Mark 1.12-13, Matthew 4.1-11, Luke 4.1-13.
Mark 1.12-13 KWL - 12 Right afterward, the Spirit threw Jesus into the wilderness.
- 13 Jesus was in the wilderness 40 days, getting tested by Satan.
- He was with the beasts. Angels were serving him.
That’s the extra-short version of Jesus’s “temptations,” as they tend to be called: Peirádzo/“test” is often meant in a tempting sense, ’cause part of the test is how badly we want what’s offered. But is it in Jesus’s divine nature to go about getting these things the wrong way? Nah. He’s never gonna put himself above his Father’s will. So let’s not treat these tests like they really made Jesus doubt his commitment to the Father. Any devout Christian can easily resist such temptations.
The Mark version doesn’t have a lot of details: Just Jesus and the devil, out in the middle of nowhere. Didn’t have to be way out in the middle of nowhere; in fact it’d be a stronger test of will if Jesus was just within sight of civilization. (As was the case in the Judean desert. Lots of hermits, nomads, even a few communes.)
If all we had was the Mark version, we’d imagine all sorts of horrors and enticements. (Especially since Mark brought up Jesus “was with the beasts”—something End Times fanatics would have all sorts of fun speculating about.)
Y’know, since it was only Jesus and the devil out there in the wilderness, it leads us to a rather obvious deduction: The authors of Matthew and Luke could only have got the particulars from Jesus himself. He shared the stories of his testing, probably with his students. Probably to teach ’em the sort of stuff the devil tries to use on us. And teach ’em how to resist.
In the Matthew and Luke versions, they’re not in the same order.
| Matthew | Luke |
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Why? There’s some speculation about the meaning of Luke’s order, but I don’t buy ’em. Luke is more likely the original story’s order. Matthew, in comparison, is focused on the kingdom, so the tests escalate from Jesus’s personal needs, to Jesus impressing Jerusalem, to Jesus conquering the world. Makes sense.
Satan didn’t size up its opponent properly.
I’ll explain the devil in more detail some other time; there’s way too much disinformation floating around about what it is and where it came from. In a nutshell: It’s a heavenly being, whose primary purpose was to play “devil’s advocate” for God—to point out certain humans weren’t all that good,
Here, it was at its usual job of trying to prove Jesus wasn’t all that. Because it didn’t realize, at the time, who Jesus really was: It thought Jesus might actually fold. It didn’t realize that Jesus, while human and therefore temptable, is also God and therefore never gonna give in to temptation. God will never violate his own character. And since Jesus is God, neither will he. No matter how badly he may want something, he’s never take the wrong route to get it.
I know: “How can you mean the devil didn’t know who Jesus was? It kept calling him God’s son.” Yeah, but “God’s son” doesn’t mean what we think it does. When Christians say it, we mean Jesus is God the Son, the second person of the trinity, God incarnate, the divine human, the God-Man, and all that theological stuff. When the ancients said it, they mean God’s adoptive son, the Messiah.
But God becoming human? The idea goes entirely against the devil’s thinking. Who would voluntarily give up infinite power? What could God seriously accomplish while powerless? The devil would never do any such thing; neither would your average human. We covet power. Giving it up?—we struggle to wrap our brains around the idea. We’re stunned when people who submit, like Jesus did, turn out to wield far more influence than we ever thought possible. It mocks our instincts.
All the devil’s tests had to do with power, with Messianic prophecy, with Jesus taking over the world. So it makes sense to recognize the devil only thought “God’s son” meant Messiah. Nothing more. It had no idea Jesus didn’t need to test the Father; that he knew the Father would easily come through for him if he requested. It had no idea Jesus not only knew the scriptures, but declared them himself from Sinai. It’s more dramatic to depict these tests as a dramatic, divine struggle, so that’s what movies and preachers do. But considering who Jesus truly is, these “temptations” were pathetic.
Art and movies also tend to depict Jesus’s tests as if the devil has some sort of physical form. It’s a spirit; it has no such thing. (Heck, if you could see the devil coming, its tricks wouldn’t work so well.) More than likely when the devil came to Jesus, it dropped its ideas in Jesus’s mind, trying to make him think he or the Holy Spirit came up with them. Of course Jesus immediately knew better. And we have to get to Jesus’s level when it comes to testing. Know what God expects of us; then we’ll ignore the devil’s tests as a waste of our time and effort.
Why’d the Spirit send Jesus to the wilderness to face Satan? Simple: To beat Satan. With one arm tied behind his back: Jesus starved himself five weeks, to the point of near death, near incoherence. And even that weak, he took the devil down. Wasn’t a hard-fought battle. Jesus responded “No,” quoted bible, and was done. This was God squashing a bug. The devil has no power other than what we surrender to it.
Rocks to bread.
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In Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson’s 1984 song “We Are the World,” the songwriters showed their profound biblical ignorance by including the line, “As God has shown us by turning stones to bread.” When the song first came out, I suppose most of the public were too busy trying to identify all the different singers to bother with the lyrics beyond “We are the world, we are the children.”
Jesus was in his thirties, so this was hardly the first test he ever experienced. Just the first one the devil lobbed him in the desert, speaking to his specific circumstances: Raving-mad hungry after 40 days of nothing.
Forty days is as long as a human can go without food before the body runs out of fat and starts consuming muscle. Now, if Jesus were as fat as an American, he might’ve gone a bit longer than 40 days, but either way let’s say he hit the point where the body was burning muscle: Mentally he’d have been losing it. Fasting helps you focus, but fast too long, that long, and your mind would start raving, “Those rocks look kinda like loaves. Since I am God’s son, perhaps I could turn one these rocks here into bread…”
And here’s where Jesus realized he didn’t come up with that idea. It was the devil dropping its warped ideas into his spirit.
Now, there’s nothing sinful, nor inherently wrong, about turning rocks to bread. It’s why Ritchie and Jackson, and most of their listeners, didn’t catch their error. God could easily turn rocks to bread, or sprinkle manna on his people, or multiply five loaves into food for five thousand. How’s such a miracle any different than the other ways God miraculously provided?
But see, the reason God became human was to surrender power. Not tap it whenever he felt it was too inconvenient to do things the same way any other human would. We weren’t granted the Holy Spirit so we could have access to miraculous shortcuts. Jesus didn’t need to transmogrify rocks; he could’ve dragged himself to the nearest nomad’s tent, and common Middle Eastern hospitality would guarantee they’d care for him. And doing such a miracle would’ve proven nothing. There was nobody around to see it; Jesus didn’t have to prove his anointing to himself; and it still wouldn’t have convinced the devil.
Jesus’s response comes from Deuteronomy—
Deuteronomy 8.3 KWL - “He oppressed you. Made you hungry. Made you eat manna.
- Neither you nor your ancestors knew about manna.
- This was so you’d learn not only by bread do humans live:
- By everything which comes from the L
ORD ’s mouth, do humans live.”
Though a spirit, the devil is a materialist. It recognizes, since we’re physical beings, we’re easily distracted by physical things. And it’s right; we are. Bread’s a material need, and hunger a real issue. So we focus on that, and not so much the provider of our bread. And that was Moses’s point in Deuteronomy.
Bread was meant to distract Jesus from the real issue. Jesus quoting Moses proved he was fully aware of the real issue.
Dive from temple.
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Bluntly, this test is fairly retarded. Since when do the scriptures claim we can jump off tall buildings and have the angels catch us? ’Cause that’s precisely what Satan suggested Psalm 91 means. Here’s that quote.
Psalm 91.10-13 KWL - 10 Evil gets cut off from you. Inside your tent, plague is expelled.
- 11 For his angels, God commands to watch you, all your ways surveilled.
- 12 Lest you strike your foot on rocks, by hand they lift you in protection.
- 13 Step on lion, cobra; trample cub—and dragon!—his discretion.
The average Christian likes to treat the bible like a giant quote book, full of scriptures which can be plucked out and re-worked into meaning whatever they wish. It’s the Philo of Alexandria technique, popularized by St. Augustine: The Old Testament is nothing but allegory, a “type and shadow” of the truth, and can fit any vessel we pour it into. ’Cause that’s the power the Holy Spirit put into it.
Wrong spirit. ’Cause that’s the technique the devil tried in this test. The psalm’s original context is to describe how God protects those who stay in his shadow.
The devil may have thought Jesus was too far gone with hunger to realize what it was pushing him to do. And if Satan was right, and Jesus was a nobody, it’d solve its problem: Jesus would splatter himself all over the priests’ court.
Jesus quoted Deuteronomy again—
Deuteronomy 6.16 KWL - “Don’t test your L
ORD God like you tested him at Massa.”
Unlike Satan, Jesus never quotes bible out of context. Never stretches a meaning, nor changes it, nor cancels it. Those Christians who claim he does: They’re the ones reinterpreting what he meant when he quoted the Old Testament, and never bother to check whether the OT context fits or explains Jesus’s teachings. It always does.
In Deuteronomy 6, Moses warned the Hebrews to not test the L
Funny thing is, since we know who Jesus was, we misinterpret the Moses quote. I preached on this passage once, and one of the listeners told me afterward, “I always thought Jesus’s response meant, ‘Don’t put me to the test.’ ’Cause Jesus is the Lord our God.” I pointed out, “If that’s what Jesus meant, he could’ve used it as his answer to every test: ‘Don’t test me.’ But he was referring to him testing the Lord: He wasn’t gonna challenge his Father.” Same as in Gethsemane, when he could’ve called off the Father’s plan, and refused to. He knew he could; he knew he never would. Jesus kept the Father at the forefront of his thoughts, not himself. It’s why he could so easily pass these tests.
Bow to Satan.
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Most commentaries and bible footnotes say Jesus’s quote is from Deuteronomy 6.13. It’s really not. Here I’ve translated it from three bibles Jesus would’ve had access to: The original Hebrew, the Aramaic Targum Onkelos, and
Deuteronomy 6.13 KWL - Masoretic text: “Fear your L
ORD God. Serve him. Swear by his name.” - Targum: “Fear your L
ORD God. Serve before him. Rise before his name.” - Septuagint: “You’ll fear your Lord God. You’ll serve him.
- You’ll weld yourselves to him. You’ll swear by his name.”
They have similar language, but it’s not a direct quote. The Greek Old Testament doesn’t include móno/“only.” It is written, in various verses in the scriptures, that we’re only to worship and serve the L
When Satan showed Jesus the kingdoms, Matthew described it as “every kingdom in the world,” and Luke “every kingdom in civilization.” To the Roman mind, civilization meant the Roman Empire: Everything outside the empire was barbarism. So in Luke the devil tempted Jesus with the very thing Jews really, really wanted Messiah to overthrow: The Romans.
Satan also commented the empire’s kingdoms and glory had “been surrendered to me. If I want, I can give it to anyone.” There’re a few different ways Christians have interpreted that:
- Ransom theory of atonement. One Christian belief about
how atonement works is the ransom theory: By sinning, humanity sold ourselves to the devil. (Think Edmund and the White Witch inThe Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe : He obeyed her, so she owned him.) So the devil’s claim is legit. - Surrendered through idolatry. Roman pagans believed the world was under the rule of Zeus, or as they called him, Jupiter Optimus Maximus/“Greatest, Best Father-God.” Various Christians who are big on demonology, and the idea of Satan as the chief demon, claim Zeus is the same spiritual being as Baal (or Beelzebub), Amon-Ra, Marduk, or Wotan; and all these names are different fronts for Satan. And that’s how Satan lays claim to the world: It plays all the world’s false gods, and thus gains the world’s worship.
- Bare-faced lie. The devil is a liar, and has no such authority. At all. But if it can convince you it does, it can make you bow and scrape before it.
I believe the last option. Mainly ’cause Jesus’s response wasn’t to take Satan seriously: Ýpage, Satana/“Oh, get out of here, Satan.” The verb ypágo, when it’s intransitive like Jesus used it, means “withdraw,” like an army would when it’s retreating. Hence the
Satan quits.
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When James advised his readers to resist the devil and it’ll flee,
Jesus had unlimited power from the Holy Spirit,
If we contain the same Holy Spirit as did Jesus, he can empower us to have the very same self-control Jesus has. We don’t have to give in to temptation. We don’t have to fear the devil’s trickery. We don’t have to fear the devil period. Satan is no more powerful than any human. We only think so because we believe its exaggerations about itself. Don’t. Satan’s a fraud, and the Spirit is infinitely more powerful. Follow him, and he’ll defeat the devil easily.
I know; every time I say such things, I hear it from
Granted, the devil’s not an utter clown. It’s just mighty enough to do serious damage. But any Christian full of the Holy Spirit is mightier. Like I said, follow him. Not your fears.
