Ephesians 6:17; Sword of the Spirit: Jesus meets the test of presumption (testing God).Sunday July 3,2022Intro: Independence Day.
[Declaration of Independence] When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
We will return to it when we eat and drink the Lord’s Supper together. In our current study of the sword of the Spirit, we must imagine that there has to be a connection between the sword and the dissolving of political bands, and in both the kosmic sword and the sword of the Spirit, there is. By political bands, for the body of the church, I have more imagery in mind than corrupt governments, but more so, overcoming the world system’s influence.
At times, the state which is good and noble, is forced to use the kosmic sword; take up arms and go to war. But the kosmic sword is not just physical, it is all things that humanity does to solve its problems without God: human intrigue, politics, and many human endeavors that attempt deliverance. Individual Christians will be called to justly fight, or sometimes serve in government. The church, however, never uses the kosmic sword, but always the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God. The evil forces of the world are not trying to rob us of our independence but of our rights as God’s creatures – our right to serve God, worship Him, gather together in public worship of God, and the right to trust in God while waiting on His deliverance. The state is not the cause of these, we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but the devil and his dark forces are the cause. As the devil tried to do to the Lord in the wilderness, he is trying to drive a wedge between our souls, minds, and yes, even our bodies and the Father.
The body of Christ has certain unalienable rights that we must stand firm to defend.
[Message … ]
Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. His forty days and His testing identify Him with Israel and He does what neither Israel or any man could do, remain perfect, sinless, and in perfect sync with the Father’s will throughout all temptation and pressure, thus making Him the true Israel.
Isa 49:3 And He said to Me, "You are My Servant, Israel, In Whom I will show My glory."
We discover that He is being tested by the Father who is using the devil to His own ends, and that is God’s sovereignty. Jesus meets three tests from the devil with three particular scriptures from Deu 6, 8.
First temptation – self-gratification that is not in time or manner of God’s will.
Jesus is human in every way. He becomes hungry and also temptable. The devil (accuser, slanderer, adversary, and opponent) desires to drive a wedge between the Man Jesus and His Father. The Holy Spirit led Jesus into this situation. As a Man, He must wait for the Father and Spirit to deliver Him. If He uses His resource as deity to change stones into bread, He would have come into conflict with the Father’s will and timing. Obedience to God’s will takes priority over self-gratification, even over the apparently essential provision of food. God will provide food when He is ready (vs. 11). Jesus’ use of Deu 8:3 shows that He understood His experience of hunger as God’s will for Him at the time, and therefore not to be evaded by a self-indulgent use of His resources. If He did that, He would have been calling into question God’s priorities, and to set Himself at odds with God’s plan.
It is Jesus’ trust as a Son that is under examination, not His Messianic agenda. And that means that we can very much identify with this temptation.
Jesus met the temptation and in so doing, instructs us how to do so.
He appeals to Scripture, taking His mind off His hunger and holding on to a particular passage that addresses the temptation directly and cuts its underbelly, bleeding away all of its strength. We must hold on to those Scriptures, for our emotions and reactions to the pressure will cloud our judgment. He also understood and applied the dignity of man. Man is more than an animal but one who lives on every word out of the mouth of God. And so, Jesus reflected on man’s chief food – the truth of God in His word. God made man in His image (Gen 1:26). He crowned man with glory and majesty (Psa 8:5); and God helps man but not angels (Heb 2:16).
The temptations to presumption and ambition.
Mat 4:5-11 Then the devil took Him into the holy city; and he had Him stand on the pinnacle [Greek: “little wing” – impossible to tell which part of the temple this means] of the temple, 6 and said to Him, "If You are the Son of God throw Yourself down; for it is written,
'He will give His angels charge concerning You';
and
'On their hands they will bear You up, Lest You strike Your foot against a stone.'"
7 Jesus said to him, "On the other hand, it is written, 'You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.'"
Temptation 1 – natural appetite. Temptation 2 + 3 – presumption and ambition.
While the first temptation urged Him to use divine powers for the satisfaction of a natural appetite common to all men, the other two were concerned directly with His unique position and destiny. Temptation is always trying to bring down to the dark recesses of the earth the very height of who we are and what we’re called to do, and in so doing, degrade and poison our extraordinary lives and ministries. Jesus said that His disciples are extraordinary. Sin is not aiming too high, but far too low.
Presumption is an attack on our given position in life. Ambition is an attack upon our given destiny.
Jesus said that His disciples act upon what they hear from Him and become houses built upon the rock, and that when the storms of pressure crash upon them, they remain steadfast, standing firm.
The tempter perceives that on his first attack against Jesus he has made a mistake in choosing too low a ground on which to approach One so completely powerful over the dictates of His physical body. Satan may revel in the confirmation that Jesus is fully human, but would realize that Jesus is no ordinary, sinful, weak human.Therefore he now proceeds to ply him with more elaborate motives.
The second temptation: presumption – you can force God’s hand to work for you when you wish (tempting God).
The presumption is that we can force or at least motivate God to change His plans and timing for us by our own doing. The gamble is the idea that we are so precious to God and needed by Him that He will change His own plans to deliver us from our own bad decisions. He clearly tells us in His word that He will not.
Jesus knows that the rolling out of His ministry, all that will happen during it, at what times and speeds those things come and go, and everything leading up to the moment He dies on the cross, is all in the sovereign hands of the Father. How often He said, “My hour has not yet come.” Jesus could read what was happening to Him, but He did not control the timing of it. As a Man, Jesus has placed Himself at the mercy of the Father’s timing. He can no more control the times than any other man, unless He uses His deity to do it. Satan tempts Jesus to force God to presently act in a way that is not planned. That is tempting God.
The devil’s proposal again draws on the assumed privileges of the Son of God. And if Jesus can quote Scripture, so can the devil, and he borrows Jesus’ own formula, “It is written,” in an attempt to make his own mastery and authority over the word of God as equal as the Lord’s.
The devil quotes Psa 91:11-12 from the Septuagint and in an abbreviated way. Neither the Greek translation nor his leaving our one small line, “to protect you in all your ways,” alter the sense of the passage. In other words, there are no tricks up the devil’s sleeves other than misinterpretation of the passage.
The devil’s chosen passage is addressed to:
Psa 91:1 He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High Will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
What a beautiful truth. One that we should consistently pray and sing about. It is a beautiful psalm addressing our courage to meet anything in life by our faith in God’s ability. And certainly, it would apply to the Son of God as the Man Jesus. But Satan’s hope is to distort this beautiful truth, the beauty of which, I’m sure, he cannot comprehend, and turn it into a sort of game in which the creature puts himself in precarious situations so as to test the validity of the truth of it. That is presumption and tempting, more fitting of a bratty child than a believer who rests in the truth of God’s power.
A similar assumption lies behind the later temptation to come down from the cross “if you are the Son of God” (Mat 27:40).
The vivid imagery of the psalm envisages some of the hazards which may be expected to confront God’s people, and promises God’s protection for them, but it does not suggest that they should take the initiative in courting these dangers. No one reading this psalm would interpret it to mean that they should jump off a tall building. The devil suggests that they deliberately create a situation in which the Father is obliged to save His Son’s life.
Presumption: man may become lord of God, and compel Him to act in service of His creature.
The Son of God came into the world to do the will of the Father, not for the Father to do His will (Heb 10:7).
Jesus responds with another Scripture. He doesn’t deny the Scripture Satan chose, but He does deny its interpretation. One of the best ways to expose a false interpretation is by comparing it with other Scriptures that speak about the same subject.
Scripture must be interpreted by Scripture. One truth cannot be inconsistent with another.
A divine promise can never justify what God has forbidden.
Jesus responds with Deu 6:16 in order to draw out the implications of the act. It would be an act of putting God to the test, so the devil’s interpretation is clearly false. Additionally, the act would demonstrate a lack of trust in the Father’s plan, demanding that the Father reveal His competence and dependability.
In Deu 6, the example of testing God used by Moses is Israel in the wilderness of Sin where their water supplies got dangerously low as they did at the bitter waters of Meribah. God gave them water then, days after God divided the Red Sea for them. Now, with water low again, they wonder, “Is the Lord among us, or not?” What a question for that people. They in essence proclaimed that if God gave them water, then God was with them.
What we see there in Hebrew is a wordplay, for Massah is from the same verbal root as “test.” They tested God’s purpose and ability by demanding a miracle. How many miracles they had already seen?
Exo 17:7 And he named the place Massah and Meribah because of the quarrel of the sons of Israel, and because they tested the Lord, saying, "Is the Lord among us, or not?"
We ought to be able to trust God without testing Him.
We should note that there is no suggestion in this passage or Luke’s that anyone else would have observed the proposed leap. It is a conjecture that the reason for the temptation was for Jesus to reveal Himself as Messiah too early. More likely, it is simply what it reveals on the surface. Tempting God by trying to force Him to act outside His perfectly timed will.
We saw in 1Co 10 that Paul linked tempting God with the fiery serpents in the wilderness. The reason the serpents came upon the Israelites was because of their complaining about going the long way around to get to the Promised Land. They concluded that God was powerless to direct them in the proper manner and timing.
We must wait upon God’s timing for whatever is to happen to us, focusing in ourselves the obedience to His commandments and ways. If it is change that we seek, we must leave it to God to orchestrate, while we focus on His will for our lives today. We are not remotely able to orchestrate the will of God in our own lives. If it is deliverance that we seek (for the trial to be over, for the devil to flee from us), we must leave God to deliver. None of us are told the timing of anything.
The devil sets Christ on the pinnacle of the temple. He only needs to take a step and He will be forcing the Father to either catch Him or let Him dash to the ground. The tempting of the Father is available and possible.
The devil will supply opportunities for us to tempt God, and God will allow it. It won’t be a dream only, but a reality in which we have the possibility to think and do things in which we will take matters into our own hands and force God to act. We may take on a responsibility or position before we are ready. We may obtain something material that will distract us. We may enter a relationship in which God’s will is not clear. We’re acting before we know if God wants us to take a step in that direction.
Communion:
The opening of the second paragraph is what is most well known. Jefferson called these rights the laws of nature, and although a deist and not a Christian, he understood that the laws of nature are from nature’s God. But the fact that the founders wanted and needed this document written in order to declare independence from England would suggest that nature’s God was not really enforcing these laws Himself. In the history of rulers that might be judged as unjust, king George III of England wasn’t really one of them. He was more a victim of circumstance than a tyrant, but throughout history, tyrants and oligarchs thirsty and lusty for power are allowed to gain power and rob and kill, and over time, they all come crashing down, but not until after they create loads of pain and misery. Most of their victims do not witness their fall, and their cries for justice go with them into the grave.
The purpose of the state is simple, as C.S. Lewis states in Mere Christianity: It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects — education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects — military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden — that is what the State is for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. [end quote]
Ecclesiastes has a similar theme. For Solomon writing Ecclesiastes, joy is God’s categorical imperative for man, not only in a mystic sense of an ascetic sufferer, but rather as a full-blooded and tangible experience, expressing itself in the play of the body and the activity of the mind, the contemplation of nature and the pleasures of love. Since he insists that the pursuit of happiness with which man has been endowed by his Creator is an inescapable duty, it follows that it must be an inalienable right.
A system of society which denies inalienable rights to men is not God-ordained.
Ecc 2:24 There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and tell himself that his labor is good.
Ecc 3:12-14 I know that there is nothing better for them than to rejoice and to do good in one's lifetime; 13 moreover, that every man who eats and drinks sees good in all his labor — it is the gift of God. 14 I know that everything God does will remain forever; there is nothing to add to it and there is nothing to take from it, for God has so worked that men should fear Him.
What is also clear in Ecc is that ills in this world cannot be changed to good. Sometimes good overcomes evil in real time, before the eyes of the living, but for the most part, people don’t live to see it. Millions died without seeing the Nazis overpowered or the USSR toppled. And those who did, if they lived long enough, witnessed other evil, power hungry people, perhaps of a different kind or not to honest about it as their predecessors, but sure enough, unfairness, oppression, injustice, poverty return in another high priced suit.
Putting more revelation together we discover that God allows unfairness, injustice, persecution and oppression for a time, and that time may include most, if not all, of our lives on earth, but that His promises and judgments are true and definite. And in the meantime, while we don’t live in a perfect world, there are always things like food and drink and labor and family and marriage that we can enjoy, and Solomon concludes that we must. And while we do, those of us who understand our certain destiny, we can eat, drink, and be merry in the midst of an evil world, for we know that this is only a temporary ill, and God is always glorifying Himself in it. We have courage and hope, and therefore independence from fear, and freedom to serve our Lord with strength and gladness.
Jer 33:14-22 'Behold, days are coming,' declares the Lord,' when I will fulfill the good word which I have spoken concerning the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 15 'In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch of David to spring forth; and He shall execute justice and righteousness on the earth. 16 'In those days Judah shall be saved, and Jerusalem shall dwell in safety; and this is the name by which she shall be called: the Lord is our righteousness.' 17 "For thus says the Lord, 'David shall never lack a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel; 18 and the Levitical priests shall never lack a man before Me to offer burnt offerings, to burn grain offerings, and to prepare sacrifices continually.'"
19 And the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, saying, 20 "Thus says the Lord, 'If you can break My covenant for the day, and My covenant for the night, so that day and night will not be at their appointed time, 21 then My covenant may also be broken with David My servant that he shall not have a son to reign on his throne, and with the Levitical priests, My ministers. 22 'As the host of heaven cannot be counted, and the sand of the sea cannot be measured, so I will multiply the descendants of David My servant and the Levites who minister to Me.'"
Jesus’ finished work, what we remember at this table, guarantees that the good purposes of God will all be accomplished. The pressures in our lives, all being some form of test, have the design of getting us to see more of the glory of God, and so to rest in it by faith and joy in the power and faithfulness of the God of the universe.
1Co 11:23-26 For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread; 24 and when He had given thanks, He broke it, and said, "This is My body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of Me." 25 In the same way He took the cup also, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me." 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes. |