Why God Lets Us Be Tempted

Matthew 4:1-11
(shared with the people of Friendship Church, February 13, 2005)

A young woman in Catechism class asked me a question once. “If God wants us to turn from sin and follow Him, why,” she wondered, “does God let us be tempted?” It’s a good question.

I recently read the story of the first attempts to ship fresh North Atlantic cod fish from Boston to San Francisco in the nineteenth century.

Back then, the only way to ship the fish to the West Coast was to sail all the way around South America. That trip took months, of course. The first attempts to dress the cod in Boston and pack them on ice on the trip to California failed. By the time the fish got to San Francisco, they were inedible.

So, someone tried putting the cod in holding tanks full of water, shipping them to the West Coast alive, and then dressing them out there. But because the fish got so little exercise during the trip, they became pasty and tasteless.

Then, somebody had an idea. “Why don’t we put some catfish in with the cod?” they asked. Catfish are cods’ natural enemies. The experiment was tried. The result? When a few catfish were put in the tanks with them, the cod were always alert and swimming around. So, when they reached San Francisco, they were in great shape.

I think this story may tell us why God lets us be tempted by our enemy, the devil. It’s only when we’re tempted to go against God’s will for our lives that we develop the spiritual muscles we need to become strong in our faith and learn how to live according to God’s purposes.

That seems to be what Jesus learned in the wilderness temptations our Bible lesson describes today.

Three different times, the devil tries to persuade Jesus to do good things the wrong ways. He tempted Jesus to create bread from stones when He was hungry; to trust God to catch Him if He threw Himself from the top of the temple in Jerusalem; and to claim the kingship of the world that, after all, He’d come to take through a cross, but the devil was prepared to give it to Jesus just for worshiping the devil.

I wonder if Jesus would have gone to the cross for us, enduring all that He went through before that happened, if He hadn’t been toughened by His temptations in the wilderness? Would He have been prepared for the temptation to back away that He went through in the garden of Gethsemane, where His dread of what would follow produced anguish? Or on the cross itself when crowds jeered at Him and taunted Him with their words, "He saved others. Can't He save Himself?"

Jesus' time in the wilderness may very well have fortified Him for completing His mission of saving us from sin and death through His cross.

You and I may be presented with all sorts of temptations to do good things the wrong ways in our lives.

Young people: Good grades are a great thing. But if our grades are stolen by cheating on tests or copying reports from the Internet, we haven’t really learned anything or prepared for life, the very things grades are designed to measure in the first place.

Teens and twenties: God made sex and it’s a wonderful, beautiful thing. But “hooking up” casually robs God and our future potential marriage partners of the awesome beauty of sexual intimacy.

Adults, when the challenges of life put us in the doldrums, especially during the depressing wilderness days of midwinter, it’s so easy for us to become addicted to various pleasures--whether it’s gorging ourselves on cookies, spending money we don’t have for the next electronic gadget, or even frequenting porn sites. Cookies are good. Gadgets are good. Sex is good. But not when used in the wrong ways or for the wrong reasons.

Our call when faced with our wilderness temptations is to ask God’s help in facing them just as Jesus did.

My grandmother used to say that it was easier to resist temptation when a person gets older. I completely disagree with that. The older you and I get, the more freedom we're likely to have. The less accountability we have to others, unless we specifically choose to be accountable to others for our own spiritual well-being. Otherwise, we are the lions of our domains, able to indulge ourselves in any way we want. Do that often enough and long enough and a person soon becomes deaf to God. The devil has us bagged.

Learning how to face temptation, then is important, a matter of life and death. So, how did Jesus face and defeat His temptations?

When the devil tempted Jesus to turn stones to bread, He remembered that God’s Word, the Bible says, that our lives don’t ultimately depend on the food we eat, but on the God we follow.

When the devil, in effect taunted Jesus, daring Him to do something stupid--throw Himself off of a building--in order to prove His faith, Jesus recalled another passage of Scripture and told the devil that faith doesn’t give us the right to put God to the test, as though God has anything to prove to us.

And when the devil offered to spring Jesus from the cross if He would just give the devil first position in His life, Jesus once again called on Scripture to remind the devil that we are to worship God alone.

In the wilderness, Jesus was so steeped in God’s Word and His relationship with the Father that He was able to withstand temptation.

In just a few weeks, right after Easter, our congregation is going to go through our Forty Days of Purpose campaign. Every activity of this congregation--from Sunday School classes to small groups for adults, from worship and personal devotion times to service projects--will be built around helping all of us grow in our relationship with God, getting steeped in God’s Word, living our lives for God’s purposes, helping us face the temptations we confront in our wildernesses.

Pastor Mike Foss tells the story of a woman who had come from counseling. She was depressed about her work situation. It was a real wilderness. “I can’t stand my job,” she said, “I am the only one there who prays or seems to live [Christian] values.” She asked him to pray that God would take her out of her work environment.

Foss promised that he would certainly pray for her, then added, “But I wonder if God has something in mind with your staying there...Maybe your witness of faith is important. I remember reading once that a candle isn’t necessary in the light of day. It burns brightest in the dark. Is it possible that the candle of your faith is important in that dark work place? And so, if you will you allow me to ask God to show you if your witness is making a difference while you look for the next opportunity?”

I’ve probably read the verses of our Bible lesson hundreds of times through the years. But it wasn’t until this past week that I came to believe that the key to understanding the meaning of Jesus’ temptation for our lives can be found in its opening verse: “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”

Let me explain why I think it’s so key. The word for tempt found in the original New Testament Greek of our Bible lesson today is peirazo. The word actually has two meanings. It can mean both tempt and test.

I believe that every time the devil tempts us, he is unwittingly playing into God’s hands, making every temptation from the devil also a test from God. While the devil tempted that woman who visited Foss for counseling to spiritual pride and an almost scornful lack of concern for the spiritual well-being of her coworkers, God was testing her faith, challenging her to live her faith, to share Christ lovingly, to pray for her coworkers.

You and I live with similar challenges every day of our lives. God drives us into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil and so our faith can be made strong, so that we become sharp instruments in God’s hands, so that we're prepared to share Jesus Christ, our strength and hope, with others.

I urge you to begin praying now that Forty Days of Purpose will help us all live for God just as Jesus did when He was tempted those forty days in the wilderness.

[The true story of the codfish, which I'm certain I'd heard about before, comes from Perfect Illustrations for Every Topic and Occasion (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale Publishers, 2002.]

[Pastor Mike Foss tells the story of the counselee in a message he prepared for this Bible text, www.changingchurch.org.]