The Ministry of Jesus (10)



THE TEMPTATION



(Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:1-15)


  1. The Fact Of Temptation



Sometimes I think I could do pretty well without the heat of summer; just to have autumn, winter, and spring every year would suit me nicely. But God has His good reasons for everything and He has not let us into all His secrets. After the Lord had destroyed the world of Noah’s day with flood, He renewed His covenant with Noah and Noah worshipped (Genesis 8:20-22). And the Lord promised seasons, “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” The disciples asked Jesus just before He left this earth about His future plans for Israel, and His answer was, “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.” (Acts 1:7) I can do without the heat, but God, in His wisdom has ordained the seasons, and so all the millions of implications of that are beyond our capacity to assess, but if we think about it, we can get a glimpse of His wisdom – everything from the seasonal needs of crops to the cycles of insects. Similarly, Solomon, who tasted of both good and evil, wisdom and foolishness, teaches us the lesson the Lord taught him in Ecclesiastes 7:14, “In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider: God also hath set the one over against the other, to the end that man should find nothing after him.” I think it is fair to say (on the basis of the truth of Scripture), that if we didn’t experience suffering we would learn nothing at all and appreciate nothing at all of God’s glory and goodness! And further to this, you could safely say that the degree of wisdom, grace, character, and goodness we experience is directly proportionate to the trials we have gone through, especially if we have learned from them through submission to God and worshipping Him in all things and at all times. Noah is such an example – Do we consider that the whole flood experience was not just a picnic for Noah and his house? But he worshipped God through it all and then set aside a special time of worship after leaving the ark, and received the promises of God in response, as we just read. Like Job also, who lost everything dear to him in the world, but worshipped God in it all. He said, “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. (Job 1:21) And, how much more excellently the Son of God shows us in our text today, in going through His great trials! God can use all these things to teach us to call on Him for urgent needs, such as in times of pain and distress, or to humbly depend on Him for our “daily bread”. “Give us this day our daily bread”. We are to walk by faith in all daily matters and requirements, depending solely upon our God and Heavenly Father. This is His design and the joy it brings is greater than all the riches and kingdoms of this world! This is the joy of true worship, which we all fail to enjoy so often, because instead of submitting worshipfully to God in every circumstance, we fight against the lot that God has given us. If we are wise we will not resist God but the devil who tempts us.


Note Jesus’ answer to this first temptation – “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4). Every word! We “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). We are constantly tempted to forsake the way of faith. “Faith”, as opposed to “sight”, is believing in something unseen. In religion, invariably the Church is tempted by the devil himself to forsake the way of faith. The Scribes and Pharisees had bound up the Church of their day by their man-made traditions. And their motives were always very religious ones (so it seemed). They seemed so zealous for the kingdom – except they seemed to forget that “the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost”! (Romans 14:17). If we read on in Romans 14:18-23, we find that, “whatsoever is not of faith is sin”. Faith is, essentially, believing God’s Word – “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” (Romans 10:17) – Faith is not merely a confident expectation of something coming to pass (That is “hope”); faith is accepting God’s Word as Truth and accepting it with a submissive heart. So, an example of walking by faith is daily obedience to God’s commands – “Love one another!” “Love thy neighbour!” “Love not the world!” To look at this from another angle, if we can’t do what we do, or practice our religion the way we do, out of faith and a good conscience, even our religion is sin! Let us take a further step in understanding what this means:- To walk by faith means to commit all things to God and let Him direct us by His Word and His Spirit. That is, to make ourselves subject to His will in all things. To apply this truth, if a Church is conducting worship in a certain way, or teaching certain things because of what previous generations have taught, it is not walking by faith! If a family is not worshipping together around the Word of God daily, and living daily by reference to that Word, it is not walking by faith! This is what Jesus teaches us by His temptations – The devil was attempting to divert Him from the path of faith and true worship! We must always ask, “What saith the Scriptures?” People will ask, Why don’t we have a cross on the building?, Why don’t we run Sunday Schools?, Why don’t we celebrate Christmas and Easter?, Why don’t we have youth leaders and youth groups?, Why don’t we have women pastors and elders and deacons? People say, It can’t be wrong, all the Churches do it! The Scribes and Pharisees were wrong and they were the ruling body! Why were they wrong? Because they walked as mere men, by sight – not by faith, by their own wisdom, not by “every word of God”. Paul said, “It is good neither to eat flesh nor drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak.” Our answer to the critics and the devil himself who sent them is the same, We will neither celebrate Christmas and Easter, nor run youth groups and Sunday Schools, nor appoint women to places of leadership in the Church, if it weakens the faith of others – and so it will because it will confirm in their minds the traditions and wisdom of men as acceptable before God and take them away from the walk of faith – it will cause them to stumble in the path wherein they are commanded to “live by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” – and it will teach them that it is good to pay only lip-service to the Holy Scriptures, when God declares it to be sin, for “whatsoever is not of faith is sin”! So, let the critics give us chapter and verse when they want to pressure us to celebrate Christmass, run youth groups and Sunday schools, and if they can show us two or three witnesses in Scripture for their proposals, then we will do as they say. Then we will mix our religion with paganism, then we will make a mockery of God-ordained male leadership, then we will segregate the family in our worship, then we will teach the children by example that they can’t understand the Word of God – that it has to be converted into baby language before they can receive it, or that they can’t possibly get any benefit from a family worship service, then we will teach parents that the Church is here to baby-sit their children, that they aren’t responsible to teach them daily at home, then we will teach them that they should set aside the Scriptural injunction to train their own children and just leave them in the hands of some weirdo who is bent on being close to the children. And we’ve encountered some of that type in the Churches in the past! Churches seem to attract them. Look at the shocking statistics and news reports of religious paedophiles and ponder; Why is it that parents, grandparents, or other close family members ought to be in direct charge of their own children? And Why is it that the Lord in His wisdom never ordered His Church to run any worship or teaching programme that didn’t include the whole family? The government has set up a Blue Card system which controls approvals of individuals to work with children. As a Church, we have complied by having four of our men approved, really just to cover ourselves in case any incident arises. But I’m already having second thoughts about involvement in the whole thing. For some years now, we have not run any separate children’s programme, and although the change was gradual and for various reasons, I have for many years now had the conviction that it is actually a mistake to do so – apart from the practical reasons we can observe, it is simply not Scriptural! And I wonder if we shouldn’t go back to the government and explain, and tell them that we have no intentions of running children’s programmes because it is not Scriptural and that if all Churches would only operate according to Scripture they would not need this Blue Card system! When you boil it all down (speaking from merely an idealistic point of view), even the public schools are against God’s order. Education of children is the job of parents. I don’t say there is never a case of the exception to the rule, but as a general rule, if all parents took on their God-given responsibility to educate their children, and if governments didn’t interfere in the parents’ job, they wouldn’t even need school teachers, let alone Blue Cards for them.


Well, all this is an indication of how things go pear-shaped when we ignore God’s order, when we take the devil’s bait, when we, like Eve, follow the devil’s wisdom when he said, “Yea, hath God said..?”, questioning God’s Word instead of living conscientiously by it, or worse still, when we simply don’t even consider God’s Word and just do as others do, or do “what is right in our own eyes”, as they did in ancient times when there was no King in Israel.


Before leaving this most important point, I want to look at the application of this Scripture to family worship. We have touched on order in the family and Church and on education in the family and Church, now let us consider family worship. The Church’s answer to the infiltration of subtle deviation from Scripture in all matters of public Church order is to get back to Scripture in the running of the Christian family! How many families make a priority of daily family worship? What form does it take? Is a regular system of Scripture reading employed? Do we work through whole books of Scripture (either by ourselves or with the aid of the writings of some trustworthy expositor or commentator)? Do we include the whole family or do we just individually lock ourselves away for our own private devotions and have no real priority on gathering the family together in worship? Do children learn by an every-day example that Dad is head of the house and that he is the one who teaches and trains? Do we learn likewise that Mum’s role is to support and help Dad as head of the house? Do the children learn how to pray by the example of Dad and Mum? Do they learn the Scriptures naturally by a steady process of repetition, rather than by having to perform in front of the Church or Sunday School class, or having to learn verses and win prizes, drawing attention to themselves? Or do children learn by their parents’ example that religion is only a private thing and every one is an individual, doing his own thing? Religion in the home can be so wonderful and so natural if we’ll just follow the Scriptural way and persevere in it. God will bless our efforts! Don’t let disappointments, failures, and even impossibilities stand in the way of doing what God requires of you in the home! Family worship is the key to Reformation in religion and Revival in the nation! We have swallowed the devil’s lie of professionalism. We have been convinced that the majority of religion must take place in the institutionalized Church, that we must have our children trained by others, that we are not good enough to do it ourselves, when in actual fact, the greatest part of our worship should take place daily in the family setting, with the weekly service on the Lord’s Day being the culmination of a week’s worship already begun and the joyful beginning of a new week of worship to follow in the home. (Are we capable of bringing children into the world? Then God holds us accountable for bringing them up! We can’t say, I can’t! God says we can and we must!) Likewise we have been convinced that our pastors must be trained by somebody else, in a recognized seminary, miles away from the reality of the Church and community life where they will work. Perhaps not one of us here can say we have done what we ought to do in this matter of family worship. We must repent! We must change it now! We will be surprised at the blessing which will come as we do.


We have looked at all this this morning to note one main lesson - Temptation is a fact we must accept and deal with. Let us learn to accept God’s will, even if it seems strange to us at times, and deal with trials and temptations in a way that brings glory to Him. Job did so when he worshipped God even in the midst of the most severe trials (Job 1). Satan wanted to bring him undone and to make him curse God – his wife even suggested he should curse God and die to escape the trials (a bit like the temptation to suicide as an escape, which of course is not an escape at all, but which deceives many today), but he remained faithful.





In closing and preparing for the Lord’s Supper – While we have learned how to wrestle in faith through daily trials, let us not forget that saving faith is very simple. It is not what we do that saves our souls, but what Christ has already done. If He has suffered all temptation without succumbing to it, borne our guilt and condemnation, and the wrath of God on Calvary, which is its due penalty, then we are gloriously free! No devil, no temptation, no failure can destroy us eternally. Read Romans 8:14-39


Let us remember the wisdom of the old hymn, What a Friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear, What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer – Oh what peace we often forfeit, Oh what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer!



Let us not forget that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone! Amazing grace, How sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me, I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see! Let us take the Master’s lesson on temptation and worship our great God and Saviour.


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