Luke 4:1-13
The late psychologist Erik Erikson identified eight stages of psychosocial development for human beings, each characterized by questions that we need to address in order to mature. The first stage is called trust versus mistrust. In this stage, which runs from birth through about eighteen months of age, the issue for the child is, “Can I trust the people around me?” If the people in the baby’s world are unworthy of trust–indifferent when it comes to feeding and caring for the child, the child’s development is impaired, impacting how the child views and deals with others even in adulthood.
Spiritually, you and I are born with a decided mistrust toward God and others. We want to be our own gods because we’re not sure we can trust God. All the sins we commit have their root in our inborn mistrust of God and our skepticism that His will is better than our will for our lives. We distrust God’s commitment to provide us with our daily bread and so we covet, hoard, and sometimes, take. We distrust God’s plan for us in our marriages and so, we seek sexual intimacy with those with whom we don’t have a marriage covenant. We distrust God’s affirmation of our eternal value in His eyes and so, we tear others down to build ourselves up. Many who claim to be Christians distrust God’s grace given in Christ and so, undertake all manner of supposedly good works to prove themselves worthy of heaven. Ultimately, sin is about our failure to trust in God. This failure to trust in God leaves us constantly open to the temptation to trust in our own desires and judgments rather than in God’s loving will for us as human beings.
And this failure to trust in God didn’t start with us, you know. In the garden of Eden, the serpent–the devil–planted doubts in the minds of Adam and Eve over whether God could be trusted. “‘Did God really say,’You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?’” (Genesis 3:1) The intimation, of course, was that God was holding back something from Adam and Eve. He presented “the knowledge of good and evil”--they had hitherto only known good–as some privilege that God was unfairly withholding from them. Adam and Eve caved into the temptation. By allowing themselves to be tempted to distrust God, they failed in their call as God’s people.
Many generations later, the people of Israel, God’s own people, wandered in the wilderness, repeatedly failing to trust in God. At a place called Meribah, even after God had miraculously delivered the people from slavery in Egypt and repeatedly provided for them, they still wanted God to prove Himself to them. They “put the Lord to the test” and asked, “Is the Lord among us?” (Exodus 17:2, 17)
God’s desire has always been to save the human race from the sin and death into which we all are born. God doesn’t want “anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) This is why immediately after the human fall into sin, God told the serpent that from human beings, made in the image of God, would come a Savior Who would bring an end to the sin, death, and sorrow the serpent–the devil–had tempted the human race into: “he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” (Genesis 3:15) But, of course, if a human being was going to save the human race from sin, He would have to be different from the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve or the descendants of His people. Each generation of human beings descended from these lines have inherited the condition of sin, our inborn alienation from God, our inborn resistance to trusting in God. As God says of us: “...every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood.” (Genesis 8:21)
And so, God decides to make an entirely new human race, one founded on a new Adam and a new Israel, the Person Saint Paul calls, “the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead.” (Colossians 1:18) Paul also says of Jesus, the New Adam, “The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit…And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.” (1 Corinthians 15:45, 49) We who have been baptized in and believe in Jesus are, by grace through faith, members of this new human race, empowered to trust in God even though the devil, the world, and our sinful selves, try to pull us away from God, from trust in God. Jesus is the beginning of a new race born of the Gospel Word and the sacraments to become children of God. Jesus battles to save us from our imprisonment to sin, death, and the devil by taking on human flesh. It’s this sinless Champion of the human race Who will defeat the devil who tempted Adam and Eve, the ancient Israelites, and the whole human race into sin and distrust for God. Jesus will succeed where everyone else has failed. Our call is not to struggle to make ourselves better, as the other religions of the world insist; our call is to trust in Jesus Who has lived the perfect life and died the perfect death to save imperfect people from the sin that would otherwise damn us for all eternity.
Jesus wins the war to save us from sin, death, and the devil before the devil even knows what hit him. That’s what today’s Gospel lesson tells us. You know the history of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness well. The Holy Spirit led Jesus to a showdown with the devil, diabolos in the Greek in which Luke wrote his gospel, diabolos being a word that literally means Slanderer, a perfect designation for one who routinely slanders God and the human race God created and loves.
As is true for each of us when we’re tempted by the devil, the devil’s temptations of Jesus were tailor-made for the Savior of the world. The devil wanted to keep Jesus from fulfilling His mission of dying and rising for us. He tried to convince Jesus to skip suffering for our sin and distrust of God and, instead, grab for the glory the devil claimed he could offer Jesus: acclamation, ease, power. But Jesus’ love–God’s love—for you is so great that He refused to take the easy way out. The only way He could save you from yourself and the hell you deserve–that I deserve–was to offer His sinless body up as the perfect sacrifice for us, absorbing the hell and condemnation that, without Him, would be our lot. And so, with each temptation and each challenge the devil throws at esus to prove Himself as the Son of God, Jesus takes refuge in God and in God’s Word. Even when, His body wracked by hunger and weakness, the devil twists the Word of God to intimate that Jesus should, like the ancient Israelites, put God to the test, in this case by taking the stupid and unnecessary risk of throwing Himself from the top of the temple in Jerusalem, Jesus remains steadfast in His trust in God. The will of God for Jesus and sometimes for us will entail sacrifice and putting God’s will for us ahead of our own will for us. But just as Jesus embraced the cross to eternally save us, we can embrace the crosses God calls us to bear, the recognition that we are mortal sinners who are only saved for life with God as we follow Jesus! That is the way of victory and life with God! We see this when, resisted and repudiated by Jesus as He faced down the devil’s temptations in the power of God’s loving Word, the devil is reduced to departing from Jesus and like some pathetic scavenger, waiting for some more opportune time to tempt and test Jesus. But even now, three years before Jesus went to His cross, the devil must have known he’s been defeated. And we can see now on this side of Jesus’ cross and resurrection, that the devil and sin and death have been utterly and eternally defeated.
In another part of Luke’s gospel, Jesus says, “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are safe. But when someone stronger attacks and overpowers him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted and divides up his plunder.” (Luke 11:21-22) For centuries, the devil had seemed to exercise control over the human race, tempting and testing the faithful, undermining the good, luring the human race with lies. He was a strong man who seemed to hold the universe bound in death and futility. No wonder he had the temerity to offer Jesus the world’s kingdoms if Jesus would worship Him. But the devil underestimated the depths of Jesus’ passionate love for you and me. Jesus proved, even before He offered up His sinless life for us on the cross, to be the stronger one. By His refusal to take a shortcut to glory, His refusal to enjoy ease while we died in our sins, Jesus overpowered the evil one. Instead, Jesus resolutely set His face toward Jerusalem and His cross (Luke 9:51), where He would save all born “in bondage to sin…[incapable of freeing] ourselves,” who receive saving faith in Jesus by the Gospel Word, by the waters of Holy Baptism, and by the bread and wine of Holy Communion.
In the wilderness, Jesus, the New Adam, gave notice that He was doing a new thing. His forty-day victory at the outset of His earthly ministry declares, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Romans 10:13) The King will not abandon those who He comes to save, you and me. His victory also declares, “...if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17) The New Adam makes new people of all who, despite the temptations and tests of this world, trust in Him. And on the cross and at the empty tomb, Jesus proves that He alone is worth every ounce of our trust in Him. May the Gospel Word about Jesus empower you to trust in Jesus always. Amen
Spiritually, you and I are born with a decided mistrust toward God and others. We want to be our own gods because we’re not sure we can trust God. All the sins we commit have their root in our inborn mistrust of God and our skepticism that His will is better than our will for our lives. We distrust God’s commitment to provide us with our daily bread and so we covet, hoard, and sometimes, take. We distrust God’s plan for us in our marriages and so, we seek sexual intimacy with those with whom we don’t have a marriage covenant. We distrust God’s affirmation of our eternal value in His eyes and so, we tear others down to build ourselves up. Many who claim to be Christians distrust God’s grace given in Christ and so, undertake all manner of supposedly good works to prove themselves worthy of heaven. Ultimately, sin is about our failure to trust in God. This failure to trust in God leaves us constantly open to the temptation to trust in our own desires and judgments rather than in God’s loving will for us as human beings.
And this failure to trust in God didn’t start with us, you know. In the garden of Eden, the serpent–the devil–planted doubts in the minds of Adam and Eve over whether God could be trusted. “‘Did God really say,’You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?’” (Genesis 3:1) The intimation, of course, was that God was holding back something from Adam and Eve. He presented “the knowledge of good and evil”--they had hitherto only known good–as some privilege that God was unfairly withholding from them. Adam and Eve caved into the temptation. By allowing themselves to be tempted to distrust God, they failed in their call as God’s people.
Many generations later, the people of Israel, God’s own people, wandered in the wilderness, repeatedly failing to trust in God. At a place called Meribah, even after God had miraculously delivered the people from slavery in Egypt and repeatedly provided for them, they still wanted God to prove Himself to them. They “put the Lord to the test” and asked, “Is the Lord among us?” (Exodus 17:2, 17)
God’s desire has always been to save the human race from the sin and death into which we all are born. God doesn’t want “anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) This is why immediately after the human fall into sin, God told the serpent that from human beings, made in the image of God, would come a Savior Who would bring an end to the sin, death, and sorrow the serpent–the devil–had tempted the human race into: “he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” (Genesis 3:15) But, of course, if a human being was going to save the human race from sin, He would have to be different from the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve or the descendants of His people. Each generation of human beings descended from these lines have inherited the condition of sin, our inborn alienation from God, our inborn resistance to trusting in God. As God says of us: “...every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood.” (Genesis 8:21)
And so, God decides to make an entirely new human race, one founded on a new Adam and a new Israel, the Person Saint Paul calls, “the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead.” (Colossians 1:18) Paul also says of Jesus, the New Adam, “The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit…And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.” (1 Corinthians 15:45, 49) We who have been baptized in and believe in Jesus are, by grace through faith, members of this new human race, empowered to trust in God even though the devil, the world, and our sinful selves, try to pull us away from God, from trust in God. Jesus is the beginning of a new race born of the Gospel Word and the sacraments to become children of God. Jesus battles to save us from our imprisonment to sin, death, and the devil by taking on human flesh. It’s this sinless Champion of the human race Who will defeat the devil who tempted Adam and Eve, the ancient Israelites, and the whole human race into sin and distrust for God. Jesus will succeed where everyone else has failed. Our call is not to struggle to make ourselves better, as the other religions of the world insist; our call is to trust in Jesus Who has lived the perfect life and died the perfect death to save imperfect people from the sin that would otherwise damn us for all eternity.
Jesus wins the war to save us from sin, death, and the devil before the devil even knows what hit him. That’s what today’s Gospel lesson tells us. You know the history of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness well. The Holy Spirit led Jesus to a showdown with the devil, diabolos in the Greek in which Luke wrote his gospel, diabolos being a word that literally means Slanderer, a perfect designation for one who routinely slanders God and the human race God created and loves.
As is true for each of us when we’re tempted by the devil, the devil’s temptations of Jesus were tailor-made for the Savior of the world. The devil wanted to keep Jesus from fulfilling His mission of dying and rising for us. He tried to convince Jesus to skip suffering for our sin and distrust of God and, instead, grab for the glory the devil claimed he could offer Jesus: acclamation, ease, power. But Jesus’ love–God’s love—for you is so great that He refused to take the easy way out. The only way He could save you from yourself and the hell you deserve–that I deserve–was to offer His sinless body up as the perfect sacrifice for us, absorbing the hell and condemnation that, without Him, would be our lot. And so, with each temptation and each challenge the devil throws at esus to prove Himself as the Son of God, Jesus takes refuge in God and in God’s Word. Even when, His body wracked by hunger and weakness, the devil twists the Word of God to intimate that Jesus should, like the ancient Israelites, put God to the test, in this case by taking the stupid and unnecessary risk of throwing Himself from the top of the temple in Jerusalem, Jesus remains steadfast in His trust in God. The will of God for Jesus and sometimes for us will entail sacrifice and putting God’s will for us ahead of our own will for us. But just as Jesus embraced the cross to eternally save us, we can embrace the crosses God calls us to bear, the recognition that we are mortal sinners who are only saved for life with God as we follow Jesus! That is the way of victory and life with God! We see this when, resisted and repudiated by Jesus as He faced down the devil’s temptations in the power of God’s loving Word, the devil is reduced to departing from Jesus and like some pathetic scavenger, waiting for some more opportune time to tempt and test Jesus. But even now, three years before Jesus went to His cross, the devil must have known he’s been defeated. And we can see now on this side of Jesus’ cross and resurrection, that the devil and sin and death have been utterly and eternally defeated.
In another part of Luke’s gospel, Jesus says, “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are safe. But when someone stronger attacks and overpowers him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted and divides up his plunder.” (Luke 11:21-22) For centuries, the devil had seemed to exercise control over the human race, tempting and testing the faithful, undermining the good, luring the human race with lies. He was a strong man who seemed to hold the universe bound in death and futility. No wonder he had the temerity to offer Jesus the world’s kingdoms if Jesus would worship Him. But the devil underestimated the depths of Jesus’ passionate love for you and me. Jesus proved, even before He offered up His sinless life for us on the cross, to be the stronger one. By His refusal to take a shortcut to glory, His refusal to enjoy ease while we died in our sins, Jesus overpowered the evil one. Instead, Jesus resolutely set His face toward Jerusalem and His cross (Luke 9:51), where He would save all born “in bondage to sin…[incapable of freeing] ourselves,” who receive saving faith in Jesus by the Gospel Word, by the waters of Holy Baptism, and by the bread and wine of Holy Communion.
In the wilderness, Jesus, the New Adam, gave notice that He was doing a new thing. His forty-day victory at the outset of His earthly ministry declares, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Romans 10:13) The King will not abandon those who He comes to save, you and me. His victory also declares, “...if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17) The New Adam makes new people of all who, despite the temptations and tests of this world, trust in Him. And on the cross and at the empty tomb, Jesus proves that He alone is worth every ounce of our trust in Him. May the Gospel Word about Jesus empower you to trust in Jesus always. Amen
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