I am guessing that there is not a person here who hasn’t been tempted to do something you know you shouldn’t do—the kind of thing that might make you shrug and throw up your hands, saying, “the devil made me do it.” I’m talking about the kind of things that you know could cause harm to you or to others. Texting and driving, eating a steady diet of burgers and fries, getting involved with someone who you know to be abusive (but you think they’re really attractive anyway), tossing your candy wrapper out of the car window, staying up way too late night after night, spending every waking minute on Facebook, driving a motorcycle without a helmet, and refusing to get a colonoscopy because you don’t like the preparation…
Do any of these things seem like behaviors you’ve noticed in either yourself or someone you know?
Our lives are full of temptations that beckon us, big and small. It is part of the contract for having a brain and lots of sensors like eyes, ears, taste buds, and tactile skin sensors. It is simply awesome that we get to have this sophisticated machinery. However, none of it comes with an instruction manual, and the development of careful discernment, also known as good judgment, is a lifetime pursuit. There are resources to help: parents, teachers, siblings, friends, written history, our Holy Bible… and God. But the actual decision-making is left to us.
Your community, whether it be family, friends, church, sports teams, classmates, and colleagues helps train you to make moral and just choices; to make good and healthy decisions that will enable you to fulfill your potential.
When the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness, it was so he could be trained in the making of right choices. That’s what the testing was about. We cannot imagine what doubts and other destructive temptations the demons put before him during the forty days in the wilderness, but Luke tells us that at the end of it, when Jesus was hungry and weak, the devil mocked him by suggesting that he magically change a stone into a loaf of bread. Jesus resisted. The devil put before him fame, fortune and power. And again, Jesus held fast.
He had been told directly by God in front John the Baptist and John’s followers that he was God’s son just before the Spirit had led him into the wilderness, and I cannot even imagine how shocking that might have been; he surely had a lot to think about!
Can you imagine discovering at the age of thirty that your father is not your father at all, much less that your father is God? When you learn something truly shocking about yourself, it really throws you for a loop.
You might begin to question everything about your life, and maybe some
things that previously seemed confounding finally start to make sense, but there is likely to be a lot of processing, and most people want to get off by themselves to try to digest what a dramatic self-revelation might mean going forward.
Jesus was already a righteous man of God at the time of his baptism because, well, he went to receive baptism from John as a symbol of his turning to God. The Bible gives us his birth narrative and a tiny bit about him as a child, but mostly we don’t know much between then and the baptism. I wonder how much he already knew about who he was and how he got here? What had Mary and Joseph told him in his growing up years?
No matter what his previous life as a carpenter looked like, no doubt Jesus had a lot to think about after God’s dramatic revelation about him at his baptism. And because Luke tells us he “returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness” (Luke 4:1), he must have had quite a tumultuous head full of thoughts after that baptism. So off he went into the desert, and we’re told that Jesus passed the exhaustive testing by the devil.
This wasn’t about eating or drinking too much, and it wasn’t about driving without a seatbelt or trying to text behind the wheel, or whatever the first century equivalent might have been. It was the gut wrenching and soul-searching stuff that keeps you up at night and prevents you from eating for forty days. It was the evil intent to rob him of his confidence in following the Law and trusting in God. It was the lure of riches and power, easy satiation of his hunger.
And Jesus stood his ground. He passed the testing—all that the devil threw at him. Wow, Jesus! I wish I was that steadfast under fire.
Unfortunately, that was not to be the end of it the devil’s attempts to undermine Jesus’ relationship with his father and the accomplishment of his mission of salvation through forgiveness and love on Earth. Luke says, “When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.”
And that is how it has always been for us as well. We might be getting on with life just swimmingly, and then the demons find us again because it has become a more opportune time. Self-doubt and recrimination; hurt and anger leave us vulnerable, and many of us succumb to the temptation of power and wealth, forgetting responsibilities to God and neighbor—to make moral decisions followed up by righteous behavior.
The nature of life is such that there will always be another temptation, another decision to be made, another test of our resolve to be the children made in the image of God. And that is why we were made to live in community, because as much as we need to pay attention to our
own relationships with God, we will never be Jesus, and that’s why he left us with the Holy Spirit and told us to love one another.
Until you draw your last breath, there will be demons who seek to undermine you, but there will also be love unimaginable and the promise that when we call upon God we will be heard. Don’t be afraid of asking for help from God, and don’t be surprised if it comes to you looking like one of us– your friends and family.