Hope for the Tempted: Sermon on Matthew 4:1-11

It was a warm day in Corinth as Secundus, a local tradesman, made his way through the forum. And everything seemed difficult. He'd been a Christian for seven months, and the transition had not been easy – especially after the apostle's letter arrived the other week. Secundus hustled past the temple prostitutes of Aphrodite, and memories flooded back of wanton nights spent there. In the marketplace, peddlers hawked meats from animals sacrificed to the gods at local temples – gods Secundus used to worship, until the message of Christ turned him from them to the living God. Still, it was hard not to dine in the temple restaurants like he used to. It was hard to attend his trade guild meetings, when so many of them included pinches of incense to the gods, prayers to the gods. Aphrodite this, Zeus that, Caesar such-and-such. Secundus could hardly go to the theaters or the taverns. He had to turn down invitations and offend some of his closest family and friends. He wasn't used to the conflict that becoming a Christian had created in his life. And Paul's recent letters had urged him not to compromise with the life he used to lead. But instincts built up over years of doing what came naturally – those were hard for Secundus to break. Everywhere he went, the familiar idols and temples, the familiar women and boys, the familiar entertainments and luxuries, the familiar financial dealings and political institutions – they all called him back, all pressed him, pulled him, tempted him. Secundus knew only one place to turn.

He knew that, a couple decades before Paul had passed through Corinth with “the word of the cross,” Jesus Christ – “the power of God and the wisdom of God” – had himself endured a time of deep trial in the desert. It was just after Jesus was baptized by John in the River Jordan, when the heavens had opened and the Holy Spirit had descended and the voice of the Father had proclaimed Jesus the beloved Son of God (Matthew 3:17). And then the Spirit had led Jesus into the desert, so that, at the close of forty days and forty nights of fasting, he could be challenged by the Tempter (Matthew 4:1-10). But in all this, Secundus knew, Jesus was only retracing and replanting the footsteps of Israel. For Israel had been in Egypt but had been “baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Cor. 10:2). And God had acclaimed Israel as the son of God: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I have called my son” (Hosea 11:1).

And then, Israel the son of God was taken from baptism and led into the desert by God's presence in the fiery, cloudy pillar, which went before them all their way. God's Spirit led them through the desert for forty years, where they faced temptation time and time again. They were showered with God's resources – “all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink,” Paul had said (1 Cor. 10:3) – but when temptation came, they seldom passed the test. “With most of them, God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness” (1 Cor. 10:5). Some succumbed to the lures of idolatry (1 Cor. 10:7). Some indulged in “sexual immorality” (1 Cor. 10:8). Some “put Christ to the test” (1 Cor. 10:9). Many did nothing but “grumble” and complain (1 Cor. 10:10). To Secundus, it didn't sound like ancient history. Change the backdrop from a barren desert in the Sinai to an urbane Greek city on a hilltop, and it sounded like his own Corinth. It sounded like his own lived experience, even just that very week. It was as contemporary as his diary, as relevant as the latest breaking news proclaimed in the city forum. It still is in Lancaster County in 2019.

But this was the chain of stories Jesus came to break. He, the baptized Son of God, went into the desert to show a new path for all the sons and daughters of God who were to enter God's family through him. We've spent time over the past several Sundays exploring each of the three temptations Satan threw out him – teasing out what they really meant, how they pressed him to act according to Satan's theology of what it means to be a child of God, but how Jesus overcame those temptations with his own better understanding of what it means to live as a faithful child of God in the desert. And from him and the example, he set, Paul and Secundus and you and I can draw ten excellent lessons that will help whenever we face temptation.

First, you will face trials and temptations. There is no such thing as a life, stretched our through time within the confines of God's good but broken creation, where no trial comes. And there is no such thing as a human being bearing God's image who is not a target of the devil's envy, which is the motive behind the tempter's wiles. As Paul says, temptation is “common to man” (1 Cor. 10:13). It is not an accessory, not an add-on; it's just part of the base package of human experience. You buy into the human race, it comes included. A life beyond it is on the offer someday, when the new creation arrives in full. But as long as there's still an inch of dirt that hasn't been transformed, the seeds of trial grow there. And until the Tempter and all his allied spiritual powers are consigned to the Pit permanently, the prospect of temptation will lurk in the shadows and shimmer in the light.

Temptation is real. Trials are real. Just like Israel, just like Jesus, just like Secundus and other first-century Corinthian Christians, we will be put to the test. And it is not as gentle as it might seem to us. As Paul says, temptation overtakes us – literally, it “seizes you” (1 Cor. 10:13). That's what temptation does sometimes. It seizes you, grabs you in its clutches, like a hawk swooping down on an unsuspecting bunny in the field. The hawk snatches it in its talons. Temptations have talons, too. And when you're lifted off from terra firma, when you've got no paw left on the ground, when temptation surrounds you and has you hemmed in and away from the environment where you can regain your bearing, that's when you feel like you've lost control and have no means and no reason to resist. And that is being deep in temptation's clutches. Usually, we aren't that deep – usually, temptations deal us a glancing blow here, a strike there – but the fact remains: you will face them.

Second, the temptation you are facing is not abnormal. The hawks of temptation were not just born. They have flown the skies of earth since before the childhood of Cain. No figure in history – no king, no priest, no scholar, no farmer, no craftsman, no peasant – ever lived before the hawks of temptation winged their flight. And not a single hawk of temptation is a newborn, as much as they adapt to the inventiveness of the times. When you're in a season of temptation, you may sometimes think that you've encountered something new, something as of yet uninvented, something that comes against you with no precedent. The Corinthians thought that. And yet the sorts of temptations that swoop down on our heads are, in the main, no different than the ones that had swooped down earlier on the Israelites over a thousand years before that in the time of Moses. And the same ones are the ones still swooping down to grab at you and me. These are not new. They are not unique to your era. They are not unique to your environment. The hawks of temptation flying over the rugged expanse of vacant sand are the hawks of temptation flying over the shining urban architecture of Corinth are the hawks of temptation flying through spacious skies over amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties, and all the fruited plain. Not one is fundamentally new. What tempts you is, whatever disguise it wears, something that has been faced before.

And what's more, even this very day, your temptation is not your exclusive prerogative. Your temptation is not unique to you right now. Those hawks of temptation have not abandoned all the rest of the world to all circle over your head. People from the Americas to Australia, from Africa to Asia, are right this minute struggling valiantly – some falling, some standing – against the very same temptation that is swooping down and grabbing at you today. The same was true yesterday. The same will be true tomorrow. Whatever you are facing, it is not uniquely yours – not compared with other ages, and not compared with other places. You are not alone. “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man” (1 Cor. 10:13a).

Third, the temptation you are facing is not beyond what you can bear, with the help of God. We know because Jesus bore that same temptation, and he was “made like his brothers [and sisters] in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17). Scripture tells us that. He did not bear up under temptation because he was superhumanly strong. Oh, he could have done it that way. After all, Jesus was and is the Incarnate Word of God. All that properly belongs to God, belongs to Jesus. He is necessarily morally perfect. As such, he could not have sinned – but that was not what prevented him from sinning in the desert. It's like a tightrope walker above a well-woven net, where there's no way for the tightrope walker to actually hit the ground. But if the tightrope walker never falls, the reason for not hitting the ground isn't the net; it's that he kept his balance on the tightrope. And while Jesus' divine perfection served as the net between him and sin, he never had to fall back on that in the desert. As one of us he resisted, as one of us he bore the tempter's wiles. And so Jesus “in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). And you are not made of stuff so weak that you cannot do as he did.

And so, like Paul wrote, “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability” (1 Cor. 13:b). We can suffer beyond our ability – Paul admitted that when he later wrote to the Corinthians about a season when he and his mission team “were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself; indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death” (2 Cor. 1:8-9). That can happen. “But,” he says, “that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again” (2 Cor. 1:9-10). And that is what he means when he says that a faithful God will not let us be tempted beyond our ability to endure, if we are relying on God's endurance. It does not take superhuman strength. It just takes your humanity coupled with God's faithfulness. You can bear up under the magnetic allure or crushing strength of that temptation, that trial – relying, not on yourself, but on God who raises the dead, the God who puts a resurrection around a cross.

Fourth, the temptation you are facing is not unending. It is not boundless. By the grace of God, it has limits. It will not be part of your life together. It has a time limit. Why? Again, because “God is faithful” (1 Cor. 10:13b). We have a faithful God. Without a faithful God, temptation could be unrelenting. Without a faithful God, it really could be an infinite onslaught, pummeling us at every turn. Without a faithful God, the temptation could be an unbroken continuum, eventually becoming part of us, poisoning us, consuming us. Had we no faithful God, the temptation would ultimately dehumanize us – the temptation would reduce us to mere puppets of instinct and passion. Which, come to think of it, sounds exactly like what hell is: the infinitude of temptation chosen to be endured eternally while rejecting the faithfulness of God.

But that is not our necessity today – nor, for those who belong to Christ, does it ever have to be. We have, we know, a faithful God, whose faithfulness we can only strive to answer with our own – we love because he first loved us. And because he loves you, he does not want to see you fall. God wants to see you ace the test. God wants to see you survive, not perish. If you belong to God, he aims to keep you. And so he has issued a decree in the face of every temptation you face. He has tamed that temptation, put it on a leash, and affixed a timer. The temptation can only harass you for a season before it must subside.

Think again of Jesus in the desert. The measure is set by Christ's command. After the third temptation has risen and failed to persuade Jesus, he thunders it out: “Be gone, Satan!” (Matthew 4:10). And what happens? “Then the devil left him” (Matthew 4:11a). What excellent words those are to repeat! “Then the devil left him.” That was the end of the season of desert temptation. That was what issued from Christ's decree that the timer was up. And that is true for every temptation: it cannot be of unrelenting intensity indefinitely. It must subside when we endeavor to endure. As we cling to Christ in faith, we will always hear those relieving words boom past us: “Be gone, Satan!” And then the devil must leave. That's not to say he'll never be back. Often he will. He may bring another temptation, or he may try the same old tricks again. But, at least for a time, he will have to leave.

And when the devil left Jesus in the desert, what happened? He was still starved half to death. He was still dehydrated. He was still exhausted – more exhausted than ever, no doubt, after time spent up-close with the Tempter. Which is how we often feel, when we've withstood and outlasted a season of temptation. So what then? “And behold!” Oh, you know what comes is going to be good when God himself smacks those words against your ears, saying, “Hey, wake up, pay attention, check this bit out!” So “behold! Angels came and were ministering to him” (Matthew 4:11b). Once temptation's moment had come and gone, ministering angels came to provide Jesus with relief. They restored his health, they led him beyond the trauma of the past month, they offered him comfort, so that in the strength he recovered, he was able to undertake the trek all the way back home to Galilee where he could begin ministering to others out of his own restoration (Matthew 4:12). And what Christ enjoyed, Christ wants to share with you. On the other side of temptation and trial, once the devil leaves for browner pastures, God will supply your exhausted soul with refreshment to keep you going. In resisting temptation, you don't need to ration out your willpower. Because you will not crash-and-burn once the temptation has faded. There will be ministering angels – some earthly, some heavenly – to refresh you and tend to you and pick you back up. Be faithful and wise, and God will take care of you.

Fifth, the temptation you are facing is not inescapable. “God is faithful, and … with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13c). By God's decree, there will be an escape hatch pre-installed in every temptation. You just have to find it. This was news to some Corinthian believers like Secundus. Falling time and again to temptation, they had a rationalization: these were the end times, they said, and in the end-times were supposed to come tests and trials, tribulations and temptations, that were literally impossible to get out of; so no wonder they couldn't escape. Today, we might put it another way. We'd talk about the ubiquity of advertising, our immersion in modern or post-modern culture, and all that; we'd say that it's a new kind of world, that we're so surrounded by temptation that it's already a natural part of it. But to all this, God's answer is that there's an escape hatch. The stories of Israel and Jesus were passed down as lessons “for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11). And so the same ways of escape they had then, are still installed in temptations now. There is a way back to terra firma. It may be over rough terrain. It may be hard and exhausting. But there is a way to escape each temptation. Find its weak spot.

Sixth, any temptation can be prepared for. We know that Paul described his own life of preparation. He told Secundus and the Corinthians about how he chooses to “exercise self-control in all things” (1 Cor. 9:25). We know that Paul said, “I discipline my body and keep it under control” (1 Cor. 9:27). But he was only following Jesus' example. Jesus, throughout the so-called 'silent years' of his teens and twenties, had been striving week in and week out to cultivate the kind of life where the hardships of the desert wouldn't seem so out of place. Even as an infant, Jesus was uprooted by Herodian tyranny and violence from Bethlehem and forced into exile in a foreign land. When his parents brought him back to Galilee and once again settled in Nazareth, they did so at a time when, literally in the countryside beyond their door, a terrorist gang was ravaging and pillaging Galilee. Jesus' childhood was not a peaceful idyll of blissful meadows and serene sleep. It was a challenge.

What's more, we're told that, in his life there in Nazareth, Jesus “grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon him” (Luke 2:40). The same verb Luke uses in saying that Jesus 'became strong,' Paul uses in telling the Corinthians to “be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong” (1 Cor. 16:13). Jesus undoubtedly, during his time in Nazareth, developed both physique and psyche – body and mind, made resilient through experience. We can be sure that, as devoutly observant Jews, his parents would have trained Jesus in fasting since his teenage years. Those forty days in the desert may have been intense and extreme, but they were not the beginning. Jesus had spent years and years training for them. Before he ever went to be baptized by John, he already had God's favor, already was filled with wisdom, already was becoming strong, already was training so the desert would be less of a leap. The desert of temptation can be prepared for.

Seventh, the word of God is sufficient to answer any temptation. When Jesus was in the desert, pushed to the point of human fracture, and was then subjected to the strongest temptations the devil could muster, the ways in which Jesus responded are instructive – what he did and didn't do. He did not merely assert himself. He did not merely repeat 'No.' That would not have been enough. Instead, Jesus went beyond himself. Jesus invoked a rationale for why he would not give in to each of these temptations. When you know why you shouldn't give in, when you recite that reason out loud, that's what refortifies your resolve, helps you see clearly.

And where did he get that rationale? Not from his own self-assertion in the moment. Not from popular trends in his neighborhood. Not from pragmatic weighing of pros and cons or a cost-benefit analysis. No, he appealed to the authority of God. He reached right up to the top of the chain of being, to the Supreme Good. And to find that unimpeachable authority, that ironclad armor, he turned straight to scripture. He did not approach scripture with an attitude of doubt – “Maybe I can rely on this, maybe I can't.” He went to it as the publicly available locus of the authority of God his Father, the open warrant for all legitimacy. And in so doing, that man Jesus anchored himself at every turn in an accomplished fact: “It is written” (Matthew 4:4, 7, 10). He trusted his Father, so he trusted the word. On that rock, when temptation comes, you can stand.

But Jesus also knew how to apply the scripture. He did not prooftext. He did not play games with it. He did not lazily recite a few words here, a few words there. As we've spent the past few weeks studying how he used scripture in the desert, I hope you've picked up on how Jesus was exorbitantly attentive to the context of each verse he quoted, how he entered into the narrative it was from and chose to apply exactly those words that were designed for his particular circumstances. Jesus didn't just have bunches of strings of scriptural syllables memorized. He had studied the plot inside and out, so much so that he could read all books, see all sights, hear all songs in light of every word that comes from the mouth of God. By that, and nothing less, did Jesus live. In this case, it was from Deuteronomy's early chapters – Moses' sermon on the lessons of Israel's desert temptation – that Jesus found the authoritative wisdom of God for the times of desert temptation.

And let me be clear: If someone else had found himself standing where Jesus stood, tempted by Satan in the desert; and if that someone had not read and studied and internalized Deuteronomy – well, that person would very likely have been rendered completely defenseless against the temptation. Without scripture, they simply would not understand what was happening. Letting the words and patterns of scripture invade our hearts and minds, studying it day after day after day, is what allows us to think of the world in light of God's wisdom, and to see past the glitz and glamor and through the smoke and mirrors.

And that living weapon is more available to you and to me than it was ever available to Secundus, or indeed at just about any moment in human history before now. I have a Bible, and you have a Bible. You can get a Bible just about anywhere. You are literate; you yourself can read it. Commentaries and study aids are published by the hundreds and by the thousands. Sermons declare, explore, and expound these words every week, and we have technologies that can let us listen to entire audio libraries of sermons 24/7. There is nothing stopping any one of us from learning what scripture says about anything. There is nothing stopping us from letting scripture work its way into our heart, storing it up there like Jesus did to use against temptation. You can resist temptation, not with a mere human 'no' that's prone to fail and fall, but with the word of God that stands forever.

Eighth, the Spirit of God stays with us in the desert of temptation. That was how both Israel and Jesus found their way into the desert in the first place, of course. Israel followed the Spirit of God in the form of that pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. The Spirit visibly hovered over, or dwelled within, the tabernacle once it was constructed and consecrated. The Spirit led them into the desert, and the Spirit led them through the desert, and except to the extent they had asked the Spirit to quarantine himself for their own protection and had tasked Moses to be their go-between, the Spirit was never absent during even one moment of Israel's time in the desert. Never inaccessible. And when Jesus saw the Spirit descend on him like a dove, and then when Jesus followed the Spirit's flight into the desert, the Spirit did not fly the coop once the River Jordan faded into the background. The Spirit of God had anointed Jesus, and remained upon Jesus always. Otherwise, he would have ceased being the 'Christ,' the 'Messiah,' the '[Spirit]-Anointed One.' The Spirit of God had stayed with Israel in the desert of temptation, and the Spirit of God stayed with Jesus in the desert of temptation. So how could we ever think that the Spirit of God would fly away from us in the desert of temptation? Nothing of the sort happens. The Spirit of God stays with you in that desert, even if the dry heat makes it hard to feel his divine breeze. There is grace for your day of temptation. There is grace for your hour of trial. You continue, in the midst of temptation, to have the resources of God's own Spirit to call upon, to support you through the battle and make you endure. Use the word of God, and rely on the Spirit of God.

Ninth, the family of God is a help Jesus has given us even beyond what he had available in the desert. When he went, he went alone. He had to be a one-man Israel. But we don't, because now the body of Christ has many, many parts. We travel together. Or, at least, we're supposed to. It would be smarter to. But still we so often choose not to. Some of us forsake gathering together entirely, isolating ourselves by our own stubborn choice. But even for those faithfully gathered each Sunday, we then separate and lead atomistic lives Monday through Saturday. But we can do more. We can travel together in the desert. Instead of always insisting on our rights and our privacy, we can care for each other, lean on each other, encourage each other. We can share each other's sufferings and each other's comfort (cf. 2 Cor. 1:5-7). We can enter each other's temptations and trials to gain a shared victory. You dare not let yourself or your brother or your sister go it alone. In facing temptation and trial, you can use the word of God, rely on the Spirit of God, and keep company with the family of God.

Lastly, the Lord God is sovereign over your temptation and your trial – and in the deepest moment of it, you can trust him. He is not absent. He has tailored the trial to you and equipped you for the trial. He is still the God who is faithful. He is still the God who delivers from deadly peril. He is still the Father of all mercies, the God of all comfort, the Abba whom Jesus knows and invites us to know and love like he does. Our faithful God is still, today, Hope for the tempted. And with hope like that, who needs excuses? Thanks be to a faithful God, who comforts us in affliction and charts our way beyond temptation! Amen.