

Israel's Messiah, who represents God's people up against that ancient serpent, the devil, in another spiritual battle between two kingdoms.

The kingdom of heaven that is breaking into this world with Jesus and the kingdom of darkness,

which encompasses this world and is ruled by this spiritual being known as the devil.

That's the context that we have before us this morning, Church.

Jesus, who is the Messiah sent to Israel to bring in the long awaited kingdom of heaven in the power of the Spirit,

being trialed by humanity's greatest enemy, the devil.

So the question is, will Jesus, like Adam, who doubted God's word, or like Israel, who rejected Yahweh, triumph over Satan,

or will he be like all humanity before him who crumbled and gave into temptation to follow the devil?

Well, praise be to God, we already know the answer. But it's here that we want to explore how Jesus overcame the evil one

and how as God's people, we the Church, can do the same thing when evil and temptation come after us and be assured that it will.

So let's look at our text, verse three. The tempter came to him and said, if you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.

Now we have to remember, this is all after Jesus had been fasting for 40 days and 40 nights.

And as Matthew tells us here, he was hungry, verse two.

Let's keep that in mind. Jesus was starving because he had dedicated the last 40 days of going with our food

and giving his entire attention to the task of prayer.

Now the question instantly becomes, could Jesus have really sinned?

Well, as we've already seen in this series, Jesus is very man, but also very God.

I don't want to spend too much time on this because we've already covered it just a few weeks ago,

but we need to understand that because Jesus is very man, like you and me, he could be tempted.

But because Jesus is fully God and God cannot be tempted, we have to hold these truths together.

Jesus being fully man was able to be tempted, yet fully God who cannot be tempted was in the midst of this trial that we have in our text this morning.

How do we put these mind boggling mysteries together?

Well, I've heard it put this way. Think about the person that you love most in this world.

Picture them. And let me ask you a horrendous question. Could you murder that person?

Well, I hope that you're thinking absolutely not. And I also hope you're feeling repulsed at the very idea of hurting that person in any way.

But I want you to hear the question again. The question is, could you murder that person?

In terms of physically performing that action, and I know it's unthinkable to you, but it would be physically possible, right?

Well, in a similar way, Jesus in his deity as the light of the world in whom there is no darkness could not have sinned as his moral nature is incapable of that kind of action.

Yet at the very same time in his humanity, Jesus could have sinned in the sense that he was absolutely capable of doing so.

That is the tension we have to hold with our text this morning.

So what is the first temptation exactly?

Well, I want you to notice that this isn't about food as much as it is about doubt.

Notice it. The tempter, which is who the devil is, says here, if you are the son of God, verse three.

Now that's significant to this whole thing, because what have we just seen declared to Jesus by God the Father?

Well, we've just seen God the Father declare in chapter three, this is my son, whom I love, with him I'm well pleased.

And now we have the devil here in chapter four, trying to cast doubt on the very thing that's just been said by God, trying to get Jesus to doubt God's word that he's a son.

I mean, if this doesn't reek of there's nothing new under the sun, I don't know what does.

And I say that because he's up to those very same tricks that we saw in the garden with Adam, right?

Trying to get people to doubt God's word.

Genesis two, God said, You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

For when you eat from it, you will surely die.

Then Satan comes, very next chapter, verse three, Genesis three, saying, Really?

Did God say you'll surely die if you eat a certain tree? Come on.

So we have Satan, the devil, the tempter, coming to Jesus, doing the same thing here, trying to get Jesus to doubt God's word.

But let's look at how he responds, verse four.

Jesus answered, It is written, Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Now, it's so interesting what Jesus quotes here, as we'll see in just a moment.

But for now, I want you to notice this.

The devil tries to cast doubt on Jesus's sonship in the context of provision.

Let me say that again. The devil tries to cast doubt on Jesus's sonship in the context of provision, saying in a roundabout way,

If you're really God's son, then why are you starving? If your father's good, why is he not providing for you?

Why is he not providing for you? Come on, you can do it. You can make these stones bread.

Really, at the heart of this is self-gratification.

That's what we have here. The devil is tempting Jesus to doubt God's word so that he'll give into self-gratification.

And church, no doubt, our bodies need food and yes, our bodies have other desires.

But, and this is the important thing, these desires are intended to be looked after by our good Father in heaven.

And Jesus gets that because we see it in the way that he uses the quote from Deuteronomy.

And I want to show you that, but first let me set the scene.

So God rescued his people Israel, who he just so happened to call his son, from slavery and then miraculously took them through the Red Sea into the wilderness.

But as we read, they didn't trust God to provide for them like he said he would.

No, just the opposite. They freak out and started questioning him, wanting to go back to Egypt, wanting to go back to the House of Bondage, wanting to go back to slavery.

But as we see in the midst of their complaining, God always intended to provide for his child as a good father.

And he miraculously met their every need and made sure that they didn't die of starvation or thirst like he said they wouldn't as he led them to the promised land.

That's where Jesus took his quote from.

He took his quote from Moses in Deuteronomy 8.3, who at the very end of his ministry, he's preaching the sermon and he reminds Israel that as they were tested in the wilderness,

they failed to trust God's word time and time and time again.

So in effect, by Jesus using this quote, he's saying to the devil, where Israel failed, I won't. Where they failed to trust that God wouldn't provide for them, I do trust.

And there is something so much greater than gratifying the immediate desires here.

It's trusting what the word of God says.

So that's the first tactic that we see from the devil.

He's tempting Jesus to not trust God's word, to trust in God's provision and trying to get Jesus to self-gratify his own desires.

Next he shifts to self-protection. Read with me verses five and six.

Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple.

If you're the son of God, he said, throw yourself down for it's written.

He will command his angels concerning you and they will lift you up in their hands so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.

This is an incredibly interesting context that we have here.

We read that Jesus took Jesus to the highest point of the temple, meaning that this would have been done maybe in full public view

because you have to remember the temple was the highest building in Jerusalem and could be seen from any part of the city.

And the devil had Jesus stand on the highest point to jump off.

And that's what we have here. We have Jesus standing on the highest building, on the highest point in the whole city.

Then the devil starts quoting from Psalm 91 about God commanding his angels to come and rescue him.

Verse seven. Jesus answered him, it is also written, do not put the Lord your God to the test.

Once again, Jesus's response here goes back to Deuteronomy, which helps us understand the essence of this temptation.

Because he takes his quote from Deuteronomy 6.16, which says, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test, but notice this, as you did at Massa.

And that, as you did at Massa, takes us back to Exodus 17, when the people of God were wandering in the wilderness experiencing the testing of God.

It's there that we read that they began to complain about not having enough water and they challenge Moses.

And the challenge was, is God really among us or not? And they begin to question the presence, the provision and protection of God over them.

Complaining and grumbling, and they end up putting God to a test to protect them from certain death.

There's nothing new under the sun. Now the devil was tempting Jesus to do the same thing.

Tempting Jesus to jump off the temple as to force the father to show that Jesus was truly his son by not letting him fall to his death.

I mean, this was the equivalent of the devil getting Jesus to ask God for proof of his presence and protection,

which would demonstrate from Jesus a complete faithlessness in God's very nature towards his people.

That's what the devil wanted him to do. He wanted Jesus to do something outlandish so that he would have to be saved,

so as to prove that God really cared for him, like the Israelites did in the wilderness all those years ago.

Who basically said to God, are you with us or not?

Time and time again, God showing his love, his covenant faithfulness to these people, and they're screaming out,

are you going to let us perish? Are you going to save us?

Jesus saw right through it, and he simply responded by quoting scripture because he had an unshakable security in what the word said.

He knew that the father cared for him. He knew that the father was pleased with him.

Jesus knew the word, and he didn't need any more proof.

And as we see, by the end of these temptations, God did indeed provide for him.

Verse 11.

So the devil has gone after self-gratification. He's going after self-protection, and now he goes after self-exhortation.

Verses eight and nine.

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour.

All this I'll give you, he said, if you bow down and worship me.

Now, the context of this last temptation is admittedly, Church, a little harder to understand

because we all know in this room, as well as the original readers, that there's no mountain on earth that could show all the kingdoms of the world at one time.

So this might be an insight into another tactic that the devil has taken, and it might be with a vision.

Whatever the case may be, the devil says something intriguing that also gives us an incredible insight into his deluded mind.

That's what he says to Jesus about the world.

He says, all this I will give you.

Now, we need to understand how crafty this character is.

He's gone from trying to cast doubt in the son's mind as to his father's word and good provision

to now giving a future promise that he and Jesus knew full well that he couldn't give.

But I don't actually think the temptation that the devil is presenting here is that easily dismissed.

You see, we've already seen this morning.

The devil knew the Scriptures.

So he knew that if the world was going to belong to Jesus as the obedient second Adam,

if he was going to be the king of God's people that took the throne of his father, David,

well, the devil knew full well that that was only going to happen by doing it God's way.

And that was through the horrendously difficult road of the cross.

So, church, with that in mind, the temptation that the devil is presenting to Jesus here was to not have to do it God's way,

to not have to do it by God's way of going through the horrors of the cross as the suffering servant that Isaiah prophesied about.

The devil and Jesus knew full well that for the kingdom of heaven to come into this world,

for it to penetrate into the deepest, darkest parts of this world, it had to be established in the way that God ordained it.

And that was by way of the cross.

Why? Because no one enters into the kingdom of heaven without first being purified.

No one can stand in the holiness of God without being holy themselves.

And for that to happen, they have to have a sacrifice.

And that sacrifice has to be perfect if it's going to last for all eternity.

Jesus knew that was on the line here.

He knew that for his people to be saved for all eternity, for them to be justified and purified, they had to receive the Holy Spirit.

So as their servant, he had to stand in their place and take the punishment that they deserve for their wickedness.

That's the temptation here.

The devil is saying, you're a king, you're not a servant.

Why do you have to do it God's way?

Why do you have to suffer?

You can have all the kingdoms of the world now.

All you have to do is do it my way.

And you can have it now.

Brothers and sisters, this is what makes verse 10 so incredibly, incredibly powerful.

With all of that presented to Jesus, with all of that on the line, with all that Jesus knew he was going to have to go through for his people,

as Isaiah's suffering servant, he says to the devil, away from me Satan, for it's written,

worship the Lord your God and serve him only.

Verse 10.

So as we wrap up this morning, we wanted to answer the question that we started with.

And that was how did Jesus overcome the evil one?

And how as God's people can we do the same when evil and temptation comes after us?

Well, I think the words of American theologian, Dr. Russ Moore, sum it up very nicely.

He says Jesus refused to exchange the end time exaltation by the Father for a right now exaltation of a snake.

Jesus, the beloved son, knew the supreme duty of every single person on the planet and that's to worship God.

And he knew that everyone who humbles himself before the Lord would be exalted.

So he chose to live a life of suffering obedience to the Father instead of sinful submission to Satan.

And in the end, all authority in heaven and earth were given to him.

Church, we are told in scripture very clearly that we are to resist the devil and he will flee from us.

That is certainly the case, but as we have seen this morning,

we're to resist him in the knowledge and the strength and the wisdom of another.

And that's of God.

This means that you have to know when it's him or when it's you or others that are trying to drag you off and entice you.

And I say that because not everything is the devil.

As it's already been pointed out this morning, he's a created being, which means he's not omniscient.

He's not everywhere all at once like God.

That's not to say that there's not evil spirits that do have some sort of work in targeting Christians here in the city of Armidale and at this church by various means.

That's why we need the word of God, because it is the word that identifies the work of the evil one.

And it is through knowing the word that we can wise up to the evil one's scheme so that we can resist him,

not in our strength, but in the power and the work of the spirit.

We would be lying in this room this morning if we were to say we're no longer tempted to fulfill our wants apart from God's good design.

We are, and our flesh still desires to go back to so-called Egypt, to that house of bondage.

The devil knows that, and he's so subtle in the way that he attacks our desires, either for self-gratification, self-protection or self-exhortation in this world.

Always trying to convince us that our father doesn't really care about us, doesn't really know our needs,

and that we need to look in other places to find that satisfaction.

He tries to convince us always that these desires that we have, well, they define us.

That's who we really are.

So just go and do it.

But I want to say to you, brother, I want to say to you, sister, here this morning, because of Jesus, that is not who you are any longer.

It's because of Jesus and his total and utter obedience, which eventually, as the suffering servant, led him to go to that cross, that your sin has been forgiven,

that you have been washed clean, and that you are at this very moment a purified child of God.

And we all need reminding of this this morning, us all, that we are children of God.

And just because you have a desire that leads you towards temptation doesn't mean that that's who you're destined to be.

The reality is you may fight that desire for 40 days, 40 years or a lifetime, and it will be a battle.

The way to fight that battle, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, is the same way Jesus did.

And that was by trusting in the all satisfying, all sufficient goodness of our Father.

This is what Jesus did. Jesus didn't tell the Father when and how his desires should be met.

Instead, he trusted God to fulfill those desires in his way, according to his word.

So how do we fight self-gratification, self-protection, self-exaltation?

We fight it by believing, by trusting, and by realizing that our Father is indeed good.

Let us trust in the all satisfying, all sufficient goodness of our Father.

He is not keeping good things back from us.

We know he is a good Father, and as his children in Christ, we can rest in the unshakable security

that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

Would you please join me in prayer?

We thank you for the words that you have given us in the text of Matthew this morning.

We started our time by asking that your Spirit would work among us to show us Christ.

And I pray, Father, that we indeed see more clearly our loving Savior, the suffering servant

who didn't stay in that grave, but raised victorious, who indeed has given the Spirit,

who is alive and at work in us at this very moment.

Father, we are indeed tempted by various things.

Father, we do suffer with various infirmities.

And I ask for this church that you would give us wisdom, that you would give us discernment,

and that you would help us to pray, that you would help us to go and find time to get in that prayer closet

and come before you and confess our various struggles and infirmities,

and to witness and know and experience your loving kindness.

I ask for this all in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.