Some Housekeeping:

• Matthew Part 2 begins on Monday! Books arrive this weekend; get your book Sunday at Asbury, or email Sandie and get one in the mail.

• I preached on the testing in the wilderness these past 3 weeks. The sermons are here.

• Our next churchwide Bible study is NEXT WEDNESDAY, 9/13. 6:30-8:00 PM. It will only have been 2 weeks since the August study, but don’t miss this one. We only have 1 per month. The remaining dates are:

  • October 11

  • November 8

Matthew 4:1-4

1 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” 4 But he answered, “It is written,
“ ‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ”

In yesterday’s reading, we saw how the Father gives the Spirit to the Son at the Baptism of Jesus. The Spirit then leads Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted.

The Temptation of Jesus is a re-enactment of Israel’s temptation and wanderings in the desert following the Exodus from Egypt, and each of the three temptations involves being willing to trust that God will provide provision on God’s timing.

It seems as if the devil heard the Father’s words at the baptism: “This is my beloved Son.” And it is as the Son that Jesus is tempted:

“Since you are the Son, why don’t you...?”

There is nothing wrong with being hungry and needing food. In fact, Jesus’s response shows that eating bread is not the problem— “Man does not live by bread alone.” The problem is that bread without learning to trust God sets us up for failure.

“The temptation from Satan, then, is that Jesus should distrust God by taking the responsibility for his life on himself. Jesus remembers, however, that trustful submission to God’s word is as necessary for true existence as food itself.” —David Bauer, The Gospel of the Son of God

Jesus replies to each temptation with a verse from Deuteronomy 6-8, which in its original context is a sermon from Moses to the Israelites in the wilderness, preparing them to enter the Promised Land.

As we will see in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’s worldview is that God can be trusted to provide all our needs, no matter what, and so therefore we ought to live without anxiety.

Where do you need to choose to trust God’s provision today?

NOTE: We have been reading through Psalms, and until we get to Psalm 150, I’m going to keep posting at the bottom of each Matthew post daily commentary on that day’s psalm.  (On the weekends, it will just be that day’s psalm by itself.)  If you’ve read this far, you are an over-achiever.  —AF

We Praise Because God is a Just Judge - Psalm 149

1 Praise the Lord!
Sing to the Lord a new song,
    his praise in the assembly of the godly!
2 Let Israel be glad in his Maker;
    let the children of Zion rejoice in their King!
3 Let them praise his name with dancing,
    making melody to him with tambourine and lyre!
4 For the Lord takes pleasure in his people;
    he adorns the humble with salvation.
5 Let the godly exult in glory;
    let them sing for joy on their beds.
6 Let the high praises of God be in their throats
    and two-edged swords in their hands,
7 to execute vengeance on the nations
    and punishments on the peoples,
8 to bind their kings with chains
    and their nobles with fetters of iron,
9 to execute on them the judgment written!
    This is honor for all his godly ones.
Praise the Lord!

This is a song of praise, and one of the reasons it calls for praise is because God executes vengeance.  That might strike us as strange, but can you imagine a judge that refused to address wrongs?  The reason we can love our enemies is because we trust that God is the perfect judge and he will make all things right in the end.