Seeing Jesus in Matthew - The Temptation of Jesus

Hey, good morning. Good morning, everybody.

Hi, whoever said that. Good to see you all.

I realized as I was prepping this week, this is my first time up here since

starting in a role as associate pastor.

So yeah, I'm excited about that. I'm excited about, yeah, being a part of the team here.

And I had to put on, you know, because of that, I had to put on the pastor uniform today.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, look at Trey right now,

and you'll see there is clearly a uniform.

Yeah, so we'll call each other again next week, Trey, and we'll figure it out.

Yeah, I'm excited about this church. I'm excited about the community we have

right here, right now, and I'm also excited about how God is going to use this church in the future.

And no, I don't know exactly what that means, but I think there's exciting stuff going on here.

So let's pray, and then we'll dive into Matthew here.

Lord God, God, I just thank you so much for this time, for the opportunity that

we get to just sit under you today.

Let us just spend a few minutes here, just learning from you and seeing what

you have for us. God, show us your word.

Let us open it up together and let us see what you have for us this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.

I realize I did not say, if I haven't met you, my name is Ryan.

And yeah, so we're looking at Matthew today.

I mean, we've been in Matthew for a few weeks. Matthew's purpose in this book

is really to show us who Jesus is.

And so we have a nice picture on the screen that may or may not actually look

like Jesus, but we can kind of visualize that.

But that's Matthew's whole purpose is to show us Jesus. We've seen his birth,

all the prophecy that was fulfilled by his birth in the first couple years of his life.

And we're now about 28 years later, Jesus is ready to kick off his earthly ministry.

His cousin John was going around telling everybody, get ready.

The one we've been waiting for, the Messiah, he's coming.

We kind of talked about that last week. John baptizes Jesus in this magnificent

scene. We see Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the same place.

Spirit of God descends on Jesus. And it's like, let's go. Okay.

We've been waiting for this. Let's get this party started.

There's been so much lead up going all the way back to Genesis where Jesus Jesus

was prophesied as the coming one who would crush sin in the world,

and now he's here and ready to start his ministry. So let's go.

But you've got to love God's patience here. The first thing that we see happen

after that kind of let's go moment is Jesus is going into the wilderness on his own for a long time.

All this build up to this moment, and we start with a camping trip.

Not really a camping trip, but in some ways. So let's read. We're going to be in Matthew 4.

You guys have a Bible in the chair in front of you. It might be handy to have

it open to Matthew 4 because we're going to jump around to some different things,

but then just constantly referring back to Matthew 4.

And if you can't see on that tiny print on the screen, it's verses 1 through 11.

It says, then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

And after fasting for 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry.

And the tempter came and said to him, if you are the son of God,

command these stones to become loaves of bread.

But he answered, it is written, man shall not live by bread alone,

but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him up on the pinnacle of the

temple and said to him, if you are the son of God, throw yourself down for it

is written, he will command his angels concerning you.

And on their hands, they will, with their hands, they will bear you up lest

you strike your foot against a stone.

Jesus said to him, again, it is written, you should 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 glory.

And he said to him, all these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me.

Then Jesus said to him, be gone, Satan, for it is written, You shall worship

the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.

Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.

We'll be going back through this passage in some detail as we jump around,

but let me tell you exactly where we're going with this, kind of three big points that we see here.

And there are lots of different things that we could pull out of this.

This is a rich, dense passage.

So if you finish, if I'm done and you're like, well, why didn't you talk about? I get it.

There's a lot of other things. Let's talk after church. There's a lot of other

things we could have pulled out of this. Three things that we're going to look at today.

Jesus is humanity. And I think I have a a slide for this. Yeah,

Jesus is humanity, Jesus as fulfillment, and that God provides.

My family, I recently bought a pressure washer, and I don't know if any of you

guys have the pleasure of owning a pressure washer. I never have before.

It's fantastic. I'm probably going to, once we get home from the Blue Angels,

the pressure washer's coming out, and I got to do the backyard again.

It's great, but we've never had a pressure washer before. So I did our driveway

for the first time. And I thought our driveway was pretty clean.

I actually foolishly thought that my 1997 Toyota 4Runner with 272,000 miles

on it was not leaking oil because I couldn't see it on the driveway.

Turns out I couldn't see it because the driveway was too dirty.

So as soon as I got the junk off, there was stuff going on below the surface that I couldn't see.

There were cracks, there were oil stains, there was this weird little tar patch

that I have no idea where where that came from or how that got there.

But I couldn't see that because all I could see was just what was on the surface,

had to get down below it a little bit. So yeah, now you see where I'm going with it.

With this passage, there's some things going on down below the surface that

I honestly had not seen before this week and kind of digging into this.

So we are going to get out the pressure washer a little bit and we're going

to go into some things that might not be immediately apparent,

or at least they hadn't been immediately apparent in my previous reading on this stuff. off.

So the first big idea here, the humanity of Christ.

After fasting for 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry. That's how this begins.

This seems like such an obvious statement that it's easy to read it over as

if it's simply kind of setting up the next thing in the narrative.

And whether you read Jesus' experience in the wilderness as 40 literal 24-hour

days, or if you read it as a literary device to say a really,

really long time, either Either way, the fact that he was hungry is not surprising.

So why make a big deal? Why put

it in all bold and all caps and say he's hungry? Why is that a big deal?

Well, it's important that we understand who exactly we're talking about who

was hungry, and it was Jesus.

So who is Jesus? Why would that be a big deal? Genesis 1.26,

if you want to flip there, you're welcome to. It's on the screen as well.

Genesis 1.26 says, God is speaking, says, let us make man in our image.

There's an us and there's an our, and there's every reason to believe that that is Jesus there.

And part of the reason we think that is because of what John says,

the apostle John, in his gospel, he says, in the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The Father, full of grace and truth. So we have Jesus, who John calls the Word,

who eventually became flesh, but he's there in the beginning. So Jesus is with God.

Paul tells the Philippians in his letter to the Philippians,

He says, Jesus Christ, who though he was in the form of God,

did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by

taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

So if you're a Christian sitting here, as many of us are, you know this.

Jesus is God in the form of man.

If you're not a Christian, you're probably aware that that's something that

Christians believe. So I don't think I've said anything surprising yet.

So I'm not issuing any breaking news. But in reflecting on this,

it actually, I felt like it's really shocking that God,

God, that's our starting point here, God embodied as Jesus has experienced everything

we experience, experience including something so basic as hunger.

Jesus was not just kind of embodied, like he didn't kind of become a man.

He didn't bounce in and out of humanity like he wanted to, or when he wanted

to. He was hungry. He was sad.

He wept at least three times that we know of. He lost loved ones to death and betrayal.

He felt pain. He was humiliated. He was frustrated. frustrated,

and as we see here, he experienced temptation.

And in a weird kind of way, this is great news.

This is great news to us. He did not have to do all that.

And I think it's a very valid, we get a very valid point from this,

that God did not have to do all this human stuff, that honestly for us can get

really annoying at times.

He didn't have to do that, but he did. He took human form fully.

Whatever we can and will experience, he has experienced willingly.

Jesus Christ willingly subjected himself to the same things that we experience on earth.

And that brings us to the second big point here, that Jesus accomplished what

we were trying to accomplish.

Okay, so we've got the humanity of Jesus. We see that just the fact that he's

hungry and he experiences things like hunger.

And now as we dig a little deeper in this, we get out the pressure washer,

we scrub below the surface.

I want to show us how this passage shows that Jesus accomplished for us what

we were trying to accomplish.

Jesus did the thing. The thing that we might, you know, in our own thinking,

in our own like, I've got it together, I'm mature, I'm accomplished,

I'm capable, I don't need any help.

In that kind of way, we might think that we should be able to do certain things

and yet keep getting frustrated that we actually cannot do those things.

Jesus has done that thing. So we're going to look at this in two different ways.

The first one is right on the surface.

And the second one we're going to need to get out the pressure washer and look

underneath. What's right on the surface is that Jesus resisted temptation.

And I don't want to like gloss over this. This is like really important and really cool.

And if you could walk out of here with this kind of point in your head,

I would be perfectly happy.

I think there's more to it than this, but this is an awesome thing.

Jesus resisted temptation. He was tempted by the devil with some very appealing things.

I mean, if you just think about it, 40 days of no food, hungry.

Yeah. The opportunity to get food, very tempting.

The devil suggests that Jesus commands some angels to rescue him or that he

take power and control of the world.

Those are kind of the three main things, the food, putting God to the test and power.

They're all appealing things. And especially the whole eating thing when you're

really hungry. So why would Jesus not take them? Why would he not give in?

He's hungry. The angels can save him. He does have power over the whole world.

That's the reality of the situation.

So why not just go for it? Well, those things are not from God.

They're being offered to him by the devil. It's a very different thing. It's not from God.

So Jesus resists, which begs the question, okay, how? What can we pull out of

this about how Jesus resisted?

And anytime I've read this passage or heard teaching on this passage,

this is kind of generally the takeaway from it, that Jesus resists temptation

with scripture and with boldness.

Three times he says it is written and he says it boldly and he tells the devil

to boldly get the heck out of there.

Okay, he resists temptation with scripture and with boldness.

And again, if that's what you walk out of here with, awesome.

Psalm 119, 11 says, "'I have stored up your word in my heart "'that I might

not sin against you.' "'There's a connection between having scripture "'in our

hearts and being able to avoid temptation.'" Hebrews 4, 15, I love, this is so encouraging.

It says, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our

weakness, but one who is in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

So Jesus has an example of resisting temptation. This is good and true,

but we've got to get a little farther with this and realize Jesus came to do

so, so much more than just help us manage our sin.

He didn't come to just show us an example of strategies around sin management.

He came to do so much more.

And this is what was not really apparent to me until I dug into it and started

doing some more reading on this passage.

The scriptures that Jesus quotes in his responses to the devil all come from

Deuteronomy 6 through 8. And this is kind of the connection.

In Deuteronomy 6 through 8, the nation of Israel, God's chosen people,

thousands of years before this, are wandering wandering in the desert.

They wander in the desert for 40 years.

Jesus wandered in the desert for the 40 days and nights.

God's chosen people are hungry. God provides bread to his chosen people.

He provides bread, but he puts a little stipulation on it.

He says, I'm going to give you this, this bread from heaven,

this manna, but don't collect more than you need for a day.

Okay? Pretty simple. I'll give you more the next day and the next day and the next day.

So what do quite a few of the people immediately do? What would,

I mean, if I'm honest with myself, what maybe would I do?

Ooh, I'm a little, I'm not sure I really trust that. I'm gonna collect as much as I can, okay?

And that's what God's people do. They gather up as much as they can,

they try to store it. And it doesn't work out well for them, it rots.

They couldn't obey God like they said they wanted to, but Jesus could and did, okay?

I have a slide on this that kind of charts this out a little bit.

So God's people were asked in the desert to trust God for food, particularly bread.

They're not able to do it. Jesus does this thing. They're asked to not put God to the test.

They put God to the test. That's the whammy. You remember that game show?

Some of you are old enough. I know some of you are. I didn't even remember the

name of the show, but it's like, no whammy, no whammy, whammy.

And then the whammy comes up and you lose. So that's the whammy.

They weren't able to do it. They didn't do the thing. They put God to the test.

They wanted God to make water come out of a rock just to test him.

And that's what the devil wanted Jesus to do. And Jesus refused to do that.

Jesus was tempted to fall down and

worship the devil and not follow God's commandment to worship him alone.

Well, the people in the desert were given the same commandment.

And immediately after just a few days of waiting around for Moses to come give

them instructions, they get impatient, they lose faith, they lose trust,

and they start worshiping a golden calf, which seems silly.

But after some honest reflection on our parts, it's not actually all that silly.

We do some similar things.

But the point of this chart is just to show that this passage is in here,

at least partly, to show that Jesus did the thing that the people were not able to do.

It's way too easy, I think, to look at the failings of the ancient Israelites,

to look at that column with the X and the whammy and the golden calf and just

to scoff at them and say, you know, how could they be such fools?

I know nobody in this room is actually thinking that because you're all humble

and mature and nice people who think generously of others.

But maybe some people other places might look at the Israelites and be like,

how could they mess up so badly?

But I think if we put ourself in their shoes, it's actually really easy to imagine

how you could maybe lose faith that God was going to bring more food tomorrow.

Or you're going to lose faith that you need to put God to the test.

You need to see him do something if you're going to really believe.

And that you would lose the ability to turn your worship just to him.

It's actually really easy to imagine how we would do that. So easy.

How easy is it, I guess I'd say, to trust God for his provision?

When you can't see where that provision is coming from.

And that provision can be food, of course, but it can also be peace,

provision of relationship, of the health of a loved one.

Of provision of perceived financial security, of whatever that next thing is

that you want to accomplish once you accomplish the thing in front of you.

And many of us are old enough to know there's always a next thing,

the thing that's going to finally be the thing that's going to get you to the

point you want to be. It doesn't actually exist.

But we're always searching for that next thing that's gonna finally give us peace and comfort.

And how much is that? You know, we're just, we're worshiping something other than God in that case.

My point is it's really easy for us to, I think if we're honest with ourselves.

It's easy to look and see, oh yeah, we do some of that stuff too.

We don't trust God the way we should.

And this is the really hopeful part of it, that Jesus has done this thing for us.

He has done the thing. We see him in this passage, do the thing. that we are trying to do.

Romans 8.3, I think I have a slide on this one.

Romans 8.3 says, for God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not

do by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and sin,

he condemned sin in the flesh.

Now I wish, I really wish that this was a cure-all and we could just say,

go and sin no more and just be done with it, right?

If we really know this, we're good to go. But it's not a cure-all.

We are fallen people in a fallen world, and we still struggle with this.

I do think, though, that it is hugely comforting and hugely helpful to know

that Jesus has done the thing you're trying to do.

He has willingly taken on humanity, all the goods and bads of it,

willingly, and done the thing that we are trying to do.

It's comforting to know that. When I say to know that, I don't mean just like

you read it once or you heard some dude spouting off about it sometime.

Like to really know that in your heart and have that be something that your

thoughts bounce off of. To really deeply know that.

That thing that you're struggling with, that thing that you're putting your

trust in, that power, that recognition that you keep seeking above God,

Jesus has overcome that.

The thing that you're trying to do, Jesus did it. Know that.

And so if we're seeing Jesus as fully human to the point that he experiences

hunger, and then we watch him overcome the devil and do the things that we keep

struggling with, how do we see God come through for Jesus?

And this was kind of this aha moment in my study of this passage this week that's

just so stinking encouraging.

I can't even get over it. So let's look at verse 11.

And this is our third point here. God provides.

God provides. And I had read over this in this passage so many times.

And a couple of the commentaries I read didn't mention it, but then a couple

of them pointed it out and it was like mind-blowing. This is amazing.

Matthew 4, verses 11. So Jesus has gone through temptation. He's resisted temptation.

Matthew 4:11

He tells the devil to flee. devil flees.

It says, then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering

to him. The devil left him.

So, who's more powerful?

The God-man Jesus or the devil?

You can say it. Sunday school answer. Jesus. Okay, we see that.

That's a part of this. That's not the whole part of it, but that's critical.

We see Jesus has the power as a human. He has the power to say,

the devil flee from me. And he does.

Jesus wins this epic face-off, and this is cause for celebration.

And let's not miss this part. Behold, the angels came and were ministering to him.

Now, like I said, I've read this passage many times and kind of missed this

point. Who came and ministered to Jesus? The angels.

The same angels that the devil had said, hey, you should put your God to the

test and angels will rescue you.

In the end, they're there for him. Okay.

Psalm 91 11. This is actually the scripture that the devil quotes when he's

telling Jesus, hey, you should put them, you should put God to the test.

It comes from Psalm 91 11. It says, for he will command his angels concerning

you to guard you in all your ways.

In the end, angels came to his rescue. How did they come to his rescue?

It's highly likely, the word food is not in the text here in our English,

but it's highly likely that they came with food.

We know that from context, because I think if you asked yourself,

what would you bring to somebody who had been in the desert without food for 40 days?

You might bring some food. That might be a good idea. So I can conjecture there

that they probably brought food.

Also, the Greek word, from what I'm told from people who know Greek really well,

the Greek word here that is used, that is translated as ministered or attended,

other places it's often used to refer to food, like the ministry of food.

So every after party that we have, Lori is providing the ministry of food,

just as these angels are providing the ministry of food to Jesus.

So the devil offered God provided food. The devil offered that angels would surely rescue him.

And God provided angels at his rescue. What else did the devil offer?

That third thing, that third thing that he tempted Jesus with is power.

Power, control. Well, Jesus now begins his earthly ministry as the son of God

and the initiation of God's kingdom on earth.

That's power. He's literally bringing God's kingdom to earth.

D.A. Carson says it better than I can. We got this quote up here.

Jesus had refused to relieve his hunger by miraculously turning stones to bread.

Now, by these angels, he's fed supernaturally.

He had refused to throw himself off the temple heights in the hope of angelic help.

Now angels feed him. He had refused to take a shortcut to inherit the kingdom of the world.

Now he fulfills scripture by beginning his ministry and announcing the kingdom

in Galilee of the Gentiles.

So everything that the devil offered him, God had for him.

God had actually like the real version. There is nothing.

This is like the key point that I've been so encouraged by this week thinking about this.

There is nothing that the devil could offer Jesus that he couldn't offer in

an even better way, that God couldn't offer in an even better way.

There's nothing that the devil could offer that God can't offer in an even better way.

There's nothing that the devil can offer you or me that God can't offer in an even better way.

The devil's a liar, and that is good news.

God comes through, and that is better news.

Anything that the devil can offer is just a poor imitation of what God wants to give you.

And I wrote that sentence in my notes. I was like, ooh, that sounds kind of

like health and wealth. And I want to say it's not.

And the reason it's not, as worship team can come up here, actually,

as we're kind of wrapping up,

worship team come up, that idea that God wants to give you something even better

than the devil, it's not health and wealth because when rightly understood,

this is an incredibly encouraging passage.

What God wants to give us is, yeah, sorry, lost to my notes a little bit.

What God wants to give us is better than what we think we want. Okay?

I'm convinced, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced the things

that we think we want, the world would be a terrible place if we all got the

things that we thought we wanted.

Even if we, you know, even if we think, okay, we're well-meaning,

I'm a good person, that's fine.

And I think that is true of all of you.

But I also think that if we just got the things that we wanted,

that the world would would be a terrible place.

And so God sometimes has things that are better for us.

This can be an incredibly encouraging passage. And I know that seems a little

weird when it's all about the devil and Jesus resisting him in some ways that

seem really difficult to us.

But the facts are that Jesus took on humanity so that he could experience what

we experience, even something as basic as hunger.

He did the things that we keep trying and failing to do.

And God came through in the end and provided everything that the devil was offering,

even much more, as we'll see as we get further along in Matthew.

Whatever it might be that you're striving for, money, health, status,

relationships, achievement, peace, whatever that thing is, if or when you are

tempted to go for that thing without God, or even like the devil offered to

go for that thing against God,

know that there's nothing that you can achieve and nothing that the devil can

provide that can even touch what God wants to give you.

And this is a good thing. Ultimately, God wants to draw you to him.

That is like the best thing that he has for you. He wants you,

his child, to be drawn into his presence and blessing, which is far superior

to anything that we could think or that we could strive for.

It's just being in that presence of God. Jesus became human to experience what

we experienced. Jesus accomplished what we are trying to accomplish.

And God comes through for us, just like he came through for Jesus.

Let's pray and then we'll worship. Father God, I thank you for this word.

I thank you, you know, on that surface level for the example that Jesus gives

us of resisting temptation and having scripture in our hearts and speaking boldly against temptation.

Lord, but I also thank you for the humanity of your son that you gave.

You literally put him on this earth.

You walk the same earth as us, experience the same things.

So we don't have a great high priest that doesn't know us. We don't have a great

high priest that hasn't been through what we go through.

And God, he conquered all of that. Lord, we're just so thankful for that.

Help us to be drawn to you through this fact, this reality that Jesus came and lived and conquered.

Thank you, Lord. Amen.