A Legitimate Need In An Illegitimate Way

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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.

 

A Close Look at the Fall of Man

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Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.

 

What do we know about the serpent?

  • He was made by God;

  • He is a beast, i.e., not a man;

  • He is wise. The other times the Hebrew word “arum” is used in the Bible, it has a positive sense, like “prudent” or “clever.” Here, the serpent is using his wisdom to undermine the harmony of God’s creation.

So, who is the serpent? Some kind of spiritual being who is in rebellion against God. Putting together what we learn from the rest of the Bible, we can see that the serpent is the devil, who is some kind of fallen angel.

We are totally free in our actions, and totally accountable for our actions. But it is also true that there is a dark power that tempts and trips and teases us into making the wrong choice. Who among us has not felt it? If you have ever given over to sudden, snarling rage, for example, you know exactly what I’m talking about: you made the choice to be angry, but there was also a strong pull towards anger, as if something were urging you on.

 

He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

 

Notice how the serpent insidiously flips around what God actually said.

Rather than focusing on ALL the trees that God gave the man and the woman, the serpent draws her attention to the ONE tree that’s forbidden.

Whenever we focus on what we lack rather than on what we have, we are imitating the devil’s voice, so to speak.

 

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

 

The serpent’s work is already bearing fruit:

Although the woman correctly states that God gave the humans the trees in the garden for food, note how she nevertheless focuses on the prohibition, and even intensifies it, as God, as far as we know, has not forbidden them to touch the fruit.

 

“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

 

As we will shortly see, it is literally true that they do not drop dead when they eat from the tree, but it is the case that their innocence immediately dies, and, once lost, can never be regained. And, literal death inevitably follows. The serpent cleverly mixes in just enough truth to bait the woman.

The devil is a liar. Don’t ever believe what he says.

And here’s the other thing: the man and the woman already are like God. What do we read on page one of the Bible?

So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.

So, the serpent tricks the woman into forgetting what God has already given her, namely his own image.

See what’s at stake when you focus on what you lack rather than on what you possess? You end up totally forgetting the most important things about you.

 

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.

 

Although God’s prohibition was as clear as possible, the woman decides that she knows best and reaches out and takes and eats the fruit. She is “wise in her own eyes.”

 

She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

 

I’m convinced that passivity is the primal temptation of men.

 

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

 

They were beguiled by the serpent’s prediction that they would become god-like, but the only result of their sin is their awareness of their own shame.

Sin always works that way: promises the world, and delivers woe.

 

Today’s Scripture

Genesis 3:1-7