Matthew 4:1-11
Years ago, a man shared with a group of us what his dad told him every time he borrowed the car keys when he was a teenager. His dad said: “Remember who you are.”
Those seem like wise words to me because it’s so easy in the daily challenges of life to forget who we are and who we’re meant to be and to become someone else.
The Word of God teaches that we all have a call, a vocation. For the Christian, our vocation has less to do with our jobs than with who we are and who we are called by God to be, whatever our jobs or stations in life.
The call we all have as disciples of Jesus Christ is given to us at the moment of our baptisms when, after we are washed in the water connected to God’s Word and God’s promise, Christ’s cross is marked on our foreheads, and we are given our vocation, our identity, “child of God.” “Mark James,” the pastor said at my baptism, “child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.” Pastors said similar things when you were baptized, whenever you were baptized.
As Christians, our vocation, our call, is to be God’s children, daily turning to the One Who has saved us in repentance and faith and through our faith in Jesus, acting as God’s light in a dark world.
We Christians aren’t the first God called children or sons of God. Moses once told Egypt’s king, Pharaoh: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Israel is my firstborn son, and I told you, “Let my son go, so he may worship me.’” (Exodus 4:22-23)
History shows though that Israel failed in its calling as God’s son. The people of Israel constantly forgot who they were. They chased after false gods, temporary pleasures, worldly power. They became diverted from their mission as God’s children to be God’s light to the nations.
Our first lesson for this morning shows us that it was always God’s intention to send a Messiah into the world in order to save the human race and the universe our sin has impacted. God told the serpent–the devil, “...I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” (Genesis 3:15)
Jesus, the Messiah, was to fulfill the call that Israel--and no one else among we sinful human beings--ever could fulfill: the call of being the perfectly obedient Son of God, Who by going to the cross as God the Father willed, would crush the power of Satan over all of us.
Our gospel lesson for today starts right after Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River. There, “a voice from heaven said of Jesus, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’” (Matthew 3:17) Jesus was given His call to be the obedient Son of God. Abruptly, Matthew 4:1 then tells us, “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”
Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, but He is also a human being, though a sinless one, Who did not inherit the condition of sin we all have inherited from Adam and Eve. Jesus had to take on our humanity, becoming the perfect human sacrifice for our sins, paying the debt we owe for failing in our call to be children of God. We sinful human beings don’t want God to have authority over us. But Jesus, as the Son of God, lives under the authority of the Father and the Holy Spirit.
So the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness for the express purpose of Jesus being tempted by the devil. Like ancient Israel, who God had called His son, Jesus, just proclaimed God’s Son at the Jordan, goes into the wilderness. In Jesus’ forty days, He was tempted in the same ways that ancient Israel was tempted. But with a different result: Jesus resists every temptation, fulfilling His call as the Son of God.
Jesus is tempted in three ways by the devil.
Knowing that Jesus is hungry, the devil tells Jesus to turn stones into bread. Jesus cites words from Deuteronomy: “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4:4)
Next, the devil tells Jesus that He should throw Himself from the top of the Temple in Jerusalem to show people how the Father takes care of Him. Jesus refuses, saying, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” (Matthew 4:7)
Finally, the devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and says that Jesus can have them all without suffering, scorn, rejection, cross, death, or grave, if Jesus will just worship him. “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’” (Matthew 4:10) Although the devil continued to try luring Jesus away from His call as our Savior, and still tempts people today, the devil knew at that moment that the jig was up. Jesus defeated the devil in the wilderness and would finally, definitively defeat Him at the cross by obediently remembering Who He was and that His call was and is to save us.
We often read this account and think of it as a how-to guide: “how to evade temptation by knowing God’s Word.” I've even preached on this lesson that way.
Being steeped in God’s Word, as Jesus was, will help us to avoid the temptation to individual sins: adultery, cursing, thievery, gluttony, covetousness, murder, idolatry, not worshiping with God’s people, or lying.
But if we think that’s why the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted, we miss the point. In Jesus' temptations, God is not telling us to so much remember who we are, but to remember Who Jesus is.
You see, if Jesus came into this world only to be a good example for us, He could have skipped the cross. The temptation to sin and sin itself isn’t something that we can manage by following “three steps to holy living.” Jesus isn’t a self-help guru. To think so underestimates both how helpless and hopeless we are in the face of both our sin and our temptation. It ignores how deadly, how eternally fatal, sin is! The Bible says that “the wages of sin is death” and we are born in infinite debt to God for our sin.
People who think, after reading the account of Jesus’ temptations, that they’re prepared to face off against the temptations of the devil, the world, and their (our) sinful selves are sitting ducks, bound for condemnation and hell no matter how firm their resolutions to walk away from temptation and sin.
We dare not face off against temptation in our own power!
Even if your intentions are good, the devil will drag you down to hell with him.
So will the sinful world.
So will your sinful, good-intentioned self.
The apostle Peter reminds us, “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” (1 Peter 5:8)
Sin is so deadly that it required a Savior facing our temptations and living in total sinless righteousness to die on a cross to set us free from its power to eternally separate us from God. We can only resist the temptation to sin and we can only know that our sins–the sins we commit every day because we are human–are forgiven as we turn repeatedly to Jesus.
Jesus turned back the devil in the wilderness and at the cross by remembering Who He was--He remembered His call, so that He could save you from the sins we all commit that distort us into becoming something other than what He died and rose to make us, children of God.
So, when we are tempted, we can take refuge in the Savior Who renders the devil, the sinful world, and our sinful selves powerless over us!
Jesus remembered that He was the Son of God for you. He willingly became one of us, bore the rejection of the world, flogging, hatred, condemnation, and crucifixion because He never forgot you.
He never forgot that you need to be saved from sin, death, and the grave.
He always remembered His vocation.
In Jesus, the preacher of the New Testament book of Hebrews says, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.” (Hebrews 4:15)
The Savior Who went to the wilderness and the cross and now sits at the right hand of the Father, always remembers you.
It’s in Him and Him alone that we find forgiveness and the grace to be who we could never be by our own willpower or pious resolutions: children of God.
Throughout this Lenten season and each day of life, friends turn to Jesus.
He will never forget nor leave defenseless in the face of sin and death those who turn to Him in trust. Amen
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